Le'lorinel could hardly draw breath. Drizzt was near. It had to have been that dangerous dark elf who had felled Bathunk.
The elf stalked about the room then went out into the corridor, stalking past Bellany's room and Sheila's, to the end of the hall and the small chamber where Jule Pepper had set up for the winter.
The three women arrived a few moments later, shaking their heads and making off-color jokes about Chogurugga's antics, with Sheila Kree doing a fair imitation of the crazed ogress.
“Quite an exit,” Bellany remarked. “You missed the grandest show of all.”
“Poor Chogurugga,” said Jule with a grin.
“Poor Bloog, ye mean,” Sheila was quick to correct, and the three had a laugh.
“All right, ye best be telling me what ye're knowing about it,” Sheila said to Le'lorinel when the elf didn't join in the mirth, when the elf didn't crack the slightest of smiles, intensity burning behind those blue and gold orbs.
“I was here when Bathunk was killed, obviously,” Le'lorinel reminded.
Bellany was the first to laugh. “You know something,” the sorceress said. “As soon as you went to Bathunk's corpse. .”
“Ye think it was that damned drow who did it to Bathunk,” Sheila Kree reasoned.
Le'lorinel didn't answer, other than to keep a perfectly straight, perfectly grim countenance.
“Ye do!”
“The mountains are a big place, with many dangerous adversaries,” Jule Pepper put in. “There are thousands who could have done this to the foolish young ogre.”
Before Le'lorinel could counter, Bellany said, “Hmm,” and walked out in front of the other two, one delicate hand up against her pursed lips. “But you saw the wounds,” the sorceress reasoned.
“Curving wounds, like the cuts of a scimitar,” Le'lorinel confirmed
“A sword will cut a wound like that if the target's falling when he gets it,” Sheila put in. “The wounds don't tell ye as much as ye think.”
“They tell me all I need to know,” Le'lorinel replied.
“They were well placed,” Jule reasoned. “No novice swordsman cut down Bathunk.
“And I know Chogurugga gave him many of the potions you delivered to her,” she added to Bellany.
That made even Sheila lift her eyebrows in surprise. Bathunk was no ordinary ogre. He was huge, strong, and well trained, and some of those potions were formidable enhancements.
“It was Drizzt,” Le'lorinel stated with confidence. “He is nearby and likely on his way to us.”
“So said the diviner who delivered you here,” said Bellany, who knew the story well.
“E'kressa the gnome. He sent me to find the mark of Aegis-fang, for that mark would bring Drizzt Do'Urden.”
Jule and Bellany looked to each other, then turned to regard Sheila Kree, who was standing with her head down, deep in thought.
“Could've been the soldiers at the tower,” the pirate leader said at length, “Could've been reinforcements from one of the smaller villages. Could've been a wandering band of heroes, or even other monsters, trying to claim the prize the ogres had taken.”
“Could’ve been Drizzt Do'Urden,” interjected Jule, who had firsthand experience with the dangerous drow and his heroic friends.
Sheila looked at the tall, willowy woman and nodded, then turned her gaze over Le'lorinel. “Ye ready for him—if it is him and if he is coming this way?”
The elf stood straight and tall, head back, chest out proudly. “I have prepared for nothing else in many years.”
“If he can take down Bathunk, he'll be a tough fight, don't ye doubt,” the pirate leader added.
“We will all be there to aid in the cause,” Bellany pointed out, but Le'lorinel didn't seem thrilled at that prospect.
“I know him as well as he knows himself,” the elf explained. “If Drizzt Do'Urden comes to us, then he will die.”
“At the end of your blade,” Bellany said with a grin.
“Or at the end of his own,” the ever-cryptic Le'lorinel replied.
“Then we'll be hoping that it's Drizzit,” Sheila agreed. “But ye canno' be knowing. The towers in the mountains are well guarded. Many o' Chogurugga's kinfolk've been killed in going against them, or just in working the roads. Too many soldiers about and too many hero-minded adventurers. Ye canno' be knowing it's Drizzt or anyone else.”
Le'lorinel let it go at that. Let Sheila think whatever Sheila wanted to think.
Le'lorinel, though, heard again the words of E'kressa.
Le'lorinel knew that it was Drizzt, and Le'lorinel was ready. Nothing else—not Sheila, not Drizzt's friends, not the ogres— mattered.
Chapter 25 COMING TO TERMS
Wulfgar,” Regis said again, when no one reacted at all to his first remark.
The halfling looked around to the others, trying to read their expressions. Catti-brie's was easy enough to discern. The woman looked like she could be pushed over by a gentle breeze, looked frozen in shock at the realization that Wulfgar was again standing before her.
Drizzt appeared much more composed, and it seemed to Regis as if the perceptive drow was consciously studying Wulfgar's every move, that he was trying to get some honest gauge as to who this man standing before him truly was. The Wulfgar of their earlier days, or the one who had slapped Catti-brie?
As for Bruenor, Regis wasn't sure if the dwarf wanted to run up and hug the man or run up and throttle him. Bruenor was trembling—though out of surprise, rage, or simple amazement, the halfling couldn't tell.
And Wulfgar, too, seemed to be trying to read some hint of the truth of Bruenor's expression and posture. The barbarian, his stern gaze never leaving the crusty and sour look of Bruenor Battlehammer, gave a deferential nod the halfling's way.
“We have been looking for you,” Drizzt remarked. “All the way to Waterdeep and back.”
Wulfgar nodded, his expression holding steady, as if he feared to change it.
“It may be that Wulfgar has been looking for Wulfgar, as well,” Robillard interjected. The wizard arced an eyebrow when Drizzt turned to regard him directly.
“Well, we found you—or you found us,” said Regis.
“But ye think ye found yerself?” Bruenor asked, a healthy skepticism in his tone.
Wulfgar's lips tightened to thin lines, his jaw clenching tightly. He wanted to cry out that he had—he prayed that he had. He looked to them all in turn, wanting to explode into a wild rush that would gather them all up in his arms.
But there he found a wall, as fluid and shifting as the smoke of Errtu's Abyss, and yet through which his emotions seemed not to be able to pass.
“Once again, it seems that I am in your debt,” the barbarian managed to say, a perfectly stupid change of subject, he knew.
“Delly told us of your heroics,” Robillard was quick to add. “All of us are grateful, needless to say. Never before has anyone so boldly gone against the house of Deudermont. I assure you that the perpetrators have brought the scorn of the Lords of Waterdeep upon those they represented.”
The grand statement was diminished somewhat by the knowledge of all in the audience that the Lords of Waterdeep would not likely come to the north in search of those missing conspirators. The Lords of Waterdeep, like the lords of almost every large city, were better at making proclamations than at carrying through with action.
“Perhaps we can exact that vengeance for the Lords of Waterdeep, and for Captain Deudermont as well,” Drizzt offered with a sly expression turned Robillard's way. “We hunt for Sheila Kree, and it was she who perpetrated the attack on the captain's house.”
“I have delivered Wulfgar to you to join in that hunt.”
Again all eyes fell over the huge barbarian, and again, his lips thinned with the tension. Drizzt saw it clearly and understood that this was not the time to burst the dam that was holding back Wulfgar's, and thus all of their feelings. The drow turned to regard Catti-brie, and the fact that she didn't blink for several long moments told him much about her fragile state of mind.