Realms of Magic - Brian Thomsen King [43]
All too often the night visions it sent drifted away in smoky tatters, but when her will was strong enough to hold steady to them, they showed her how to command the pendant to take memories… and to yield its memories up, like the scenes acted out at revels.
As Grandmama had warned, the Eye could drink thoughts-and when she got the right chance, she'd use it on Khelben, to steal his magic. Then she would be a great sorceress, and he'd be left a shambling, slack-jawed idiot. A fitting fate, she thought… until that dark day when the pendant showed her why he'd refused to keep Grand-mama alive.
Ambreene saw how it all had happened, saw it through the Eye.
Teshla had been a lush, dark beauty in her youth, all flashing eyes, flowing raven hair, full cruel lips… and a proud and amoral spirit. Many men longed for her, but she saw them as passing fancies to be duped into making her richer and more powerful. She professed undying love for one wizard-but in her bed, the Eye pressed between them by their bodies and her mouth entrapping his-she drained all Endairn's magic away, becoming a mage of power in one night.
With her newfound arts, she chained the emptied mage in a dark cellar, bound in spell-silence, and set forth to lure the most cunning merchant of the city to wed her.
Horthran Hawkwinter was rich indeed. She did not refuse his shower of coins, but it was his wits she truly wanted, his judgment of folk and knowledge of their pasts, schemes, alliances, and abilities. It was his wits she took on another night like the first, in the very bed he had given to her, the bed in which she was to die. The confused Horthran had been confined to his chambers from then on, visited by Teshla only when she wanted an heir, and then another child in case misfortune befell the first.
Ambreene shivered as the Eye showed her infant elders set aside in a nursery. Meanwhile, Teshla clawed and carved her subtle way to dominance, making the Hawkwinters a grand and respected house in Waterdeep.
She wept when the Eye showed a bored Teshla bringing together her husband and the mindless wizard and goading them into fighting each other for her amusement. They both died-sharing a look of heartfelt gratitude as they stared into each other's eyes and throttled each other.
That look troubled Teshla, even after she had the bodies burned and the ashes scattered at sea by a Hawkwinter ship. Eventually her nightmares about it frightened her servants so much that they called in the Lord Mage of Waterdeep. Khelben stripped away all her spellbooks and things of power except the Eye and left her alone in her turret room. The look he gave her as he departed haunted Teshla almost as much as the dying looks of Endairn and Horthran.
Over the long years, Teshla built up her magic again, scroll by scroll, her coins reaching where she could not, to win for her-often with bloodied blades-magic she dared not seek openly. Her son and heir, Eremoes, grew into a man of wisdom and justice under the best tutors the Hawkwinter coffers could buy. There came the day when he returned to Hawkwinter House with a new and beautiful wife, the sorceress Merilylee Caranthor of Athkatla.
Seeing her mother clearly in the memory-visions, Ambreene watched numbly as the Amnian woman sought Khelben's protection against the Eye. Cloaked in his spell, she tried to seize Teshla's magic for her own.
The sorcerous attack on Hawkwinter House left no trace of his beloved Merilylee, slew half his servants, and razed the upper floors of the family mansion. Eremoes always thought this destruction the work of a rival house, not the result of a sorcerous duel between his mother and his wife. A duel Teshla did not loose.
Ambreene wept as she saw herself shielded in her nursery by Teshla's spells. From the first, her Grand-mama had chosen Ambreene to be her friend and sorcerous heir, and shaped her into the role coldly and caleulatingly.
When she came to the end of the long, long years of memories the Eye had seen, Ambreene spent a tearful night