Robert Salvatore - Sojourn

The creature shuddered and thrashed for a second longer, then lay still, its back still glowing hotly.

A second roar from Guenhwyvar took the proud dwarf’s eyes from his kill. Bruenor, injured and tentative, looked up to see Drizzt and the panther fast approaching, the drow with both scimitars drawn.

“Come on!” Bruenor roared at them both, misunderstanding their charge. He banged his axe against his heavy shield. “Come on and feel me blade!”

Drizzt stopped abruptly and called for Guenhwyvar to do the same. The panther continued to stalk, though, ears flattened.

“Be gone, Guenhwyvar!” Drizzt commanded.

The panther growled indignantly one final time and sprang away.

Satisfied that the cat was gone, Bruenor snapped his glare on Drizzt, standing at the other end of the fallen polar worm.

“Yerself and me, then?” the dwarf spat. “Ye got the belly to face me axe, drow, or do little girls be more to yer likin?”

The obvious reference to Catti-brie brought an angry light to Drizzt’s eyes, and his grasp on his weapons tightened.

Bruenor swung his axe easily. “Come on,” he chided derisively. “Ye got the belly to come and play with a dwarf?”

Drizzt wanted to scream out for all the world to hear. He wanted to spring over the dead monster and smash the dwarf, deny the dwarf’s words with sheer and brutal force, but he couldn’t. Drizzt couldn’t deny Mielikki and couldn’t betray Mooshie. He had to sublimate his rage once again, had to take the insults stoically and with the realization that he, and his goddess, knew the truth of what lay in his heart.

The scimitars spun into their sheaths and Drizzt walked away, Guenhwyvar coming up beside him.

Bruenor watched the pair go curiously. At first he thought the drow a coward, but then, as the excitement of the battle gradually diminished, Bruenor came to wonder about the drow’s intent. Had he come down to finish off both combatants, as Bruenor had first assumed? Or had he, possibly, come down to Bruenor’s aid?

“Nah,” the dwarf muttered, dismissing the possibility. “Not a dark elf!”

The walk back was long for the limping dwarf, giving Bruenor many opportunities to replay the events around the northwestern spur. When he finally arrived back at the mines, the sun had long set and Catti-brie and several dwarves were gathered, ready to go out to look for him.

“Ye’re hurt,” one of the dwarves remarked. Catti-brie immediately imagined a fight between Drizzt and her father.

“Polar worm,” the dwarf explained casually. “Got him good, but got a bit of a burn for me effort.”

The other dwarves nodded admiringly at their leader’s battle prowess—a polar worm was no easy kill—and Catti-brie sighed audibly.

“I saw the drow!” Bruenor growled at her, suspecting the source of that sigh. The dwarf remained confused about his meeting with the dark elf, and confused, too, about where Catti-brie fit into all of this. Had Catti-brie actually met the dark elf? he wondered.

“I seen him, I did!” Bruenor continued, now speaking more to the other dwarves. “Drow and the biggest an’ blackest cat me eyes ever set on. He came down for me, just as I dropped the worm.”

“Drizzt would not!” Catti-brie interrupted, before her father could get into his customary story-telling roll.

“Drizzt?” Bruenor asked, and the girl turned away, realizing that her lie was up. Bruenor let it go—for the moment.

“He did, I say!” the dwarf continued. “Came in at me with both his blades drawn! I chased that one an’ the cat off.”

“We could hunt him down,” offered one of the dwarves. “Run him off the mountain!” The others nodded and mumbled their agreement, but Bruenor, still struggling with the drow’s intent, cut them short.

“He’s got the mountain,” Bruenor told them. “Cassius gave it to him, and we need no trouble with Bryn Shander. As long as the drow stays put and stays outa our way, we’ll leave him be.

“But,” Bruenor continued, eyeing Catti-brie directly, “ye’re not to speak to, ye’re not to go near, that one again!”

“But—” Catti-brie started futilely.

“Never!” Bruenor roared. “I’ll have yer word now, girl, or by Moradin, I’ll have that dark elf’s head!”

Catti-brie hesitated, horribly trapped.

“Tell me!” Bruenor demanded.

“Ye have me word,” the girl mumbled, and she fled back to the dark shelter of the cave.

“Cassius, Spokesman o’ Bryn Shander, sent me yer way,” the gruff man explained. “Says ye’d know the drow if any would.”

Bruenor glanced around his formal audience hall to the many other dwarves in attendance, none of them overly impressed by the rude stranger. Bruenor dropped his bearded chin into his palm and yawned widely, determined to remain outside this apparent conflict. He might have bluffed the crude man and his smelly dog out of the halls without further bother, but Catti-brie, sitting at her father’s side, shuffled uneasily.

Roddy McGristle did not miss her revealing movement. “Cassius says ye must’ve seen the drow, him bein’ so close.”

“If any of me people have,” Bruenor replied absently, “they’ve spoke not a bit of it. If yer drow’s about, he’s been no bother.”

Catti-brie looked curiously at her father and breathed easier.

“No bother?” Roddy muttered, a sly look coming into his eye. “Never is, that one.” Slowly and dramatically, the mountain man peeled back his hood, revealing his scars. “Never a bother, until ye don’t expect what ye get!”

“Drow give ye that?” Bruenor asked, not overly alarmed or impressed. “Fancy scars—better’n most I seen.”

“He killed my dog!” Roddy growled.

“Don’t look dead to me,” Bruenor quipped, drawing chuckles from every corner.

“My other dog,” Roddy snarled, understanding where he stood with this stubborn dwarf. “Ye care not a thing for me, and well ye shouldn’t. But it’s not for myself that I’m hunting this one, and not for any bounty on his head. Ye ever heared o’ Maldobar?”

Bruenor shrugged.

“North o’ Sundabar,” Roddy explained. “Small, peaceable place. Farmers all. One family, the Thistledowns, lived on the side o’ town, three generations in a single house, as good families will. Bartholemew Thistledown was a good man, I tell ye, as his pa afore him, an’ his children, four lads and a filly—much like yer own—standing tall and straight with a heart of spirit and a love o’ the world.”

Bruenor suspected where the burly man was leading, and by Catti-brie’s uncomfortable shifting beside him, he figured that his perceptive daughter knew as well.

“Good family,” Roddy mused, feigning a wispy, distant expression. “Nine in the house.” The mountain man’s visage hardened suddenly and he glared straight at Bruenor. “Nine died in the house,” he declared. “Hacked by yer drow, and one ate up by his devil cat!”

Catti-brie tried to respond, but her words came out in a garbled shriek. Bruenor was glad of her confusion, for if she had spoken clearly, her argument would have given the mountain man more than Bruenor wanted him to know. The dwarf laid a hand across his daughter’s shoulders, then answered Roddy calmly. “Ye’ve come to us with a dark tale. Ye shook me daughter, and I’m not for liking me daughter shook!”

“I beg yer forgivings kingly dwarf,” Roddy said with a bow, “but ye must be told of the danger on yer door. Brow’s a bad one, and so’s his devil cat! I want no repeating o’ the Maldobar tragedy.”

“And ye’ll get none in me halls,” Bruenor assured him. “We’re not simple farmers, take to yer heart. Drow won’t be botherin’ us any more’n ye’ve bothered us already.”