fighting crouch.
“Where? What?”
“Forks,” Drizzt said. “It has been a long time since you’ve used one.”
Bruenor glowered at him.
“Evenfeast?” Drizzt suggested, motioning toward the door.
“Bah, but our talk earlier put some old thoughts in me mind, elf, thoughts what turned to dreams. And ye stole ’em.”
“Memories of Wulfgar?”
“Aye, me boy and me girl.”
Drizzt nodded, knowing full well the comfort such dreams could impart. He offered his friend a sympathetic smile, and bowed in apology. “Had I known, I would have gone for my meal without you.”
Bruenor waved that away with one hand and rubbed his grumbling belly with the other. He grabbed up his one-horned helm and plopped it on his head, slung his shield over his shoulder, and took up his axe.
“Don’t need no damned fork,” he said, showing Drizzt his axe, “and if it is an orc, we’ll chop it up to bite-sized pieces, don’t ye doubt.”
Something struck Drizzt as odd by the time he and Bruenor were only halfway down the stairs to the common room. Shivanni wasn’t behind the bar, which was unusual though hardly suspicious, but it was more than that, something he couldn’t quite sort out. They continued down and found a small table off to the side of the bar, with Drizzt continuing his scan of the room and its patrons.
“Does something seem wrong to you?” he quietly asked his companion as Bruenor sorted himself out, resting his axe against one chair and carefully resting his shield against the axe, so he could comfortably sit.
The dwarf glanced around, then turned back, clearly perplexed.
Drizzt could only shake his head, but then his discomfort registered more clearly: there were no elderly people in the tavern, and no unshaven and grubby-looking characters who looked like they’d just climbed out of a rum bottle and from the deck of a pirate ship.
There was something too … uniform, about the tidy crowd.
“Keep your axe close,” Drizzt whispered as a barmaid—one he didn’t recognize, though, since he was so rarely in Luskan of late, he didn’t know them all—came over.
“Well met,” she greeted.
“And to yerself, lass, and what might yer name be?” Bruenor asked.
She smiled and turned her head demurely, but not a hint of a blush came to her cheeks, Drizzt noted. And he noticed, too, in the sweep of her half-turn, that she bore a painful-looking burn scar between her left breast and collar bone.
Drizzt again scanned the room, focusing on one tall man bending across the way, the movement opening a gap between the man’s shirt and breeches, and revealing a similar scar. Then he spotted a woman seated at a table directly across the way, and from his angle, he could see the neckline of her dress, and enough under it to note a scar—not a scar, a brand—identical to the barmaid’s.
He turned his attention back to Bruenor and the barmaid, to find the dwarf ordering a pot of stew and a bottomless flagon of Baldur’s Gate Pale.
“No, hold,” Drizzt interrupted.
“Eh? But I’m hungry,” Bruenor protested. “Ye waked me up and I’m hungry.”
“As am I, but we’re late for our meeting,” Drizzt insisted as he stood.
Bruenor looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“I am confident that Wulfgar will have venison aboard his boat,” Drizzt reassured the dwarf, and Bruenor looked at him with blank confusion for just a moment before catching on.
“Ah, so’d be me hope,” the dwarf said and rose to his feet.
As did everyone else in the Cutlass.
“Interesting,” Drizzt said, his hands resting on his scimitar hilts.
“Be reasonable, drow,” said the barmaid. “You have nowhere to run. We wish to speak with you two, privately, and in a place of our choosing. Hand over your weapons, and less of your blood will be spilled.”
“Surrender?” Drizzt asked casually, and with a hint of a snicker.
“Look around you. You are sorely outnumbered.”
“Yerself ain’t met me friend, I see,” Bruenor interjected, and he grabbed up his axe and banged it against his shield to set the shield firmly in place on his arm.
The barmaid tossed aside her tray and stepped back, but not quick enough. Drizzt’s weapons came out in a flash, Twinkle’s blade knifing in to stop at the side of her neck.
“I’m bettin’ first blood spilled to be yer own,” Bruenor told her.
“It matters not,” the woman replied with a strange smile. “You’ll not get to Gauntlgrym, whatever my fate. You can abandon that thought peacefully, or we will ensure that fact by killing you. The choice is yours.”
Bruenor and Drizzt exchanged glances,