The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(85)

Looking up the ladder and not back at him, she paused and waited for a tirade that did not come.

So Dahlia left him there.

“Do you wish to talk about it?” Drizzt asked Dahlia that night when he came to her as she sat alone on the deck. Guenhwyvar paced wearily beside him.

Dahlia turned to Drizzt and stared at him, considering the question, trying to fathom something from the tone. There was no hostility there. He knew about her tryst with Entreri, she knew without doubt, for Ambergris had warned Entreri of Effron’s revelations, and he in turn had told Dahlia.

But neither was there comprehension in Drizzt, Dahlia believed, and apparently that showed in her expression, for Drizzt then remarked, “I grew up in a dark place. Perhaps I do not understand that which you have suffered, but my own life, for longer than you have been alive, was spent among a culture that thought nothing of murder and deception.”

Dahlia licked her lips, a bit off guard by this uncharacteristic display. Drizzt was reaching out to her. Despite the distance that had grown between them—a gulf that had driven her to Artemis Entreri, no less!—the drow seemed to be honestly trying here. The elf woman reached over and patted Guen and the panther curled up at her feet, gave a great, toothy yawn, and sank down to the deck.

She appreciated Drizzt’s integrity, but still, there was nothing for her to say. Not then.

Drizzt reached out his arms and Dahlia accepted the invitation. She was truly grateful for the hug. She even admitted to herself that if Drizzt tried to take that hug to further intimacy, she wouldn’t stop him.

But he didn’t, and in a roundabout way, that seemed to Dahlia a rejection in and of itself. She moved to line up with Drizzt’s face and kissed him passionately.

Or tried to, for he turned away at the last moment.

Dahlia gave a little cry and grabbed at him forcefully, trying to push herself upon him. Drizzt was too strong for that, however, and he held her there.

So she punched him and pulled back instead, and he grabbed her and hugged her close again, tighter this time, pinning her arms.

She wanted to kill him!

Nay, she wanted to, needed to, make love to him. She needed him against her and inside her. She needed to devour him, to use him as her emotional anchor, to know that he loved her as she …

Dahlia stopped struggling and found it hard to breathe.

After a short while, Drizzt pushed her back to arms’ length, and said, “Go and see Effron again, as often as you can.”

Dahlia felt her jaw drop open, and she held that pose as Drizzt turned to the mainmast. “Be gone, Guen,” he said, dismissing Dahlia as surely as he was the cat, for he then scrambled up to his post—a post that had become his most customary perch, even throughout the nights.

Dahlia didn’t know what to think, or what to feel. She needed Drizzt at that moment, but he had left.

She needed her lover.

Dahlia had never needed a lover.

Never!

Until now, and she needed him and he had walked away, and it was her fault. Why had she gone to Entreri that night in Baldur’s Gate? Was it anger that had driven her to his bed? Or was it fear of these startling and undeniable feelings toward this rogue drow?

She felt as if she were on that cliff again, throwing Effron to the wind. She had ruined him on that fateful day, but she had invariably ruined herself as well.

Had she done the same in going to Entreri?

She watched Guenhwyvar dissolving into gray mist, into nothingness, and she saw that as an appropriate representation of her relationship with Drizzt.

“Go to Effron,” Drizzt called down to her, and she felt as if he were reading her inner turmoil. “You can repair this.”

Effron.

“Effron,” she whispered under her breath.

Dahlia found herself terrified of even daring to hope. She wanted nothing more than to cut her own wrist and melt down onto the deck and sob until death mercifully ended this cruel torment.

But Drizzt’s words kept echoing in her thoughts, denying the despair.

Eventually, the elf woman managed to turn and look over her shoulder, in the direction of the aft hatch and the small room where Effron remained.

She went there, quietly, and didn’t even rouse the sleeping dwarf and monk, or Effron, who tossed and turned in his hammock with troubled dreams. She quietly set the chair near that hammock, and eventually put her hand on Effron’s twisted shoulder, whispering for him to be still.

She fell asleep there, and when she woke up, she found Effron staring back at her from the hammock, but making no move to push her hand away, for it remained on his shoulder.

She tried to decipher the young warlock’s expression, but found she could not. Certainly, the pain remained etched on his thin and angular features, but what she could not then see, however, was the venom that had been so clear previously.

Dahlia swallowed hard. “We put into Memnon this day,” she said. “I hold to my word, if that is your choice.” Her voice nearly broke apart as she finished, “I hope you will sail back out with us.”

“Why?” he asked in what seemed a sincere tone.

Dahlia shrugged. She felt the tears welling in her eyes and could not deny them.

So she rose and rushed from the hold.





Minnow Skipper glided into Memnon’s harbor the next morning, the crew rushing around to drop the sails and ready the lines.