The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [110]
The armaragor stared at his friend in dumbfounded silence. He'd never seen the spiderlike little procurer this angry-not even the first time some long-dead idiot had called Craer "Longfingers," a name the procurer still, twenty summers later, wasn't fond of. Hawk blinked-and his sword halted, right where it was.
Craer marched right up to him and grabbed Hawkril's sword arm by the wrist. "I said drop it!"
Hawkril shook his head, let fall his sword, and reached out a hand toward the procurer's face, as if in wonder. "She tried to kill us, Craer…"
"Spell-thralled by one of the Silvertree mages, no doubt," the procurer snapped. "So your brilliant response to this is to butcher her, just as they're trying to do to us, hey? So tell me, Hawk: have we joined Silvertree's army, after all this? Or has he put a spell on you to make you do his bidding… is that it? Just how long do you think we'll last against those same three mages without her, hey? Did you think of that, yet? Or were you going to wait until you'd cut her head off, and start doing your thinking then?"
Craer was almost shrieking his words now, spraying spittle with every sentence, his face white and his eyes glittering. Embra's eyes were still closed, and Sarasper came around to stand before her, watching her intently. Her throat moved in a tremulous swallow, and her tongue flicked out over dry lips, but she neither moved nor spoke.
"Craer…?" The armaragor's rumble held an almost pleading tone.
The procurer shouldered past him to take Embra by the elbows-he could not reach her shoulders-and sit her down. "Idiot," he snapped over his shoulder at Hawkril, and then turned his head to look at Sarasper and asked calmly, "Good healer, would you stand watch right now? I need you to go a few paces away from our noise and listen hard, that way in particular. Someone-or something-may have heard us."
Without waiting for a reply, the procurer leaned forward to the sorceress until their foreheads were almost touching, and asked gently, "Embra? Lady Embra? What happened?"
Faerod Silvertree's daughter raised agonized eyes to him, tried to frame words, and then burst into sobs and threw her arms around him. The procurer held her tight and waited for her weeping to subside, hearing Hawkril move restlessly behind him. One of the sounds was the scrape of the armaragor's sword being grounded in mossy soil.
It was some time before Embra recovered herself enough to gasp out so much that the three men understood the dreadful compulsion that had seized her, when through mists in her mind she saw the Spellmaster sitting at a gleaming table in her father's favorite chamber in Castle Silvertree with a wooden figurine in his hands… under her father's cold smile, as the magic took hold…
"No more tears, now," Craer snapped, and raised his eyes to Sarasper, who'd drifted back to hear the sorceress.
"Is there any way to break this magic?" the old man asked carefully. Embra was gulping in deep, shuddering breaths, her face hidden behind tangled hair, but she managed to draw up her shoulders and then drop them, in an exaggerated shrug.
The three men traded grim glances, and then Sarasper bent again and asked, "If that wood doll he's using was destroyed, what then?"
"T-that would work, yes," Embra gulped. "Until Ambelter made another. He'd need to craft a new figurine, himself, and bind to it something of me-probably hairs from my hairbrush, if they haven't used them all to work their seeking spells by now."
"Can we, say, burn that thing from here-with your magic, if I-if we all help?"
Embra closed her eyes and seemed to shrink. They saw her shiver before she said very quietly, "There is a way. It will… kill me."
"How so?"
"I have to set myself afire… and as I char, hold the link to the thing of wood back in the Castle, so that it burns, too."
"What if we three healed you as you burned? Would we heal the doll, too, or can you hold that back?"
Embra opened her eyes and looked at him sharply, sudden hope leaping in her face. "That-that would