Dancing With Gods at the Sunglade

Everything has been building to the Sunglade. The scattered Cha’Tel’Quessir, the lurking Red Wizards, the ancient gods stirring beneath the forest floor. These three chapters are where it all crashes together, and the results are brutal.

Chapter 24: Grinding Flour and Saying Goodbye

The Simbul, still disguised as Chayan, spends an entire afternoon grinding grain with the Cha’Tel’Quessir. It’s a wonderful detail. Here’s one of the most powerful wizards in Faerun, on her knees with two stones, grinding wheat and oats until her back screams and her hands bleed. She heals her back in secret but can’t heal her hands without breaking cover. By sundown, there’s a bit of Aglarond’s queen in every loaf of journey bread.

She skips the bread at supper.

The camp mourns Shali, Bro’s mother. Rizcarn leads the songs. Alassra watches from the edge of camp with her drow sister’s knife, using elven sight to see what’s really happening. There’s a silver-green aura around Rizcarn, the same kind she’s only ever seen on ancient trees and menhirs. Whatever Bro’s father has become, it’s something deeply connected to the Yuirwood.

Bro is at the mourning circle, drinking honey wine. But Alassra already cast a modified haste spell on him so he metabolizes the alcohol faster. He’s steadier than he thinks. She follows him to the stream, watches him wash off the sweat. And then Halaern appears.

This scene between the Simbul and her forester is heartbreaking. Halaern knows about Bro’s feelings for Chayan. He asks her to have a care for the boy. “You mistake the value of your friendship and laughter, my lady, and you are never less than beautiful.” He tells her he’s seen her disguised as a blackbird and a dead tree, and it makes no difference to his heart.

Alassra promises that Chayan will vanish from Bro’s life after a few days. She asks Halaern to be there for him when that happens. Halaern agrees, but that’s not why he came.

The real news is about Rizcarn. He covered his tracks so thoroughly that even Halaern couldn’t follow them. The missing Red Wizard solitaire has vanished. And the storm that’s been hanging over the Yuirwood for a full day is getting worse. Something is holding it in the clouds. Halaern thinks the Yuirwood itself is behind it, responding to all the magic being thrown around.

Alassra casts protective spells on Halaern, worried that some force is manipulating him and others to be distracted and forgetful. The weather is oppressive. The air is thick with something more than summer heat.

Later that night, Bro tells Alassra about the mourning circle. He heard the silences between words louder than the words themselves, a side effect of her haste spell that she forgot about. He’s sore again. His wounds have gotten worse, the cautery burns raw and weeping. When Alassra tries to get him into a pool to heal him properly, he fights her every step.

So she grabs him and pulls him into the water. She casts the synostodweomer, a spell that converts raw magical power into healing. A willow tree on the bank bursts into flames and dies. Bro’s wounds close up completely, leaving only clean scars. She tells the gathered Cha’Tel’Quessir that Relkath sacrificed a tree to heal Rizcarn’s son.

Bro doesn’t fully buy it. He felt magic pass from her to him. But when he says he could more than like her, she tells him honestly that she’ll move on. “There’s a time for thinking about tomorrow, Ebroin, but it’s not when there’s a hanging storm over your head.”

They walk hand in hand through a brutal afternoon. The storm finally breaks that night with catastrophic violence.

Chapter 25: The Storm

This chapter is written from Bro’s perspective and it’s one of the most visceral in the book.

He sits where he fell when the storm started, knees to his chin, reliving the nightmare of Sulalk while a new nightmare plays out above him. There’s a man tall as a tree made of fire, hurling flame and lightning at the Cha’Tel’Quessir. There’s a woman shrouded in silver who fights back with her own lightning.

Zandilar.

And here Bro starts connecting dots he doesn’t want to connect. Zandilar seduced him in Sulalk. Zandilar took the colt into the ground. Zandilar healed him in the pool. Chayan said it was Zandilar. But the silver woman who fights with lightning, that sounds a lot like a certain queen he knows too.

He pushes the thought away.

The aftermath is horrible. Bro grabs what he thinks is a fallen tree limb and it comes apart in his hands. It’s a charred arm, stiff at the elbow and wrist. He drops it and retreats. Two bodies burned beyond recognition.

Chayan finds him curled on the ground with his hands over his head. He tells her to go away. He wants to die. She digs her fingers between his healed ribs to get him sitting up, and when he starts shaking she slaps him hard. He swings back. She catches his wrist.

“Later, Ebroin.”

Anger restores him, which is exactly what she intended. Thirteen dead. Thirteen alive including them. The rest are missing, including Rizcarn.

They search for Rizcarn and find him carving runes into a glowing tree, talking to himself. “Wake up the trees, Rizcarn. Gather the Cha’Tel’Quessir, Rizcarn. Lead them to the Sunglade, Rizcarn.” His face is gouged open. One eye swollen shut. The other has the white-ringed look of madness.

But he calls Bro “Ember,” the childhood name he hasn’t used since they reunited. He asks about Shali as if he doesn’t know she’s dead. The madness might be real, or it might be something inside Rizcarn waking up and pushing the real man aside.

Chayan mutters to herself about the body they found earlier, half wizard, half Cha’Tel’Quessir. She curses Elminster in Common, which Bro overhears. She covers it as a habit from fighting the Tuigans.

They get back to the fire. Only eight Cha’Tel’Quessir left from the original forty-something. Rizcarn wants to keep walking. Bro wants to wait and search for survivors. Chayan sides with Rizcarn.

“This is war, Ebroin,” she says.

They march through dawn. Bro recognizes the forest near MightyTree. He says nothing as they walk past the trails that would take him home.

Chapter 26: The Simbul Hunts and Mythrell’aa Strikes

Alassra drops the Chayan disguise and goes hunting. The way Abbey writes this is fantastic. She becomes herself, silver-haired, blue-eyed, and deadly. When the Simbul hunts Red Wizards, she scorns stealth. She wants them to see her coming.

The first group she takes out with a painted goose egg that creates an expanding sphere of vacuum. They suffocate. Two escape the sphere, so she puts poison-dipped throwing stars in their necks. One is still alive when she reaches him. She takes the truth from his mind before ending his life. Then she strips them of useful gear, because Red Wizards carry the best equipment in Faerun, and leaves the bodies for scavengers.

The second group is harder. She stumbles into them by accident, which embarrasses her. She’s glad Halaern isn’t there to see it. This group has archers with fire-arrows alongside the wizards. She kills them all, one by one, in what she finds to be a somewhat undignified skirmish.

Then she reaches for Halaern through the circlet and gets a cold, nearly lifeless response. She runs.

She finds him in the brush with frostbitten arms, swollen to the elbow with black-and-white patches. Bro is gone. The solitaire, Mythrell’aa, the Zulkir of Illusion, has taken him.

Halaern blames himself. He wasn’t beside Bro when it happened. Bro had just guessed that Chayan was Zandilar in disguise, and Halaern was so flustered by the wrong answer that he let the boy get ahead of him. A shadow appeared around Bro and he was gone.

Alassra tells him the solitaire is a zulkir and there was nothing he could have done.

And then we see what Mythrell’aa has done. She hates the Yuirwood. She hates the bugs, the mud, the dead leaves. But she has Bro, and she’s satisfied. She tortures him for information, calls him Ee’bro’een with contempt, and learns that he thinks Zandilar will dance with him at the Sunglade at midnight.

Mythrell’aa decides on two triumphs. First, she’ll use Lailomun, the man she’s been controlling since she abducted him, as a living bomb. She inscribes the Mark of Gur on him, a suicide spell from Thay’s ancient wars. When Lailomun sees the Simbul, he’ll run to her, and the spell will detonate and kill everything within an expanded radius. The Simbul, the Cha’Tel’Quessir, all of it.

Second triumph: with the Sunglade empty, Mythrell’aa will impersonate Zandilar and claim whatever power the Yuirwood offers.

The chapter ends with the Simbul returning to the remaining Cha’Tel’Quessir and confronting Rizcarn. He speaks like a broken instrument, talking about Relkath and Zandilar and dancing. And then Halaern does something nobody expected.

He takes off his circlet. He offers himself as the dancer in Bro’s place. The Simbul argues. She tells him through the circlet’s telepathy that Rizcarn is practically admitting he’s part Red Wizard. That Zandilar will keep whoever she dances with. That this is nonsense.

Halaern’s response is devastating. “I have danced with a goddess all my life. I’m not afraid of Zandilar.”

When Alassra orders him to stop as his queen, he refuses. “You speak not as my queen, but as my ladylove. My queen, I know, understands.”

She takes the circlet and places it on her own brow. Rizcarn gathers the remaining Cha’Tel’Quessir and leads the way to the Sunglade.

What I Think

The stone circle scene with the firestorm is genuinely eerie and well-written. But what stays with me is the image of ancient gods struggling to manifest in a world that’s forgotten them. Relkath carving himself into the trees through Rizcarn’s hands. Zandilar rising as luminous mist from a carved stone. These aren’t grand, world-shaking deities. They’re fragments, echoes, trying to remember what they were.

And the people who follow them are just as fragmented. Forty Cha’Tel’Quessir became thirteen. Now they’re ten, following a madman to a stone circle because they have nothing else. It’s bleak. But there’s something real about it too. Sometimes faith is just the decision to keep walking when every rational reason says to stop.

Halaern’s sacrifice hits hard. He knows exactly what he’s walking into. He knows Zandilar takes what she dances with. He does it anyway, not because he believes in the old gods, but because he believes in the Simbul and because Bro needs saving and someone has to keep Rizcarn cooperative. It’s the most practical act of love in the entire book.

And Mythrell’aa. She’s a proper villain, cruel and smart and resourceful. But Abbey gives her just enough texture to be interesting. She hates every minute of being in the forest. She’s improvising a plan involving impersonating a goddess, which is the kind of ambition that either makes you a legend or gets you killed by forces you don’t understand. In a forest full of ancient powers that don’t like outsiders, putting on a god’s face seems like a spectacularly bad idea. But Mythrell’aa has never met a power she didn’t think she could steal.

Everything converges at the Sunglade. Bro is captured. The Simbul is exposed. Halaern has offered himself to a goddess he doesn’t believe in. Lailomun is a walking bomb. And whatever Zandilar actually is, she’s about to wake up for real.

Previous: Love, Loss, and Lightning in the Forest

Next: A Zulkir’s Gift and a Queen’s True Name

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