“Bah, but I ain’t yer smelly son, ye damned orc!” Pwent yelled back.
As it happened, they rolled around just then, coming apart just enough to look straight at Jessa, her arms crossed, glaring at them from on high.
“Err… goblin,” both corrected together as they came to their feet side by side. Both shrugged a half-hearted apology Jessa’s way, and they went right back into it, wrestling and punching with abandon. They stumbled out of the boulder tumble and across a small patch of grass to the top of a small bluff, and there Bruenor gained a slight advantage, managing to pull Pwent’s arm behind his back. The battlerager let out a shriek as he looked down the other side of the bluff.
“And I been wanting ye to take a bath all them hunnerd years!” Bruenor declared.
He bulled Pwent down the hill into a short run, then threw the dwarf and flew after him right into the midst of a cold, clear mountain stream.
Pwent hopped up, and anyone watching would have thought the poor frantic dwarf had landed face down in acid. He stood in the stream shaking wildly, trying to get the water off. But the ploy had worked at least. He had no more fight left in him.
“Why’d ye do that, me king?” a heartbroken Pwent all but whispered.
“Because ye smell, and I ain’t yer king,” Bruenor replied, splashing his way to the bank.
“Why?” Pwent asked, his voice so full of confusion and pain that Bruenor stopped short, even though he was still in the cold water, and turned back to regard his loyal battlerager.
“Why?” Thibbledorf Pwent asked again.
Bruenor looked up at the other three-four, counting Guenhwyvar-who had come to the top of the bluff to watch. With a great sigh, the dead King of Mithral Hall turned back to his loyal battlerager and held out his hand.
“Was the only way,” Bruenor explained as he and Pwent started up the bluff. “Only fair way to Banak.”
“Banak didn’t need to be king,” said Pwent.
“Aye, but I couldn’t be king anymore. I’m done with it, me friend.”
That last word gave them both pause, and as the implications of it truly settled on both their shoulders, they each draped an arm across the other’s strong shoulders and walked together up the hill.
“Been too long with me bum in a throne,” Bruenor explained as they made their way past the others and back toward the boulder tumble. “Not for knowing how many years I got left, but there’s things I’m wanting to find, and I won’t be finding ’em in Mithral Hall.”
“Yer girl and the halfling runt?” Pwent reasoned.
“Ah, but don’t ye make me cry,” said Bruenor. “And Moradin willing, I’ll be doing that one day, if not in this life, then in his great halls. But no, there’s more.”
“What more?”
Bruenor put his hands on his hips again and looked out across the wide lands to the west, bordered by the towering mountains in the north and the still-impressive foothills in the south.
“Gauntlgrym’s me hope,” said Bruenor. “But know that just the open road and the wind in me face’ll do.”
“So ye’re going? Ye’re going forever, not to return to the hall?”
“I am,” Bruenor declared. “Know that I am, and not to return. Ever. The hall’s Banak’s now, and I can’t be twisting that. As far as me kin-our kin-are forever to know, as far as all the kings o’ the Silver Marches are forever to know, King Bruenor Battlehammer died on the fifth day of the sixth month of the Year of True Omens. So it be.”
“And ye didn’t tell me,” said Pwent. “Ye telled th’elf, ye telled the gnome, ye telled a stinkin’ orc, but ye didn’t tell me.”
“I telled them that’s going with me,” Bruenor explained. “And none in the hall’re knowing, except Cordio, and I needed him so them priests didn’t figure it out. And he’s known to keep his trap shut, don’t ye doubt.”
“But ye didn’t trust yer Pwent.”
“Ye didn’t need to know. Better for yerself!”
“To see me king, me friend, put under the stones?”
Bruenor sighed and had no answer. “Well I’m trusting ye now, as ye gived me no choice. Ye serve Banak now, but know that telling him is doing no favor to any in the hall.”
Pwent resolutely shook his head through the last half of Bruenor’s words. “I served King Bruenor, me friend Bruenor,” he said. “All me life for me king and me friend.”
That caught Bruenor off his guard. He looked to Drizzt, who shrugged and smiled; then to Nanfoodle, who nodded eagerly; then to Jessa, who answered, “Only if ye promise to brawl with each other now and again. I do so love the sight of dwarves beating the beer-sweat out of each other!”
“Bah!” Bruenor snorted.
“Now where, me ki-me friend?” Pwent asked.
“To the west,” said Bruenor. “Far to the west. Forever to the west.”
Part I. Poking a Mad God
It is time to let the waters of the past flow away to distant shores. Though never to be forgotten, those friends long gone must not haunt my thoughts all the day and night. They will be there, I take comfort in knowing, ready to smile whenever my mind’s eye seeks that comforting sight, ready to shout a chant to a war god when battle draws near, ready to remind me of my folly when I cannot see that which is right before me, and ready, ever ready, to make me smile, to warm my heart.
But they will ever be there, too, I fear, to remind me of the pain, of the injustice, of the callous gods who took from me my love in just that time when I had at last found peace. I’ll not forgive them.
“Live your life in segments,” a wise elf once told me, for to be a long-lived creature who might see the dawn and dusk of centuries would be a curse indeed if the immediacy and intensity of anticipated age and inevitable death is allowed to be forgotten.
And so now, after more than forty years, I lift my glass in toast to those who have gone before: to Deudermont; to Cadderly; to Regis; perhaps to Wulfgar, for I know not of his fate; and most of all, to Catti-brie, my love, my life-nay, the love of that one segment of my life.
By circumstance, by fate, by the gods…
I’ll never forgive them.
So certain and confident these words of freedom read, yet my hand shakes as I pen them. It has been two- thirds of a century since the catastrophe of the Ghost King, the fall of Spirit Soaring, and the dea-the loss of Catti- brie. But that awful morning seems as if it was only this very morning, and while so many memories of my life with Catti seem so far away now, almost as if I am looking back at the life of another drow, one whose boots I inherited, that morning when the spirits of my love and Regis rode from Mithral Hall on a ghostly unicorn, rode through the stone walls and were lost to me, that morning of the deepest pain I have ever known, remains to me an open, bleeding, and burning wound.
But no more.
That memory I now place on the flowing waters, and look not behind me as it recedes.
I go forward, on the open road with friends old and new. Too long have my blades been still, too clean are my boots and cape. Too restless is Guenhwyvar. Too restless is the heart of Drizzt Do’Urden.
We are off to Gauntlgrym, Bruenor insists, though I think that unlikely. But it matters not, for in truth, he is off to close his life and I am away to seek new shores-clean shores, free of the bonds of the past, a new segment of my life.
It is what it is to be an elf.
It is what it is to be alive, for though this exercise is most poignant and necessary in those races living long, even the short-lived humans divide their lives into segments, though they rarely recognize the transient truth as they move through one or another stage of their existence. Every person I have known tricks himself into thinking
