Robert Salvatore: The Orc King

“Obould?” Catti-brie asked, for she thought the orc king long dead.

“He lives,” Drizzt replied. “Somehow he escaped the catastrophe of the landslide, and the gathered orcs are bound still by the will of that most powerful orc.”

“Curse his name.”

Drizzt smiled at her, but didn’t quite agree.

“I am surprised that you and Wulfgar have already returned,” Drizzt said. “What news of Colson?”

Catti-brie shook her head. “We do not know. We did cross the Surbrin on the same morning you flew off with Innovindil for the Sword Coast, but winter was too close on our heels, and brought us back. We did learn that the refugee groups had marched for Silvery-moon, at least, and so Wulfgar intends to be off for Lady Alustriel’s fair city as soon as the ferry is prepared to run once more.”

Drizzt pulled her back to arms’ length and looked down at her wounded hip. She wore a dress, as she had been every day, for the tight fit of breeches was too uncomfortable. The drow looked at the crutch the dwarves had fashioned for her, but she caught his gaze with her own and held it.

“I am not healed,” she admitted, “but I have rested enough to make the journey with Wulfgar.” She paused and reached up with her free hand to gently stroke Drizzt’s chin and cheek. “I have to.”

“I am no less compelled,” Drizzt assured her. “Only my responsibility to Bruenor keeps me here instead.”

“Wulfgar will not be alone on this road,” she assured him.

Drizzt nodded, and his smile showed that he did indeed take comfort in that. “We should go to Bruenor,” he said and started away.

Catti-brie grabbed him by the shoulder. “With good news?”

Drizzt looked at her curiously.

“Your stride is lighter,” she remarked. “You walk as if unburdened. What did you see out there? Are the orc armies set to collapse? Are the folk of the Silver Marches ready to rise as one to repel—”

“Nothing like that,” Drizzt said. “All is as it was when I departed, except that Obould’s forces dig in deeper, as if they mean to stay.”

“Your smile does not deceive me,” Catti-brie said.

“Because you know me too well,” said Drizzt.

“The grim tides of war do not diminish your smile?”

“I have spoken with Ellifain.”

Catti-brie gasped. “She lives?” Drizzt’s expression showed her the absurdity of that conclusion. Hadn’t Catti-brie been there when Ellifain had died, to Drizzt’s own blade? “Resurrection?” the woman breathed. “Did the elves employ a powerful cleric to wrest the soul—”

“Nothing like that,” Drizzt assured her. “But they did provide Ellifain a conduit to relate to me…an apology. And she accepted my own apology.”

“You had no reason to apologize,” Catti-brie insisted. “You did nothing wrong, nor could you have known.”

“I know,” Drizzt replied, and the serenity in his voice warmed Catti-brie. “Much has been put right. Ellifain is at peace.”

“Drizzt Do’Urden is at peace, you mean.”

Drizzt only smiled. “I cannot be,” he said. “We approach an uncertain future, with tens of thousands of orcs on our doorstep. So many have died, friends included, and it seems likely that many more will fall.”

Catti-brie hardly seemed convinced that his mood was dour.

“Drizzt Do’Urden is at peace,” the drow agreed against her unrelenting grin.

He moved as if to lead the woman back to the carriage, but Catti-brie shook her head and motioned instead for him to lead her, crutching, along the corridor that would take them to the bridge across Garumn’s Gorge, and to the western reaches of Mithral Hall where Bruenor sat in audience.

“It is a long walk,” Drizzt warned her, eyeing her wounded leg.

“I have you to support me,” Catti-brie replied, and Drizzt could hardly disagree.

With a grateful nod and a wave to the four dwarf bearers, the couple started away.

So real was his dream that he could feel the warm sun and the cold wind upon his cheeks. So vivid was the sensation that he could smell the cold saltiness of the air blowing down from the Sea of Moving Ice.

So real was it all that Wulfgar was truly surprised when he awoke from his nap to find himself in his small room in Mithral Hall. He closed his eyes again and tried to recapture the dream, tried to step again into the freedom of Icewind Dale.

But it was not possible, and the big man opened his eyes and pulled himself out of his chair. He looked across the room to the bed. He hardly slept there of late, for that had been the bed he’d shared with Delly, his dead wife. On the few occasions he had dared to recline upon it, he had found himself reaching for her, rolling to where she should have been.

The feeling of emptiness as reality invaded his slumber had left Wulfgar cold every time.

At the foot of the bed sat Colson’s crib, and looking at it proved even more distressing.

Wulfgar dropped his head in his hands, the soft feel of hair reminding him of his new-grown beard. He smoothed both beard and mustache, and rubbed the blurriness from his eyes. He tried not to think of Delly, then, or even of Colson, needing to be free of his regrets and fears for just a brief moment. He envisioned Icewind Dale in his younger days. He had known loss then, too, and had keenly felt the stings of battle. There were no delusions invading his dreams or his memories that presented a softer image of that harsh land. Icewind Dale remained uncompromising, its winter wind more deadly than refreshing.

But there was something simpler about that place, Wulfgar knew. Something purer. Death was a common visitor to the tundra, and monsters roamed freely. It was a land of constant trial, and with no room for error, and even in the absence of error, the result of any decision often proved disastrous.

Wulfgar nodded, understanding the emotional refuge offered by such uncompromising conditions. For Icewind Dale was a land without regret. It simply was the way of things.

Wulfgar pulled himself from his chair and stretched the weariness from his long arms and legs. He felt constricted, trapped, and as the walls seemed to close in on him, he recalled Delly’s pleas to him regarding that very feeling.

“Perhaps you were right,” Wulfgar said to the empty room.

He laughed then, at himself, as he considered the steps that had brought him back to that place. He had been turned around by a storm.

He, Wulfgar, son of Beornegar, who had grown tall and strong in the brutal winters of frozen Icewind Dale, had been chased back into the dwarven complex by the threat of winter snows!

Then it hit him. All of it. His meandering, empty road for the last eight years of his life, since his return from the Abyss and the torments of the demon, Errtu. Even after he had gathered up Colson from Meralda in Auckney, had retrieved Aegis-fang and his sense of who he was, and had rejoined his friends for the journey back to Mithral Hall, Wulfgar’s steps had not been purposeful, had not been driven by a clear sense of where he wanted to go. He had taken Delly as his wife, but had never stopped loving Catti-brie.

Yes, it was true, he admitted. He could lie about it to others, but not to himself.

Many things came clear at last to Wulfgar that morning in his room in Mithral Hall, most of all the fact that he had allowed himself to live a lie. He knew that he couldn’t have Catti-brie—her heart was for Drizzt—but how unfair had he been to Delly and to Colson? He had created a facade, an illusion of family and of stability for the benefit of everyone involved, himself included.

Wulfgar had walked his road of redemption, since Auckney, with manipulation and falsity. He understood that finally. He had been so determined to put everything into a neat and trim little box, a perfectly controlled scene, that he had denied the very essence of who he was, the very fires that had forged Wulfgar son of Beornegar.