The Storm Queen Throws Hands in the Yuirwood

Chapter 6 opens with the Simbul standing over Bro in the Yuirwood, thumping her staff on the ground next to his head.

“Are you finished? Are you ready to behave like an intelligent man? Or, are you going to continue behaving like a complete fool?”

Bro is curled in a ball, possibly sobbing. She’s probably broken a few of his ribs. And this is the woman who saved his life.

Welcome to the most dysfunctional rescue in Forgotten Realms history.

What Actually Happened in Sulalk

Let me piece together the timeline from both chapters, because the book gives it to us out of order.

The Simbul went to Sulalk for the colt, Zandilar’s Dancer. She’d been watching it for two years through her scrying mirror and wanted it as a birthday gift for Elminster. She arrived disguised as an old woman. The Red Wizards disguised as grain traders made their move. One of them approached her. She burned through his disguise before he could cast a spell. Then everything went sideways.

The wizards started blasting the village. Bro’s mother Shali died, hit her head on the hearthstones when the blasts shook the cottage. Bro’s stepfather Dent was cut in half by magic. The lower half of his body was leaning against a fence post. No blood. The wound was cauterized. The smell of roast meat was in the air.

That detail is genuinely horrible. Lynn Abbey doesn’t flinch from it.

Bro found his mother first. Tried to feel for a pulse. Too much blood. Then he found Dent. Then he killed a Red Wizard with a pitchfork, the guy’s spell misfired and suddenly a scared half-elf with a farm tool had the advantage. Bro stabbed him, and kept stabbing after the wizard was dead, until another blast snapped him out of it.

Then he found the Simbul in the barn with Dancer. She pointed a finger at his face and said “I am the witch-queen of Aglarond and you’ve made your very last mistake.” Knocked him unconscious with a force blast. She was trying to get the colt into a transport circle when Bro charged in and disrupted everything. Then Tay-Fay followed him into the circle. The spell went haywire. Instead of Velprintalar, they ended up in the Yuirwood, displaced in time.

And then Bro attacked her. Four times. Not counting the original charge into her spell circle.

The first two times she froze him with paralysis spells. Then she ran out of paralysis spells (she’d prepared for Red Wizards, not grief-crazed teenagers) and had to use her last gentle magic on Tay-Fay and the colt to keep them from making things worse. After that, she just beat Bro with her staff until he stopped.

The Simbul Is Terrible At People

Here’s the thing about the Simbul. She’s six hundred years old. She can command storms, shapeshift, teleport across continents, and single-handedly hold back the entire nation of Thay. She is one of Mystra’s Chosen. She is, by any reasonable measure, among the top five most powerful beings on the continent.

And she has absolutely no idea how to talk to a grieving teenager.

“Your life has been seized by forces beyond your control, Ebroin. It will never be the same as it was or would have been. Blame me, if you must. But above all, don’t blame yourself. You hadn’t the power to shape this day, and you haven’t the strength to bear responsibility for it.”

That’s technically correct. It’s also the emotional equivalent of handing someone a pamphlet at a funeral. The book even tells us outright: “Compassion was not the Simbul’s greatest strength. The Rashemaar witches who’d raised her considered it a luxury.”

She heals his broken ribs with a vial of unguent. She offers him a place in the palace at Velprintalar. He refuses. She tells him there’s nothing left in Sulalk. He screams that he’s not a farmer.

And that’s actually the breakthrough. Not because she said the right thing, but because she accidentally hit a nerve. Bro wasn’t going to stay in Sulalk anyway. He’d been planning to run away, back to the Yuirwood. He’d prayed to Zandilar for a way out that wouldn’t break his mother’s heart. And the goddess answered with his mother’s death.

That guilt is eating him alive.

When the Simbul finally decides to leave Bro in the forest and take Tay-Fay back to Velprintalar, she gives him her boots (“Don’t worry, they’ll fit. I’ve got huge feet”), a knife, and a single strand of her silver hair tied around his wrist. Squeeze the knot and say her name, she tells him, and she’ll be there before he takes his next breath.

His response: “Just take good care of her. Don’t let her forget that her mother was Cha’Tel’Quessir.”

He doesn’t trust her. He doesn’t like her. But she’s the only person who knows where he is, and Tay-Fay needs someone. So he makes the deal.

“She likes honey on her porridge.”

That line kills me. In the middle of everything, after losing his parents and getting beaten by his own queen, Bro’s last instruction is about breakfast. That’s real grief. That’s a kid pretending to be okay by focusing on the small things.

Mythrell’aa and Her Pet

Chapter 7 is dark. Really dark.

Mythrell’aa, the Zulkir of Illusion, is in her Serpent Tower in Bezantur. She’s scrying for the Simbul through ash and embers, using a name that nobody else in Thay knows: Alassra Shentrantra. The Simbul’s true name.

She also has something else nobody knows about. Lailomun.

Lailomun was the Simbul’s lover. Decades ago, Mythrell’aa ambushed him in the trysting room that Alassra had prepared for them. She took him. Brought him back to Serpent Tower. And she’s kept him there ever since.

She didn’t change him. That’s the cruel part. She left his personality intact. He knows who he is. He knows who she is. He hates her. But she cast a spell that cripples his memory. He can’t retain anything that happens after his capture. Every time she wakes him up, he thinks he’s just been taken. It’s always fresh. It’s always the first time.

She shows him the ember images of Alassra carrying a child. Tells him his lover moved on. Tries to make him believe the child isn’t his. She digs her nails into his face and says, “I could show you Alassra Shentrantra in the arms of a score of men.” Then she watches his reaction break him all over again.

This has been going on for more than a hundred years.

But there’s a moment. A small, desperate one. The brazier gets knocked over, blinds Mythrell’aa temporarily. And Lailomun, for once, remembers. He realizes what’s been done to him. He can’t fight a zulkir. He knows the memory will fade. So he grabs the hot poker and brands a message into his own forearm, in a code he invented as an apprentice: “You have a child. A part of you lives free.”

He’s hoping his future self will see the scars and read the message before she can erase it.

Mythrell’aa catches him. Wrenches the poker away. “What are you thinking, Lailomun? Nothing will come of it, my pet. You can’t remember anything from one hour to the next.”

The light in his eyes goes out.

That is one of the most gut-wrenching scenes in any Forgotten Realms novel I’ve read. Lailomun has been alive, aware, and tortured for over a century. And his one act of rebellion is branding a coded message into his own skin because it’s the only thing that might survive his enemy’s magic.

We also learn that Mythrell’aa’s personal vendetta against the Simbul is the driving force behind the Sulalk attack. Her spy Vazurmu reports in through smoke and incense. The village is destroyed. But the Simbul survived, rescued a child, and disappeared with the horse. Mythrell’aa is furious. She executes Vazurmu remotely through necromantic magic borrowed from Szass Tam.

The takeaway: Mythrell’aa isn’t playing the same game as Thrul and Lauzoril. She’s not after territory or political advantage. This is personal. She wants to hurt Alassra because she enjoys it.

Bro Alone in the Forest

Chapter 8 is quieter. It’s Bro alone in the Yuirwood with Zandilar’s Dancer, trying to survive the night.

He can’t sleep. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees fire and death. He talks to an owl because he needs someone to talk to. When the owl moves to a closer branch instead of flying away, Bro cries with relief.

He thinks about food. His mother’s bread soup with thick cheese crust. Her dumplings. Even the lumpy vegetable porridges he never liked. There will be no more of any of it.

He thinks about his father Rizcarn, who roamed the forest alone and died falling out of a tree, which for a man who claimed to be the messenger of the tree god Relkath is painfully ironic. He thinks about his old community of MightyTree, where there were always aunts and uncles around. What he actually misses isn’t the forest. It’s the people.

“I want to go home,” he says out loud, because sound breaks the isolation.

His thoughts answer: Home is gone.

Then the Simbul’s boots and knife get tested. He finds a butternut tree with his father’s carving on it, Relkath’s mark, and he refreshes it with his new knife. “Remind the trees. Help the Yuirwood remember. Don’t let the forest forget.” He doesn’t know what the forest is supposed to remember. His father never explained.

He falls asleep. And gets woken up by seelie, tiny fairy creatures who want him to dance. They jab him with little swords and cast spells at him. When he refuses to cooperate, they escalate. They turn Dancer’s back legs into bear legs, which is as horrible as it sounds. The colt screams and falls.

Bro charges. Gets hit with everything they have. And then he’s shrinking, growing a bushy tail, and emerging from the top of the Simbul’s boot as a squirrel.

The chapter ends with him as a squirrel, his name barely fitting in his shrunken head, chittering the bawdy song he was singing as a defense, and escaping into the tree branches.

Just when you think this kid can’t catch a worse break.

What These Chapters Do Well

Lynn Abbey is juggling a lot here. We have Bro’s grief, which is raw and specific. We have the Simbul’s competence paired with her complete inability to connect with people. We have Mythrell’aa’s cruelty, which is intimate and personal in a way that makes the standard “evil wizard” template look lazy. And we have Bro alone in the forest, slowly realizing that the independence he dreamed about is a lot lonelier than he imagined.

The contrast between the Simbul and Mythrell’aa is especially sharp in these chapters. Both are ancient, powerful women. One beats up a teenager she’s trying to save because she literally didn’t bring the right spells for emotional situations. The other has been psychologically torturing a man for a century because he dated the wrong woman.

The Simbul is bad at people. Mythrell’aa is good at hurting them. That’s a very different kind of evil.

And somewhere in the middle, Bro is a squirrel.

Previous: Undead Grandpa and Thayan Spy Games

Next: Messy Chambers, Missing Kids, and Sisterly Advice

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