The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(83)

“Badly,” Effron spat back.

“That is one choice, but only that, a choice.”

“I’ll see her dead.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“You don’t know—” Effron started, but Drizzt cut him short.

“It won’t free you of your burden,” Drizzt calmly assured him. “Your satisfaction will prove short-lived, and ever longer will your misery grow. This I know. Whatever else, whatever other details you think yourself privy to that I am not, matter not at all. Because this I know.”

Effron stared at him hard.

“Where will this all go?” Drizzt asked again, and he started off. And he knew that Ambergris has been listening to every word when she came around the corner before Drizzt had reached it.

And he knew it by the look on the dwarf’s face, an expression of sympathy aimed at him.

“Ask yerself the same,” the dwarf advised in a whisper as Drizzt walked by.





Up above the deck in the crow’s nest, Drizzt was the first to spot land, a jutting mountain to the south east. Memnon was closer than that natural mound, Drizzt knew, though it was not yet visible, as Minnow Skipper neared the end of the second leg of her journey.

He called down to Captain Cannavara, who looked up at him and nodded, as if expecting the call. “So keep your eyes to the horizons for pirate sails, drow!” he yelled back. “Here’s the channel they haunt!”

Drizzt nodded, but thought little of it. There were no sails to be seen, and in truth, that irked Drizzt. He scanned as the captain had asked, and he hoped to see something, and was dismayed that he did not.

Drizzt wanted a fight.

He had spent the last two tendays wanting a fight. Since his confrontation with Effron, the drow had subconsciously wrung the blood out of his knuckles on many occasions, most often whenever Artemis Entreri was in view.

He looked down at the deck now, forward, where Entreri was sitting and eating some bread. Dahlia wasn’t far from him, working the lines as the pilot tried to keep the sails full of wind.

The two of them in the same frame stung him, and his imagination took him to dark places indeed. He shook it away and tried to rationalize, tried to find a distinction where Drizzt left off and Dahlia began. He didn’t focus on the claim he held on the woman as much as on the notion that any such claim was preposterous.

Still, the drow found himself gnashing his teeth. The intersection of emotion and rational thought was not bordered by well-marked corners after all.





“Memnon?” Dahlia asked Captain Cannavara after Drizzt’s call.

“With the morning tide,” the captain replied.

Dahlia glanced over at Entreri, and with alarm. It wasn’t just the notion of him leaving, as he had hinted, but more the coming conclusion to the situation with Effron. One way or another, something had to be resolved. Dahlia had hardly seen her son, willingly relinquishing control of him to Afafrenfere and Ambergris, though she doubted that much attention was even needed, given Effron’s obvious distress. The young warlock appeared as broken inside as out, now, and showed no signs of trying to lash out, or escape. Indeed, Ambergris had assured them all that Effron could have gotten away on several occasions, for he knew how to shadowstep. If he tried to execute such a maneuver to return to the Shadowfell, only immediate and overwhelming intervention could stop him, and surely over the course of tendays, there had been many such opportunities for Effron to escape.

But now loomed Memnon, the next dock, and Cannavara had informed the crew that they would be in port for a tenday, perhaps two, as they executed some needed repairs to Minnow Skipper’s hull and masts.

With a heavy sigh, Dahlia started for the hold.

“Here now, girl!” Cannavara said to her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’ve something I need to do.”

“Not now, you don’t, unless you’re thinking that you need to work that line. We’re in pirate waters, the last run to Memnon, and we’re not to put aside our diligence until we’re fast tied to the long dock.”

Dahlia turned away from the captain. “Entreri,” she called, and he looked back at her over his shoulder. She nodded to her post and gave a pleading expression and shrug.

Artemis Entreri tore off another piece of bread and nodded, moving to replace her.

Dahlia turned back to Captain Cannavara, who had already turned away to move on to other business.

The elf pointedly did not look up at Drizzt as she moved to the open bulkhead of the aft hold.

“Leave,” she instructed the dwarf and the monk as she descended.

“Aye, but we’re too close to be takin’ such a gamble as that,” Ambergris warned.

Dahlia didn’t blink, and didn’t regard the dwarf, her eyes locked on the small figure reclining in a hammock across the way.

“Tie him, then,” Ambergris instructed the monk, but before Afafrenfere took a step toward Effron, Dahlia repeated, “Leave,” her tone leaving no room for debate.

The dwarf and the monk exchanged looks and shrugs, and neither seemed to care much at that time.

“Ye do what ye need do,” Ambergris offered, moving up to the deck behind her monk companion.

“We are almost in port,” Dahlia said when she and Effron were alone in the small aft hold.