“Wulfgar,” said Deudermont. “Perhaps it was that Morik character he ran beside—though he’s not supposed to be in Luskan, on pain of death.”
Drizzt shrugged. “Whatever good fortune brought Guenhwyvar’s statue to Regis, it’s good fortune I will accept.”
“True enough,” said the captain. “And now you are bound for Icewind Dale. Are you sure that you cannot stay the winter, for I’ve much to do, and your help would serve me well.”
“If we hurry, we can beat the snows to Ten-Towns,” said Drizzt.
“And you will return to Luskan in the spring?”
“We would be sorry friends indeed if we didn’t,” Regis answered.
“We will return,” Drizzt promised.
With handshakes and bows, the pair left Sea Sprite, which served as the governor’s palace until the devastation in the city could be sorted out and a new location, formerly the Red Dragon Inn on the northern bank of the Mirar, could be properly secured and readied.
The enormity of the rebuilding task ahead of Luskan was not lost on Drizzt and Regis as they walked through the city’s streets. Much of the place had been gutted by flames and so many had died, leaving one empty structure after another. Many of the larger homes and taverns had been confiscated by order of Governor Deudermont and set up as hospitals for the many, many wounded, or as often as not as morgues to hold the bodies until they could be properly identified and buried.
“The Luskar will do little through the winter, other than to try to find food and warmth,” Regis remarked as they passed a group of haggard women huddled in a doorway.
“It will be a long road,” Drizzt agreed.
“Was it worth the cost?” the halfling asked.
“We can’t yet know.”
“A lot of folk would disagree with you on that,” Regis remarked, nodding in the direction of the new graveyard north of the city.
“Arklem Greeth was intolerable,” Drizzt reminded his friend. “If the city can withstand the next few months, a year perhaps, with the rebuilding in the summer, then Deudermont will do well by them, do not doubt. He will call in every favor from every Waterdhavian lord, and goods and supplies will flow fast to Luskan.”
“Will it be enough, though?” Regis asked. “With so many of the healthy adults dead, how many of their families will even stay?”
Drizzt shrugged helplessly.
“Perhaps we should stay and help through the winter,” said Regis, but Drizzt was shaking his head.
“Not everyone in Luskan accepts me, Deudermont’s friend or not,” the drow replied. “We didn’t instigate their fight, but we helped the correct side win it. Now we must trust them to do what’s right—there’s little we can do here now. Besides, I want to see Wulfgar again, and Icewind Dale. Its been too long since I’ve looked upon my first true home.”
“But Luskan…” Regis started.
Drizzt interrupted with an upraised hand.
“Was it really worth it?” Regis pressed anyway.
“I have no answers, nor do you.”
They passed out of the city’s northern gate then, to the halfhearted cheers of the few guardsmen along the wall and towers.
“Maybe we could get them all to march to Longsaddle next,” Regis remarked, and Drizzt laughed, almost as helplessly as he had shrugged.
PART 3
HARMONY
I am often struck by the parallel courses I find in the wide world. My life’s road has led me to many places, back and forth from Mithral Hall to the Sword Coast, to Icewind Dale and the Snowflake Mountains, to Calimport and to the Underdark. I have come to know the truth of the old saying that the only constant is change, but what strikes me most profoundly is the similarity of direction in that change, a concordance of mood, from place to place, in towns and among people who have no, or at least only cursory, knowledge of each other.
I find unrest and I find hope. I find contentment and I find anger. And always, it seems, I’m met with the same general set of emotions among the people from place to place. I understand there is a rationality to it all, for even peoples remote from each other will share common influences: a difficult winter, a war in one land that affects commerce in another, whispers of a spreading plague, the rise of a new king whose message resonates among the populace and brings hope and joy even to those far removed from his growing legend. But still, I often feel as though there is another realm of the senses. As a cold winter might spread through Icewind Dale and Luskan, and all the way to the Silver Marches, so too, it seems, does mood spiderweb the paths and roads of the Realms. It’s almost as if there is a second layer of weather, an emotional wave that rolls and roils its way across Faerûn.
There is trepidation and hopeful change in Mithral Hall and the rest of the Silver Marches, a collective holding of breath where the coin of true peace and all-out war spins on its edge, and not dwarf nor elf nor human nor orc knows on which side it will land. There is a powerful emotional battle waging between the status quo and the desire to embrace great and promising change.
And so I found this same unsettling dynamic in Longsaddle, where the Harpells are engaged in a similar state of near disaster with the rival factions of their community. They hold the coin fast, locked in spells to conserve what is, but the stress and strain are obvious to all who view. And so I found this same dynamic in Luskan, where the potential change is no less profound than the possible—and none too popular—acceptance of an orc kingdom as a viable partner in the league of nations that comprise the Silver Marches.
A wave of unrest and edginess has gripped the land, from Mithral Hall to the Sword Coast—palpably so. It’s as if the people and races of the world have all at once declared the unacceptability of their current lot in life, as if the sentient beings have finished their collective exhale and are now taking in a new breath.
I head to Icewind Dale, a land of tradition that extends beyond the people who live there, a land of constants and of constant pres sure. A land not unaccustomed to war, a land that knows death intimately. If the same breath that brought Obould from his hole, that brought out ancient hatreds among the priests of Longsaddle, that led to the rise of Deudermont and the fall of Arklem Greeth, has filled the unending winds of Icewind Dale, then I truly fear what I may find there, in a place where the smoke of a gutted homestead is almost as common as the smoke of a campfire, and where the howl of the wolf is no less threatening than the war cry of a barbarian, or the battle call of an orc, or the roar of a white dragon. Under the constant struggle to simply survive, Icewind Dale is on edge even in those times when the world is in a place of peace and contentment. What might I find there now, when my road has passed through lands of strife and battle?
I wonder sometimes if there is a god, or gods, who play with the emotions of the collective of sentient beings as an artist colors a canvas. Might there be supernatural beings watching and taking amusement at our toils and tribulations? Do these gods wave giant wands of envy or greed or contentment or love over us all, that they can then watch at their pleasure, perhaps even gamble on the outcome?
Or do they, too, battle amongst themselves, reflections of our own failures, and their victories and failures similarly extend to us, their insignificant minions?
Or am I simply taking the easier route of reasoning, and ascribing what I cannot know to some irrationally defined being or beings for the sake of my own comfort? This trail, I fear, may be no more than warm porridge on a wintry morning.
Whatever it is, the weather or the rise of a great foe, folk demanding to partake of advancements in comfort or the sweep of a plague, or some unseen and nefarious god or gods at play, or whether, perhaps, the collective I view is no more than an extension of my own inner turmoil or contentment, a projection of Drizzt upon the people he views…whatever it may be, this collective emotion seems to me a palpable thing, a real and true motion of shared breath.