The Companions

by R. A. Salvatore

“Perhaps our friend … our friends, were not as fortunate,” the halfling said.

  Catti-brie held up her hands and gave a little shrug, and Regis noted moisture rimming her deep blue eyes.

  He moved quickly across the floor and wrapped Catti-brie in a tight hug, needing her support as much as he was offering his own.

  The Year of the Awakened Sleepers (1484 DR) Outside Luskan

  “Ye’re sure to be dead, then, and so I’ll miss ye,” the farmer woman said to the dwarf who had lived in her barn and worked for her and her husband through the winter. “And just when I was getting fond of ye, Mister Bonnego Battleaxe, off ye go running, and to Icewind Dale, of all the foul places! Ah, but what a fool ye are!”

  Bruenor could hardly contain his grin through the woman’s speech. This family had been quite good to him, swapping a bed in their barn’s hayloft for his extra set of hands to help them get their farm through the wintry months.

  “Winter’s breaking early, so say the scouts,” he replied. “I telled ye when I joined ye that me time here’d be short.”

  “The dale’ll kill ye this time o’ year.”

  Bruenor couldn’t rightly disagree with the woman. He knew that he’d find snow and mud, deep for both, scattered around the tundra north of the Spine of the World. He knew that the wolves and the yetis and the goblinkin would be out in force, hunting for some food after their thin winter pickings. Icewind Dale woke up in the third month of each year, and more folk perished in that month than any other.

  “No one’s going up there,” the woman scolded. “No caravan would leave for another month, at the least! Yet here ye are, so sick o’ the sight of me and my family that ye’d rather run off to die than look at us anymore!”

  Bruenor laughed out loud at that one, and he moved across the barn to offer his hostess a great hug—and he noticed only then that she carried something over her shoulder. He pulled up short, looking curiously.

  “From my husband,” she explained, and she pulled two items over her shoulder and tossed them at Bruenor’s feet. “It’ll give ye a chance, at least.”

  Bruenor stared at the curious gifts, a pair of flat disks, they seemed, made of bent wood forming a circumference and with straps of flat leather set in a weave inside the ring.

  “Snow shoes,” the farmer woman explained. “Ye tie ’em on and they’ll help ye get across …”

  Bruenor silenced her with another great hug. She didn’t need to explain any further, for the first two words had revealed the purpose all too well. Indeed, he had seen such shoes in his first existence in Icewind Dale.

  “Ye been good to this old dwarf,” he whispered as he crushed the woman close.

  “Old? I got a son at least yer age, ye fool!”

  Bruenor just laughed and squeezed her tighter.

  He set off that very morning after a hearty breakfast at the table in the main house, and the farmers stuffed his pack full of bread and eggs and a load of smoked meat.

  His spirits were high as he began that journey, nearing the end of the second month of the Year of the Awakened Sleepers, but Bruenor knew well the dangers ahead, and indeed, it was hard for him to think of this trek as anything less than a suicide mission. If a late-season snowstorm didn’t bury him, or the mud didn’t swallow him, then surely he’d put his axe to work long before he ever saw the smoke of Ten-Towns.

  But he had to try.

  His oath, his word, his loyalty—everything that had made him Bruenor Battlehammer, everything that had made him a Companion of the Hall, everything that had made him twice king of Mithral Hall—meant that he had to try.

  “Five days,” Regis said to Catti-brie as he entered the small house on the lake and quickly closed the door against a driving rain and sleet storm pelting the whole of Icewind Dale. It was the fourteenth of Ches, the third month, five days short of the spring equinox, the most holy day of Mielikki.

  Catti-brie nodded. “My birthday,” she said. “Or re-birthday, I call it.”

  Regis managed a smile at that, but it didn’t hold.

  “No word?” Catti-brie asked.

  “Not in Lonelywood, nor among the Silverstream dwarves under the mountain.” All through the last few tendays, Regis and Catti-brie had taken turns going out from the small house and from Lonelywood to gather whispers about any newcomers venturing into the towns. But there had been no whispers to be found, just the quiet of Icewind Dale’s hard winter.

  That same morning, across the lake of Redwaters in the town of Bremen, the door to the Knuckleheader banged open and a half-frozen, mud-covered, wild-eyed dwarf verily fell into the common room.

  Innkeeper Darby Snide was the first to the poor soul, helping him to a sitting position.

  “What are you about, then?” Darby asked of the surprising visitor. The dwarf looked at him blankly, began laughing crazily, and fell over unconscious.

  “Look at his axe!” said one of the Bremen citizens, who had come into the Knuckleheader for his morning meal.

  Darby noted the weapon, stained with blood and with fur the men of Icewind Dale knew all too well stuck into several of the blade’s many notches. The dwarf’s shield, too, showed bloodstains, and the blood found around the side of the dwarf’s armor was his own, they realized as they settled him down on a cot and tried to make him comfortable, lifting his mail shirt to reveal the jagged wound of a yeti claw.

  Another patron fetched some water and Darby started to clean the wound, and to the surprise of all, the dwarf sat up and shook his hairy head.

  “Bah!” he snorted. “But I need to be goin’! Can I beg of ye some food?”

  “Going?” Darby echoed incredulously. “You’re near dead, fool! Lay back!” He pushed the dwarf’s shoulder gently, forcing him to lie down.

  “He’s to need healing,” noted a woman from the side. “Is Delly about Bremen, then?”

  Others shrugged and looked around, having no answers. “Ain’t seen her,” said one.

  “Go and ask,” Darby bade them. “See if any have seen Delly Curtie, for this one could use a bit of her warmth, to be sure.”

  Somewhere nearby and yet far away, the dazed Bruenor heard the name, “Delly Curtie,” and it registered in the back of his mind, where it flitted around for a few moments.

  The dwarf’s eyes popped open wide, and he pushed back against Darby’s restraint. “Who’d ye say?” he demanded of the innkeeper.

  “Lie back!” Darby insisted.

  “Who?” Bruenor shot right back at him.

  “Who?” Darby asked right back, looking confused.

  “Delly Curtie, ye said!”

  “Aye,” said Darby.

  “A witch, but a good one,” said the woman.

  “Tell me!” Bruenor insisted. “What’s she look like?”

  Darby, the woman, and some other patrons exchanged curious looks. Darby turned back to Bruenor and began describing to him this woman they knew as Delly Curtie—Delly Curtie, the name of Wulfgar’s wife in a previous life, and a name the dwarf realized Catti-brie might well use as an alias. If he was Bonnego Battleaxe, then she could well be Delly Curtie.

  And as Darby described the auburn-haired witch in the white gown and the black shawl, Bruenor’s smile widened with every word, and he nodded knowingly.

  She had made it! His daughter had survived the decades and had made the journey back to Ten-Towns. Catti-brie was alive and well, so they said, and he would soon hold her once more.

  “You know her, then?” Darby asked, for Bruenor’s expression revealed it all quite clearly.

  “What’s the day?” Bruenor asked. “Fifteenth o’ Ches?”

  “Fourteenth,” the woman behind Darby corrected.

  Bruenor grabbed Darby’s arm and squeezed it tight. “Ye get me fed and give me a bit o’ rest, friend, and I’ll pay ye when I can.”

  “You know her?” Darby asked.

  Bruenor nodded.

  “A friend?” Darby asked, and the dwarf nodded again.

  “More t
han ye could e’er know,” Bruenor said, his tone wistful, a tear streaming from his eye. He lay back then and let himself fall into the embrace of hopeful dreams.

  CHAPTER 29

  BRUENOR’S CLIMB

  The Year of the Awakened Sleepers (1484 DR) Icewind Dale

  THE SUN RODE LOW IN THE EASTERN SKY, THE FIRST RAYS OF DAYLIGHT reaching across Icewind Dale to tickle the icy ridges of the peaks of Kelvin’s Cairn. Regis paused at his cottage door, admiring those crystalline outlines.

  “Marking Bruenor’s Climb with a light of hope,” Catti-brie remarked when she came up beside him.

  The halfling nodded, hoping her observation was prophetic. The pair solemnly started out from the small cottage near the lake. Bolstered by Catti-brie’s protection spells, armed with potions Regis had brewed, and their step lightened by the much better weather that had settled over Ten-Towns in the past couple of days, the duo made good time in their westward trek.

  They spoke little, however, for each settled within personal fears on this most important of nights, the spring equinox of 1484. For Catti-brie, this, her birthday, was the promise, the possible fruition of the hopes Mielikki had offered in the magical forest of Iruladoon. She was a priestess of Mielikki, indeed, Chosen of the goddess, and so she went forth with her expectations high, but with her eyes opened wide.

  She knew the possibilities, all of them, and from all that she had seen, along with her understanding of Mielikki’s offering of a chance and nothing more, those many potential outcomes appeared far more dire than promising. But she had to go.

  For Regis, this was the intersection, the great crossroads of his second life. Here he would repay the debt to Mielikki, and here he would know again, so he hoped, the greatest friends with whom he had ever shared a road.

  But now there were others, he knew, and alternate roads that beckoned. The Grinning Ponies traveled the Trade Way, and Donnola led Morada Topolino far to the east, and either organization would welcome him back with open arms. He had not forgotten his oldest friends, of course, but Regis had hedged his bets, or at least, circumstance had given him the opportunity to do so.

  The fall of darkness beat the duo to the base of Kelvin’s Cairn. There they paused and looked up the familiar trails from a life lived long ago. Catti-brie had climbed the mountain the previous summer, just to ensure that Bruenor’s Climb was still accessible, but she had only gone up once, and only briefly, and never to the top.

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that, reserving the final ascent for this very night.

  She reached over and took Regis by the hand, giving it a little squeeze.

  “So we go,” the woman said.

  “To see if our hopes are realized,” Regis replied. “And if not …”

  Catti-brie squeezed his hand tighter and looked down at him, her plaintive expression stealing the words from him. Now that Regis had known love, he understood so much better now what Catti-brie had shared with Drizzt. As frightened as he was, he knew, this dear woman beside him had so much more to lose. Regis squeezed her hand back, and led the way up the side of the mountain, to that special place called Bruenor’s Climb, the lower, northern peak, a bare rock that seemed lifted into the bosom of the nighttime sky, nestled among the stars themselves.

  Eagerness flooded through Bruenor when the torchlight came into view, and he moved toward it with all the speed he could muster, hoping, expecting, to see Catti-brie, and perhaps even Drizzt and Regis beside her. Who else would be out on the side of Kelvin’s Cairn in the dark of night this early in the season, after all?

  His hopes were dashed when he spotted the group, and he slowed his step and moved in more stealthily, unsure of the scene, and of this unlikely trio in the clearing before him.

  “He’s a ranger, then, and with no small skill,” he heard in a Dwarvish voice, and a female one at that. He spotted the speaker. He didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t look like a Battlehammer.

  Particularly not given the company she kept, Bruenor thought as the second of the group, a skinny and twisted, ugly little creature, perhaps human, perhaps something more nefarious, replied, “But where would he go?”

  “To the Battlehammer dwarves,” said the third, a sturdy human man in plain-looking robes.

  “We’ll go by there and see,” said the dwarf.

  At the thought that these three were not enemies of the Battlehammers, Bruenor started forward, but he fell back immediately when the ugly little man—or tiefling, actually, Bruenor then realized—added, “Entreri said we were to leave directly, and before the dawn. To the south and the east and out of the dale.”

  Entreri? The name rang discordantly in Bruenor’s thoughts, a name he had not heard in many decades, and one he had never wanted to hear again. He shook his head, convinced he had misheard the tiefling, but the human replied, “Entreri’s wrong, then. Drizzt wouldn’t leave a friend in such a state, nor will I.”

  “Aye,” the female dwarf agreed.

  Bruenor faded back a couple of quiet steps, shaking his head in confusion. “Drizzt?” he mouthed under his breath. “Entreri?”

  He looked back at the firelight, unsure of his next move. Should he go to these three and learn what he might?

  But Catti-brie was around Icewind Dale, he had learned from his time in Bremen at the Knuckleheader. She would be up there, on Bruenor’s Climb, waiting for him.

  Bruenor sneaked away, back to trails he knew so well, for little had changed in this place he had so long called home. With the strangers out of sight, he broke into a trot, climbing tirelessly, his heart beating fast, and more from anticipation than exertion.

  He came to a patch of snow along the trail, shining in the moonlight. He dropped to one knee to examine a light boot print and the padded paw prints of a huge cat. Bruenor knew those well.

  His joy didn’t last, though, as he noted the wetness beside the small snow patch. He dipped his fingers and brought them up before his eyes and nose.

  Blood.

  Lots of blood, lining the trail.

  Bruenor scrambled up so fast that he slipped and fell face down into the muck. He was up in a heartbeat, wiping his eyes as he ran, and barely had he begun again when he skidded to a stop, frozen in place by the long, low roar of a distant cat, a panther’s roar, Guenhwyvar’s call.

  A mournful roar, he thought, as if a cry evincing great loss.

  Regis grasped Catti-brie’s forearm tightly as they beheld the sight: Drizzt, limping badly, leaning against Guenhwyvar, and surely were it not for the panther, the drow would have fallen to the ground.

  Clearly dazed and battered, blood dripping from his head, one leg only gingerly touching down as he shambled toward the peak of Bruenor’s Climb, the drow went along silently.

  “Go, go!” Regis told Catti-brie, and when he looked at her, her face a mask of horror, the halfling shoved her along, and called more loudly “Go!”

  Catti-brie scrambled forward and began to sing, the same melody Regis had heard those days in the forest of Iruladoon, calling to her goddess, singing the song of Mielikki.

  Drizzt seemed to hear it, and even looked over at the approaching woman, though it seemed to Regis as if his battered friend had moved past the point of sight.

  Or perhaps Drizzt did notice her, the halfling corrected himself, and he scrambled to catch up, for at that moment of recognition, all strength seemed to flee the drow and he simply collapsed.

  Catti-brie caught him and she screamed, “No!” with such desperation that Regis cursed the gods.

  All of this … and they had been a moment too late?

  Down the trail, Bruenor Battlehammer heard that desperate, agonized scream, accompanied by the plaintive cry of Guenhwyvar. He tried to speed up, but stumbled and fell to his face, the impact making all of his recent wounds hurt him all the more.

  He threw that aside, though, whispering, “Me girl! Me girl!” and he scrambled and clawed and ran on.

  “No!” Catti-brie cried, hu
gging Drizzt close. “Don’t you leave me! Don’t you dare!”

  “Heal him!” Regis implored her, stumbling forward.

  But she shook her head, for she could not, she understood. The wounds were too severe, he was already falling far, far away. She hadn’t the time, she hadn’t the strength.

  “Catti, try!” Regis yelled.

  How could they say good-bye when they hadn’t even said hello?

  Guenhwyvar cried out, long and low, a mournful song, and when Regis neared and viewed the ghastly wound upon Drizzt’s head, and the limp tilt of his body, he shared the cat’s dismay. He slowed to a stop, still strides away, afraid to move closer, afraid to accept the reality before him.

  Catti-brie looked to him, shaking her head.

  A blue tendril of misty magic curled out of the woman’s sleeves then, wrapping around her and around Drizzt, like the embrace of Mielikki herself. Catti-brie looked at it curiously, then shrugged at Regis, for it had come unbidden.

  “What—?” Regis asked, or started to ask, for he was interrupted by a cry.

  “Drizzt!” came a shout from back behind Regis, and he swung around and Catti-brie looked up, for they surely recognized that voice.

  “Ye durned elf!” Bruenor shouted, charging up from the trail. He stumbled along and skidded to a stop, eyes wide at the scene before him, jaw falling open as any forthcoming calls had been surely stolen by the shock of the moment.

  “Bruenor?” came a reply from the other way, and Regis spun around yet again, his heart leaping at the sound of the voice.

  At the sound of Drizzt’s voice.

  Bruenor collected the halfling as he hustled by, the two crashing into Drizzt, Catti-brie, and Guenhwyvar upon the bare rock atop Bruenor’s Climb, where the stars reached down to touch again the Companions of the Hall.

  “You saved him!” a sobbing Regis said to Catti-brie.

  She could only shake her head, confused. She had not cast a spell, nay, but she had merely been a conduit in that moment.