Robert Salvatore: Sojourn

“Dagnaggit blasted,” the dwarf muttered, “adjusting” the helmet a second time.

Drizzt was certainly intrigued, but he was also smart enough to realize that a grumbling dwarf wouldn’t likely welcome an uninvited drow in the middle of a dark night. As the dwarf moved for yet another adjustment, Drizzt skipped off, running lightly and silently along the side of the trail. He passed close by the dwarf but then was gone with no more rustle than the shadow of a cloud.

“Eh?” the dwarf mumbled when he came back up, this time satisfied with his headgear’s fit. “Who’s that? What’re ye about?” He went into a series of short, spinning hops, eyes darting alertly all about.

There was only the darkness, the stones, and the wind.

The season’s first snow fell lazily over Icewind Dale, large flakes drifting down in mesmerizing zigzag dances, so different from the wind-whipped blizzards most common to the region. The young girl, Catti-brie, watched it with obvious enchantment from the doorway of her cavern home, the hue of her deep-blue eyes seeming even purer in the reflection of the ground’s white blanket.

“Late in comin’, but hard when it gets here,” grumbled Bruenor Battlehammer, a red-bearded dwarf, as he came up behind Catti-brie, his adopted daughter. “Suren to be a hard season, as are all in this place for white dragons!”

“Oh, me Daddy!” replied Catti-brie sternly. “Stop yer whining! Suren ‘tis a beautiful fall, and harmless enough without the wind to drive it.”

“Humans,” huffed the dwarf derisively, still behind the girl. Catti-brie could not see his expression, tender toward her even as he grumbled, but she didn’t need to. Bruenor was nine parts bluster and one part grouch, by Catti-brie’s estimation.

Catti-brie spun on the dwarf suddenly, her shoulder-length, auburn locks twirling about her face. “Can I go out to play?” she asked, a hopeful smile on her face. “Oh, please, me Daddy!”

Bruenor forced on his best grimace. “Go out!” he roared. “None but a fool’d look for an Icewind Dale winter as a place for playin’! Show some sense, girl! The season’d freeze yer bones!”

Catti-brie’s smile disappeared, but she refused to surrender so easily. “Well said for a dwarf,” she retorted, to Bruenor’s horror. “Ye’re well enough fit for the holes and the less ye see o’ the sky, the more ye’re smiling! But I’ve a long winter ahead, and this might be me last chance to see the sky. Please, Daddy?”

Bruenor could not hold his snarling visage against his daughter’s charm, but he did not want her to go out. “I’m fearing there’s something prowlin’ out there,” he explained, trying to sound authoritative. “Sensed it on the climb a few nights back, though I never seen it. Mighten be a white lion, or a white bear. Best to… ” Bruenor never finished, for Catti-brie’s disheartened look more than destroyed the dwarf’s imagined fears.

Catti-brie was no novice to the dangers of the region. She had lived with Bruenor and his dwarven clan for more than seven years. A raiding goblin band had killed Gatti-brie’s parents when she was only a toddler, and, though she was human, Bruenor had taken her in as his own.

“Ye’re a hard one, me girl,” Bruenor said in answer to Catti-brie’s relentless, sorrow-filled expression. “Go out and find yer play, then, but don’t ye be goin’ too far! On yer word, ye spirited filly, keep the caves in sight and a sword and horn on yer belt.”

Catti-brie rushed over and planted a wet kiss on Bruenor’s cheek, which the taciturn dwarf promptly wiped away, grumbling at the girl’s back as she disappeared into the tunnel. Bruenor was the leader of the clan, as tough as the stone they mined. But every time Catti-brie planted an appreciative kiss on his cheek, the dwarf realized he had given in to her.

“Humans!” the dwarf growled again, and he stomped down the tunnel to the mine, thinking to batter a few pieces of iron, just to remind himself of his toughness.

It was easy for the spirited young girl to rationalize her disobedience when she looked back across the valley from the lower slopes of Kelvin’s Cairn, more than three miles from Bruenor’s front door. Bruenor had told Catti-brie to keep the caves in sight, and they were, or at least the wider terrain around them was, from this high vantage point.

But Catti-brie, happily sliding down one bumpy expanse, soon found a flaw in not heeding to her experienced father’s warnings. She had come to the bottom, a delightful ride, and was briskly rubbing the stinging chill out of her hands, when she heard a low and ominous growl.

“White lion,” Catti-brie mouthed silently, remembering Bruenor’s suspicion. When she looked up, she saw that her father’s guess had not quite hit the mark. It was indeed a great feline the girl saw looking down at her from a bare, stony mound, but the cat was black, not white, and a huge panther, not a lion.

Defiantly, Catti-brie pulled her knife from its sheath. “Keep yerself back, cat!” she said, only the slightest tremor in her voice, for she knew that fear invited attack from wild animals.

Guenhwyvar flattened its ears and plopped to its belly, then issued a long and resounding roar that echoed throughout the stony region.

Catti-brie could not respond to the power in that roar, or to the very long and abundant teeth the panther showed. She searched around for some escape but knew that no matter which way she ran she could not get beyond the panther’s first mighty spring.

“Guenhwyvar!” came a call from above. Catti-brie looked back up the snowy expanse to see a slender, cloaked form picking a careful route toward her. “Guenhwyvar!” the newcomer called again. “Be gone from here!”

The panther growled a throaty reply, then bounded away, leaping the snow-covered boulders and springing up small cliffs as easily as if it were running across a smooth and flat field.

Despite her continuing fears, Catti-brie watched the departing panther with sincere admiration. She had always loved animals and had often studied them, but the interplay of Guenhwyvar’s sleek muscles was more majestic than anything she had ever imagined. When she at last came out of her trance, she realized that the slender figure was right behind her. She whirled about, knife still in hand.

The blade dropped from her grasp and her breathing halted abruptly as soon as she looked upon the drow.

Drizzt, too, found himself stunned by the encounter. He wanted to make certain that the girl was all right, but when he looked upon Catti-brie, all thoughts of his purpose faded away in a flood of memories.

She was about the same age as the sandy-haired boy on the farm, Drizzt noted initially, and that thought inevitably brought back the agonizing memories of Maldobar. When Drizzt looked more closely, though, into Catti-brie’s eyes, his thoughts were sent flying back further into his past, to his days marching alongside his dark kin. Catti-brie’s eyes possessed that same joyful and innocent sparkle that Drizzt had seen in the eyes of an elven child, a girl he had rescued from the savage blades of his raiding kin. The memory overwhelmed Drizzt, sent him whirling back to that bloody glade in the elven wood, where his brother and fellow drow had brutally slaughtered an elven gathering. In the frenzy, Drizzt had almost killed the elven child, had almost put himself forever on that same dark road that his kin so willingly followed.

Drizzt shook himself free of the recollection and reminded himself that this was a different child of a different race. He meant to speak a greeting, but the girl was gone.

That damning word, “drizzit,” echoed in the drow’s thoughts several times as he made his way back to the cave he had set up as his home on the mountain’s northern face.