The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(10)

Dahlia reclined, removed her hat, and ran her fingers through her hair, allowing the sunbeams to splash over her face.

“Come along,” he bade her. “We must learn who or what killed those goblins. There’s a vampire about, so you claim.”

Dahlia shrugged, showing no interest.

“Or a battlerager,” Drizzt went on stubbornly. “And if it is the latter, then we would do well to find him. A powerful ally.”

“So I thought of my vampire lover,” Dahlia said, and she seemed to take some pleasure when Drizzt grimaced at the reference.

“Will we never speak of what happened in Gauntlgrym?” Drizzt asked suddenly. “The twisted tiefling accused you of murder.” Dahlia’s expression abruptly changed. She snapped a glare over him.

Dahlia swallowed hard and did not turn her stare from Drizzt for an instant as he took a seat beside her.

“He claimed Alegni was his father,” Drizzt pressed.

“Shut up,” Dahlia warned.

“He called you his mother.”

Her eyes bored through him, and Drizzt expected her to reach out and claw at his face, or to explode into a tirade of shouted curses.

But she didn’t, and that, perhaps, was more unsettling still. She just sat there, staring. A cloud passed overhead, blocking the sunlight, sending a shadow across Dahlia’s pretty face.

“Implausible, of course, likely impossible,” Drizzt said quietly, trying to back away.

Dahlia held perfectly still. He could almost hear her heartbeat, or was it his own? Many moments slipped past. Drizzt lost count of them.

“It’s true,” she admitted, and now it was Drizzt who looked as if he had been slapped.

“Cannot be,” he finally managed to reply. “He is a young man, but you’re a young woman—”

“I was barely more than a child when the shadow of Herzgo Alegni fell over my clan,” Dahlia said, so very softly that Drizzt could hardly hear the words. “Twenty years ago.”

Drizzt’s thoughts spun in circles, very easily coming to the dark conclusion of Dahlia’s leading words. He tried to respond, but found himself sputtering helplessly in the face of a horror so far beyond him. He thought back to his own youth, to his graduation at Melee Magthere, when his own sister had advanced upon him so lewdly, forcing him to run away with revulsion.

For a moment, he thought to tell that tale to Dahlia, to try to claim some kinship to her pain, but then realized that his own experience surely paled beside her trauma.

And so he sputtered, and finally he reached out a hand to her to pull her close.

She resisted, but she was trembling. The tears that rolled from her blue eyes were formed in profound sadness, he knew, even as she issued a low growl to cover her weakness.

But denial couldn’t hold, and anger couldn’t cover the scar.

Drizzt tried to pull her close, but she spun away and scrambled to her feet, walking off a few steps, her back to him.

“So now you know,” she said, her voice as cold as winter’s deepest ice.

“Dahlia,” he pleaded, rising and taking a step her way. Should he go to her and grab her, and crush her close against him, and whisper to her that she might let the pain flow freely? Did she want that? She didn’t seem to, and yet, she had let Entreri kiss …

With a growl of his own, Drizzt dismissed that ridiculous jealousy. This wasn’t about him, wasn’t about his relationship with Dahlia, and surely wasn’t about her moments with Entreri. This was about Dahlia, and her pain so profound.

He didn’t know what to say, or what to do. He felt like a child. He had grown up in a place of deceit and murder and treachery as a way of life, perhaps the vilest city in all the world, and so he thought that he had fully inoculated himself against the scars of depravity and inhumanity. He was Drizzt Do’Urden, the hero of Icewind Dale, the hero of Mithral Hall, who had fought a thousand battles and killed a thousand enemies, who had watched dear friends die, who had loved and lost. Ever level-headed, hardened to the dark realities of life …

So he had thought.

So he had lied to himself.

This combination of emotions roiling within Dahlia was quite beyond him at that strange moment. This was darkness compounded in darkness, irredeemable and outside any comfort zones Drizzt might have constructed through his own less-complicated experiences. Dahlia had suffered something to her core, a violation beyond even an enemy’s sword, with which Drizzt could not empathize and of which Drizzt couldn’t even understand.

“Come,” Dahlia bade him, her voice even and strong. “Let us find this killer.” She walked off into the forest.

Drizzt watched her with surprise, until he recognized that she was now eager for the hunt for no better reason than to find an enemy to battle. The emotions Drizzt had stirred went too deep and Dahlia couldn’t find comfort in Drizzt’s hesitant embrace and awkward words, and so she needed to find someone, something, to destroy.

He had missed his moment, Drizzt understood. He had failed her.





The monk stood in the main square of Neverwinter, staring at his hands as he turned them around before his eyes.

“That a fightin’ practice?” Ambergris asked.

“I’m looking for hints of shadowstuff,” Brother Afafrenfere replied curtly. “What have you done to me, dwarf?”