Rise of the King

by R. A. Salvatore

  Looking out at the ruins of Stonecutter’s Solace, considering the tumultuous waters that always seemed to roil in his own wake, Drizzt couldn’t help but think that he, not Regis, should be the one with the reputation of towing trouble in his wake.

  The drow ranger smiled as he considered that truth. In his younger days, such dark thoughts would have weighed heavily upon his shoulders, the anvil of guilt bending his mouth into a frown.

  Now he knew better. Now, finally, Drizzt understood that the world was a wider place, and a dangerous place regardless of his chosen path—and indeed, for those who knew him as friend and ally, surely a more dangerous place without him. The dark elves needed no specific reason to invade any town, and surely any major demon set loose to walk the world of mortal men would wreak chaos whether in pursuit of Drizzt or not.

  This was not about him. The destruction of Stonecutter’s Solace was not upon his shoulders. Likely the place, the whole town, would have been abandoned long ago had not Drizzt and his former companions, Entreri and Dahlia and the others, driven the sahuagin back into the sea.

  He thought of that other group now and glanced once more, one by one, to the Companions of the Hall. In many ways, the comparisons were quite apparent. Both this adventuring troupe and the last surrounding Drizzt could claim a competence in battle that few in the Realms could match.

  But those comparisons ended there, at a very superficial level. His heart felt full. Beyond the ability to wield a sword or a spell, or even to battle side-by-side in true, devastating harmony, this group now beside him could not be more different than Entreri, Dahlia, and the others.

  He laughed aloud as he thought of Afafrenfere and Ambergris among these very people, in the old Stonecutter’s Solace. The dwarf had set the monk up as a prizefighter, and then collected bags of coins betting on Afafrenfere, who surely did not appear formidable. But with his martial training, focusing on battles with open hands, the tall and lanky Afafrenfere could easily defeat men much larger and stronger than he.

  “What’re ye seein’ in yer thoughts, elf?” Bruenor asked. “And what’s so durned funny?”

  Drizzt just shook his head, never looking at Bruenor, for his gaze had drifted across the wide cave to Wulfgar. If Ambergris and Afafrenfere had come to this place now to set up their betting game, would Wulfgar accept the challenge?

  And if he did, if Wulfgar squared up against the skilled monk, upon which combatant might Drizzt wisely place his own bet?

  “Well?” Bruenor prompted.

  “Wulfgar,” Drizzt decided, answering himself and not the dwarf, and he nodded as he played out the fighting his mind. Even with Afafrenfere’s undeniable skills, Drizzt had seen too much of Wulfgar’s sheer power to ever bet against him.

  “Eh?” the perplexed dwarf asked.

  Drizzt just laughed again. How could he not? Even with the grim realities that had hit Port Llast so recently, no lament could hold, not when surrounded by the spirit of the town, the hardy folk full of life and cheer and celebration this night for the return of several citizens they had thought forever lost to the drow raiders.

  More and more of the folk came into the cave as word of the rescue—and the heroic rescuers—spread far and wide.

  “This was a mine?” Regis asked, sitting on the other side of Catti-brie from Drizzt.

  “Quarry,” Bruenor corrected, looking at the walls of the place and the sheer cuts. “Or might’ve been a bit o’ both,” he added, noting one snaking tunnel at the back of the wide chamber.

  A great cheer rose up at the other side of this largest room, and all eyes turned there, to see Wulfgar downing a large flagon of foamy beer, prodded on by the roars of the patrons. The barbarian held up one arm and flexed, his muscles standing as tall and as hard as any rock a dwarven pick had ever chipped.

  The cheers cascaded around and back to the other four heroes, a trio of patrons coming their way, hands full of flagons, faces full of smiles. They would celebrate throughout the night, so the town leaders had declared.

  “Ambergris will be sorry that she didn’t come north with us just a bit longer,” Regis remarked, taking an offered flagon.

  “She survived, then?” came a raspy voice from the side.

  The companions turned to see a most remarkable creature: half-elf, half-tiefling, dressed in dark robes and carrying a staff made of bone with a tiny humanoid skull set atop it. Broken and twisted, the man seemed quite infirm at first glance. But that impression was quickly lost by any who could recognize the cut of his clothing and the clear power resonating in that staff. His skinny shoulders sat somewhat askew, left side back from the right, and with his left arm hanging limp behind him, almost like a tail that had sprung from his high back.

  Drizzt’s eyes popped open wide and he felt as if he were about to tumble from his chair.

  “Effron?” the perceptive Regis and Catti-brie asked of the drow in unison.

  Drizzt collected himself and sprang from the chair. “Effron!” he cried and rushed to clasp hands with the warlock. Drizzt pulled him in from there for a hug, one the tiefling—a former cellmate of Drizzt’s in the home of Draygo Quick—gladly reciprocated.

  “I had thought you dead.”

  “Very near,” Effron said, pulling back to arms’ length. “Filthy dr …” he paused and swallowed hard, then finished by altering the word to: “driders.”

  Drizzt nodded and let it go. Given the circumstances, had Effron said “drow,” Drizzt would have agreed.

  “I feared the same for you,” Effron said. “We went in search of you on the mountainside in Icewind Dale, but we could not find your trail.”

  “For the better, in the end,” said Drizzt.

  Effron moved in a bit closer, putting his mouth near Drizzt’s ear. “I am sorry for the way it ended between us all,” he whispered, referring to that dark night on Kelvin’s Cairn. “We even went to the dwarves in search of you, but they had heard no word.”

  “Against your mother’s wishes, no doubt,” Drizzt said, beginning with a smile, but one that fast faded as he remembered the end of Dahlia, Effron’s mother.

  Drizzt pulled back from him, and again offered a wide smile. He motioned to Wulfgar’s empty seat at the table and bade Effron to sit.

  “I have a lot to tell you,” Drizzt said.

  Effron hesitated, then said, “Tell me of my mother.”

  And a cloud passed over Drizzt’s face, enough so that Effron had heard, at that moment, all he needed. Appearing unsteady on his feet, the tiefling warlock slipped into the chair.

  Drizzt introduced his companions, even calling Wulfgar back to the table.

  “This is Catti-brie?” Effron asked at one point. “Truly?”

  “From the same forest as that in which we slept,” Drizzt tried to explain. “Returned to the world, as were we, from a long slumber.”

  Effron eyed the woman up and down, his expression revealing his displeasure no matter how hard he tried to hide it. “You found your ghost,” he stated rather dryly to Drizzt.

  Catti-brie nodded. Drizzt could see the lump in her throat, for she knew that they—and more pointedly, that she—had to be honest here, and that the honest retelling of their recent adventures was certainly going to hurt this young warlock profoundly.

  “Ambergris is alive, yes, and with Afafrenfere on the road south and then northeast across the inland sea,” Drizzt explained as he recounted the recent journey to Gauntlgrym. “Entreri, too, survived the drow attack, but did not return with us. He may still be in Gauntlgrym for all we know, but I do not doubt that he’s alive still—on his guard, few are more capable than Artemis Entreri.”

  “But they killed my mother,” Effron said.

  Drizzt sighed and started to reply, but Catti-brie interjected, “No,” rather sharply, turning all eyes her way.

  “I did,” she admitted.

  Now it was Effron who looked like he might fall off his chair, and beside him, Drizzt held his breath, expecting an explosion. />
  “They did worse than kill her,” Drizzt tried to explain. “They told her you were dead. By Entreri’s estimation, they broke her heart, and her spirit. She attacked Catti-brie—”

  “I didn’t want to kill her,” Catti-brie said. “I didn’t want to fight her at all. Dahlia was not my ene—”

  “She was Drizzt’s lover,” Effron said, as if that point alone belied the woman’s claims.

  But Catti-brie shrugged as if that hardly mattered, and indeed, it didn’t, not to her and not in any rational sense. “Was I to be jealous when my husband thought me a hundred years dead—indeed, when I had been a hundred years dead?”

  Effron stared at her hard. He started to talk once or twice, as though fumbling over both the specific words and the tone he intended. But then, finally, he seemed to relax a bit.

  “She was not my enemy,” Catti-brie said again. “Never that. But it was not simply Dahlia I battled in the fire chamber of Gauntlgrym. She commanded jade spiders. She fought with a demonic eye possessed of Lady Lolth’s spirit, while I was filled with the power of Mielikki. We were pawns of two goddesses—that much is clear to me. And in that event, Effron, I say to you with all confidence that your mother is freed now from a curse worse than death at my hands.”

  “The line between life and death,” Effron muttered and lowered his eyes, and a single tear made its way down the taut skin of his thin cheek. “So fine, it seems, and so many times have those around me walked it of late.”

  “Given yer skull-headed staff and what th’ elf’s been sayin’ about ye, ye should be knowin’ that better’n most,” Bruenor interjected.

  Effron looked up at him and managed a self-deprecating shrug.

  “They told her that I was dead?” he asked Drizzt.

  The drow nodded solemnly.

  “Then she died without hope,” Effron lamented. “She had lost you …” He paused and gave a half-hearted chortle in Catti-brie’s general direction. “Lost you to her. And then I was taken from her, so she thought—and I know well that pain. When we believed her lost to us in the home of Draygo Quick, and taken from me so soon after our reconciliation …” He sighed and could not continue.

  “But surely, like these folk celebrating about us, the outcome of the drow attack on Port Llast is better than was expected,” Regis interjected. “Many of those you thought dead are not, yes?”

  Effron stared at him blankly, clearly unable to bring himself to that positive way of looking at the situation. Indeed, the tiefling seemed incredulous at that moment, and Regis shifted back in his seat.

  Effron turned fast to Drizzt, as if an idea had come to him. “Where are Afafrenfere and Amber bound? South and then across the inland sea, you said. On the road to Suzail then?”

  “Heading for the Bloodstone Lands and the kingdom of Damara,” Drizzt answered. “To Afafrenfere’s former home in the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, so they said. But it’s a long and perilous journey, with many side roads, no doubt.”

  Effron planted his staff firmly beside his chair and pulled himself up quickly. “Then I bid you—”

  “Come with us,” Drizzt blurted, and the four others around the table widened their eyes at that unexpected remark.

  “We seek the truth in a dangerous land,” Drizzt explained. “We fear our blades may be needed, with the fate of many kingdoms in the balance.”

  Effron paused and looked around at the Companions of the Hall, as if taking a measure of each. He motioned to Drizzt and moved aside so the two of them could speak in private.

  “My way of magic will not prove appealing to these companions of yours,” he said when they were alone.

  “They’re a tolerant group,” Drizzt assured him lightheartedly.

  But Effron shook his head through every word. “Better that I find the monk and the dwarf, or that I walk my own road,” he decided. “We are cut from different cloth, Drizzt Do’Urden, and so I bid you farewell. I do not doubt that our paths will cross again, and when they do, in whatever circumstance, know that I am not your enemy—never your enemy.”

  “And my friends?” Drizzt asked with clear skepticism, and he got right to the point when he added, “And Catti-brie?”

  Effron’s ensuing pause was telling, for of course it was Catti-brie’s presence, and recent history, that had turned him away from the party. He hadn’t carried his anger forward at that moment, and Drizzt could see that he was trying, at least, to accept her explanation.

  But clearly it tasted as bitter oil.

  “I believe her tale,” Effron said at last.

  Drizzt nodded, not because he was convinced, or even convinced that Effron believed what he had just proclaimed, but because Drizzt knew that it was the most the young warlock could emotionally offer at that painful time.

  “Better that I go with Afafrenfere and Ambergris,” Effron said quietly, and Drizzt didn’t disagree. He patted Effron on the shoulder and gave him another hug.

  “Well met, well parted, and well met again, on another road on another day,” Drizzt said.

  Effron nodded and left the cave serving as Stonecutter’s Solace, and soon after, left Port Llast along the southern road.

  “And how many nights do ye think it’ll be taking him to avenge his Ma?” Bruenor asked when Drizzt returned to the table. The dwarf gave a great and disgusted shake of his hairy head.

  “Drizzt asked him along to better watch over him,” Regis said to the dwarf.

  “Ah, but did ye, elf?”

  Drizzt didn’t answer. He slid back into his seat and sat exchanging stares with Catti-brie.

  “Better that Effron goes with the others,” she said quietly, and Drizzt nodded. “That pain is fresh—how could it not be? Perhaps as time passes, he’ll find a better way to see it all.”

  “Well, elf?” Bruenor demanded and Drizzt looked at him curiously.

  “Did ye ask him along to better look over him, then?”

  Drizzt considered the words, and more pointedly, the dwarf’s accusing tone, for a few heartbeats, then replied. “I asked him along because he is a friend.”

  “A friend who’s Ma me girl killed,” the dwarf retorted. “And one who’s knowin’ it!”

  “So are we to look over our shoulder for that one?” Wulfgar asked.

  “No,” Drizzt blurted loudly, without hesitation and with all confidence. The four others leaned back at the unexpected outburst.

  “No,” the drow repeated more softly. He paused to consider his reaction, and thought back to the times he had spent with Effron and the others, and in Dahlia’s arms. It was a complicated relationship between all of them—hadn’t he first met Ambergris and Afafrenfere when they were trying to capture or even murder him and Dahlia, after all? In a brutal and bloody battle in which Drizzt had killed Afafrenfere’s beloved fellow monk, Parbid?

  But Afafrenfere had forgiven him.

  Aye, that was the thing about his previous companions, Drizzt understood then. They lived on the edge of disaster and on the edge of morality, but to a one, Entreri included, they had always accepted the responsibility of their actions. As Afafrenfere had come to accept that Drizzt’s defeat of Parbid had been simply an act of self-defense, and in a fight Parbid, Afafrenfere, and the other mercenaries of Cavus Dun had initiated. Afafrenfere had come to move past his anger and accept Drizzt as a trusted companion.

  It would be the same with Effron, Drizzt was certain. The young tiefling who had known so much pain had surely kept his sense of justice about him. He wouldn’t join them now because the wound was fresh, and no doubt every time he looked upon Catti-brie’s fair face, he would be reminded of his dead mother.

  Perhaps it would be different on another day, on another road, when the wounds had healed.

  “You have met four of my companions,” Drizzt said. “Let me tell you about them, and of Dahlia.”

  “I met her, too,” Catti-brie reminded him.

  “And I,” said Wulfgar, “when your band of merry murderers traveled through
the encampment of my people just before the spring equinox.”

  “Aye, and I knowed the crazy elf lass from before, or have ye forgotten that?” Bruenor insisted.

  “Let me tell you more, then,” Drizzt replied with a smile.

  “I know Artemis Entreri better than you,” Regis said. “I need hear no more about him.”

  But Drizzt was shaking his head. “You knew the man Artemis Entreri once was,” he explained, and Regis rolled his eyes, and Catti-brie, who had once been captured by the assassin, didn’t seem very convinced, either.

  “This very town, Port Llast, exists today because of the efforts of those companions fighting beside me. Together we drove the sea devils from the shore, and together we strengthened the town in heart and arms. Speak the name of any of my former companions to any in Port Llast and you will hear a huzzah in response.”

  “Even after the drow came for them and laid waste to much of the town?” Catti-brie asked.

  “Yes,” Drizzt insisted. “We did well here, and we did good. Even Entreri, and without compensation.” Drizzt was smiling—he couldn’t help it—and nodding as he spoke.

  “Might that yerself should be goin’ to find them all, eh elf?” said Bruenor. “Seems ye’re not needing us no more, then.”

  “I am quite content with my present company,” Drizzt assured him.

  “Then go get the skinny, twisted boy back, and we’ll send Rumblebelly for the dwarf and monk and we’ll all go find Entreri. With them four aside ye, ye’ll clear Obould’s dogs from the Silver Marches all on yer own, so ye’re sounding.”

  “They were formidable, I’ll not deny that,” Drizzt replied against the biting sarcasm.

  “Bah!” Bruenor snorted and threw up his arms, then swung around and called for the barkeep. When he couldn’t get the man’s attention, he hoisted his shield and reached behind it and brought forth a magical mug of hearty ale.

  Catti-brie laughed, and Wulfgar pulled himself up, promising to go and fetch another round of drinks. “So we can toast your old companions,” he said with a sly wink at the drow, the tension, what little there ever was, mostly broken.