“Five children,” Dahlia said with a mocking tone. She reached for the woman’s hand and lifted it, turning it as she went so that Drizzt could clearly see the deep calluses, broken fingernails, and seemingly-permanent dirt stains.
Clearly embarrassed, the woman pulled her hand back. Dahlia laughed, shook her head, and walked back to the farm’s rickety door.
“I hope some of your children are old enough to help you around here,” Drizzt said, trying to put forth a better face. He flashed a stern scowl at Dahlia. She smirked.
“We get by,” the woman replied. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” Drizzt answered. “We saw the garden, and were—”
“So you want my food, then? You’d take it from the mouths of children?”
“No, no,” Drizzt assured her. “We … I was surprised to see that someone was living here, nothing more. We’re traveling to Luskan, and I was curious as to the state of the farms.”
“Farms,” the woman snorted. “There are no farms.”
“Do you know a man, a farmer, named Stuyles?” Dahlia asked from the doorway.
“I knew someone named Stuyles. A few of them.”
“Oh, and pray tell us what has happened to them.”
Drizzt shot Dahlia another angry glance. He turned back just in time to see the woman shrug. “Those that could go, went,” she answered. “Some to sail with the pirates, no doubt. Some to their graves at the end of a blade, no doubt. Some to other lands, for good or ill.”
“And how many have stayed?” Dahlia asked. “How many like you, living off the land, hoping your garden isn’t raided by highwaymen or soldiers—or goblinkin or wild animals—so you go to sleep without your belly growling too loudly?”
The woman, embarrassed, looked away and didn’t answer.
“Leave them,” Dahlia said to Drizzt. “We’ve leagues to travel and I grow bored with this nonsense.”
Drizzt didn’t know where to turn. He felt more completely at a loss than he had for a long, long time. The world, even around the always wild Luskan, had devolved to such a miserable state. It shook the core beliefs and optimism that had guided him for more than a century.
And there seemed nothing he could do about it, and that was the most troubling and terrifying reality of all.
As he stood there in contemplation, Dahlia grabbed him roughly by the hand and tugged him toward the door. As they exited, the woman shouted after them, “Don’t you steal my melons!”
“If we did, there would be nothing you could do about it,” Dahlia snapped back.
Outside, though, Dahlia didn’t go for the garden, but straight to Andahar, offering only a cursory glance at the three children hiding—badly—nearby, gawking at the sight of the magnificent unicorn.
“Did you have to speak to her in such a manner?” Drizzt asked, climbing up on Andahar’s strong back.
“I was speaking to you,” Dahlia retorted. “I care nothing for her.”
“Perhaps that’s your problem,” said Drizzt.
“More likely it’s your folly,” said Dahlia.
They rode away from the farm and down the road in silence after that, and Drizzt even stopped the magical bells from singing their sweet song, for it seemed out of place there, as if the music would lend neither hope nor joy, but would instead simply mock the broken country.
More farms came into view around every bend, and none were in better repair than the one they’d just left. Most of the farmhouses and barns were simply burned-out shells, and more than one settlement within a sea of overgrown and ruined fields showed nothing more than a few charred beams and the stones of a lonely, abandoned hearth.
“Farmer Stuyles’s home, I wonder?” Dahlia teased at one such ruin.
Drizzt ignored her. On one level, he was angry with Dahlia, but on another level he was worried she was right. He couldn’t find any logic with which to argue against her unstoppable cynicism. All of that, of course, led him back to farmer Stuyles and the band of “highwaymen.” Could he deny their justifications? The obvious truth lay bare before him now: With the fall of any pretense of civilization in Luskan, the surrounding farmlands, neglected by any organized militia, fell victim to bandits and even to minions of the new powers of the City of Sails. Everything those men and women had worked to build, everything their parents and grandparents for many generations had built, had been stolen away. The idea that they could simply pack up and relocate in the now-wild realms