03 Condemnation by Forgotten Realms

Author:Forgotten Realms [Realms, Forgotten]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-10T15:56:44.501000+00:00

SIXTEEN Within a day of Seyll's murder, Halisstra began to wonder if she might have been better off going with the Eilistraee priestess and feigning conversion. It might have been a strategy unlikely to reunite her with her comrades, but it would have meant that she would have enjoyed shelter, food, and the opportunity to perhaps regain her equipment, instead of an interminable march through the freezing woods. As dawn approached, she could find no better shelter than a small, damp hollow surrounded by drow-high boulders and bare trees. Shivering, she shrugged off her stolen backpack and searched it thoroughly, hoping against hope that she had somehow overlooked some key implement or a scrap of food. Seyll and her followers had not anticipated a wilderness sojourn of more than a few hours. They carried no more gear than Halisstra would have, had she decided to venture out to a well-known cavern a mile or two from Ched Nasad. They certainly hadn't equipped themselves for the convenience of their captive's escape. With the crossbow she'd taken from Xarra and the bae'qeshel songs at her command, she had a fair chance of dropping any game she came across, but in her hours and hours of wandering she'd not seen anything larger than a bird. Even if she did succeed in killing something for her dinner, she had no means to cook it, and Halisstra was beginning to suspect that the forest itself conspired against her. She was reasonably sure that she'd managed to keep heading west after her escape from the heretic. If Seyll hadn't been lying when she said they were near the spot where Halisstra had been captured, the Melarn priestess was no more than one or two nights' march from the small river Pharaun had described in his vision. Since the river ran south to north somewhere in front of her, it seemed a difficult target to miss as long as she kept moving west. Halisstra tried to keep the sunset and moonset ahead of her, and a little to her left, since they'd be somewhat south of her at this time of year--or so she'd gathered from watching Valas navigate the woods over the past few days. Of course, she had no way of knowing whether to turn upstream or downstream when she did reach Pharaun's river, since she couldn't be sure that she'd struck the stream at the spot the wizard anticipated. For that matter, she was unlikely to know for certain whether she'd found the right stream at all. She'd already crossed a dozen small brooks in a day and a half, and while she didn't think any of them could properly be called a river, she simply didn't have enough experience of the surface world to be sure. "Of course, that all presumes that I haven't been wandering in circles for hours," Halisstra muttered. It could be that the most sensible thing to do would be to abandon the notion of searching for the Jaelre, and pick the straightest course out of the forest she could find.

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