Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [9]
Alassra had always been the hardest of her sisters to love, though Storm’d worked hard to keep things trusting and not too distant between them. And as long as his beloved Witch-Queen lived, Elminster would treat Storm only as a friend.
She wanted so much more, but neither El nor Alassra would learn that from her. Ever.
She held some measure of power over both of them, if she’d been the sort of worm to seek to wield it. The Simbul had been torn witless by the Spellplague, magic ravaging her mind; ever after only magic made her sane.
Magic she’d accept only from Elminster. Magic he could only give her by letting the fires within her consume the frozen fires of enchanted items he brought her—because the Spellplague had marred him, too. Casting spells plunged him into madness on the spot.
Unless one person—just one, in all Faerûn, for all she or he knew—healed him, with almost the only magic the Spellplague had left her. Storm Silverhand, the Bard of Shadowdale no longer. Now she was Elminster’s healer, though they’d taken great care the Realms never learned that. By touch and will she could heal his mind, pouring her vitality into him shaped by the paltry Art left to her, to bring him back to sanity almost as fast as he lost it, if she stood with him. Time and again she had done so.
So the feared Witch-Queen needed magic to regain sanity for fleeting times, magic she trusted only Elminster to give her, and Elminster needed Storm if he was to work magic at all.
The very sight of Storm sometimes enraged Alassra when she was less than lucid, and El, damn him, trusted Storm as a friend, road-companion, and fellow warrior. Not as his lady.
“I am Storm Silverhand,” she told the nearest tree in a fierce but almost soundless whisper. “And I want more. So much more.”
They had lain together in each other’s arms and had watched the dusking sky above them … as one by one, the stars had come out.
She was asleep, and dreaming. Moving against him, clinging to him for comfort, murmuring, and caressing. Alassra was dreaming of making love to him again.
As still as he could keep himself, his arms going numb around her, Elminster lay awake, staring grimly up at the coldly twinkling stars.
A wolf howled, far off to the north, and there had been nearer hootings and rustlings from time to time, but El feared no foraging beasts; Storm was somewhere near, standing sentinel. She’d stolen out of the trees to stand silently looking at them both a little while earlier, tears glimmering in her eyes as she stared down at her sister—but had gone again, a softly hastening shadow, when Alassra had stirred.
Leaving Elminster alone with his brooding.
How long would she stay herself this time? He needed to find more powerful magic and have done with this business once and for all.
He was tired of feeding her little oddments of Art to win her a mere handful of days and nights of sanity, then doing it all again for another paltry handful a few months hence. If he could lay hands on something truly powerful that hadn’t been twisted too wild by the Spellplague, he might be able to make the Simbul whole and sane again. There was risk, but he knew how.
The gorget he’d brought with him wasn’t enough. It should buy her days, perhaps a month or more, and when she sank into deeper dreaming he’d feed it to her. When she’d have some time asleep for it to work its way through her.
Aye, he needed mightier magic. Not that he didn’t need powerful enchanted items—whose wielding, unlike the casting of a spell, wouldn’t plunge him into madness—for other uses. Such as destroying or at least blunting some of the more pressing dangers of the Realms.
Foes he once would have been able to blast at will or misdirect into doing good they did not intend. Back when he dared use magic, back when he still had a body that would obey him.
Back when he was still someone.
The worst of it was that he knew where so much powerful magic was … or had been. Yet the greater part of it was lost