The Simbul Goes Native and Thay Calls a Meeting
Three chapters. Three completely different vibes. A room full of the most dangerous wizards in Faerun. A queen strapping on leather armor. And a boy getting shot in the back with an arrow right after hugging his dad.
Let’s get into it.
Chapter 18: The Zulkirs Play Nice (They Don’t)
Lauzoril paces his bolt-hole in Bezantur, wearing crimson robes that shimmer with enchantments. He’s waiting for a Convocation, the rare occasion when all eight zulkirs sit down together and pretend to govern Thay.
He hates these meetings. The posturing. The deceptive spells everyone throws up that everyone else can see through. They can all see Szass Tam for the corpse he is. They can all see Lauzoril for the slave’s son he is. Nobody’s fooling anybody. And yet the performance continues.
The politics here are thick. Aznar Thrul called this Convocation, using Szass Tam’s seal. Mythrell’aa has been secretly supporting Szass Tam all spring, funneling him reagents and living minions to replace his lost undead servants. And Lauzoril knows all this because Thrul’s own spy master has been feeding him information. She told him flat out: Thrul despises you. You were supposed to die at the Gorge of Gauros. He’ll never forgive you for surviving.
The Convocation itself is held in the Bezantur slave market. The eight chairs are arranged in a circle. The Chairmaster calls each zulkir in turn.
And then Szass Tam arrives late. Deliberately late. When he appears, he’s facing his chair with his back to everyone, wearing robes so dark red they look black, covered in patterns that could drive an unprotected mind to madness. When he turns around, the room reacts.
His face is chalk white and constantly in motion, rotting and reforming. His eye sockets are empty, seething with luminous green vapor. His neck has become a serpent whose head replaced the tongue in his gaping mouth.
The lich lord has fallen far. And every living zulkir in that circle knows it.
Thrul’s plan is to use this Convocation to humiliate Mythrell’aa. He accuses her of breaking her neutrality oath, of doing Szass Tam’s work in Aglarond, of spying on the Simbul, of making alliances with “Yuirwood mongrels.” He demands she be confined and denied access to her school.
But Thrul is bad at diplomacy. He picks a fight with Szass Tam instead of letting the lich side with him. Mythrell’aa watches from her chair, clutching a black jewel Szass Tam gave her. A jewel with the power to kill. Useless against the already dead, but good for other targets.
And while she sits through her humiliation and disgrace, something shifts in Mythrell’aa. She stops seeing herself as Szass Tam’s loyal supporter waiting for her lord to recover. She starts seeing herself as a player in her own right. It was time to leave Serpent Tower. Time to take Lailomun to Aglarond. And when that was done, time to return.
That’s a villain upgrade, and it’s quiet enough that you almost miss it.
Chapter 19: The Simbul Packs Her Bags
The Simbul has been putting off leaving Velprintalar and she knows it. She spent an entire day agonizing over which spells to inscribe in a deer-hide spellbook, which reagents to stuff into an enchanted pouch that’s bigger on the inside (yes, like a bag of holding, but classier). She can’t fit everything. She’s overthinking it.
This is one of those small character moments that makes Lynn Abbey’s writing stand out. The most powerful woman in the region is packing a bag and second-guessing herself. She’s done everything she can think of to delay. Now dawn is coming and she has to go.
But first, one last look at the mirror.
She asks it to show her Thay. And instead of the usual scattered stains and splotches, all the darkness gathers in one spot: Bezantur. A Convocation. All eight zulkirs in one place.
The Simbul’s reaction is immediate. She snaps out of her Cha’Tel’Quessir disguise, storms into her audience chamber for the first time since her birthday, summons her councilors, and doubles Aglarond’s defenses. She shares just enough truth to keep them convinced the danger is real.
It’s late morning before she gets back to her bolt-hole. Noon before she’s dressed again in Cha’Tel’Quessir leathers. She’s added a bow and arrows to her kit now. Sword in scabbard. Ironwood spear in hand.
One more glance at the mirror. The Convocation has ended. The zulkirs are scattering. Invocation and Conjuration stayed in Bezantur. Lauzoril has vanished the way powerful wizards do when they’re hiding. And the crimson smear of Illusion, Mythrell’aa, is on the move. Bold as blood, headed west.
West toward Aglarond. Toward the Yuirwood.
The Simbul raises her arms, speaks a word, and disappears. She reappears at the base of a great oak deep in the Yuirwood, where she expected to find her chief forester, Trovar Halaern. Instead she finds Gren, his sister, a Cha’Tel’Quessir woman who very reasonably freaks out when a stranger teleports in right in front of her.
After sorting out the misunderstanding (the Simbul was late and didn’t warn anyone she’d be in disguise), Gren tells her Halaern went north to deal with trouble among the “seelie cousins.” She sends the Simbul after him with the message: if he’s not back by sundown, she’ll come looking.
The Simbul heads north. She finds Halaern fighting dark seelie. Nasty little creatures, part bat, part serpent, part orc, with poisoned weapons and shapeshifting spells. They’ve been attacking a mother bear and her cubs. One cub is already too far gone. The other is frightened but okay.
The Simbul doesn’t use magic. She draws her sword and wades in. She gives a warbling war cry and whacks a grotesque seelie just before it looses a spell. The dark seelie don’t know who she really is. They see a Cha’Tel’Quessir sell-sword without even a circlet for protection. So they try harder. She kills one by hitting three of them at once with a double-handed swing. Two vanish. The third hits the ground.
She pins it under her heel. That one won’t be leaving.
After the fight, Halaern recognizes his queen when they grip wrists in greeting. He gets awkward and tongue-tied. Tries to kneel. She stops him with an embrace. And then a kiss. Because these two have history, and it’s complicated.
They heal the bear together. Halaern mercifully kills the dying cub. Then they talk.
Halaern tells her about Rizcarn. A Cha’Tel’Quessir from GoldenMoss who was supposedly dead for seven years. Back now, preaching about waking the old gods, carving Relkath’s rune in tree bark, calling all Cha’Tel’Quessir to the Sunglade. “Always was a strange one,” Halaern says. They thought he was slightly mad, completely harmless. Now people are listening.
The Simbul makes the connection. Rizcarn is Bro’s dead father. The one with the black mourning bead.
She tells Halaern: “I will look closely at this Rizcarn. You will look for Red Wizards in the Yuirwood.”
And then Alassra says she’d be delighted to come home with him for dinner.
Chapter 20: Everything Falls Apart
Back to Bro. Four days of following Rizcarn through the forest, watching his father recruit. The camp has grown to thirty people. Rizcarn doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t eat. Wanders off every night, comes back every morning.
The Cha’Tel’Quessir around the campfire talk about dead ancestors and a wonderful future. Bro has lived through days when everything changed and it didn’t become wonderful. So he sulks off by himself.
One night, Bro can’t sleep. He decides to find Rizcarn and confront him. He tracks his father by following carved Relkath runes on tree trunks, climbing high to spot one that’s “bright as a torch.”
He finds Rizcarn sitting beneath a tree, eyes closed, surrounded by a sphere of light. Bright as sunshine, soft as moonlight. It’s coming from Rizcarn himself.
Bro calls out. Rizcarn’s eyes open. They’re pure, pupiless white. The source of the light.
And then Rizcarn does something devastating. He talks about Shali.
He tells Bro about meeting his mother when she was wild, living free in the Yuirwood, wearing nothing but her own hair and wolf skin. How MightyTree blessed their union. How Shali wanted a child, then a hearth, then a home, and each step took her further from the freedom Rizcarn craved. How he kept coming back and she kept putting down roots. How she wanted another child and he said no. How she knew he wasn’t coming back.
Bro can’t reconcile this with his memories. For him, Shali was the cottage, the hearth, the garden. But didn’t he remember her standing in the rain, staring up at the trees as if she knew their names?
“You died, Poppa.”
“She didn’t want me to leave.”
“I saw you buried.”
“A body. I hadn’t finished Relkath’s work.”
The conversation breaks Bro open. He cries on his father’s neck. They agree to go to MightyTree together. Rizcarn hugs him tight, the way he did when Bro was small.
And then Bro starts walking back to camp.
Something thumps between his shoulder blade and his ribs. He thinks his father tossed an acorn at him, the way Rizcarn used to do.
It’s not an acorn. It’s an arrow.
Bro goes down. The Cha’Tel’Quessir pull it out, cauterize the wound, pour honey wine on it. The arrow was poisoned. Bro screams through most of it and finally passes out when they press the Simbul’s knife, heated red-hot, against his flesh.
When he wakes up, Rizcarn is gone. Left at dawn. Said the gods had spoken when Bro fell. Took Shali’s talisman beads and headed east. Toward the Sunglade.
Bro realizes he’s been played. Rizcarn talked about Shali to soothe his surface hurts and leave the deeper questions unanswered. He’d been a fool.
And then a woman he’s never seen before sits down beside him. She knows his name. Her fingers are cold as ice when she touches his shoulder. She’s wearing wine-dyed leathers and bristling with steel weapons. She says her name is Chayan. She says she was born in the Yuirwood, left a long time ago, fought the Tuigans in the East, and came back when she heard about Rizcarn’s plan to wake the gods.
For a moment, Chayan reminds Bro of the Simbul. He can’t figure out why.
The chapter ends with Chayan examining the arrow that hit Bro. It’s not Cha’Tel’Quessir. Not Aglarondan at all. Someone from outside is hunting in this forest.
My Thoughts
The Simbul putting on leather and grabbing a bow to go undercover in the forest she rules is pretty badass. But what sells it is the reason. She’s not doing it for fun. She’s doing it because the forest doesn’t trust its queen. The Cha’Tel’Quessir need to see one of their own, not the Storm Queen. And the Simbul is self-aware enough to know that.
The Convocation scene is Lynn Abbey at her best with Thayan politics. Every zulkir in that circle is calculating three moves ahead, and half of them are wrong about what game they’re playing. Mythrell’aa’s quiet transformation from loyal subordinate to independent operator is the kind of slow-burn character shift that rewards careful reading.
But the real gut punch is Bro and Rizcarn. That conversation about Shali is genuinely moving. Rizcarn tells the truth for probably the first time. And the truth is that he loved Shali but couldn’t be what she needed. Bro carries guilt for being born, for being the reason his parents couldn’t live free together. “A tree doesn’t grow until a seed’s been planted,” Rizcarn says, using Shali’s own words.
And then the arrow comes out of nowhere. Right after the hug. Right after the tears. Right after Bro finally lets his guard down.
Whether it was Thayan agents, dark seelie, or something else entirely, it doesn’t matter in the moment. What matters is that Bro had ten seconds of peace and the world took them away. And Rizcarn left. Again.
The arrival of “Chayan” at the end ties the three storylines together beautifully. The Simbul is now in the forest, in disguise, sitting next to the boy she’s been watching for two years. And he has no idea.
Previous: Bro Finds His People (And They’re A Mess)
Next: Love, Loss, and Lightning in the Forest
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