Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(79)

“You think her dead,” Drizzt remarked.

Arunika shrugged and patted his shoulder again. “I think we cannot know. What we, what I, know, is that there is no connection I can sense between your statuette and that creature, Guenhwyvar. Your figurine still radiates magic—that much I can easily see, but it is a beacon without a viewer.”

Drizzt swallowed hard and slowly shook his head, not wanting to hear it.

“I’m sorry, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Arunika said, and she went up to her tip-toes and kissed Drizzt on the cheek.

He pulled back. “Keep looking!” He thought back to a fateful day in Mithral Hall, so long ago, when he had grabbed Jarlaxle by the collar and similarly implored him, only on that occasion, to find Catti-brie and Regis.

Arunika just fixed him with that sympathetic, calming smile and nodded.

Drizzt stumbled out of the room and the inn and back onto the street, where only a few folks milled around, all looking his way curiously.

“He’s been to the red-headed one’s bed,” one woman snickered to her friend as they hustled by, clearly mistaking the drow’s wobbly gait.

“Guenhwyvar,” he whispered, rolling the onyx statue over in his hand. A burst of rage came over him. He blew into his silver whistle, and leaped upon Andahar’s strong back as the unicorn thundered up to join him, then urged the mighty steed away at a full gallop.

He needed the exertion; he sought exhaustion. Only in action could he find solace at that dark moment.

He thundered out of Neverwinter’s main gate, Andahar’s hooves churning the northern road, the wind bringing moistness to the drow’s lavender eyes.

Or maybe it wasn’t the wind.





“I thought that I hated Alegni,” Entreri said, standing across the small cooking fire from Dahlia. Prudence dictated that they should have no such firelight out in the unsettled wilds of Neverwinter Wood, but these two didn’t often listen to such moderate voices; or perhaps it was that very voice that compelled the two troubled souls to light such a beacon, inviting danger and battle.

“You did not?” the elf sarcastically replied.

Entreri laughed. “Of course I did, with all of my heart, so I believed—until I measure my hatred of him to your own.”

“Perhaps your heart is not as big as mine.”

“Perhaps my heart is not as dark as yours.” The assassin managed a little grin as he uttered the quip, expecting a rejoinder from the quick-witted woman. To his surprise, though, Dahlia simply looked down at the fire and stirred it a bit with a stick she had retrieved. She poked and prodded at the embers, drawing bursts of small flames which made her eyes sparkle in their dancing and darting reflections.

There was pain in Dahlia’s pretty eyes, along with a simmering anger—no, something more than anger, like the purest outrage crystallized into a sharp and stabbing point of light.

Artemis Entreri recognized it, had felt the same, and when he, too, was very young.

“You presume much,” Dahlia said. “We went to kill Alegni, and so we did, and you attacked him no less than I.”

This, too, this avoidance, Entreri knew well.

“I had no choice. I had no escape from the man,” he said. “He carried the sword and the sword owned me. My choice was to fight—”

“To die,” Dahlia interrupted.

“Preferable to what came before.”

The woman looked up, her eyes meeting his, but only for a heartbeat before she turned again to the safety of the distracting firelight.

“This was the easier, and the safer path,” Entreri said. “A prisoner attempts to break free, or he accepts his servitude. But not so for you. Herzgo Alegni had no hold over Dahlia, yet you drove us there, to that bridge and to that fight.”

“I pay back my debts.”

“Indeed, and what a great debt this must have been, yes?”

She glanced at him again, but this time, not in shared recognition, but with a warning scowl. And again, she returned her gaze to the firelight.

“And when all seemed lost, Alegni’s army closing in around us, Drizzt downed by my own sword, and myself helpless beneath Alegni’s blade, Dahlia was free.”

She did look up, then, and stared at him hard.

“Free to fly away.”

“What friend would I be . . .?” she started to ask, but Entreri’s quiet snicker mocked her.

“I know you better than that,” he declared.

“You know nothing,” she said, but without conviction, for as she stared at Entreri and he at her, the connection between them could not escape either.

“You did not fly back onto the bridge out of loyalty, but out of something so deep within you and so dark inside that you could not leave. I said I would die before returning to my servitude, but Dahlia was no less captured than I. I by a sword, and you by . . .”

Dahlia looked away abruptly, her gaze to the fire, where she kicked at it to send a rush of embers into the air, obviously needing the distraction, the change of subject, anything.

“A memory,” Artemis Entreri finished, and Dahlia’s shoulders slumped so profoundly that she seemed as if she would simply topple over into the fire.

And despite himself, despite everything he had spent nearly a century and a half perfecting, Artemis Entreri went to her, right beside her, and put his arm around her to hold her steady. Her tears streamed down her face and dropped to the ground below, but he did not wipe them away.