could take it no longer. “You’re hardly the only one angered by the fact that Obould lived out his years in comfort,” he said. “No one wanted to kill him more than I.”
“But we didn’t.”
“And we did the right thing.”
“Did we, elf?” Bruenor asked in all seriousness. “Now he’s gone and they’re wantin’ to keep on, but are they really? When’s it goin’ to break? When’re the orcs goin’ to be orcs and start another war?”
Drizzt shrugged, for what answer could he give?
“And there ye go, elf!” Bruenor replied to that shrug. “Ye can’t be knowing and I can’t be knowing, and ye telled me to sign the damned treaty, and I signed the damned treaty … and we can’t be knowin’!”
“But we are ‘knowing’ that many humans and elves and yes, Bruenor, dwarves, got to live out their lives in peace and prosperity because you had the courage to sign that damned treaty. Because you chose not to fight that next war.”
“Bah!” the dwarf snorted, throwing up his hands. “Been stickin’ in me craw since that day. Damned smell o’ orc. And now they’re tradin’ with Silverymoon and Sundabar, and them damned cowards o’ Nesmé! Should o’ killed them all to death in battle, by Clangeddin.”
Drizzt nodded. He didn’t disagree. How much easier his life would be if life in the North became a never-ending fight! In his heart, Drizzt surely agreed.
But in his head, he knew better. With Obould offering peace, Mithral Hall’s intransigence would have pitted Bruenor’s clan alone against Obould’s tens of thousands, a fight they could never have won. But if Obould’s successor decided to break the treaty, the resulting war would pit all the goodly kingdoms of the Silver Marches against Many-Arrows alone.
A cruel grin widened on the drow’s face, but it fast became a grimace as he considered the many orcs who had become, at least somewhat, friends of his over the last … had it been nearly four decades?
“You did the right thing, Bruenor,” he said. “Because you dared to sign that parchment, ten, twenty, fifty thousand lived out their lives that would have been shortened in a bloody war.”
“I cannot do it again,” Bruenor replied, shaking his head. “I got no more, elf. Done all I could be doin’ here, and not to be doin’ it again.”
He dipped his mug in the open cask between the chairs and took a great swallow.
“Ye think he’s still out there?” Bruenor asked through a foamy beard. “In the cold and snows?”
“If he is,” Drizzt replied, “then know that Wulfgar is where he wants to be.”
“Aye, but I’m bettin’ his old bones’re arguing that stubborn head o’ his every step!” Bruenor replied, adding a bit of levity that both needed this day.
Drizzt smiled as the dwarf chortled, but one word of Bruenor’s quip played a different note: old. He considered the year, and while he, being a long-lived drow, had barely aged, physically, if Wulfgar was indeed alive out there on the tundra of Icewind Dale, the barbarian would be greeting his seventieth year.
The reality of that struck Drizzt profoundly.
“Would ye still love her, elf?” Bruenor asked, referring to his other lost child.
Drizzt looked at him as if he’d been slapped, an all-too-familiar flash of anger crossing his once serene features. “I do still love her.”
“If me girl was still with us, I mean,” said Bruenor. “She’d be old now, same as Wulfgar, and many’d say she’d be ugly.”
“Many say that about you, and said it even when you were young,” the drow quipped, deflecting the absurd conversation. It was true enough that Catti-brie would be turning seventy as well, had she not been taken in the Spellplague those twenty-four years before. She would be old for a human, old like Wulfgar, but ugly? Drizzt could never think such a thing of his beloved Catti-brie, for never in his hundred and twelve years of life had the drow seen anyone or anything more beautiful than his wife. The reflection of her in Drizzt’s lavender eyes could hold no imperfection, no matter the ravages of time on her human face, no matter the scars of battle, no matter the color of her hair. Catti-brie would forever look to Drizzt as she had when he first came to know he loved her, on a long-ago journey to the far southern city of Calimport when they had gone to rescue Regis.
Regis. Drizzt winced at the memory of the halfling, another dear friend lost in that time of chaos,