Drizzt knew he was defeated, so he followed the dwarves into the common room. It was as expected, with every eye turning on Drizzt the moment he walked through the door. The tavernkeeper gave a great sigh of resignation; word had gone out from Elastul that the drow must be served, Drizzt realized.
He didn’t argue, nor did he press the point, allowing Torgar and Shingles to go to the bar to get the food while he and Regis settled at the most remote table. The four spent the whole of their meal suffering the glares of a dozen other patrons. If it bothered Regis at all, he didn’t show it, for he never looked up from his plate, other than to scout out the next helping.
It was no leisurely meal, to be sure. The tavernkeeper and his serving lady showed great efficiency in producing the meal and cleaning the empty plates.
That suited Drizzt, and when the last of the bones and crumbs were removed and Regis pulled out his pipe and began tapping it on the table, the drow put his hand atop it, holding it still. He held still, too, the halfling’s gaze.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
“Mirabar won’t open her gates at this hour,” Torgar protested.
“I’m betting they will,” Drizzt replied, “to let a dark elf leave.”
Torgar was wise enough to refuse that bet, and as the gates of the city above swung open, Drizzt and Regis said farewell to their two dwarf companions and went out into the night.
“That bothers me more than it bothers you, doesn’t it?” Regis asked as the city receded into the darkness behind them.
“Only because it costs you a soft bed and good food.”
“No,” the halfling said, in all seriousness.
Drizzt shrugged as if it didn’t matter, and of course, to him it didn’t. He had found similar receptions in so many surface communities, particularly during his first years on the World Above, before his reputation had spread before him. The mood of Mirabar, though the folk harbored resentment against the dwarves and Mithral Hall as well, had been light compared to Drizzt’s early days—days when he dared not even approach a city’s gates without an expectation of mortal peril.
“I wonder if Ten-Towns is different now,” Regis remarked some time later, as they set their camp in a sheltered dell.
“Different?”
“Bigger, perhaps. More people.”
Drizzt shook his head, thinking that unlikely. “It’s a difficult journey through lands not easily tamed. We will find Luskan a larger place, no doubt, unless plague or war has visited it, but Icewind Dale is a land barely touched by the passage of time. It is now as it has been for centuries, with small communities surviving on the banks of the three lakes and various tribes of Wulfgar’s people following the caribou, as they have beyond memory.”
“Unless war or a plague has left them empty.”
Drizzt shook his head again. “If any or all of the ten towns of Icewind Dale were destroyed, they would be rebuilt in short order and the cycle of life and death there is returned to balance.”
“You sound certain.”
That brought a smile to the drow’s face. There was indeed something comforting about the perpetuity of a land like Icewind Dale, some solace and a sense of belonging in a place where traditions reached back through the generations, where the rhythms of nature ruled supreme, where the seasons were the only timepiece that really mattered.
“The world is grounded in places like Icewind Dale,” Drizzt said, as much to himself as to Regis. “And all the tumult of Luskan and Waterdeep, prey to the petty whims of transient, short-lived rulers, cannot take root there. Icewind Dale serves no ruler, unless it be Toril herself, and Toril is a patient mistress.” He looked at Regis and grinned to lighten the mood. “Perhaps a thousand years from now, a halfling fishing the banks of Maer Dualdon will happen upon a piece of ancient scrimshaw, and will see the mark of Regis upon it.”
“Keep talking, friend,” Regis replied, “and Bruenor and your wife will wonder, years hence, why we didn’t return.”
CHAPTER 7
FAITH IN THE BETTER ANGELS
W e go with the rising sun and the morning tide,” Lord Brambleberry said to the gathering in the great room of his estate, “to deal a blow to the pirates as never before!”
The guests, lords and ladies all, lifted their crystal goblets high in response, but only after a moment of whispering and shrugging, for Brambleberry’s invitation had mentioned nothing about any grand adventure. Those shrugs fast turned to nods as the news settled in, however, for rumors had been growing around “impatient Lord Brambleberry” for many months. He had made no secret of his desire to transform good fortune into great deed.
Up to that point, though, his blather had been considered the typical boasting of almost any young lord of Waterdeep, a game to impress the ladies, to create stature where before had been only finery. Many in the room carried reputations as worthy heroes, after all, though some of them had never set foot outside of Waterdeep, except traveling in luxury and surrounded by an army of private guards. Some other lords with actual battlefield credentials to their names had gained such notoriety over the bodies of hired warriors, only arriving on the scene of a victory after the fact for the heroic pose to be captured on a painter’s canvas.
There were real heroes in the room, to be sure. Morus Brokengulf the Younger, paladin of great renown and well-earned reputation, had just returned to Waterdeep to inherit his family’s vast holdings. He stood talking to Rhiist Majarra, considered the greatest bard of the city, perhaps of the entire Sword Coast, though he’d barely passed his twentieth year. Across the way from them, the ranger Aluar Zendos, “who could track a shadow at midnight,” and the famous Captain Rulathon tapped glasses of fine wine and commiserated of great adventures and heroic deeds. These men, usually the least boastful of the crowd, knew the difference between the posers and the doers, and often relished in such gossip, and up to that moment they had been evenly split on which camp the striking young Lord Brambleberry would ultimately inhabit.
It was hard not to take him seriously at that moment, however, for standing beside the young Brambleberry was Captain Deudermont of Sea Sprite, well known in Waterdeep and very highly considered among the nobility. If Brambleberry sailed with Deudermont, his adventure would be no ruse. Those true heroes in the room offered solemn nods of approval to each other, but quietly, for they didn’t want to spoil the excited and humorously inane conversations erupting all across the hall, squealed in the corners under cover of the rousing symphony or whispered on the dance floor.
Roaming the floor, Deudermont and Robillard took it all in; the wizard even cast an enchantment of clairaudience so that they could better spy on the amusing exchanges.
“He’s not satisfied with wealth and wine,” one lady of court whispered. She stood in the corner near a table full of tallglasses, which she not-so-gracefully imbibed one after another.
“He’ll add the word ‘hero’ to his title or they’ll put him in the cold ground for trying,” said her friend, with hair bound up in a woven mound that climbed more than a foot above her head.
“To get such fine skin dirty at the feet of an ogre….” another decried.
“Or bloody at the end of a pirate’s sword,” yet another lamented. “So much the pity.”
They all stopped chattering at once, all eyes going to Brambleberry, who swept across their field of view on the dance floor, gracefully twirling a pretty young thing. That brought a collective sigh from the four, and the first remarked, “One would expect the older and wiser lords to temper this one. So much a waste!”