R.A. Salvatore - Maestro

“You are alive and seem well.”

She smiled and nodded.

“Then no tale you tell me can wound me, my little Zubrija.”

When they entered the family tent, Catti-brie had to leap across the floor to catch Kavita, who gasped and collapsed in joy at the sight of her.

Catti-brie gladly buried her face in Kavita’s thick black hair, and she drank in the smell of the woman, the smell of her childhood.

“You haven’t aged,” Catti-brie whispered in the woman’s ear.

Kavita kissed her on the cheek.

“Nayan keeps her young,” Niraj said, and when Catti-brie looked back at him, he nodded his chin toward the far end of the room.

Catti-brie’s gaze locked on the small bed, and her jaw drooped open.

“Nayan?” she whispered, pulling back from Kavita. She looked to her mother, who smiled and nodded then motioned for her to go and see.

Catti-brie quietly moved across the room. She saw a bit of movement first, under some blankets, and she paused, overwhelmed by the thought that she had a brother-overwhelmed and not sure how to even consider this child. Was he really her brother? Similarly, were Niraj and Kavita actually her parents? She had come back to the world fully conscious of her previous life, a life where she had been born to other parents, though she had barely known, and remembered nothing of, her father, and had known her mother not at all.

Still, where did she fit here with this Desai family? She did not even consider herself Desai! Was Kavita no more than a carrier for the will of Mielikki?

These questions had followed Catti-brie since her earliest days in this strange second life.

The blankets moved and the little boy, Nayan, rolled over into sight, his head covered in thick black hair like Kavita, his mouth and jowls wide and expressive like Niraj.

And Catti-brie had her answer, to all of it. The explosion in her heart offered no room for doubt.

This was her baby brother. And these were her parents, her mother and her father, and that it was her second life mattered not at all.

She was home. This was her family, as much as Mithral Hall had been her home and Bruenor was forever her Da.

Whether she was Desai or not mattered not at all, no more than the fact that she wasn’t a dwarf-nay less, she decided, because she was human, just like this family, just like this tribe. The rest of it-skin color, hair color, homeland-was nonsense, fabricated by people who needed to pretend that they were somehow superior for such superficial reasons.

None of it mattered. This was her family, and she could only love them as such.

Nayan opened his dark eyes then. He looked right at her and his whole face smiled, his mouth all crooked and wide and with just a couple of tiny teeth showing.

Catti-brie, charmed, turned back to her parents, who stood together now, leaning on each other.

“May I?”

Kavita laughed. “I will be angry with you if you do not!”

Catti-brie scooped Nayan up in her arms, lifted him up in front of her eyes, and made giggling, nonsensical noises. She had no idea why she might be doing that, but she surely was, and as Nayan thoroughly enjoyed it and laughed aloud, she didn’t stop for a long while, until her arms got tired and she brought the young mister in close on her hip.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, turning back to Niraj and Kavita. “He has just enough of both of you, the best features of both.”

“We are just glad he got Kavita’s hair,” the bald-headed Niraj laughed and winked.

“Tell me you are returned to us,” Kavita bade her. “The threat of Shade Enclave is no more. We are safe now, and so much happier will we be with our Ruqiah with us.”

The smile disappeared from Catti-brie’s face and she gave a resigned sigh. “Mother, Father …” she began, shaking her head. “I have so much to tell you, so much I can tell you now. I left you confused.”

“Speaking of the goddess Mielikki and spouting prophecy about the return of Anauroch,” said Niraj.

“You are a chosen, so you claimed,” Kavita added.

“You remember.”

“Remember?” Kavita echoed incredulously, and she rushed across the floor. “Every heartbeat, I remember,” she said, and she seemed as if she was about to wail. “It was the day I lost my baby girl.” Her voice began to crack. “It has haunted my dreams for twenty years.”

“We always hoped you would come back to us,” Niraj added, moving beside Kavita and taking her arm.

“Let us sit,” Catti-brie bade them. “And I will tell you everything. All of it. And you must believe me, and you must understand that none of it changes the way I feel about you, the love I know here from you. That love sustains me. I need you now, both of you.”

On her hip, Nayan gurgled a spit-filled response.

“And you, too!” Catti-brie said with a laugh. She jostled Nayan, and that was all it took to get him laughing yet again.

“All of it,” she said more seriously to Niraj and Kavita, “the truth of the past, the truth of my arrival into your home, and the promise of the future.”

She motioned to the small table and chairs in the tent and the three sat down, Catti-brie placing Nayan on a rug right beside her chair, Kavita tossing her a bunch of plains-grass dolls Niraj had made for the child, to toy with or chew on as he chose.

And so Catti-brie somberly told her parents the truth-everything, from the details of her previous life to the journey that had led her from Mithral Hall to the divine forest of Iruladoon to Kavita’s womb. These two were not simple nomads; both were trained in the Art, and though Catti-brie noted the doubts expressed initially on their faces-surely they thought their daughter had lost her mind-she could see that she was clearly breaking down the barriers of denial. She watched as Kavita’s hand crept nearer and nearer to Niraj’s, finally clasping his hand tightly and squeezing as if to save her very sanity.

And he was no less glad of the grasp.

Catti-brie told them of her departure from the Desai, trapped and dragged to her time in Shade Enclave with Lady Avelyere and the Coven. She told them of Longsaddle and her journey to fulfill her promise to Mielikki and go to Drizzt, her drow husband-which raised a few eyebrows-on Kelvin’s Cairn. She told them of the war in the west, the Silver Marches.

She told them of Gauntlgrym, of her other father who was now king, of her current quest to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane, and the mission that had brought her back to their side.

She finished and leaned forward, placing a hand on the knee of each. “Every word I told you was the truth. You deserve that much at least from me.”

Kavita nodded, but Niraj just sat there staring blankly, trying to digest the amazing story.

For a long while, they sat in silence, other than when Nayan found something particularly amusing or tasty.

“The Netherese remain in the hills below where Shade Enclave once floated,” Niraj confirmed for her, finally.

“You cannot go to them,” said Kavita, shaking her head. “The war is over, but they are no friend to Desai. They will throw you in shackles and use you-”

“I go with the imprimatur of a very powerful friend, who is allied with Lord Parise Ulfbinder,” Catti-brie replied. “An urgent request the Netherese lord will not ignore, and so he will not dare threaten me in any way.”

“You cannot know!” Kavita retorted, but Niraj put his hand on her leg and nodded comfortingly to the rightly-worried mother.

“Perhaps our little Ruqiah has earned our trust,” he said.

Kavita looked into Catti-brie’s eyes. “Our little Ruqiah,” she echoed in a whisper. “Can we even call you that?”

“Of course you can,” said Catti-brie, grinning happily, but that smile did not charm Kavita.