R.A Salvatore: Gauntlgrym

“If me girl was still with us, I mean,” said Bruenor. “She’d be old now, same as Wulfgar, and many’d say she’d be ugly.”

“Many say that about you, and said it even when you were young,” the drow quipped, deflecting the absurd conversation. It was true enough that Catti-brie would be turning seventy as well, had she not been taken in the Spellplague those twenty-four years before. She would be old for a human, old like Wulfgar, but ugly? Drizzt could never think such a thing of his beloved Catti-brie, for never in his hundred and twelve years of life had the drow seen anyone or anything more beautiful than his wife. The reflection of her in Drizzt’s lavender eyes could hold no imperfection, no matter the ravages of time on her human face, no matter the scars of battle, no matter the color of her hair. Catti-brie would forever look to Drizzt as she had when he first came to know he loved her, on a long-ago journey to the far southern city of Calimport when they had gone to rescue Regis.

Regis. Drizzt winced at the memory of the halfling, another dear friend lost in that time of chaos, when the Ghost King had come to Spirit Soaring, laying low one of the most wondrous structures in the world, the portend of a great darkness that had spread across the breadth of Toril.

The drow had once been advised to live his long life in a series of shorter time spans, to dwell in the immediacy of the humans that surrounded him, then to move on, to find that life, that lust, that love, again. It was good advice, he knew in his heart, but in the quarter of a century since he’d lost Catti-brie, he had come to understand that sometimes advice was easier to hear than it was to embrace.

“She’s still with us,” Bruenor corrected himself a short while later. He drained his mug and threw it into the hearth, where it shattered into a thousand shards. “Just that damn Jarlaxle thinking like a drow and taking his time, as if the years mean nothing to him.”

Drizzt started to answer, reflexively moving to calm his friend, but he bit back the response and just stared into the flames. Both he and Bruenor had taxed, had begged Jarlaxle, that most worldly of dark elves, to find Catti-brie and Regis-to find their spirits, at least, for they had watched the spirits of their lost loved ones ride a ghostly unicorn through the stone walls of Mithral Hall on that fateful morning. The goddess Mielikki had taken the pair, Drizzt believed, but surely she could not be so cruel as to keep them. But perhaps even Mielikki could not rob Kelemvor, Lord of the Dead, of his hard-won prize.

Drizzt thought back to that terrible morning, as if it had been only the day before. He had awakened to Bruenor’s shouts, after a sweet night of lovemaking with his wife, who had seemed returned to him from the depths of her confusing affliction.

And there, that terrible morning, she lay beside him, cold to his touch.

“Break the truce,” Drizzt muttered, thinking of the new king of Many-Arrows, an orc not nearly as intelligent and far-seeing as his father.

Drizzt’s hand reflexively went to his hip, though he wasn’t wearing his scimitars. He wanted to feel the weight of those deadly blades in his grip once more. The thought of battle, of the stench of death, even of his own death, didn’t trouble him. Not that morning. Not with images of Catti-brie and Regis floating all around him, taunting him in his helplessness.

“I don’t like coming here,” the orc woman remarked as she handed over the herb bag. She wasn’t tall for an orc, but still she towered over her diminutive counterpart.

“We are at peace, Jessa,” Nanfoodle the gnome replied. He pulled open the bag and produced one of the roots, bringing it up under his long nose and taking a deep inhale of it. “Ah, the sweet mandragora,” he said. “Just enough can take your pain.”

“And your painful thoughts,” the orc said. “And make of you a fool… like a dwarf swimming in a pool of mead, thinking to drink himself to dry ground.”

“Only five?” Nanfoodle asked, sifting through the large pouch.

“The other plants are full in bloom,” Jessa replied. “Only five, you say! I expected to find none, or one… hoped to find two, and said a prayer to Gruumsh for a third.”

Nanfoodle looked up from the pouch, but not at the orc, his absent gaze drifted off into the distance, and his mind whirled behind it. “Five?” he mused and glanced at his beakers and coils. He tapped a bony finger to his small, pointy white beard, and after a few moments of screwing up his tiny round face this way and that, he decided, “Five will finish the task.”

“Finish?” Jessa echoed. “Then you will dare to do it?”

Nanfoodle looked at her as if she were being ridiculous. “Well along the way,” he assured her.

A wicked little grin curled Jessa’s lips up so high they seemed to catch the twisting strands of yellow hair, a single bouncing curl to either side, that framed her flat, round face and piggish nose. Her light brown eyes twinkled with mischief.

“Do you have to enjoy it so?” the gnome scolded.

But Jessa twirled aside with a laugh, immune to his words. “I enjoy excitement,” the young priestess explained. “Life is so boring, after all.” She spun to a stop and pointed to the herb pouch, still held by Nanfoodle. “And so do you, obviously.”

The gnome looked down at the potentially poisonous roots. “I have no choice in the matter.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Should I be?”

“I am,” Jessa said, though her blunt tone made it seem more a welcomed declaration than an admission. She nodded somberly in deference to the gnome. “Long live the king,” she said as she curtsied. Then she departed, taking care to pick her way back to the embassy of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows without drawing any more than the usual attention afforded an orc walking the corridors of Mithral Hall.

Nanfoodle took up the roots and moved to his jars and coils, set on a wide bench at the side of his laboratory. He took note of himself in the mirror that hung on the wall behind the bench, and even struck a pose, thinking that he looked quite distinguished in his middle age-which of course meant that he was well past middle age! Most of his hair was gone, except for thick white clumps above his large ears, but he took care to keep those neatly trimmed, like his pointy beard and thin mustache, and to keep the rest of his large noggin cleanly shaved. Well, except for his eyebrows, he thought with a chuckle as he noted that some of the hairs there had grown so long that their curl could be clearly noted.

Nanfoodle took up a pair of spectacles and pinched them onto his nose as he finally pulled himself from the mirror. He tilted his head back to get a better viewing angle through the small round magnifiers as he carefully adjusted the height of the oiled wick.

The heat had to be just right, he reminded himself, for him to extract the right amount of crystal poison.

He had to be precise, but in looking at the hourglass at the end of the bench, he realized that he had to be quick, as well.

King Bruenor’s mug awaited.

Thibbledorf Pwent wasn’t wearing his ridged, creased, and spiked armor, one of the few occasions that anyone had ever seen the dwarf without it. But he wasn’t wearing it for exactly that reason: He didn’t want anyone to recognize him, or more specifically, to hear him.

He skulked in the shadows at the far end of a rough corridor, behind a pile of kegs, with Nanfoodle’s door in sight.

The battlerager gnashed his teeth to hold back the stream of curses he wanted to mutter when Jessa Dribble-Obould entered that chamber, first glancing up and down the corridor to make sure no one was watching her.

“Orcs in Mithral Hall,” Pwent mouthed quietly, and he shook his dirty, hairy head and spat on the floor. How Pwent had screeched in protest when the decision had been made to grant the Kingdom of Many-Arrows an embassy in the dwarven halls! Oh, it was a limited embassy, of course-no more than four orcs were allowed into Mithral Hall at any given time, and those four were not allowed unfettered access. A host of dwarf guards, often Pwent’s own battleragers, were always available to escort their “guests.”