low-burning fire and began collecting her pack and supplies.
"Perhaps we can put some distance behind us before the snow begins," she said as she strapped on her sword and dagger. "With this wind, we'll not move through the storm."
Drizzt didn't reply other than a slight nod, which Innovindil was too busy to even notice. The drow just watched her going about her tasks, enjoying the flow of her body and the sweep of her long golden hair as gusts of wind blew through.
He thought of his days immediately following the fall of Shallows, when he had hidden in a cave, rolling the one-horned helm of his dead friend in his hands. The emptiness of that time assailed him again, reminding him of how far he'd come. Drizzt had given in to the anger and the pain, had accepted a sense of complete hopelessness for perhaps the first time in all his life.
Innovindil and Tarathiel had brought him from that dark place, with patience and calm words and simple friendship. They had tolerated his instinctive defenses, which he'd thrown up to rebuff their every advance. They had accepted his explanation of Ellifain's death without suspicion.
Drizzt Do'Urden knew that he could never replace Bruenor, Catti-brie, Regis, and Wulfgar; those four were as much a part of who he was as any friend could ever hope. But maybe he didn't have to replace them. Maybe he could satisfy his emotional needs around the holes, if not filling in the holes themselves.
That was the promise of Innovindil, he knew.
And he was glad.
* * * * *
"Move swifter," Kaer'lic instructed in her broken command of the Dwarvish tongue. She had gleaned a few words of the language in her years on the surface, and with its many hard consonant sounds, the language bore some similarities to the drow's own, and even more to the tongue of the svirfneblin, which Kaer'lic spoke fluently. To get her point across, even if her words were not correct, the drow priestess kicked poor Fender on the back, sending him stumbling ahead.
He nearly fell, but battered though he was, he was too stubborn for that. He straightened and looked back, narrowing his gray eyes under his bushy brows in a threatening scowl.
Kaer'lic jammed the handle of her mace into his face.
Fender hit the ground hard, coughing blood, and he spat out a tooth. He tried to scream at the priestess, but all that came through his expertly slashed throat was a wheezing and fluttering sound like a burst of wind through a row of hanging parchments.
"With all care," Tos'un said to his companion. "The more you injure him, the longer it will take for us to be away." As he finished, the male drow glanced back to the south, as if expecting a fiery chariot or a host of warriors to rush over him. "We should have left the wretch with Proffit. The trolls would have eaten him and that would have been the end of it."
"Or Lady Alustriel and her army would have rescued him as they overran Proffit, and wouldn't he be quick in telling them all about a pair of dark elves roaming the land?"
"Then we should have just killed him and been done with it."
Kaer'lic paused and spent a moment scrutinizing her companion. She allowed her expression to show her disappointment in him, for truly, after all those years, she expected more from the warrior of House Barrison Del'Armgo.
"Obould will get nothing more from him than we have already gleaned," Tos'un said, his tone uncertain and revealing that he knew he was trying an awkward dodge. "And we will need no barter with the orc king - he will be glad that we have returned to him, even though the news we bear will hardly be to his liking."
"The news of Proffit's downfall and the reclamation of Nesme will outrage him."
"But he is smart enough to separate the message from the messenger."
"Agreed," said Kaer'lic. "But you presume that King Obould is still alive, and that his forces have not been scattered and overrun. Has it occurred to you that perhaps we are returning to a northland where Bruenor Battlehammer is king once more?"
That unsettling thought had occurred to Tos'un, obviously, and he glanced past Kaer'lic and kicked poor Fender as the dwarf tried to rise.
"When I see Donnia again, I will slap her for leading us down this horrid road."
"If we see Donnia and Ad'non again, we will all need to find a new road to