Elminster_ The Making of a Mage - Ed Greenwood [5]
Brigands? Orcs? Something out of the woods?
He ran up the road, the enchanted blade that was his proudest possession naked in his hand. The sharp reek of burning came to him. A sick fear was already rising in his throat when he rounded the butcher's shop and behind it found the fire.
His own cottage was an inferno of leaping flame. Perhaps she'd been out-but no… no…
"Amrythale," he whispered. Sudden tears blinded him, and he wiped at them with his sleeve. Somewhere in all that roaring were her bones.
He knew some folk had whispered that a common forester's lass must have used witchery to find a bridal bed with one of the most respected princes of Athalantar-but Elthryn had loved her. And she him. He gazed in horror at her pyre, and in his memory saw her smiling face. As the tears rolled down his cheeks, the prince felt a black rage build inside him.
"Who has done this thing?" he roared. His shout echoed back from the now-empty shops and houses of Heldon, but was answered only by crackling flames… and then by a roar so loud and deep that the shops and houses around trembled, and the very cobbles of the street shifted under his boots. Amid the dust that curled up from them, the prince looked up and saw it, aloft, wheeling with contemptuous laziness over the trees: an elder red dragon of great size, its scales dark as dried blood. A man rode it, a man in robes who held a wand ready, a man Elthryn did not know but a wizard without a doubt, and that could mean only one thing: the cruel hand of his eldest brother Belaur was finally about to close on him.
Elthryn had been his father's favorite, and Belaur had always hated him for it. The king had given Elthryn the Lion Sword-it was all he had left of his father, now. It had served him often and well… but it was a legacy, not a miracle-spell. As he heard the wizard laugh and lean out to hurl lightning down at some villager fleeing over the back fields, Prince Elthryn looked up into the sky and saw his own death there, wheeling on proud wings.
He raised the Lion Sword to his lips, kissed it, and summoned the lean, serious face of his son to mind: beak-nosed and surrounded by an unruly mane of jet-black hair. Elminster, with all his loneliness, seriousness, and homeliness, and with his secret, the mind-powers the gods gave few folk in Faerun. Perhaps the gods had something special in mind for him. Clinging to that last, slim hope, Elthryn clutched the sword and spoke through tears.
"Live, my son," he whispered. "Live to avenge thy mother… and restore honor to the Stag Throne. Hear me!"
*****
Panting his slithering way down a tree-clad slope, still a long way above the village, Elminster stiffened and fetched up breathless against a tree, his eyes blazing. The ghostly whisper of his father's voice was clear in his ears; he was calling on a power of his enchanted sword that El had seen him use only once, when his mother had been lost in a snow squall. He knew what those words meant. His father was about to die.
"I'm coming, Father!" he shouted at the unhearing trees around. "I'm coming!" And he stumbled on, recklessly leaping deadfalls and crashing through thickets, gasping for breath, knowing he'd be too late…
*****
Grimly, Elthryn Aumar set his feet firmly on the road, raised his sword, and prepared to die as a prince should. The dragon swept past, ignoring the lone man with the sword as its rider pointed two wands and calmly struck down the fleeing folk of Heldon with hurled lightning and bolts of magical death. As he swept over the prince, the wizard carelessly aimed one wand at the lone swordsman below.
There was a flash of white light, and then the whole world seemed to be dancing and crawling. Lightning crackled and coiled around Elthryn, but he felt no pain; the blade in his hands