Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(2)

“Bah!” the dwarf snorted, throwing up his hands. “Been stickin’ in me craw since that day. Damned smell o’ orc. And now they’re tradin’ with Silverymoon and Sundabar, and them damned cowards o’ Nesmé! Should o’ killed them all to death in battle, by Clangeddin.”

Drizzt nodded. He didn’t disagree. How much easier his life would be if life in the North became a never-ending fight! In his heart, Drizzt surely agreed.

But in his head, he knew better. With Obould offering peace, Mithral Hall’s intransigence would have pitted Bruenor’s clan alone against Obould’s tens of thousands, a fight they could never have won. But if Obould’s successor decided to break the treaty, the resulting war would pit all the goodly kingdoms of the Silver Marches against Many-Arrows alone.

A cruel grin widened on the drow’s face, but it fast became a grimace as he considered the many orcs who had become, at least somewhat, friends of his over the last … had it been nearly four decades?

“You did the right thing, Bruenor,” he said. “Because you dared to sign that parchment, ten, twenty, fifty thousand lived out their lives that would have been shortened in a bloody war.”

“I cannot do it again,” Bruenor replied, shaking his head. “I got no more, elf. Done all I could be doin’ here, and not to be doin’ it again.”

He dipped his mug in the open cask between the chairs and took a great swallow.

“Ye think he’s still out there?” Bruenor asked through a foamy beard. “In the cold and snows?”

“If he is,” Drizzt replied, “then know that Wulfgar is where he wants to be.”

“Aye, but I’m bettin’ his old bones’re arguing that stubborn head o’ his every step!” Bruenor replied, adding a bit of levity that both needed this day.

Drizzt smiled as the dwarf chortled, but one word of Bruenor’s quip played a different note: old. He considered the year, and while he, being a long-lived drow, had barely aged, physically, if Wulfgar was indeed alive out there on the tundra of Icewind Dale, the barbarian would be greeting his seventieth year.

The reality of that struck Drizzt profoundly.

“Would ye still love her, elf?” Bruenor asked, referring to his other lost child.

Drizzt looked at him as if he’d been slapped, an all-too-familiar flash of anger crossing his once serene features. “I do still love her.”

“If me girl was still with us, I mean,” said Bruenor. “She’d be old now, same as Wulfgar, and many’d say she’d be ugly.”

“Many say that about you, and said it even when you were young,” the drow quipped, deflecting the absurd conversation. It was true enough that Catti-brie would be turning seventy as well, had she not been taken in the Spellplague those twenty-four years before. She would be old for a human, old like Wulfgar, but ugly? Drizzt could never think such a thing of his beloved Catti-brie, for never in his hundred and twelve years of life had the drow seen anyone or anything more beautiful than his wife. The reflection of her in Drizzt’s lavender eyes could hold no imperfection, no matter the ravages of time on her human face, no matter the scars of battle, no matter the color of her hair. Catti-brie would forever look to Drizzt as she had when he first came to know he loved her, on a long-ago journey to the far southern city of Calimport when they had gone to rescue Regis.

Regis. Drizzt winced at the memory of the halfling, another dear friend lost in that time of chaos, when the Ghost King had come to Spirit Soaring, laying low one of the most wondrous structures in the world, the portend of a great darkness that had spread across the breadth of Toril.

The drow had once been advised to live his long life in a series of shorter time spans, to dwell in the immediacy of the humans that surrounded him, then to move on, to find that life, that lust, that love, again. It was good advice, he knew in his heart, but in the quarter of a century since he’d lost Catti-brie, he had come to understand that sometimes advice was easier to hear than it was to embrace.

“She’s still with us,” Bruenor corrected himself a short while later. He drained his mug and threw it into the hearth, where it shattered into a thousand shards. “Just that damn Jarlaxle thinking like a drow and taking his time, as if the years mean nothing to him.”

Drizzt started to answer, reflexively moving to calm his friend, but he bit back the response and just stared into the flames. Both he and Bruenor had taxed, had begged Jarlaxle, that most worldly of dark elves, to find Catti-brie and Regis—to find their spirits, at least, for they had watched the spirits of their lost loved ones ride a ghostly unicorn through the stone walls of Mithral Hall on that fateful morning. The goddess Mielikki had taken the pair, Drizzt believed, but surely she could not be so cruel as to keep them. But perhaps even Mielikki could not rob Kelemvor, Lord of the Dead, of his hard-won prize.

Drizzt thought back to that terrible morning, as if it had been only the day before. He had awakened to Bruenor’s shouts, after a sweet night of lovemaking with his wife, who had seemed returned to him from the depths of her confusing affliction.

And there, that terrible morning, she lay beside him, cold to his touch.

“Break the truce,” Drizzt muttered, thinking of the new king of Many-Arrows, an orc not nearly as intelligent and far-seeing as his father.

Drizzt’s hand reflexively went to his hip, though he wasn’t wearing his scimitars. He wanted to feel the weight of those deadly blades in his grip once more. The thought of battle, of the stench of death, even of his own death, didn’t trouble him. Not that morning. Not with images of Catti-brie and Regis floating all around him, taunting him in his helplessness.