Tymora's Luck - Kate Novak [94]
"They're gone, Jas. It's going to be all right now," the kender assured her in a soft voice. Very gently he pulled the hood from Jas's head. The winged woman turned her head and blinked in the light of the torch on the wall, but she didn't seem to see Emilo.
The kender unbuckled the leather straps that held Jas to the table.
Freed from her bonds, Jas suddenly sprang up and flew to the ceiling. She fluttered in a dark corner like a moth caught in ajar.
"Jas, come down," Emilo whispered. "What are you doing up there?"
Jas hissed at the kender.
Emilo sighed. Then an idea occurred to him. He pulled out Jas's star-filled paperweight and held it up to the light. "See what I have?" he asked softly. "Come down and look at the stars, Jas."
Jas's eyes followed the paperweight, entranced by the sparkles inside. Suddenly she swooped down and grabbed the ornament in her talons. As she crouched beside the kender and stared down at the flecks of glitter within the paperweight, her eyes ceased to glow. In another few moments, she took on human shape. Finally Jas collapsed to her knees, sobbing.
The kender stroked Jas's hair while she cried. She still said nothing, but the sobbing was definitely a human sound. After a few minutes, her crying grew less violent, and Emilo pulled out a purple handkerchief and pressed it into one of her talons. Jas looked up at the kender.
"You've got to go find Joel, Emilo," Jas said. "Leave me behind."
"I can't," Emilo replied. "Joel wouldn't want me to, and I don't want to. It's two to one. You're outvoted."
"Emilo, the dark stalker could take over again at any moment," Jas growled. "I could end up hunting you for Xvim's people. I could betray you and Joel. I don't deserve to live."
Emilo put his hands on Jas's cheeks and leaned his face very close to hers. "Jas, listen to me very carefully," he said. "There is no dark stalker in you. It's your heart playing tricks on your mind."
Jas drew away from the kender and glared at him angrily. "You don't know what you're talking about," she snapped.
"Maybe not," the kender said, "but Finder and Tymora seemed to think they did. When you and Joel were sampling the wine in Tymora's garden, I followed Finder and Tymora and Winnie to find out what they were talking about."
"So? What did they say?" Jas demanded.
"Finder said that the crazy Xvimlar wizard had cast an ordinary spell on you. The priests told you it would make you into a dark stalker, so you believed them. But all the spell really did was change your shape. When Finder changed you back to your true form, though, he couldn't make you believe you weren't a dark stalker. He told Tymora that your belief was too strong to overcome, but if Tymora cast a spell on you and made it look like it was very powerful, you would believe she had removed the dark stalker because she was so powerful."
"That's ridiculous," Jas hissed. "If the dark stalker wasn't inside me, I never would have changed back." "Well, Finder had an explanation for that, too. He said the spell the Xvimlar cast on you unbalanced the magic in the wings that Tymora gave you. The magic in your wings is very powerful. So when the magic kind of leaked out into your whole body, your body changed to match your emotions. Kind of like the way your wings change when you go to a different place so that you always fit in. Anyway, there's really no such thing as a spell to make a person into a dark stalker."
"Bear was a dark stalker," Jas argued. "He hunted Finder all the way through Daggerdale."
"Finder was confused by that, too, but Tymora said Bear may have been driven mad by the wizard, and those who are driven mad can sometimes sense power intuitively."
"You're making all this up," Jas shouted. "There's no way I am wrong about the dark stalker. I can feel it inside