She was at peace.
And yet, she was not, for this place, this moment, reminded her of why she had returned to Faerun, and of the task before her, in not so many years. This day, the spring equinox of 1479, marked her sixteenth birthday, or “re-birthday,” as she had privately named it. She had spent some hours with Niraj and Kavita in the Desai encampment, and she was not due back at the Coven until the next morning.
“Five more years,” she whispered to a flower before her. She lifted the plant’s wide and soft petals and gently brushed them. “Only five.”
She conjured an image of Drizzt in her thoughts, and she smiled widely. She had been gone from him for just over sixteen years by her measure, but more than a century in his lifetime. Had his feelings faded for her? Would he even remember her in any meaningful way?
Would she find him happily married, to an elf perhaps, and raising children of his own?
The woman shrugged, not happy about the possibility, but accepting it as just that, a possibility, and one that she could not control. She thought of seeing him again, of his smile, of his touch. How she missed that touch! Many things could seem trivial to Catti-brie now that she had been in the arms of a goddess, now that she had looked at the multiverse with such profound understanding. But Drizzt’s touch was not one of those trivial things; their bond seemed as large as that of the celestial spheres, and as eternal as the cycle of life and death, no matter the interfering practicalities.
If Drizzt had another wife, then so be it. Catti-brie knew that he still loved her, that he would always love her, as she would always love him.
She would be no less dedicated to the coming battle Mielikki had described to her in her days of communing with the goddess in the enchanted forest. If Lady Lolth or her minions came for Drizzt, they would have to fight through Catti-brie to get to him!
She pictured Kelvin’s Cairn in Icewind Dale, under a sky as sparkling as this one, the unending wind tossing her hair, the chill breeze tickling her skin.
“Five more years,” she whispered again.
“Five more years for what?” came a sharp voice behind her. Catti-brie froze in place, smile vanishing, eyes going wide. She knew that voice, too well! “For what?” Lady Avelyere asked again. “And do face me, child.” Catti-brie took a deep breath.
“Your magic is no match for my own, child,” Lady Avelyere said, as if reading her thoughts. “And you’ll not shapechange fast enough to be away from me.”
Catti-brie slowly turned around. Avelyere stood at the entrance to her secret garden, dressed in rich traveling robes of purple and white, and she seemed taller to Catti-brie at that moment, much taller and more imposing.
“You lied to me,” she said quietly, but each word resonated in Catti-brie’s mind as if it had been shouted into her ear.
“No, Lady …,” she stammered.
“I took you in, opened my house to you, and you lied to me,” Lady Avelyere insisted. “No …”
“Yes!”
Catti-brie swallowed hard.
“You didn’t know where your power of healing and shapeshifting came from, you told me,” Lady Avelyere went on. “You didn’t know that they were divinely inspired or themselvesIanythingon different at all. But you have deceived me all along, worshiping this … god?”
“Goddess,” Catti-brie managed to say.
“I spared your parents!” Lady Avelyere screamed at her. “A mere word from me about their magical activities and Shade Enclave would have captured them and tortured them in the town square. And this is how you repay me? By lying to me?”
She swept forward as she spoke, moving very near to Catti-brie, staring down at her from on high.
“This does not concern them,” Catti-brie stammered, rising, but keeping her head bowed. The thought that Avelyere might take out her wrath on Niraj and Kavita horrified the woman-how would she be able to live with herself after bringing such ruin on those wonderful people?
But a comforting thread wove into her mind then, an assurance that Lady Avelyere would do no such thing, that Niraj and Kavita were not Avelyere’s concern and would not be exposed.
Catti-brie looked up at the woman. Lady Avelyere reached out a hand and gently stroked Catti-brie’s thick hair. “Oh, dear girl,” she said, her voice as smooth as the flower’s petal. “Do you not understand that I have come to love you as if you were my own daughter?”
“Yes, Lady,” Catti-brie heard herself replying.
“I’m merely wounded, truly wounded, that you did not trust me with your secret.”
“I didn’t think you would understand.”
“Faith, child, faith,” Lady Avelyere cooed. “I am your mentor, not your enemy.” She drew Catti-brie to her side and looked all around. “Tell me about this place. It is your shrine to this … goddess, yes?”
“Mielikki,” Catti-brie whispered.
“Yes, well do tell me more. Surely you have been blessed by her! I have seen the marking.”
Catti-brie’s hand reflexively went to her opposite forearm, to the unicorn-shaped spellscar she carried.
“Your spellscar, yes, and the powers it affords you,” Lady Avelyere said, though Catti-brie noticed that Avelyere had not even looked down or followed Catti-brie’s inadvertent movement.
“Tell me of it. Tell me of Mielikki,” Lady Avelyere purred. “And tell me of this dark elf and the mountain under the stars.”
Had she been of her reasoning faculties at that moment, Catti-brie would have understood that Lady Avelyere had garnered much more information than she could surmise by the garden, for Catti-brie had not spoken openly of Drizzt, had merely thought of him and pictured him.
“Tell me, Ruqiah,” Lady Avelyere prompted.
“Catti-brie,” the disciple of Mielikki corrected.
Lord Parise Ulfbinder sat in his grand chair, his hands together and before his pursed lips. He didn’t blink as Lady Avelyere poured forth the wild claims of young Ruqiah of the Desai.
“She is Chosen of Mielikki,” Parise said a long while after the diviner had finished her lengthy tale.
Lady Avelyere could only shrug. “It would seem.”
“And you believe her?”Alpirs and UntarisIanythingon
Again the woman shrugged, but this time she added a nod.
“A Bedine child, a Chosen of Mielikki, who is not a Bedine goddess?” Parise asked skeptically.
“But she says she is not a Bedine child,” Lady Avelyere said. “She claims her name is not Ruqiah, but Catti-brie.”
It was Parise Ulfbinder’s turn to shrug, for the name meant nothing to him.
“A woman from another time, before the Spellplague.”
“That is quite a claim. Is it not more likely that she is merely trying to protect her outlaw parents?”
“So I thought,” Lady Avelyere replied. “But her claims-”
“Desperate claims for a desperate young woman …”
“She was adopted by a dwarf in this previous life,” Lady Avelyere interrupted. “A dwarf king.”
The end of his intended sentence caught in Parise’s throat. “A dwarf king?” he asked instead.
“King Bruenor Battlehammer of Mithral Hall,” Lady Avelyere explained. “She told me this under my charm dweomer, under a spell of hypnosis, under the power of magical suggestion.”
“She completed the concocted story,” Parise argued.
“There is record of such a king in the library of Shade Enclave.”
“So the girl visited the library.”
“And a mention of his adopted daughter, Catti-brie-”
“So the girl went to the library!” Lord Parise Ulfbinder shouted.
“-who was taken in the night by the ghost of Mielikki’s unicorn,” Lady Avelyere talked over him.
Parise fell back in his chair and meekly asked, “What do you mean?”
“This human daughter of King Bruenor, driven mad by the Spellplague, died in the night and was spirited away from her bed by a celestial unicorn, so goes the legend.” She paused and painted a wry grin on her face. “Away from the bed of her dark elf husband, Drizzt Do’Urden.”