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“That’s what I’m hoping Horaldin can tell us.”

Eyes closed, the druid Horaldin held his hands over the stone Qilué had just tipped from her pouch. It lay on his workbench, a thick slab of clearstone that had been balanced on the tops of two enormous petrified mushrooms. Living mushrooms sprouted from the walls and ceiling of his quarters. The druid had somehow coaxed them to grow on solid stone.

Horaldin himself was pale as a mushroom, his moon elf skin practically glowing white. His blue-black hair was as tangled as lichen and hung to his waist. One of his slender-fingered hands moved stiffly. The priestesses had healed the mangled ruin the slavers had left it in, but the druid favored it still. Ever since his rescue from Skullport, he’d lived in the Promenade among the faithful. He worshiped the Leaflord still, but served Eilistraee equally faithfully.

After a moment, his eyes sprang open. “Your priestess did indeed touch the gem,” he said. “She picked it up from a flat expanse of stone—a floor, by the sound of it, but I can’t tell you where, exactly.” He spoke softly, barely above a whisper—a habit formed over more than a century of living alone in the woods. “Not too long before the priestess touched it, the stone was handled by a spider-shifter. Before that, a drow with a ‘leg’ growing from the back of his head—I think the stone means a braid of hair—and a ‘shining chest.’ A polished breastplate, perhaps.”

“A Selvetargtlin?” Qilué asked. Followers of the Spider Queen’s champion were known for their single braids.

“Perhaps. The stone makes no such distinctions. Before the drow with the braid handled it, the stone lay under the belly of a large, winged, black creature for what sounds like many centuries. A dragon, I believe. One with a deep wound in its side that never healed. Long, long before that—several millennia, I’m guessing—the stone was shaped by small brown hands. The shaper had a gray beard, and pointed ears. That person smoothed the stone until it was round, and infused it with its magic. Before that, the stone was fractured from a larger piece of rock, quarried, and passed through many different hands before reaching the one who shaped it.”

“Small brown hands and a beard,” Qilué repeated. “A rock gnome?”

Horaldin inclined his head. “My guess also, Lady.”

“What about the rune?” Qilué asked. “What spell does it trigger?”

Horaldin shrugged, spreading his hands. “That, I cannot tell you. The stone itself does not know what magic it contains, but its magic was altered by someone, either the dragon or the drow with the braid, perhaps by both. The stone is uncertain on that point. The threads of magic that wind through the stone—the spiderweb pattern your detection revealed—are linked to the dark elves still. It’s tainted by fell magic—either Selvetarm’s or Lolth’s.”

Qilué took a sharp breath. Traces of silver fire danced in her hair.

“Will you destroy it, Lady?” the druid asked.

Qilué considered the question. If she negated the stone’s magic, she might never learn the answer to the riddle it posed. The aranea had obviously carried the gemstone into the caverns claimed by the Promenade and hidden it there, only for Thaleste, praise Eilistraee, to stumble upon it.

“I won’t be destroying it quite yet,” Qilué answered at last. “Not until I’ve learned what it does.”

She levitated the stone back inside her pouch, thankful that whatever fell plans the aranea had been trying to carry out had been thwarted. Whatever the oval of black obsidian was, it could get up to no mischief while inside the magical bag’s extradimensional space.

Buoyed by her magical boots, Cavatina floated through the rotting branches, trying to keep an eye both on the murky water below and the trees around her. She’d been fourteen days and nights on the hunt. The moon above had dwindled to a thin sliver, and the twinkling points of light that followed it through the sky were dim as guttering candles. The creature she’d been chasing had left Cormanthor and veered south into