“If ye’re e’er to deceive…” Bruenor started to whisper, but he shook his head and let the thought drift away.
“It is no less bitter for me,” Obould assured him.
And still they signed. For the good of their respective peoples, they put their names to the Treaty of Garumn’s Gorge, recognizing the Kingdom of Many-Arrows and forever changing the face of the Silver Marches.
Calls went out from the gorge, and horns blew along the tunnels of Mithral Hall. And there came a greater blast, a rumble and resonance that vibrated through the stones of the hall and beyond, as the great horn once known as Kokto Gung Karuck, a gift from Obould to Bruenor, sounded from its new perch on the high lookout post above Mithral Hall’s eastern door.
The world had changed, Bruenor knew.
EPILOGUE
How different might the world now be if King Bruenor had not chosen such a course with the first Obould Many-Arrows,” Hralien asked Drizzt. “Better, or worse?”
“Who can know?” the drow replied. “But at that time, a war between Obould’s thousands and the gathered armies of the Silver Marches would have changed the region profoundly. How many of Bruenor’s people would have died? How many of your own, who now flourish in the Glimmerwood in relative peace? And in the end, my friend, we do not know who would have prevailed.”
“And yet here we stand, a century beyond that ceremony, and can either of us say with absolute truth that Bruenor chose correctly?”
He was right, Drizzt knew, to his ultimate frustration. He reminded himself of the roads he had walked over the last decades, of the ruins he had seen, of the devastation of the Spellplague. But in the North, instead of that, because of a brave dwarf named Bruenor Battlehammer, who threw off his baser instincts, his hatred and his hunger for revenge, in light of what he believed to be the greater good, the region had known a century and more of relative peace. More peace than ever it had known before. And that while the world around had fallen to shadow and despair.
Hralien started away, but Drizzt called after him.
“We both supported Bruenor on that day when he signed the Treaty of Garumn’s Gorge,” he reminded. Hralien nodded as he turned.
“As we both fought alongside Bruenor on the day he chose to stand beside Obould against Grguch and the old ways of Gruumsh,” Drizzt added. “If I recall that day correctly, a younger Hralien was so taken by the moment that he chose to place his trust in a dark elf, though that same drow had marched to war against Hralien’s people only months before.”
Hralien laughed and held up his hands in surrender.
“And what resulted from that trust?” Drizzt asked. “How fares Tos’un Armgo, husband of Sinnafain, father of Teirflin and Doum’wielle?”
“I will ask him when I return to the Moonwood,” the beaten Hralien replied, but he managed to get in the last arrow when he directed Drizzt’s gaze to the prisoners they had taken that day.
Drizzt conceded the point with a polite nod. It wasn’t over. It wasn’t decided. The world rolled on around him, the sand shifted under his feet.
He reached down to pet Guenhwyvar, needing to feel the comfort of his panther friend, the one constant in his surprising life, the one great hope along his ever-winding road.
R.A. SALVATORE
R.A. Salvatore was born in Massachusetts in 1959. His love affair with fantasy, and with literature in general, began during his sophomore year of college when he was given a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift. He promptly changed his major from computer science to journalism. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Communications in 1981, then returned for the degree he always cherished, the Bachelor of Arts in English. He began writing seriously in 1982, penning the manuscript that would become Echoes of the Fourth Magic.
His first published novel was The Crystal Shard from TSR in 1988 and he is still best known as the creator of the dark elf Drizzt, one of fantasy’s most beloved characters.
His novel The Silent Blade won the Origins Award, and in the fall of 1997, his letters, manuscripts, and other professional papers were donated to the R.A. Salvatore Library at his alma mater, Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
FORGOTTEN REALMS, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc., in the U.S.A. and other countries. © 2008 Wizards.
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The Orc King t-1 Page 41