Robert Salvatore - The Orc King

That laboratory, hidden and magically warded, remained secure even though his unwitting protectors, Clan Karuck, had traveled out of the Underdark. And still, Jack had followed them. He had followed Hakuun, though the pathetic Hakuun was hardly worth following, because, he knew deep inside but wasn’t quite ready to admit, he had wanted to come back, to remember the last time he was Jack the Gnome.

He found himself pleasantly surprised by the view. Something tingled in the air around him, something exciting and teeming with possibility.

Perhaps he didn’t know the extent of Hakuun’s reasoning in allowing Grguch to come forth, Jack thought, and he was intrigued.

Wulfgar’s long, powerful legs drove through the knee-deep—often hip-deep—snow, plowing a path north from the mountain ridge. Rather than perceive the snow as a hindrance, though, Wulfgar considered it a freeing experience. That kind of trailblazing reminded him of the crisp air of home, and in a more practical sense, the snow slowed to a grumbling halt the pair of dwarven sentries who stubbornly pursued him.

More snow fell, and the wind blew cold from the north, promising yet another storm. But Wulfgar did not fear, and his smile was genuine as he drove forward. He kept the river on his immediate right and scrolled through his thoughts all of the landmarks Ivan Boulder-shoulder had told him regarding the trail leading to the body of Delly Curtie. Wulfgar had grilled Ivan and Pikel on the details before they had departed Mithral Hall.

The cold wind, the stinging snow, the pressure on his legs from winter’s deep…it all felt right to Wulfgar, familiar and comforting, and he knew in his heart that his course was the right one. He drove on all the harder, his stride purposeful and powerful, and no snow drift could slow him.

The calls of protest from Bruenor’s kin dissipated into nothingness behind him, defeated by the wall of wind, and very soon the fortifications and towers, and the mountain ridge itself became indistinct black splotches in the distant background.

He was alone and he was free. He had no one on whom he could rely, but no one for whom he was responsible. It was just Wulfgar, son of Beornegar, ranging through the deep winter snow, against the wind of the newest storm. He was just a lone adventurer, whose path was his own to choose, and who had found, to his thrill, a road worth walking.

Despite the cold, despite the danger, despite the missing Colson, despite Delly’s death and Catti-brie’s relationship with Drizzt, Wulfgar knew only simple joy.

He traveled on long after the dim light had waned to darkness, until the cold night air became too intense for even a proud son of the frozen tundra to bear. He set up camp under the lowest boughs of thick pines, behind insulating walls of snow, where the wind could not find him. He passed the night in dreams of the caribou, and the wandering tribes that followed the herd. He envisioned his friends, all of them, beside him in the shadow of Kelvin’s Cairn.

He slept well, and went out early the next day, under the gray sky.

The land was not unfamiliar to Wulfgar, who had spent years in Mithral Hall, and even as he had exited the eastern door of the dwarven complex, he had a good idea of where Ivan and Pikel had found the body of poor Delly. He would get there that day, he knew, but reminded himself repeatedly of the need for caution. He had left friendly lands, and from the moment he had crossed the dwarven battlements on the mountain spur, he was outside the realm of civilization. Wulfgar passed several encampments, the dark smoke of campfires curling lazily into the air, and he didn’t need to get close enough to see the campers to know their orc heritage and their malicious intent.

He was glad that the daylight was dim.

The snow began again soon after midday, but it was not the driving stuff of the previous night. Puffy flakes danced lightly on the air, trailing a meandering course to the ground, for there was no wind other than the occasional small whisper of a breeze. Despite having to continually watch for signs of orcs and other monsters, Wulfgar made great progress, and the afternoon was still young when he breached one small rocky rise to look down upon a bowl-shaped dell.

Wulfgar held his breath as he scanned the region. Across the way, beyond the opposite rise, rose the smoke of several campfires, and in the small vale itself Wulfgar saw the remains of an older, deserted encampment. For though the dell was sheltered, the wind had found its way in on the previous day, and had driven the snow to the southeastern reaches, leaving a large portion of the bowl practically uncovered. Wulfgar could clearly see a half-covered ring of small stones, the remains of a cooking pit.

Exactly as Ivan Bouldershoulder had described it.

With a great sigh, the barbarian pulled himself over the ridge and began a slow and deliberate trudge into the dell. He slid his feet along slowly rather than lift them, aware that he might trip over a body buried beneath the foot or so of snow that blanketed the ground. He set a path that took him straight to the cooking pit, then lined himself up as Ivan had described and slowly made his way back out. It took him a long while, but sure enough, he noticed a bluish hand protruding from the edge of the snow.

Wulfgar knelt beside it and reverently brushed back the white powder. It was Delly, unmistakably so, for the deep freeze of winter had only intensified after her fall those months before, and little decomposition had set in. Her face was bloated, but not greatly, and her features were not too badly distorted.

She looked as if she were asleep and at peace, and it occurred to Wulfgar that the poor woman had never known such serenity in all of her life.

A pang of guilt stung him at that realization, for in the end, that truth had been no small part his own fault. He recalled their last conversations, when Delly had subtly and quietly begged him to get her out of Mithral Hall, when she had pleaded with him to free her from the confines of the dwarf-hewn tunnels.

“But I am a stupid one,” he whispered to her, gently stroking her face. “Would that you had said it more directly, and yet I fear that still I would not have heard you.”

She had given up everything to follow him to Mithral Hall. Truly her impoverished life in Luskan had not been an enviable existence. But still, in Luskan Delly Curtie had friends who were as her family, had a warm bed and food to eat. She had abandoned that much at least for Wulfgar and Colson, and had held up her end of that bargain all the way to Mithral Hall and beyond.

In the end, she had failed. Because of Catti-brie’s evil and sentient sword, to be sure, but also because the man she had trusted to stand beside her had not been able to hear and recognize her quiet desperation.

“Forgive me,” Wulfgar said, and he bent low to kiss her cold cheek. He rose back to his knees and blinked, for suddenly the dim daylight stung his eyes.

Wulfgar stood.

“Ma la, bo gor du wanak,” he said, an ancient barbarian way of accepting resignation, a remark without direct translation to the common tongue.

It was a lament that the world “is as it would be,” as the gods would have it, and it was the place of men to accept and discover their best path from what was presented them. Hearing the somewhat stilted and less-flowing tongue of the Icewind Dale barbarians rolling so easily from his lips gave Wulfgar pause. He never used that language anymore, and yet it had come back to him so easily just then.

With the winter thick about him, in the crisp and chill air, and with tragedy lying at his feet, the words had come to him, unbidden and irresistible.