“Lofty goals,” said Rethnor.
“My father, I only seek to make you proud,” Kensidan said with such obvious sarcasm that old Rethnor could only laugh, and heartily.
“I’m not easy with this disembodied voice arriving in the darkness,” Deudermont said. “But pleased I am, beyond anything, to see you alive and well.”
“Well is a relative term,” the drow replied. “But I’m recovering—though if you ever happen to travel to the plane of my imprisonment, take care to avoid the mushrooms.”
Deudermont and Robillard laughed at that, as did Regis, who was standing at Drizzt’s side, both of them carrying their packs for the road.
“I have acquaintances on Luskan’s streets,” Drizzt reasoned. “Some not even of my knowing, but friends of a friend.”
“Wulfgar,” said Deudermont. “Perhaps it was that Morik character he ran beside—though he’s not supposed to be in Luskan, on pain of death.”
Drizzt shrugged. “Whatever good fortune brought Guenhwyvar’s statue to Regis, it’s good fortune I will accept.”
“True enough,” said the captain. “And now you are bound for Icewind Dale. Are you sure that you cannot stay the winter, for I’ve much to do, and your help would serve me well.”
“If we hurry, we can beat the snows to Ten-Towns,” said Drizzt.
“And you will return to Luskan in the spring?”
“We would be sorry friends indeed if we didn’t,” Regis answered.
“We will return,” Drizzt promised.
With handshakes and bows, the pair left Sea Sprite, which served as the governor’s palace until the devastation in the city could be sorted out and a new location, formerly the Red Dragon Inn on the northern bank of the Mirar, could be properly secured and readied.
The enormity of the rebuilding task ahead of Luskan was not lost on Drizzt and Regis as they walked through the city’s streets. Much of the place had been gutted by flames and so many had died, leaving one empty structure after another. Many of the larger homes and taverns had been confiscated by order of Governor Deudermont and set up as hospitals for the many, many wounded, or as often as not as morgues to hold the bodies until they could be properly identified and buried.
“The Luskar will do little through the winter, other than to try to find food and warmth,” Regis remarked as they passed a group of haggard women huddled in a doorway.
“It will be a long road,” Drizzt agreed.
“Was it worth the cost?” the halfling asked.
“We can’t yet know.”
“A lot of folk would disagree with you on that,” Regis remarked, nodding in the direction of the new graveyard north of the city.
“Arklem Greeth was intolerable,” Drizzt reminded his friend. “If the city can withstand the next few months, a year perhaps, with the rebuilding in the summer, then Deudermont will do well by them, do not doubt. He will call in every favor from every Waterdhavian lord, and goods and supplies will flow fast to Luskan.”
“Will it be enough, though?” Regis asked. “With so many of the healthy adults dead, how many of their families will even stay?”
Drizzt shrugged helplessly.
“Perhaps we should stay and help through the winter,” said Regis, but Drizzt was shaking his head.
“Not everyone in Luskan accepts me, Deudermont’s friend or not,” the drow replied. “We didn’t instigate their fight, but we helped the correct side win it. Now we must trust them to do what’s right—there’s little we can do here now. Besides, I want to see Wulfgar again, and Icewind Dale. Its been too long since I’ve looked upon my first true home.”
“But Luskan…” Regis started.
Drizzt interrupted with an upraised hand.
“Was it really worth it?” Regis pressed anyway.
“I have no answers, nor do you.”
They passed out of the city’s northern gate then, to the halfhearted cheers of the few guardsmen along the wall and towers.
“Maybe we could get them all to march to Longsaddle next,” Regis remarked, and Drizzt laughed, almost as helplessly as he had shrugged.
PART 3
HARMONY
I am often struck by the parallel courses I find in the wide world. My life’s road has led me to many places, back and forth from Mithral Hall to the Sword Coast, to Icewind Dale and the Snowflake Mountains, to Calimport and to the Underdark. I have come to know the truth of the old saying that the only constant is change, but what strikes me most profoundly is the similarity of direction in that change, a concordance of mood, from place to place, in towns and among people who have no, or at least only cursory, knowledge of each other.
I find unrest and I find hope. I find contentment and I find anger. And always, it seems, I’m met with the same general set of emotions among the people from place to place. I understand there is a rationality to it all, for even peoples remote from each other will share common influences: a difficult winter, a war in one land that affects commerce in another, whispers of a spreading plague, the rise of a new king whose message resonates among the populace and brings hope and joy even to those far removed from his growing legend. But still, I often feel as though there is another realm of the senses. As a cold winter might spread through Icewind Dale and Luskan, and all the way to the Silver Marches, so too, it seems, does mood spiderweb the paths and roads of the Realms. It’s almost as if there is a second layer of weather, an emotional wave that rolls and roils its way across Faerûn.
There is trepidation and hopeful change in Mithral Hall and the rest of the Silver Marches, a collective holding of breath where the coin of true peace and all-out war spins on its edge, and not dwarf nor elf nor human nor orc knows on which side it will land. There is a powerful emotional battle waging between the status quo and the desire to embrace great and promising change.
And so I found this same unsettling dynamic in Longsaddle, where the Harpells are engaged in a similar state of near disaster with the rival factions of their community. They hold the coin fast, locked in spells to conserve what is, but the stress and strain are obvious to all who view. And so I found this same dynamic in Luskan, where the potential change is no less profound than the possible—and none too popular—acceptance of an orc kingdom as a viable partner in the league of nations that comprise the Silver Marches.
A wave of unrest and edginess has gripped the land, from Mithral Hall to the Sword Coast—palpably so. It’s as if the people and races of the world have all at once declared the unacceptability of their current lot in life, as if the sentient beings have finished their collective exhale and are now taking in a new breath.
I head to Icewind Dale, a land of tradition that extends beyond the people who live there, a land of constants and of constant pres sure. A land not unaccustomed to war, a land that knows death intimately. If the same breath that brought Obould from his hole, that brought out ancient hatreds among the priests of Longsaddle, that led to the rise of Deudermont and the fall of Arklem Greeth, has filled the unending winds of Icewind Dale, then I truly fear what I may find there, in a place where the smoke of a gutted homestead is almost as common as the smoke of a campfire, and where the howl of the wolf is no less threatening than the war cry of a barbarian, or the battle call of an orc, or the roar of a white dragon. Under the constant struggle to simply survive, Icewind Dale is on edge even in those times when the world is in a place of peace and contentment. What might I find there now, when my road has passed through lands of strife and battle?
I wonder sometimes if there is a god, or gods, who play with the emotions of the collective of sentient beings as an artist colors a canvas. Might there be supernatural beings watching and taking amusement at our toils and tribulations? Do these gods wave giant wands of envy or greed or contentment or love over us all, that they can then watch at their pleasure, perhaps even gamble on the outcome?
Or do they, too, battle amongst themselves, reflections of our own failures, and their victories and failures simil
arly extend to us, their insignificant minions?
Or am I simply taking the easier route of reasoning, and ascribing what I cannot know to some irrationally defined being or beings for the sake of my own comfort? This trail, I fear, may be no more than warm porridge on a wintry morning.
Whatever it is, the weather or the rise of a great foe, folk demanding to partake of advancements in comfort or the sweep of a plague, or some unseen and nefarious god or gods at play, or whether, perhaps, the collective I view is no more than an extension of my own inner turmoil or contentment, a projection of Drizzt upon the people he views…whatever it may be, this collective emotion seems to me a palpable thing, a real and true motion of shared breath.
— Drizzt Do’Urden
CHAPTER 19
THE WIND IN THEIR EARS
I t happened imperceptibly, a delicate transition that touched the memories and souls of the companions as profoundly as it reverberated in their physical senses. For as the endless and mournful wind of Icewind Dale filled their ears, as the smell of the tundra filled their noses, as the cold northern air tickled their skin, and as the sheet of wintry white dazzled their eyes, so too did the aura of the place, the primal savagery, the pristine beauty, fill their thoughts, so too did the edge of catastrophe awaken their conflicting fears.
That was the true power of the dale, exemplified by the wind, always the wind, the constant reminder of the paradox of existence, that one was always alone and never alone, that communion ended at senses’ edge and yet that the same communion never truly ended.
They walked side-by-side, without speaking, but not in silence. They were joined by the wind of Icewind Dale, in the same place and same time, and whatever thoughts they each entertained separately could not fully escape the bond of awareness forced by Icewind Dale itself upon all who ventured there.
They crossed out of the pass through the Spine of the World and onto the wider tundra one bright and shining morning, and found that the snows were not yet too deep, and the wind not yet too cold. In a few days, if the weather held, they would arrive in Ten-Towns, the ten settlements around the three deep lakes to the north. There, Regis had once found sanctuary from the relentless pursuit of Pasha Pook, a former employer, from whom he had stolen the magical ruby pendant he still wore. There, the beleaguered and weary Drizzt Do’Urden had at last found a place to call home, and the friends he continued to hold most dear.
For the next few days, they held wistfulness in their eyes and fullness in their hearts. Around their small campfire each night they spoke of times past, of fishing Maer Dualdon, the largest of the lakes; of nights on Kelvin’s Cairn, the lone mountain above the caves where Bruenor’s clan had lived in exile, where the stars seemed so close that one could grasp them; and questions of immortality seemed crystalline clear. For one could not stand on Bruenor’s Climb on Kelvin’s Cairn, amidst the stars on a cold and crisp Icewind Dale night and not feel a profound connection to eternity.
The trail, known simply as “the caravan route,” ran almost directly northeast to Bryn Shander, the largest of the ten settlements, the accepted seat of power for the region and the common marketplace. Bryn Shander was favorably located within the meager protection of a series of rolling hillocks and nearly equidistant to the three lakes, Maer Dualdon to the northwest, Redwaters to the southeast and Lac Dinneshere, the easternmost of the lakes. Along the same line as the caravan route, just half a day’s walk northeast of Bryn Shander, loomed the dormant volcano Kelvin’s Cairn, and before it, the valley and tunnels that once, and for more than a century, had housed Clan Battlehammer.
Nearly ten thousand hearty souls lived in those ten settlements, all but those in Bryn Shander on the banks of one of the three lakes.
The approach of a dark elf and a halfling elicited excitement and alarm in the young guards manning Bryn Shander’s main gate. To see anyone coming up the caravan route at such a late date was a surprise, but to have one of those approaching be an elf with skin as black as midnight…!
The gates closed fast and hard, and Drizzt laughed aloud—loud enough to be heard, though he and Regis were still many yards away.
“I told you to keep your hood up,” Regis scolded.
“Better they see me for what I am before we’re in range of a longbow.”
Regis took a step away from the drow, and Drizzt laughed again, and so did the halfling.
“Halt and be recognized!” a guard shouted at them in a voice too shaky to truly be threatening.
“Recognize me, then, and be done with this foolishness,” Drizzt called back, and he stopped in the middle of the road barely twenty strides from the wooden stockade wall. “How many years must one live among the folk of Ten-Towns before the lapse of a few short years so erases the memory of men?”
A long pause ensued before a different guard called out, “What is your name?”
“Drizzt Do’Urden, you fool!” Regis yelled back. “And I am Regis of Lonelywood, who serves King Bruenor in Mithral Hall.”
“Can it be?” yet another voice cried out.
The gates swung open as quickly and as forcefully as they had closed.
“Apparently their memories are not as short as you feared,” Regis remarked.
“It’s good to be home,” the drow replied.
The snow-covered trees muffled the wind’s mournful song as Regis silently padded through them down to the banks of the partially frozen lake a few days later. Maer Dualdon spread out wide before him, gray ice, black ice, and blue water. One boat bobbed at the town of Lonelywood’s longest wharf, not yet caught fast by the winter. From dozens of small houses nestled in the woods, single lines of smoke wafted into the morning air.
Regis was at peace.
He moved to the water’s edge, where a small patch remained unfrozen, and dropped a tiny chunk of ice into the lake, then watched as the ripples rolled out from the impact, washing little bits of water onto the surrounding ice. His mind took him through those ripples and into the past. He thought of fishing—this had been his favorite spot. He told himself it would be a good thing to come back one summer and again set his bobber in the waters of Maer Dualdon.
Hardly thinking of the action, he reached into a small sack he had tied to his belt and produced a palm-sized piece of white bone, the famous skull that gave the trout of Icewind Dale their name. From his other hip pouch, he produced his carving knife, and never looking down at the bone, his eyes gazing across the empty lake, he went to work. Shavings fell as the halfling worked to free that which he knew to be in the bone, for that was the true secret of scrimshaw. His art wasn’t to carve the bone into some definable shape, but to free the shape that was already in there, waiting for skilled and delicate fingers to show it to the world.
Regis looked down and smiled as he came to understand the image he was freeing, one so fitting for him at that moment of reflection on what had once been, of good times spent among good friends in a land so beautiful and so deadly all at once.
He lost track of time as he stood there reminiscing and sculpting, and soaking in the beauty and the refreshing chill. Half in a daze, half in the past, Regis nearly jumped out of his furry boots when he glanced down again and saw the head of a gigantic cat beside his hip.
His little squeak became a call of, “Guenhwyvar!” as the startled halfling tried to catch his breath.
“She likes it here, too,” Drizzt said from the trees behind him, and he turned to watch his drow friend’s approach.
“You could have called out a warning,” Regis said, and he noted that in his startled jump, he’d nicked his thumb with the sharp knife. He brought it up to suck on the wound, and was greatly relieved to learn that his scrimshaw had not been damaged.
“I did,” Drizzt replied. “Twice. You’ve the wind in your ears.”
“It’s not so breezy here.”
“Then the winds of time,” said Drizzt.
Regis smiled and nodded. “It’s hard to come here and not want to stay.”
/>
“It’s a more difficult place than Mithral Hall,” said Drizzt.
“But a more simple one,” Regis answered, and it was Drizzt’s turn to smile and nod. “You met with the spokesmen of Bryn Shander?”
Drizzt shook his head. “There was no need,” he explained. “Proprietor Faelfaril knew well of Wulfgar’s journey through Ten-Towns four years ago. I learned everything we need from the innkeeper.”
“And it saved you the trouble of the fanfare you knew would accompany your return.”
“As you avoided it by jumping a wagon north to Lonelywood,” Drizzt retorted.
“I wanted to see it again. It was my home, after all, and for many, many years. Did fat old Faelfaril mention any subsequent visits by Wulfgar?”
Drizzt shook his head. “Our friend came through, praise Tempus, but very briefly before going straightaway out to the tundra, to rejoin his people. The folk of Bryn Shander heard one other mention of him, just one, a short time after that, but nothing definitive and nothing that Faelfaril remembers well.”
“Then he is out there,” Regis said, nodding to the northeast, the open lands where the barbarians roamed. “I’d wager he’s the king of them all by now.”
Drizzt’s expression showed he didn’t agree. “Where he went, where he is, is not known in Bryn Shander, and perhaps Wulfgar has become chieftain of the Tribe of the Elk, his people. But the tribes are no longer united, and have not been for years. They have only occasional and very minor dealings with the folk of Ten-Towns at all, and Faelfaril assured me that were it not for the occasional campfires seen in the distance, the folk of Ten-Towns wouldn’t even know that they were constantly surrounded by wandering barbarians.”
Regis furrowed his brow in consternation.
“But neither do they fear the tribes, as they once did,” Drizzt said. “They coexist, and there is relative peace, and that is no small legacy of our friend Wulfgar.”
The Pirate King t-2 Page 23