The Companions

by R. A. Salvatore

  Surprisingly strong hands reached down to grab Regis and he was easily hoisted from his bed.

  “Here’s to hoping you’re your mother’s son,” the halfling said, bringing Regis against his shoulder and moving swiftly out of the house.

  Regis got his first view of the city then, and it was a large place, with rows of shacks and shanties stacked before the high-walled lines of more respectable houses. One hill, far off, sported a castle. His father turned onto a boardwalk, leading downward from their position, and rambled along for many, many steps, through turns and down stairs, along some more declines. Few buildings were to be seen around the raised planks, and those were merely ramshackle and simple things.

  Soon there were birds all around them, everywhere, flying and diving and squawking noisily, and it took Regis some time to recognize that these were water birds, mostly, and indeed, it wasn’t until this halfling he presumed to be his father turned down yet another long and declining way that Regis came to understand this boardwalk as a long wharf, and this city a port—though, strangely, a port built far from the water’s edge.

  And what a grand ocean it was, he noted at one turn, catching a glimpse of seemingly endless waves. He thought of Luskan or Baldur’s Gate, Waterdeep or Calimport, but this city wasn’t any of those. Still, they were traveling west, he knew from the sun in the sky, and so he figured this must be the Sword Coast.

  He didn’t smell any salt in the air, though.

  They moved down to the shore, a small beach tucked between a variety of smaller wharves and boardwalks. Many boats bobbed in the waters around them. A human couple threw an oft-repaired net out into the surf. Another halfling dug for shellfish in the sand at water’s edge.

  His father splashed into the water, up to his waist.

  “Breathe deep, runt,” he said, and to Regis’s shock, he flipped Regis around from his shoulder and plunged him under the water!

  The baby squirmed and thrashed for all he was worth, for his very life!

  Futilely, of course, for this tiny, uncoordinated, little-muscled form could not begin to counter the strength in the elder halfling’s hands. Reflexively, Regis held his breath, but he could not for long, and the bubbles came forth from his lips. He tried to hold out, fought to keep his mouth shut.

  His father was drowning him!

  All of the dreams that had carried him out of Iruladoon flashed through his thoughts then. He had imagined the Companions of the Hall rejoined, and this time, he had sworn, he would not be the tag-along, the helpless soul hiding in the back of the battle. No, he would become an equal in the coming trials, and would fight bravely to save Drizzt from the darkness Catti-brie had hinted of, from the clutches of Lady Lolth, perhaps!

  But now he wouldn’t.

  His little mouth opened and the sea rushed in. He tried not to swallow, not to gasp, but alas, he could not resist.

  As he could not break free of his father’s iron grip.

  So he would find his final reward, as surely as if he had gone with Wulfgar into the pond. Before he had even been given a chance to prove his worth, it would all be over.

  And he would not see his friends again, unless it was in the Green Fields …

  “Is that Eiverbreen?” asked a halfling working on the dock not far away.

  “Aye,” answered his dwarf companion. “Eiverbreen and his new runt. Pity that Jolee passed in birthing him.”

  “Aye.”

  “So, eh, what’s that then? Eiverbreen’s set on killin’ the waif? Ah, but who could blame him, and the little one’s better off anyway.”

  “Nay, not that,” the halfling answered, and he paused in his work and moved to the near edge of the dock, watching the scene more closely. His dwarf friend followed, hands on hips, neither harboring any intent to interfere, whether this was indeed infanticide or something else.

  Regis came out of the water as abruptly as he had been thrust in, his father twirling him up and spinning him around to look him in the eye. The little one sputtered and spat, water flowing out of him as easily as it had gone in. His father, who had just tried to kill him, smiled.

  “Not blue,” he said with a hoarse laugh. “Aye, so you’re your mother’s son. By the gods, but luck’s with you, ain’t it? It’s our secret, you know, and you’re to make a fine wage!”

  With that, he tucked Regis under his arm and headed back up the long, long boardwalk, back to the lean-to.

  The baby’s thoughts spun in confusion. What had that been about? To torture him? To terrify him? To make him think he was being drowned, being murdered? But to what end? What possible gain …?

  Regis forced himself to calm down, forced the pulsing questions aside.

  He hadn’t drowned—in truth, he hadn’t come close to drowning and had felt no physical discomfort at all beyond the strong and tight grip of his father’s hands.

  But he had been under the water for a long time. He couldn’t keep holding his breath. He couldn’t keep his mouth closed, couldn’t keep the water away.

  But he wasn’t blue, his father had just told him, and indeed, when he had come up from the water, he hadn’t even been gasping for air.

  Was this all the result of his young age, as if, perhaps, his mind couldn’t yet even acknowledge such discomfort? That seemed a possibility, but Regis didn’t think it likely. No, more likely, it seemed to him that he hadn’t registered any discomfort because there hadn’t been any discomfort.

  How was that possible?

  He clutched tightly at his father’s raggedy shirt as he considered the mystery. He felt something round and hard in his little hand, and gripped it instinctively, and only as they neared their home did he even realize it to be a button.

  A button held by a single thread, he realized as he worked it around, and as his father moved to set him back down in his crib, he tightened his grip and pulled with all his strength.

  The button came free, and Regis took care to keep his hand closed over it.

  “So you’ve got the genasi blood,” his father said, though Regis had no idea of what that might even mean. “That’ll make you worth keeping, lucky runt. Like your Ma. Aye, but we’ll put that gift to work!”

  He walked away then, out of the lean-to.

  Regis didn’t understand any of this, of course, but he told himself to be patient. The one thing he had now, Mielikki willing, for all of his plans, was time. Lots of time, but not time enough to be wasted.

  Twenty-one years of time, and he would put them to good use. As he had determined when he had walked out of Iruladoon, he would waste not a day.

  He managed to lift his little hand up before his eyes, and opened his fingers just enough to see the button. He thought to roll it around his fingers, but an involuntary twitch jerked his arm then, and he nearly lost the item.

  If it fell free, he would have no way to collect it … likely a rat would pick it up and scurry off with it.

  So he squeezed it instead, repeatedly, training his fingers, training his muscles, and slowly maneuvering one finger or another around it a bit, gaining strength, gaining dexterity. He held it tightly when the wet nurse came to feed him, then he brought his arm down to his side and leaned upon it to secure the button as he slept.

  Days later, he managed to shift it to his other hand, his left hand. Again, he brought it up before his eyes, and then he paused and stared.

  He noted his thumb and the three fingers beside it, and the stump where his pinky should be.

  The image jolted the halfling back in time, to the captivity he had endured under Artemis Entreri, where Entreri had cut off his finger as a warning to Drizzt …

  Had that physical wound carried over to this new body? How could that be?

  He stared at the stump, and noted then the jagged line of skin and the scab, not yet fully healed. No, this was not a carryover of Entreri’s cruelty, he realized, but an ironic twist of fate. He recalled the moment of his rebirth, when his mother had died, he now understood, and so the midwif
e had used a knife to slice her open and get him out. He remembered the sharp and burning pain, and now he understood the source.

  For a long, long while, the halfling baby lay there, staring at the wound, lost in memories more than in his current hopes and aspirations.

  He pressed beyond the shock, though, and repeated the exercises, exactly as he had done with the other hand, squeezing and holding, building his strength and his muscle memory.

  Tendays later, he began to roll the button around his fingers, one hand and then the other, feeling the play as it rolled over one knuckle to be caught between that finger and the next and rolled again. Back and forth, pinky-to-thumb, thumb-to-pinky, on his right hand, thumb-to-ring finger, ring finger-to-thumb on the left.

  Hand-to-hand.

  He could almost feel the connections forming in his little brain and muscles, as indeed they were, so that he became attuned to his fingers and to the subtle muscle movements controlling each.

  Some time later, he could not guess how many days or even tendays had passed, his father came for him and took him again to the small beach between the docks.

  Under the waves he went, until the bubbles came forth and the water rushed in. He tried to mentally count the passage of time until he was hoisted out and shaken, only to be thrust back in soon after.

  “You’ll find the deeps,” his father said on one lift, then thrust him back under.

  “Where the oysters rest,” his father added on the next lift.

  “A master diver, as your Ma!” the dirty and bedraggled halfling declared, and under the waves Regis went once more.

  This time for longer, much longer. He lost count of his heartbeats, lost all sense of time around him. Only gradually did he feel the need for air, and it was not an urgent sensation, as if he were drowning, but more a desire.

  Many more heartbeats passed before his father lifted him once more. The elder halfling inspected him carefully, then issued a belly laugh, clearly pleased as he declared, “Not blue in the face!”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CHOSEN

  The Year of the Reborn Hero (1463 DR) Netheril

  NO MOMENT OF FEAR, NOT AN INSTANT OF DOUBT, FOLLOWED CATTI-BRIE out of Iruladoon. In the days she had spent there—the century on Toril—she had danced the movements of Mielikki and sung the song of Mielikki, and so it was with great understanding of the goddess and great confidence in the eternal circle of life itself, that Catti-brie had stepped from the forest to begin her floating journey, to find the womb, to gasp her first breath in her new body, reincarnated, reborn. It happened on the night of the spring equinox.

  The holy night of Mielikki, the night of the birth of the goddess’s Chosen.

  Wrapped in swaddling clothes, the infant seemed fully helpless before the adult humans milling around in the tent. But even though she could not move her arms under the tight wrappings, Catti-brie instinctively understood that there remained at her disposal several potent spells she could utilize to defend herself, dweomers that needed no movements to enact.

  Unlike her friends who had similarly journeyed from Iruladoon, Catti-brie had taken no infantile confusion with her. The instincts of childhood gnawed at her, of course, but because of her communing with the goddess, she was better prepared for this journey by far, and more knowledgeable and thus able to keep those penetrating pangs and desires in their proper place.

  Good fortune had followed her, as well, for her mother—she heard the name Kavita spoken tenderly by her father and others—doted on her, lifting her often and holding her close. That is, when Kavita wasn’t passing the baby around to the other women who flocked to the Bedine tent, all wanting to cuddle with the newborn. To the Bedine tribe of the Desai, the birth of a child was a grand celebration indeed, and Catti-brie—Ruqiah, they called her—was the center of that play.

  She wisely held silent throughout the pawing and the cooing and the continual conversations directed at her, just inches from her face, for she understood well what had happened to Wulfgar when he had been reborn, and feared that she, too, could forget herself and spout some actual words.

  And so, like her journey in the first phases of her departure from Iruladoon, the baby who was really a woman lay back and observed, and let the beauty of the experience grant her insight and more knowledge. Many times in those first days, did Catti-brie silently give extra thanks to Mielikki.

  Only a few days later, the tribe was on the move again, Catti-brie, swaddled tightly as always, strapped to her walking mother’s back. She strained her eyes, focusing on the land as the miles rolled by, trying to get a feel for where she might be.

  Patient and observant, the baby learned and watched, and when she was alone in the dark of night, she prayed and she practiced, perfecting her little voice so that she could again sing the notes of Mielikki. She regretted the tight binding of the cloth wrapped around her, though, and feared that it would take her some time to properly perfect control of her arms and legs.

  But she had time, she reminded herself.

  “She’s beautiful,” Kavita said to Niraj as she stood by Ruqiah’s cradle. The night outside was dark and quiet—even the wind seemed to have drifted off to sleep. “But her eyes are so blue! How can that be?”

  “They will darken with age,” Niraj assured her. “As did mine.”

  “And so her hair will fall out?” Kavita asked, teasing her bald-headed husband.

  “No,” he said, moving near and placing his hand gently on Kavita’s bare shoulder, and feeling, as he did, the raised skin of her long scar. He bent in and kissed her there, on the shoulder blade, where she had been marked so dramatically by the whip of a Netherese enforcer who had heard a whispered rumor that Kavita was practicing magic.

  That one had learned the hard way that Kavita was indeed a wizard, and so was her husband, Niraj, who had laid the man low with a bolt of lightning. How pathetic the brutal enforcer had seemed then, trying to work his arm and snap his whip from his back in the sand—Sand Kavita’s spell had then dug out from under him, and which had been abruptly put back, only now atop him, burying him alive, by the subsequent enchantment of Niraj and Kavita.

  “She will have the thick tresses of her mother, I am sure,” Niraj added, running his hand through Kavita’s hair. He could feel the tension within his wife. “What troubles you, my love?”

  “The Netherese are everywhere,” Kavita said. “With every pilgrimage, there are more to be seen, shadowing us from the hills, stopping and inspecting and questioning, always questioning.”

  “They are sand crabs,” Niraj agreed, “who came uninvited to our land. Our land I say, and we will be here long after they are gone, when the winds of Anauroch return and the land of Netheril is long forgotten!”

  “By then, we’ll be long forgotten,” Kavita replied.

  “But our descendants …,” Niraj replied, nodding his chin toward their baby girl.

  “We must take care, special care,” Kavita said. “For Ruqiah, more than for ourselves.”

  Niraj didn’t disagree. They were wizards, but secretly so, for the Netherese rulers of this land had forbidden the Bedine to practice the Art.

  Kavita looked around, left and right, then focused her gaze on the tent flap for a few moments, holding silent and craning her neck, listening for any intruders. With a glance at her husband, she bent over the cradle and unfastened the ties, loosening the swaddling cloth. She pushed the fabric aside and pulled forth Ruqiah’s bare left arm, lifting it a bit and turning it so that the meager candlelight would reflect off the inside of her forearm.

  Niraj sucked in his breath. He had seen the birthmark before—or at least, had seen what he hoped was a birthmark.

  But now there could be no doubt, for this was no ordinary birthmark. A distinct figure, resembling a seven-pointed star, was set in a circular field of red.

  “Spellscar?” Niraj asked, seeming confused, for he had not heard of one quite this distinct before.

  Kavita pulled out the baby�
��s other arm and turned it to reveal the inside of the forearm, where a second marking loomed.

  “A curved blade?” Niraj asked, and peered closer. “Nay, a horn, a unicorn’s head! She is twice-marked?”

  “And her scars will be harder to conceal.”

  “She should wear them with pride!” Niraj insisted.

  “The Netherese would not agree.”

  “Damn them! We are Bedine, not chattel!”

  Kavita put her finger over her husband’s lips to silence him. “Be at ease, my husband,” she quietly coaxed. “We are free upon our land. Let us not be bound by our hatred for those who claim dominance. Claim, but do not truly hold us in chains.”

  Niraj nodded and kissed his wife, and pulled her across the room to their bed.

  Little Ruqiah opened her eyes, having heard every word. They had not rewound the cloth around her and so for one of the rare times in her young life, her arms were free. She took the opportunity to flex them and move them, and felt indeed as if a great weight had at last been lifted from her. She managed to get both of her little arms into view long enough to study that which her parents had discussed.

  The images, the scars, brought her back to a morning long ago, when she had awakened in her tent beside her husband Drizzt. They were on their way back to Mithral Hall, unaware of the great changes that were even then beginning to befall their world.

  On that fateful day, Catti-brie had been struck by a falling strand of Mystra’s magical Weave, the Weave of Magic itself, and the blinding power of magical energy bared had overwhelmed her and driven her mad.

  The Weave of Mystra, the Lady of Magic, who carried as her symbol the seven-pointed star.

  She had not recovered from that interaction, and indeed, had inadvertently afflicted Regis with the insanity as well. In that confused state, Catti-brie had passed away, and Mielikki had taken her spirit from Mithral Hall.