The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(146)

Dahlia shrugged, clearly confused by the seemingly pointless reference to Innovindil, given his answer.

“Innovindil was wrong,” Drizzt said. “Perhaps not entirely, and perhaps not for everyone, but for me, in this regard, I know now, and admit now, that Innovindil was wrong.”

“In this regard?”

“Regarding love,” Drizzt said.

“The auburn-haired witch of the wood.”

Drizzt nodded. “My heart remains with Catti-brie. I gave it to her wholly and cannot take it back.”

“She is dead a hundred years.”

“Not in my heart.”

“Ghosts are cold comfort, Drizzt Do’Urden.”

“So be it,” he replied, and he had never been more certain of his road in all of his two centuries. “I’m not saddened by this realization, by this admission that I remain in love with a woman lost to me a century ago.”

“Saddened? I would think you insane!”

“Then I hope for you, dear Dahlia, for I wish you nothing but the best road, that one day you will understand my … insanity. Because I do truly care for you, as my friend, I hope that you will one day be so afflicted as am I. Catti-brie died, but my love for her did not. Innovindil was wrong, and I will live my life happier in the warm memories of Catti-brie’s embrace than in a foolish and impossible effort to replace her.”

“So there is only one love? There can be no other?”

Drizzt considered that for a moment, then honestly shrugged. “I know not,” he admitted. “Perhaps this is, at long last, the time when I will find closure. Perhaps there will come in my path someday another to so warm me. But I do not seek that. I do not need it. Catti-brie remains with me, very much alive.”

He watched Dahlia swallow hard, and it pained him to hurt her—but how much greater would he be wounding her by living a lie out of cowardice?

“Then take our relationship for what it is,” Dahlia offered at length, and there seemed to be a bit of desperation creeping into the edges of her voice.

“And what is that, a distraction?”

“Play,” she said as lightly as she could manage, and she put on a too-wide smile. “Let us enjoy the road and each other’s body. We fight well together and we love well together, so take it for what it is and let it have no meaning beyond—”

“No,” Drizzt interrupted, though he could not deny that Dahlia’s offer was enticing. “Not for your sake and not for my own. My heart and home are here, in Icewind Dale, and here I will stay. And here, you should not stay.”

The crestfallen expression that enveloped Dahlia nearly had Drizzt running to embrace her, but again, for her own sake, he did not.

“You would send me away with Entreri?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed, and her facial woad seemed to heighten then, reflecting a growing anger. “He is a fine lover, you know.”

Drizzt recognized that she was just lashing out here, just trying to sting him back for the rejection he had shown her. He did well to offer no response.

“I have shared his bed many times,” Dahlia pressed, to which Drizzt merely nodded.

“You do not care?” Dahlia asked, her tone on the edge of outrage.

Drizzt swallowed hard, seeing this breakup devolving into a matter of foolish pride, and he knew that he should allow Dahlia to salvage some of that. Or should he, and again, for her own sake?

“No,” he answered flatly. “I do care, but not as you imagine. I am glad that you have found each other.”

“You are walking a dangerous path, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Dahlia warned.

Drizzt wasn’t sure how to take that at first. Was she referring to his own emotional state, given his dramatic choice? Was she taking up Innovindil’s mantle of long-searching wisdom to appeal to him on some philosophical level?

She lifted her walking stick before her and snapped her wrists expertly to break it in half, into two four-foot lengths, and these she broke in half into flails—“nun’chuks,” Afafrenfere had named them—and sent them into easy spins at her side.

“You do not get to so easily dismiss me,” Dahlia informed him. “I am not a plaything for the whims of Drizzt Do’Urden.”

Drizzt thought better of reminding her that she had just offered to be exactly that, and instead focused on how he might diffuse this strange situation. “I seek only that which is best for us both.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shut up and draw your blades.”

Drizzt held his hands out unthreateningly, as if that request was absurd.

“Diamonds do not move so easily from one ear to the other,” she said. “And this one, the black diamond, is to be the most difficult of all.” She began circling to Drizzt’s left, moving up the incline near to the edge of the rock. “That is why I chose you, of course. Or do you still not understand?”

“Apparently, I don’t—” he started to answer, his words cut short as he ducked and dodged back, one of Dahlia’s weapons whipping suddenly at his head—and had it connected, it surely would have cracked open his skull.

“Dahlia!”

“Draw your blades!” she shouted back at him. “Do not further disappoint me! You were the one, the lover I could not beat! You were the one to serve me my just reward. You are a failure as a lover, as a man, with your precious witch ever in your foolish heart. Do not doubly disappoint me by failing at the one thing I know you do well!”