Mythrell'aa's Long Game and the Thayan Web
Chapters 12 through 14 give us a dead father reunion, a sister intervention, and Lauzoril having a very bad day with his undead relatives. These are the chapters where every thread starts pulling tighter.
Chapter 12: Bro Wakes Up as a Squirrel
Bro wakes up at sundown, clinging to a very tall tree branch, naked. The seelie got him. After the Simbul left him in the Yuirwood, he ran into the mischievous forest fairies. Her knife protected him from their spells while he held it, but once he dropped it, they hit him hard. Made him sing a foolish song and dance a foolish dance. Turned Dancer into some kind of bear-horse hybrid. Then they turned Bro into a squirrel and put him to sleep.
So now he’s naked, in a tree, starving, with a poisoned arm from seelie barbs. Classic Yuirwood welcome.
He climbs down and finds his clothes, the Simbul’s boots, and the knife right where he dropped it. She didn’t come for him. That hurts. He’s already grieving his mother Shali and stepfather Dent. Two days without food. A silver hair still tied around his wrist, the Simbul’s tracking token.
But he finds Dancer. The colt is fine, nudging Bro’s hands looking for carrots that don’t exist anymore. And then a voice comes from the trees.
“Never fight with the seelie, son.”
It’s Rizcarn. His father. The man who fell out of a tree and broke his neck seven years ago. The man Bro helped bury.
This reunion is brilliantly written because Bro doesn’t just accept it. He pulls the Simbul’s knife. He keeps his distance. He notices that Rizcarn’s shirt is dry even though everything else in the forest is still damp from the storm. He notices he’s now taller than his father. He tests him with questions.
Rizcarn doesn’t care about Shali’s death. “Her path led out of the Yuirwood, son.” When Bro tells him everything, the whole horror of Sulalk, the Red Wizards, the Simbul, his mother lying dead on the floor, Rizcarn’s only real interest is in Dancer and Zandilar.
“You have come home. She’s here, waiting for you.”
“Momma?”
“Zandilar!”
It’s such a gut-punch exchange. Bro wants comfort. Rizcarn wants to talk about goddesses.
But Bro goes with him anyway. He’s starving, grieving, alone. A semblance of a father is better than no father, no mother, no family, no one at all. He lets Rizcarn take the Simbul’s hair from his wrist, notched into a forked twig so it can be removed cleanly. They toss it in a stream.
The chapter ends with Bro knowing he’s taken the wrong turn. He’s a child again, doing what his father tells him. When he looks over his shoulder, he doesn’t see any path at all.
That last line is haunting. Bro has traded one form of powerlessness for another. He gave up the Simbul’s protection for his dead father’s agenda. And he knows it.
Chapter 13: Alustriel Drops By With Opinions
Back in Velprintalar. The Simbul’s chambers have been cleaned, but at a cost measured in pride. The thorn branch is gone, crushed to dust along with its crystal case. That hurt. That branch was her connection to Lailomun, the man she loved and lost. But it was also the spy-eye Mythrell’aa used against her.
Alustriel is there. The Simbul’s elder sister, ruler of Silverymoon, mother of twelve, and the kind of person who can direct dust out an open window with her fingers while looking effortlessly composed. She helped clean the chambers. “It must run in the family,” she says when Alassra calls her astonishing.
And then Alustriel starts asking questions. Where did the little girl come from? Why was she left alone in rooms full of dangerous artifacts?
The Simbul is defensive. She says it seemed like a good idea at the time. The child was exhausted, she used a lullaby cantrip. But Alustriel points out that lullaby cantrips are for babies, and Tay-Fay is seven. In the hours the Simbul was gone, Tay-Fay woke up and opened a window, which started something called “the between” whirling. That’s what triggered the emergency summons.
“How was I to know she hadn’t been properly raised?” the Simbul protests. “If she had, she wouldn’t have touched anything.”
Alustriel’s response: “Tell that to the Witches of Rashemen!”
This is the responsible older sister dynamic at its finest. Alustriel doesn’t yell. She doesn’t need to. She’s just calmly, devastatingly right. She already found a woman in the palace to care for Tay-Fay. Someone with half-elf heritage who understands what the girl needs. And she got the whole story out of Tay-Fay just by listening to her, something the Simbul never even attempted because the child was asleep and she “saw no need to wake her up with foolish questions.”
The Simbul doesn’t even know the girl’s full name is Taefaeli. She’s been calling her “it.”
“Her, ‘Las. Letting her sleep.”
But the visit isn’t just about sisterly scolding. Alustriel noticed something the moment she arrived that the Simbul missed entirely. A change in the ambient magic. Something wild, like the wind before a summer storm. Not Thayan. It bears the mark of the wilderness. Similar to what Alustriel has felt in the High Forest south of Silverymoon.
“The Yuirwood,” Alassra sighs. “Something’s rising in the Yuirwood.”
Then the Simbul feels a sharp pain on her scalp, like a hair being plucked. The silver strand she tied around Bro’s wrist just broke. He’s in trouble, or at least, someone just removed her tracking token.
The sisters teleport to the Yuirwood together. They arrive at a stream-fed pool. Bro isn’t there. No signs of a fight. Alustriel strips off her gown and dives into the pool to check if he drowned, which is dramatic but practical. He didn’t. She does find the forked twig with the Simbul’s hair carefully attached to it, floating in an eddy.
The evidence tells a story: someone helped Bro remove the hair without cutting it. Someone notched the twig, attached the strand, then cut it from his wrist. Then they tossed it in a stream so it would float away from wherever they were going.
“He had help,” Alassra decides.
“Alustriel, you have a devious and suspicious mind. I like that in a sister.”
They follow the trail upstream. Two sets of footprints and a set of hoofprints. Bro is with another Cha’Tel’Quessir. He appears to be a willing participant. But near the trail, they find something horrible: a corpse that’s been dead for weeks or months. Two faces merged together, two mouths, three eyes, half a nose. A soured shapeshifting, or a failed possession. Someone tried to swallow something and it swallowed him back.
The corpse has incomplete Red Wizard tattoos mixed with what might be Cha’Tel’Quessir features. And no marking where the heart should be, just like those unbranded wizards in Sulalk.
“Then who was walking beside young Ebroin?” Alassra asks.
They burn the corpse and go home. Alassra resists the urge to chase Bro through the forest. He’s in the thick of something much larger than himself, and she’s not prepared for what she might find. The gods of the Cha’Tel’Quessir will have to look out for him a little while longer.
Back in Velprintalar, Alustriel drops one more piece of the puzzle before she leaves. She’ll arrange a meeting with elven sages from Evermeet who might know about Zandilar and the old Yuir gods. And she tells the Simbul to ask her Cha’Tel’Quessir friends why there are two circles in the Sunglade.
Then she vanishes before the Simbul can ask what she means.
Alone, the Simbul watches a thunderstorm roll across the Inner Sea. She’s been called the storm queen. She keeps Aglarond safe. But after fifty years, she’s fighting the same enemies with the same strategies. Maybe instead of raging through the Yuirwood like a summer storm, she should disguise herself as Cha’Tel’Quessir and learn their beliefs from the inside.
Chapter 14: Lauzoril’s Family Crypt
The last chapter shifts to Lauzoril, and it’s deliciously layered.
He creates a magical double of himself, sends it walking across the hills, then sneaks down to the family crypt underneath his estate. Inside: his father Chazsinal, a mummy bound to an ebony chair, and his grandfather Gweltaz, an apparition in full Red Wizard rage. Gweltaz has been acting up again.
Lauzoril handles it the way you’d expect an annoyed grandson to handle an undead grandparent. He pins Gweltaz’s chair to the ceiling with fire magic. The howls are loud and piteous. They have no effect on Lauzoril, except that he closes the door.
These scenes are darkly funny. Chazsinal pleads for his father. Gweltaz demands respect. Lauzoril spins Gweltaz’s chair around like he’s messing with a lazy Susan. It’s dysfunction that just happens to involve undead necromancers bound to furniture.
But there’s substance under the comedy. Gweltaz and Chazsinal have detected a change: Invocation and Illusion are moving against each other in Bezantur. Thrul has put up wards around Serpent Tower. Mythrell’aa has appealed to Szass Tam, who hears but doesn’t act. Lauzoril already knows all of this. He also knows that his alliance with Thrul is fading fast.
And he has a secret. Something is stirring in the Yuirwood. Not a demon, nothing as powerful as an arch-fiend, but something that might be easier to control. Every zulkir wants it. Lauzoril thinks enchantment has an advantage. He might get there first.
Gweltaz figures it out. “You would throw revenge away for a whim. For a woman! He believes he can charm the witch-queen!”
That’s not quite right. The dagger Lauzoril is connected to, the one the Simbul gave to Bro, has been giving him impressions. But they’ve changed texture. He thinks she might have given the knife to someone else, someone younger and definitely not a wizard. He doesn’t know about the Yuirwood magic through the dagger. That intelligence comes from a different source entirely.
Thrul’s spy master has approached Lauzoril’s people. She’s offering to betray her employer. She wants gold, manpower, a safe bolt-hole, and whatever enchantment spells she needs, in exchange for the intelligence to bring Thrul down. It could be a trap. But Lauzoril will meet her anyway. Tomorrow, on his stone horse, riding to Bezantur.
The Thayan web is tightening. Everyone is turning on everyone else. Alliances fade.
The chapter ends with Lauzoril going to Wenne. His storybook wife who thinks she’s a princess. She’s embroidering griffins, each one different and remarkable. She throws herself at him. He carries her to bed. Her fingers explore his scars but never touch the oldest one: the swirling tattoo her grandfather placed above his heart.
He killed her grandfather. She doesn’t know. She’ll never know. And he’ll keep playing the prince until one of them dies.
My Take
The sister dynamic between Alassra and Alustriel is genuinely great. Alustriel is the responsible older sister who has raised twelve children, runs a major city with actual diplomacy, and can clean a room with her fingers. The Simbul is the brilliant younger sister who can destroy armies but doesn’t know how to talk to a seven-year-old, calls children “it,” and gets distracted by interesting spells when she should be looking for enemy spy-eyes.
Alustriel never raises her voice. She doesn’t need to. She just says things like “Her, ‘Las” and watches her sister squirm. That’s real sibling energy.
But what really makes these chapters work is how Lynn Abbey mirrors the two “father” stories. In chapter 12, Bro reunites with a father who may or may not be actually alive, who doesn’t care about his wife’s death, and who immediately starts pushing his own agenda. In chapter 14, Lauzoril deals with his actual dead father and grandfather, who are literally bound to chairs in his basement, and who also push their own agendas.
Both Bro and Lauzoril are sons being pulled by fathers toward purposes they didn’t choose. Bro goes along because he has nowhere else to go. Lauzoril pushes back because he’s powerful enough to pin his grandfather to the ceiling. But neither of them is free. The dead have as much claim on the living in this story as the living have on each other.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, the Simbul is trying to figure out why she can’t keep her room clean. It’s a good contrast.
Previous: Messy Chambers, Missing Kids, and Sisterly Advice
Next: Bro Finds His People (And They’re A Mess)
Book Details
- Title: The Simbul’s Gift
- Author: Lynn Abbey
- Series: The Nobles, Book 6
- Setting: Forgotten Realms (D&D)
- ISBN: 0-7869-0763-0