bending low to regard him.
"Purple eyes," the priestess said in the drow tongue.
A sense that he had played out this identical scene a hundred times in his youth nearly overwhelmed the trapped dark elf.
Vierna! The only member of his family that Drizzt had ever cared for, besides the dead Zaknafein, stood before him now.
She had been Drizzt's wean-mother, assigned to bring him, as a prince of House Do'Urden, into the dark ways of drow society. But thinking back to those distant memories, to times of which he had few, if any, recollections, Drizzt knew there was something different about Vierna, some underlying tenderness buried beneath the wicked robes of a priestess of the Spider Queen.
"How long has it been, my lost brother?" Vierna asked, still using the language of the dark elves. "Nearly three decades? And how far you have come, and yet so close again to where you began, and where you belong."
Drizzt steeled his gaze, but had no practical retort - not with his hands bound behind him and a dozen drow soldiers milling about the small chamber. Entreri was there, too, talking to a most curious dark elf who wore an outrageously plumed hat and a short, open-front vest that showed the rippling muscles of his slender stomach. The assassin had the magical mask tied to his belt, and Drizzt feared the mischief Entreri might cause if he were allowed to return to Mithril Hall.
"What will you think when you walk again into Menzoberranzan?" Vierna asked Drizzt, and though the question was again rhetorical, it drew his attention fully back to her.
"I will think as a prisoner thinks," Drizzt replied. "And when I am brought before Matr...before wicked Malice..."
"Matron Malice!" Vierna hissed.
"Malice," Drizzt repeat defiantly, and Vierna slapped him hard across the face. Several dark elves turned to regard the incident, then gave quiet chuckles and went back to their conversations.
Vierna, too, erupted in laughter, long and wild. She threw her head back, her flowing white tresses flipping back from her face.
Drizzt regarded her silently, having no idea of what had precipitated the explosive reaction.
"Matron Malice is dead, you fool!" Vierna said suddenly, snapping her head forward to within an inch of Drizzt's face.
Drizzt did not know how to react. He had just been told that his mother was dead, and he had no idea of how the information should affect him. He felt a sadness, distantly, but dismissed it, understanding that it came from a sense of never knowing a mother, not from the loss of Malice Do'Urden. As he settled back, digesting the news, Drizzt came to feel a calmness, an acceptance that brought not an ounce of grief. Malice was his natural parent, never his mother, and by all of Drizzt Do'Urden's estimation, her death was not a bad thing.
"You do not even know, do you?" Vierna laughed at him. "How long you have been gone, lost one!"
Drizzt cocked a curious eye, suspecting that some further, even greater, revelation was yet to be spoken.
"By your own actions House Do'Urden was destroyed, and you do not even know!" Vierna cackled hysterically.
"Destroyed?" Drizzt asked, surprised but, again, not overly concerned. In truth, the renegade drow felt no more for his own house than for any other in Menzoberranzan. In truth, Drizzt felt nothing at all.
"Matron Malice was charged with finding you," Vierna explained. "When she could not, when you slipped through her grasp, so, too, did the favor of Lloth."
"A pity," Drizzt interjected, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Vierna hit him again, harder, but he held firm to his stoic discipline and did not blink.
Vierna spun away from him, clenched her delicate but deceptively strong hands in front of her and found breath hard to come by.
"Destroyed," she said again, suddenly obviously pained, "taken down by the will of the Spider Queen. They are dead because of you," she cried, spinning back at Drizzt and pointing accusingly. "Your sisters, Briza and Maya, and your mother. All the house, Drizzt Do'Urden, dead because of you!"
Drizzt gave no outward expression, an accurate reflection of his absence of feelings, for the incredible news Vierna had just thrown at him. "And what of our brother?" he asked, more to discern information about this raiding force than for any sincere cares about Dinin's well-deserved demise.
"Why, Drizzt," Vierna said with obviously feigned confusion, "you have met him yourself. You nearly took one of his legs."
Drizzt's confusion was genuine - until Vierna finished the thought.
"One of his eight legs."
Again Drizzt managed to keep