to be right, and of course, her beauty. No parent could be anything but proud of a child who carried the qualities of Catti-brie.
But that child would be half-drow in a world that will not accept drow elves. I find a measure of tolerance now, in towns where my reputation precedes me, but what chance might any child beginning in this place have? By the time such a child was old enough to begin to make any such reputation, he or she would be undoubtedly scarred by the uniqueness of heritage. Perhaps we could have a child and keep it in Mithral Hall all the years.
But that, too, is a limitation, and one that Catti-brie knows all too well.
It is all too confusing and all too troubling. I love Catti-brie- I know that now-and know, too, that she loves me. We are Mends above all else, and that is the beauty of our relationship. In the here and in the now, walking the road, feeling the wind, fighting our enemies, I could not ask for a better companion, a better compliment to who I am.
But as I look farther down that road, a decade, two decades, I see sharper curves and deeper ravines. I would love Catti-brie until the day of her death, if that day found her infirm and aged while I was still in the flower of my youth. To me, there would be no burden, no longing to go out and adventure more, no need to go out and find a more physically compatible companion, an elf or perhaps even another drow.
Catti-brie once asked me if my greatest limitation was internal or external. Was I more limited by the way people viewed me as a dark elf, or by the way I viewed people viewing me? I think that same thing applies now, only for her. For while I understand the turns our road together will inevitably take, and I fully accept them, she fears them, I believe, and more for my sensibilities than for her own. In three decades, when she nears sixty years of age, she will be old by human standards. I'll be around a hundred, my first century, and would still be considered a very young adult, barely more than a child, by the reckoning of the drow. I think that her brush with mortality is making her look to that point and that she is not much enjoying the prospects-for me more than for her.
And there remains that other issue, of children. If we two were to start a family, our children would face terrific pressures and prejudices and would be young, so very young, when their mother passed away.
It is all too confusing.
I choose, for now, to walk in the present.
Yes, I do so out of fear.
Chapter 21 THE AURA OF BEING KING
Even after the greeting by the guards sent out from Shallows, the response from the town the following morning, when the King of Mithral Hall and his entourage walked through the front gate of the walled town, stunned the group.
Trumpeters sounded from the parapets and from the top of the lone tower that stood along the northern wall of the small town. Though none of the trumpeters was very good, and none dressed in the shining armor one might expect from the court of a larger city like Silverymoon, Bruenor was certain that he had never heard anyone play with more heart.
All the people of the village, more than a hundred, encircled the area beyond the gate, clapping and waving and throwing petals. There were more women than Bruenor had expected from a frontier town and even a few children, including a couple of babies. Perhaps he should be spending quite a bit of time out of Mithral Hall and watching over these developing towns, Bruenor mused. It was not an unpleasant thought. In just looking at the place, it seemed to him as if Shallows was trying hard to become a regular town, a settled place, instead of the pocket of rogues and outlaws he had always thought it and all the other towns of the Savage Frontier to be. He considered his former home then, Ten-Towns, and recalled the evolution of those ten cities into something far more settled than they had been when he had first arrived in Icewind Dale those centuries before.
The dwarf, leading the procession, paused and looked around, past the many cheering people to their sturdy houses. Most were made of stone with