The Last Threshold

Chapter 29

Moonlight.

A distinct beam reached down to the sleeping drow, penetrating the veil of his slumber, beckoning him back to consciousness. Lying flat on his back, Drizzt opened his eyes and focused on the pale orb high in the sky above him, peeking at him through a tangle of scraggly, leafless branches. He had slept for many hours, he realized, though it made little sense to him. For he had fallen asleep in the early evening, and judging by the moon, the night couldn’t be more than half over.

Gradually the memories came drifting to him: the sound of sweet music, the return of Artemis Entreri to the camp, the overwhelming desire to lie back down and go to sleep.

The starlight stolen by the heavy canopy above … but now that blanketing canopy was no more.

Drizzt felt the thick grass at his side. But when he propped himself up on his elbows, he realized this immediate area was the only remaining hint of the lush forest in which he had previously awakened. He blinked and shook his head, trying to make sense of the scene before him. His five companions lay around him, their rhythmic breathing, the snoring of Ambergris, showing them to be fast asleep. This one area, perhaps ten strides in diameter, seemed exactly as it had been in the “dream,” but everything else, everything beyond this tiny patch, was as it had been when first the six had come to this spot. No small, well-kept house. No pond. Exactly as it had been before his dream.

No, not exactly, for the snow lay thick on the ground immediately beyond the enchanted bedroom, but there had been no snow, nor any sign of an approaching storm, when they had come out from Easthaven.

Drizzt stood up and walked to the edge of the grassy anomaly. The moonlight was bright enough to give him a clear view as he inspected the snowpack, and from its formation, it seemed to him that the lower levels of snowpack, compacted and icy, had been in place for many tendays. He looked up at the clear sky, sorting the constellations.

Late winter?

But they had come out here from Easthaven just two days before, and in the early autumn.

Drizzt tried to sort it all out. Had it all been a dream? Only then did he realize that he still held an object in his hand, and he lifted it up before his eyes and confirmed the scrimshaw statuette of Catti-brie and Taulmaril.

“Entreri,” he whispered and nudged the assassin with his foot. The dangerous man, ever a light sleeper, awakened immediately and bolted upright, as if expecting an attack and already prepared to defend against it.

And in an instant, the assassin wore the same expression, Drizzt knew, as was upon the drow’s own face. He blinked repeatedly, face contorted with confusion, as he glanced around at the curious, impossible sight.

“The music?” Entreri asked quietly. “The forest?”

Drizzt shrugged, having no answers.

“A dream then,” said Entreri.

“If so, then a common one,” Drizzt replied, and showed him the scrimshaw. “And look around! Our encampment is in summertime, it seems, but the rest of the world is not.”

They let the others sleep, both going out and breaking branches from the scraggly trees around the area so they could start a fire if winter closed in. They noticed, too, that the camp remained warm, summertime warm, but the air outside that small cluster proved wickedly cold, and a strong wind swept across the lake from the northwest. But that wind, like the winter itself, did not penetrate the magically protected area, almost as if that small patch of summertime grass existed in a different plane.

Drizzt started a fire and began preparing breakfast just before the dawn, and the others awakened, and each wore the same expression and remembered the sweet music in the summertime forest and asked the same questions and lacked the same answers. None of this made any sense, of course.

Any thoughts they might entertain of spending more time in this enchanted spot, to see if the forest returned, were lost with the break of dawn, for the daylight broke the enchantment fully, and the wind howled in at them, blowing snow stealing their summertime beds.

Drizzt alone heard the music again, then, but it was a different song, or at least, the closing notes to the previous song.

The closing notes, the end. A sense of finality engulfed him, for he knew that he was watching this forest, Iruladoon, die away, lost to the ages forevermore.

“Across the frozen lake?” Ambergris asked, breaking the drow’s contemplation.

Drizzt considered the words, then shook his head. He wasn’t sure of the exact month, but he knew it to be late in the winter season, or early in the spring, and he had no idea how thick the ice might be.

“The same path that took us here,” he replied, and he started to the south, moving down toward the even ground of the lake bed. “To Easthaven.”

“Ye plannin’ to tell us what’s what?” Ambergris asked.

“If I had any idea what might be happening, I would,” Drizzt replied.

“Well, ye seem to be knowin’ our path,” the dwarf protested.

“I know where our path is not,” Drizzt clarified. “And it is not straight across the lake, with no cover from the wind, and where the ice might prove too thin to support us.”

The dwarf shrugged, satisfied with that, and off they went, trudging through the snowpack, pulling their inadequate cloaks tight around them. Drizzt couldn’t begin to sort out any of this mystery, but he was glad indeed that they hadn’t awakened in midwinter, or surely they would have soon perished.

They were still moving along the lake bed, their progress slow, when the sun began to dip off to their right-hand side.

“We need to find a cave or a sheltered dell,” Drizzt explained, turning from the lake and into the small foothills that lined the western shore of Lac Dinneshere. As the daylight began to fade, he moved to the top of one small hill, trying to get his bearings. To the south, he saw the lights of Easthaven, still many hours of walking away, but he noted, too, an encampment much nearer, nestled in the foothills. A barbarian tribe, he knew, and judging from the location and the estimated time of year, likely the Tribe of the Elk, Wulfgar’s people, who knew the legend of Drizzt well.

He left his five friends in a sheltered vale near to the barbarian fires and moved in alone, breathing a sigh of relief when he determined that it was indeed the Tribe of the Elk. He entered with his hands upraised, unthreatening, and introduced himself clearly as many suspicious looks came his way.

One large barbarian wearing the garb of the chieftain stepped forward and paced right up to the drow, staring down at him from barely a hand’s breadth away. “Drizzt Do’Urden?” he asked, and he seemed less than convinced. He lifted his weapon, a very familiar and magnificent warhammer, Drizzt’s way. “What ghost are you?”

“Aegis-fang,” Drizzt breathed, for surely it was indeed the warhammer Bruenor had crafted for Wulfgar a century before, and truly it did Drizzt’s heart good to see the hammer in the hands of the leader of this barbarian tribe, a proper legacy for a great man of Icewind Dale.

“No ghost,” he assured the man. He looked around, trying to find some face he might recognize, though he had not seen any of the tribe for some time. He spotted one large young man, barely more than a teenager with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, one who immediately sparked some note of recognition in the drow.

But no, Drizzt realized. He was surely confused, and conflating this one with a barbarian he had known so many years before. The sight of Aegis-fang, the smell of Icewind Dale, the sound of the wind in his ears once more-it all seemed enough to transport Drizzt back those many decades.

“I have friends nearby, just five,” Drizzt explained. “We’re bound for Easthaven, but ill-equipped for the season. If we could spend the night …”

The chieftain looked around at his people, then back at the drow. “Drizzt Do’Urden?” he asked again, seeming unconvinced. “Drizzt Do’Urden is long lost to the world, they say, taken by the tundra many years ago.”

“If they say that, then they are wrong. I passed through Easthaven only recently, coming out to find … well, you or some other tribe, to investigate rumors of a forest on the banks of Lac Dinneshere.”

“Why would you seek us?”

“I was told that three of your tribesmen spoke of such a forest.”

“I know of no such rumors,” said the chieftain and he seemed to stiffen at the suggestion.

“I have heard this talk,” interjected one of the others, an older woman. “But not for many years.”

Drizzt glanced at her, but found his gaze drawn instead to the young man who reminded Drizzt so much of young Wulfgar, who, Drizzt suspected, might be a descendant of his friend, so strong, uncanny even, seemed the resemblance. The young man shied away from his glance.

“You are Drizzt Do’Urden?” the chieftain asked him directly.

“As surely as your hammer was forged by King Bruenor Battlehammer for Wulfgar, son of Beornegar,” Drizzt answered. “A hammer named Aegis-fang, and etched upon its mithral head with the intertwined symbols of the three dwarf gods, Moradin, Dumathoin, and Clangeddin. I was there when it was forged, and there when it was given to Wulfgar-and indeed, with Wulfgar did I travel to the lair of Ingeloakastamizilian, Icingdeath, the white dragon, and there where I came upon this very weapon.” As he finished, he drew out his diamond-edged scimitar, which he had named after the slain dragon, and held it up before the chieftain, letting the firelight catch the brilliant edge. He rolled it over in his hand to display the black adamantine handle shaped as the head of a hunting cat.

“Gather your friends,” the chieftain said, nodding in recognition of the distinctive scimitar and smiling widely, for as Drizzt had hoped, the legend of Drizzt and particularly of Wulfgar, remained strong in the oral tradition of the Tribe of the Elk. “Share our fire and our food, and we will dress you warmly for the road to Easthaven.”

“Long dead,” said the young ferryman. “Drowned in ’73. Saved the boat, but not old Spiblin.”

The six companions looked to each other curiously, not knowing what to make of the strange words. They had made the southeastern corner of Lac Dinneshere, the egress point of the ferry, early the next afternoon, and luck had been with them, for they saw the boat’s sails not far off the shore. A signal fire had brought it sailing in, but to their surprise, the captain was not the crusty graybeard who had dropped them at this spot only a few days earlier.

“There are several ferries from Easthaven’s docks, then,” Drizzt reasoned.

“Nay, just this one,” said the young skipper.

“And the former captain?”

“Long dead, like I telled you.”

“Wait, you said ’73,” Afafrenfere put in.

“Aye, we speak of it as the Year of the Wave, for such a storm blew down from the north that half the waters of Dinneshere took the docks of Easthaven, and most of our fleet as well. Spiblin was too stubborn to run to higher ground, saying he’d save his boat if he had to die doing it. And so he did, to both. Eleven years, it’s been since then.”

“1484?” Drizzt asked, and behind him, Effron sucked in his breath. Drizzt turned around, to see the monk and the tiefling staring at each other.

“By Dalereckoning. It is 1484?” Effron asked the ferryman, who nodded. Effron looked back at the monk and said, “The Year of the Awakened Sleepers.”

They disembarked the ferry at Easthaven’s docks, and indeed these were not the same structures from which they had departed, though remnants of those “old” docks were still to be seen. They didn’t even enter the town, though, despite the late hour, but instead brought forth the nightmare and the unicorn. Drizzt, Dahlia, and Effron on Andahar, the other three on Entreri’s steed, they thundered off down the Eastway, making for Bryn Shander and Kelvin’s Cairn, determining that Clan Battlehammer seemed their best hope for answers.

Another riddle met them the next morning at Bryn Shander’s gate, for they were denied entrance.

“No friend of Ten-Towns drags a demon in his wake, then runs off!” the captain of the Bryn Shander garrison shouted to them from the wall when he at last arrived to the summons of the guards. “What menace chases you here this time, Drizzt Do’Urden?”

“No menace,” Drizzt replied, and he wanted to say much more, but found the words impossible to find. The city looked much the same, but he knew none of the guards, nor the captain, though he had met the captain on his last journey through the city, which seemed only a tenday previous.

“What demon?” Artemis Entreri asked when it became obvious that Drizzt was overwhelmed, and tongue-tied.

“A mighty balor, seeking Drizzt Do’Urden,” the captain replied from on high. “And praise that Master Tiago was around, to slay the demon before our western gate!”

A huzzah went up from the other guards at the mention of … Tiago?

Entreri turned and stared open-mouthed at Drizzt and both shook their heads. “And pray tell, what year was this battle?” Entreri asked the captain of the guard.

The captain looked at him curiously.

“The year?” Entreri repeated.

“The very year my son was born,” the captain answered. “1466. Eighteen years ago this coming fall.”

“1484,” Entreri muttered, doing the math.

“The Year of the Awakened Sleepers,” Afafrenfere remarked.

“No wonder me belly’s grumbling with hunger,” Ambergris put in dryly.

“I have ever been a friend to Ten-Towns,” Drizzt called out. “Something … strange has happened here. Beyond reason or all sense. I bid you let me enter, that I might speak with the ruling council, perhaps a gathering of all the towns-”

“Ride around, drow,” the captain replied sternly. “Your previous reputation wards you from the wrath of the people, perhaps, but you have used up all your good will here. You’ll not be allowed entry here, nor to any of the other towns, once word has spread of your return.”

“I did not bring the demon-not knowingly, at least,” Drizzt tried to argue.

“Go to the dwarves, then,” the captain offered, and he winced as he spoke, as if trying to reconcile the Drizzt of legend with the Drizzt who had brought ruin to much of Bryn Shander with this shaken drow standing before him. “Stokely Silverstream will have you, to be sure. Let him call a gathering of Ten-Towns. Let him plead the case of Drizzt Do’Urden.”

The advice seemed sound enough, a pocket of clarity within this tumultuous, illogical sea of absurdity. Drizzt and Entreri dismissed their mounts and the six hiked off around the city, taking the southerly route. When they came to the western gate, they found it flanked by two stone guard towers, much larger than the meager structures that had been there when last they had passed through, still further confirmation that they had lost many years in their night of long sleep in the strange forest on the banks of Lac Dinneshere.

“It’s true, then,” Ambergris said, staring at the gate, for of course these could not have been constructed in the tenday they believed they had been gone. Before the gate and just south of it, was a wide circle of blackness, surrounded by a rock wall and with a small stone statue of a drow warrior, sword and shield upraised.

“ ‘On this spot did Master Tiago slay the demon,’ ” Afafrenfere read from the plaque beneath it. “ ‘And the snows will cover it nevermore.’ ”

“We have all gone insane, then,” said Dahlia, shaking her head. “I have walked the planes to the Shadowfell, I have existed as a statue of stone, and now I have awakened from a slumber of eighteen winters? What madness this?”

She walked off a bit to the west and stood facing away from the others, hands on hips and head down.

“Madness indeed,” muttered Entreri.

“But if it’s all true, then Draygo Quick’s long lost interest,” Ambergris said, and she slapped Afafrenfere on the back and gave a great snort. “But why’s the long faces?” she asked of them all. “None had family now gone, eh? We come to the dale to be rid o’ Tiago’s hunters.”

“And Draygo’s eyes,” Effron reminded.

“Aye, and Cavus Dun, too,” said Afafrenfere.

“So fugitives we been, and now one long nap’s fixed it for us!” Ambergris said with a belly-laugh. “Slate’s as clean as an Icewind Dale snowstorm, and every road’s open!”

“You would dismiss this loss of time so easily?” Drizzt asked incredulously.

“Ye thinkin’ ye know anything I might be doing against it?” the dwarf replied. “It is what it is, elf, and what it is is a blessin’ more than any curse to any one o’ us! Least-ways, that’s what I be thinkin’!”

Effron nodded his agreement and managed a smile, as did Afafrenfere, but neither Entreri nor Drizzt could find the line of thinking to join in their relief, or whatever it was. The shock of this all had them both reeling, particularly Drizzt, who dropped a hand into his belt pouch and rolled a small piece of scrimshaw around in his fingers. They had found an enchanted forest, so it seemed obvious, and one where time had all but stopped through a long night’s slumber. He had heard the song of Mielikki, so he believed, and had found a reminder to a long-lost friend.

But what did it all mean? How did it all make any sense, and what implications might he draw?

Overwhelmed, Drizzt led the others away from Bryn Shander at a leisurely, meandering pace. They got into the foothills of Kelvin’s Cairn as night descended and, exhausted and overwhelmed, set their camp.

Drizzt didn’t know it, but it was the night of the Spring Equinox, the holiest day in the calendar of Mielikki, in the Year of the Awakened Sleepers.

Drizzt got the fire burning, and Ambergris brought it to great heights. At one point, the dwarf giggled that she would surely “turn the night orange.”

“Truly?” Effron replied. “I prefer purple!” With that, he cast a spell, and a colored bolt reached out from his fingers to the flames, his cantrip altering the color indeed-to purple.

“Bah for yerself and yer minor magic!” Ambergris huffed, and she cast her own enchantment, her divine magic overwhelming the warlock’s tricks.

“Oh, indeed!” said Effron, and he went right back at her, and the flames fought their battle, shifting hue in a wild dance for supremacy. It became a game to her and Effron, to the amusement of Afafrenfere, who kept feeding more kindling to the blaze.

Even ever-dour Entreri, sitting off to the side and polishing his dagger, couldn’t suppress a chuckle or two.

Because they were all free, Drizzt realized. This apparent and bizarre time-shift had only made the world a better place for these four fugitives. The dwarf and monk could go as they pleased with no fear of Cavus Dun, and for Effron and Entreri, the specter of Draygo Quick seemed lifted, and likely, too, the shadows of a hundred others with a vendetta against Artemis Entreri.

So, too, would this strange leap of years benefit Drizzt and Dahlia, he realized, but the elf warrior showed no mirth, sitting by herself, her expression grim, and glancing his way every now and again.

For Drizzt, there was just confusion. Had his sleep, had the enchanted forest, been a vision, a love letter to him from Mielikki? More likely, he realized, it had been a moment of closure. Awakening in the tiny secluded area of a land still grasped by the late winter signaled a farewell to Drizzt.

The forest was gone.

Somehow he knew that, in his heart and soul. The enchanted forest was gone, was no more, and so too were flown any ties to the world that had once been, before the Spellplague.

Thus, his past was gone, at long last.

He focused on that moment when the moon had opened his eyes, and thought it a passage. He thought of Innovindil (and stole a glance at Dahlia) and her insistence that an elf must live his life in shorter time spans, must reinvent his existence, his friends, his love, with each passing generation, to know vitality and happiness.

He glanced at Dahlia again, but his gaze inevitably lowered to his own hands, where he rolled a piece of scrimshaw over and over again.

By the time he looked back up, while the dwarf, monk, and warlock remained at play with the fire, Dahlia had gone to sit with Entreri, the two conversing privately.

Drizzt nodded, rose, and walked off into the night. He came to a high rock, overlooking Bryn Shander away to the southeast, and with the high peak of Kelvin’s Cairn to the northwest behind him. He stood there, the wind in his face and in his ears, remembering what was and pondering what might now be.

“We’re not staying,” came Dahlia’s voice behind him, and he wasn’t surprised-by her presence or her message. “We’ll go to the dwarves, perhaps, but for a short while only. We’re to ride with a caravan out of this forlorn place at the earliest opportunity.”

“To where?” Drizzt asked, but didn’t turn to face her.

“Does it matter? A decade and more’s gone by and our names have slipped past in the wind.”

“You underestimate the memories of those with a vendetta,” Drizzt said, and he turned in time to see Dahlia shrug, as if it hardly mattered.

“When we came here, you said it would be for the season. The seasons have come and gone fifty times and more. I’ve not thought of living my years out in the emptiness of Icewind Dale, and might any time prove safer for us to leave than right now, before rumors of our return filter to the south?”

Drizzt mulled over her words, looking for some way to argue the point. He was as confused as the rest of them, unsure of what had happened or what it might mean. Was it really 1484? Had the world passed them by while they had slept in some enchanted forest?

And if that was the enchanted forest of Nathan Obridock, the place named Iruladoon, then what of the auburn-haired witch and the halfling by the pond?

Drizzt couldn’t help but wince as he considered the place, for there it was again in his heart, the knowledge that he had witnessed the very end of Iruladoon when he had awakened in the one warm spot amidst the last snows. He had felt the magic drain away to nothingness. It wasn’t that the enchantment had moved along. Nay, it had dissipated all together. That place, whether it was Iruladoon or not, was no more, nevermore. He knew that with certainty, though he knew not how he understood it with certainty. Mielikki had signaled to him that it was no more, that it was gone, and with a pervading sense of comfort … that it was all right.

“Are you agreed?” Dahlia asked impatiently, and Drizzt realized from her tone and her stance that she was reiterating that question for more than the second time.

“Agreed?” he had to ask.

“First caravan out,” Dahlia said.

Drizzt chewed his lip and looked all around, but really tried to look within his own heart. Behind Dahlia loomed the blackness of Kelvin’s Cairn, and it did not elicit a cold emotion within Drizzt-quite the opposite.

“We can have the life up here that we spoke of before we went to Easthaven,” he said.

Dahlia looked at him incredulously, even laughed at him.

“It will be an easy life, and one of adventure.”

“They wouldn’t even let you in their town, you fool,” Dahlia reminded him.

“That will change, with time.”

But Dahlia shook her head resolutely, and Drizzt recognized that she didn’t disagree with his particular reasoning, but rejected the whole premise.

“We’re all for going, all five,” she said. “Even Ambergris.”

“To where?”

Again Dahlia laughed at him. “Does it matter?”

“If it doesn’t, then why not here?”

“No,” she stated flatly. “We are leaving this forlorn place of tedious winds and endless boredom. All of us. And I’ll not chase your ghosts back to Icewind Dale again, if all of Menzoberranzan, all of the Empire of Netheril, and all the demons of the Abyss are chasing us.”

“There are no ghosts left to chase,” Drizzt whispered under his breath, for he knew it to be true.

But even with that, spoken sincerely, there was no compromise to be found within her, Drizzt realized. She saw Icewind Dale as a surrogate to Catti-brie for him, a place of those memories, and she would not tolerate it.

But nor could Drizzt lie any longer, to himself or to Dahlia. He felt a twinge of guilt in coercing her up here in the first place, but reminded himself that he had done so only to protect her from Tiago Baenre. But now that threat seemed distant, and Dahlia was right, there was no compelling reason for any of them to remain in Icewind Dale any longer.

Any of the other five, at least.

“It is best that you go,” he agreed.

“That I go?” she asked, and a dark edge came over her voice and her posture. Drizzt nodded.

“But not you?”

“This is my home.”

“But not mine?” she asked.

“No.”

“So that you can chase your witch of the wood?”

Drizzt chuckled helplessly at that, for there was some measure of truth in it, he had to admit. Not literally, of course, but in this place, even without his old and dear friends by his side, he felt the warmth of hearth and home, and it was a feeling he would not allow to slip from his grasp yet again.

“Have I told you of Innovindil?” he asked, and Dahlia rolled her eyes. Drizzt pressed on anyway, though he remembered that yes, he had told her many stories of his lost elf friend. “Have I explained to you the idea that an elf who resides among the shorter-living races must live his life in bursts to accommodate their sensations of time?”

“Yes, yes, to let go of the past and press ahead to new roads,” Dahlia said absently, as if long bored of that particular lecture.

“I seem to be ignoring Innovindil’s advice,” said Drizzt.

“Then let us leave in the morning.”

“No.”

Dahlia shrugged, clearly confused by the seemingly pointless reference to Innovindil, given his answer.

“Innovindil was wrong,” Drizzt said. “Perhaps not entirely, and perhaps not for everyone, but for me, in this regard, I know now, and admit now, that Innovindil was wrong.”

“In this regard?”

“Regarding love,” Drizzt said.

“The auburn-haired witch of the wood.”

Drizzt nodded. “My heart remains with Catti-brie. I gave it to her wholly and cannot take it back.”

“She is dead a hundred years.”

“Not in my heart.”

“Ghosts are cold comfort, Drizzt Do’Urden.”

“So be it,” he replied, and he had never been more certain of his road in all of his two centuries. “I’m not saddened by this realization, by this admission that I remain in love with a woman lost to me a century ago.”

“Saddened? I would think you insane!”

“Then I hope for you, dear Dahlia, for I wish you nothing but the best road, that one day you will understand my … insanity. Because I do truly care for you, as my friend, I hope that you will one day be so afflicted as am I. Catti-brie died, but my love for her did not. Innovindil was wrong, and I will live my life happier in the warm memories of Catti-brie’s embrace than in a foolish and impossible effort to replace her.”

“So there is only one love? There can be no other?”

Drizzt considered that for a moment, then honestly shrugged. “I know not,” he admitted. “Perhaps this is, at long last, the time when I will find closure. Perhaps there will come in my path someday another to so warm me. But I do not seek that. I do not need it. Catti-brie remains with me, very much alive.”

He watched Dahlia swallow hard, and it pained him to hurt her-but how much greater would he be wounding her by living a lie out of cowardice?

“Then take our relationship for what it is,” Dahlia offered at length, and there seemed to be a bit of desperation creeping into the edges of her voice.

“And what is that, a distraction?”

“Play,” she said as lightly as she could manage, and she put on a too-wide smile. “Let us enjoy the road and each other’s body. We fight well together and we love well together, so take it for what it is and let it have no meaning beyond-”

“No,” Drizzt interrupted, though he could not deny that Dahlia’s offer was enticing. “Not for your sake and not for my own. My heart and home are here, in Icewind Dale, and here I will stay. And here, you should not stay.”

The crestfallen expression that enveloped Dahlia nearly had Drizzt running to embrace her, but again, for her own sake, he did not.

“You would send me away with Entreri?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed, and her facial woad seemed to heighten then, reflecting a growing anger. “He is a fine lover, you know.”

Drizzt recognized that she was just lashing out here, just trying to sting him back for the rejection he had shown her. He did well to offer no response.

“I have shared his bed many times,” Dahlia pressed, to which Drizzt merely nodded.

“You do not care?” Dahlia asked, her tone on the edge of outrage.

Drizzt swallowed hard, seeing this breakup devolving into a matter of foolish pride, and he knew that he should allow Dahlia to salvage some of that. Or should he, and again, for her own sake?

“No,” he answered flatly. “I do care, but not as you imagine. I am glad that you have found each other.”

“You are walking a dangerous path, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Dahlia warned.

Drizzt wasn’t sure how to take that at first. Was she referring to his own emotional state, given his dramatic choice? Was she taking up Innovindil’s mantle of long-searching wisdom to appeal to him on some philosophical level?

She lifted her walking stick before her and snapped her wrists expertly to break it in half, into two four-foot lengths, and these she broke in half into flails-“nun’chuks,” Afafrenfere had named them-and sent them into easy spins at her side.

“You do not get to so easily dismiss me,” Dahlia informed him. “I am not a plaything for the whims of Drizzt Do’Urden.”

Drizzt thought better of reminding her that she had just offered to be exactly that, and instead focused on how he might diffuse this strange situation. “I seek only that which is best for us both.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shut up and draw your blades.”

Drizzt held his hands out unthreateningly, as if that request was absurd.

“Diamonds do not move so easily from one ear to the other,” she said. “And this one, the black diamond, is to be the most difficult of all.” She began circling to Drizzt’s left, moving up the incline near to the edge of the rock. “That is why I chose you, of course. Or do you still not understand?”

“Apparently, I don’t-” he started to answer, his words cut short as he ducked and dodged back, one of Dahlia’s weapons whipping suddenly at his head-and had it connected, it surely would have cracked open his skull.

“Dahlia!”

“Draw your blades!” she shouted back at him. “Do not further disappoint me! You were the one, the lover I could not beat! You were the one to serve me my just reward. You are a failure as a lover, as a man, with your precious witch ever in your foolish heart. Do not doubly disappoint me by failing at the one thing I know you do well!”

On she came in a rush, and despite himself, Drizzt found his scimitars in his hands as he fended the sudden, brutal attacks, the flails spinning in at him from every conceivable angle. Instinct alone had Drizzt parrying and twisting away from the assault, for his brain could not fathom the situation unfolding before him. Instinct alone had him countering Dahlia’s movements, even striking out at her with a reflexive riposte after one clean parry.

Drizzt sucked in his breath and retracted his scimitar at the same time, horrified that he had nearly skewered Dahlia, to the point where blood had begun to stain her torn shirt.

She didn’t seem the least bit bothered, though, and pressed the attack with apparent glee, swinging her right-hand flail back in at Drizzt’s retracting blade. And when the pole struck the scimitar, Dahlia released some lightning energy, which coursed Twinkle and sparked into Drizzt’s left hand and arm.

The drow’s teeth clenched involuntarily, and it was all he could do to hold onto his weapon, the muscles in his forearm clenching and knotting under the tingling and burning sensation.

“Stop!” Drizzt yelled at her between the ring of his blades blocking her swinging poles. “Dahlia!”

His calls only made her attack all the more ferociously, however. She went into a spin, coming around with her flying weapon swinging across for Drizzt’s head. He ducked the blow, then leaped as she turned a second circuit, this time bending as she came around and sweeping a backhand of her other weapon for his legs.

She had left him an opening. With him up high and Dahlia down low, Drizzt could have charged in and put her at a tremendous, likely insurmountable, disadvantage then and there, and indeed he started that way.

But he didn’t lead with his blades. He hadn’t the heart to cut her again, and instead tried to wrap her in a hug as she tried to stand back up, moving in too close for her to strike at him with those deadly flails.

She seemed to lose all strength then, and Drizzt reached out for her, hopeful that this insanity had come to its end.

Dahlia smashed her forehead into his nose and drove a knee up into his groin as he fell back, and before he had even fully straightened again, she lashed out at him once more with her weapons.

He blocked right with Icingdeath, left with Twinkle, then brought Twinkle across to block again to the right, and turned around away from Dahlia, coming around with Icingdeath angled diagonally to lift up her second attack from the left.

He dived under that raising nun’chuk, just ahead of her next trailing strike. He rolled easily to his feet, tasting blood from his smashed nose, and fell into a crouch as Dahlia turned to pursue.

But again, suddenly, she seemed to lose all strength for the fight, and her arms slumped to the side and she looked at Drizzt with a clear sense of helplessness, of anguish and sadness. She offered a shrug and a sniffle.

Then snapped her right hand, her nun’chuk lashing straight ahead like a serpent.

Drizzt fell for the ruse because he desperately needed to believe in the ruse. For all his training and all his speed and honed reflexes, Drizzt couldn’t quite catch up to that attack. The nun’chuk’s tip cracked into his forehead, knocking him upright, and Dahlia released the rest of Kozah’s Needle’s magical lightning, throwing him forcefully backward. He flipped off the edge of the rocky outcropping, spinning right over as he fell from the ledge. He slammed down on the sloping ground some ten feet below the rock, and bounced and rolled his way down the slope, crashing through brush, wet snow, and rocks alike.

He finally settled against a rock, his thoughts spinning, burning pain assailing him from many different wounds.

“Fool!” he heard Dahlia shout from above, and he knew she was coming for him. He couldn’t see her, for she had moved to the trail behind the rock, but she continued her verbal tirade, “This is to the death, yours or mine! So fight better or be damned, Drizzt Do’Urden!”

Drizzt climbed to all fours, or to three, at least, for he wound up tucking his right hand in close to his chest. He looked down at the hand, already swelling and bruised around the thumb and index finger. He tried to clench his fist, but could barely move the fingers.

He spotted his dropped scimitar, Icingdeath, on the slope just up above him, and climbed to his feet to retrieve it.

Such waves of pain washed over him that he nearly fell back to the ground. As he recovered, he settled his weight onto his right foot and glanced down at his left leg, noting a bulge against the leather at mid-calf. Drizzt swallowed hard, amazed that he was upright at all, for in the fall, he had surely broken the bone in his shin.

Slowly he put his foot back to the ground and eased some weight onto it. Again the waves of pain assaulted him. He looked around for a splint, but heard Dahlia’s approach and realized that he had no time.

He scrambled for his scimitar, retrieved it, and spun around to watch the woman’s determined approach, her weapons swinging easily at her sides.

“You were supposed to win,” she said through gritted teeth, tears streaming down her angry face. “In so many ways have you disappointed me!”

Her words didn’t make any sense to Drizzt, and he could barely keep his eyes focused on her. He knew that she was coming closer, ever closer. He knew that he couldn’t begin to fight her now. He had no speed and no balance, and the pain …

She was so close.

A dark form rushed by, carrying Dahlia with it off to the side.

“Enough!” Drizzt heard, Artemis Entreri’s voice. He followed the sound to see the two of them, and only then realized that he was sitting once more, and was only looking out of one eye now, as the other was covered with the blood pouring from the wound on his forehead.

Dahlia struggled against the man, but Entreri held her back, talking to her, though Drizzt could not hear the words. But Entreri remained insistent-even in his desperate and dazed state, Drizzt could recognize that-and he pushed Dahlia away, step-by-step.

“Farewell,” Drizzt heard him call back, and then something around them leaving Icewind Dale.

Drizzt couldn’t be sure. His face was in the dirt by that time, and all he heard was his own pulse, pounding in his head, images both real and imagined intertwining in a place far removed from consciousness.