She shuddered, but that shudder became a nod. She let out a deep sigh and clung to him, arms tightening. “Oh, I’ve missed you, El. Don’t leave me again.”

“I’ve missed ye, too. Don’t leave me again, Lady mine.”

The slayer of hundreds of Red Wizards smiled thinly through fresh, glimmering tears. “I’m through making promises I can’t keep,” she hissed. Her fingers clawed at him, at his tattered clothing.

Elminster’s chuckle as he drew her back from the rock into the little hollow cloaked in moss was soft and teasing. He almost managed to keep the sadness out of it.

As night came down over the Hullack Forest, Storm turned back into the trees to make another stealthy circle around the stones of Tethgard, one more patrol guarding the couple abed in the moss. As she slipped between the dark trunks like a watchful shadow, she let her face go wry for just a moment.

Alassra had always been the hardest of her sisters to love, though Storm’d worked hard to keep things trusting and not too distant between them. And as long as his beloved Witch-Queen lived, Elminster would treat Storm only as a friend.

She wanted so much more, but neither El nor Alassra would learn that from her. Ever.

She held some measure of power over both of them, if she’d been the sort of worm to seek to wield it. The Simbul had been torn witless by the Spellplague, magic ravaging her mind; ever after only magic made her sane.

Magic she’d accept only from Elminster. Magic he could only give her by letting the fires within her consume the frozen fires of enchanted items he brought her-because the Spellplague had marred him, too. Casting spells plunged him into madness on the spot.

Unless one person-just one, in all Faerun, for all she or he knew-healed him, with almost the only magic the Spellplague had left her. Storm Silverhand, the Bard of Shadowdale no longer. Now she was Elminster’s healer, though they’d taken great care the Realms never learned that. By touch and will she could heal his mind, pouring her vitality into him shaped by the paltry Art left to her, to bring him back to sanity almost as fast as he lost it, if she stood with him. Time and again she had done so.