The Simbul's gift - Lynn Abbey [46]
Bro swallowed fear and settled behind the Simbul's knife, striving to look more menacing than he felt or was.
The little seelie reappeared around Bro's head. Their tiny swords in their tiny hands couldn't break his skin, but they made him flinch while their larger brethren surged forward with weapons that drew blood. They concentrated their attacks on Bro's right hand and wrist. He kept his grip on the hilt until the weasel-seelie twirled himself around Bro's forearm and held on long enough to thrust his sword into the tendon at the base of Bro's thumb.
Pain paralyzed his arm from the shoulder down. Bro beat his forearm against the tree trunk. He knocked the weasel-seelie off, but he dropped the Simbul's knife, too.
"Now he'll dance for us!"
Bro lunged for the seelie who seemed about to cast the spell. His ears popped and a tingling spread down his legs. He thought for sure he was going to land on his face, but his feet began dancing wildly, and it appeared that he could not fall. He attacked instead, and knocked another seelie to the ground.
The seelie pulled back again, the little ones vanishing as before while the larger ones made their droning sound. One of them, the weasel-seelie, larger than before, pointed at Zandilar's Dancer, whom they'd ignored until that moment.
"Leave him alone!" Bro shouted.
His spell-driven dancing made it difficult to move closer to the colt without frightening him. But Bro judged that the lesser of two evils-Zandilar notwithstanding, horses weren't made for dancing. He'd sooner turn Dancer loose in the Yuirwood than see him go down with a broken leg. His greatest problem was keeping still long enough to untie the rope one-handed; he solved that by dropping to his knees and using his teeth.
His ears began popping before he got the knot undone. He began to sing loudly a song that made him blush, but he got the rope loose just in time for Zandilar's Dancer to rear up, trumpeting like a stallion, and beat the air with his front hooves. Bro threw himself backward, legs still dancing. The seelie laughed, but not loud enough to drown Bro's bawdy song.
Bro hoped laughter meant the seelie were satisfied. He hoped in vain. Misty light in rainbow colors spiraled up Dancer's hind quarters, transforming horse legs into bear legs. The colt reared again and fell over, hard and screaming.
Dancer's agony was more than Bro could endure. He stood on his hopping feet, shouted a challenge between the words of his song, and charged. Magic and weapons pelted him. He was blind and surrounded by rainbow light, floating and falling, on fire and freezing cold at the same time. At the end, he was shrinking and growing a bushy tail.
*****
Bro emerged from the top of the Simbul's boot, chittering his song rather than singing it, hopping from one foot to the next, and next, and next. He saw the forest clearly and all around him, but without color. There was room in his shrunken head for his name, the broadest outlines of his history, and the natural instincts of a squirrel; nothing else fit or mattered. When he saw the laughing seelie, he fluffed his tail and flicked it once, then bounded over his abandoned trousers. He dug his claws into the tree bark and escaped into a lofty tangle of branches.
9
The city of Bezantur, in Thay
Afternoon, the fifteenth day of
Eleasias, The Year of the Banner
(1368DR)
Thrul's spy master had discarded her disguise and, wearing a gown as sheer as any she wore in the zulkir's presence, worked her craft in a windowless bolt-hole. The gown was her own-that made all the difference in the world. The glass eggs in the chest in front of her had been devised by her mentor, Deaizul, when he was in his prime. They belonged to her now, and if that made them less reliable, then she was doomed and Aznar Thrul with her.
The two-score eggs, blown from the finest glass a zulkir's gold could buy and sealed with a dollop of lead, sat in padded compartments in a shallow, wooden chest. Each was about the size of the spy master's nose and empty except for strands of hair-eyelashes, mostly-fingernail