he was not yet ready to let go of the 'truth' he had believed for twenty years.
'Of your own will, you would step into the scales of Tyr's justice?' he murmured.
'I will.'
He nodded thoughtfully and his grip on the chair eased a little. 'None but the righteous would make such bold claims. I do not require such tests.'
'But I do,' Bronwyn said urgently. Until this moment, she had not fully realized how desperately she needed to know. 'I have long heard that a paladin can discern truth. Will your god tell you if there is truth in the story that brought me here?'
'I can but ask.' The paladin's eyes grew distant once more, as he sought in prayer a level of insight and enlightenment that only his god could give him.
Moments passed, long moments that were heavy with the weight of Bronwyn's twenty years of exile. She waited, scarcely breathing, until the unseen vision faded from Hronulf's eyes, and his gaze once again focused upon her. Bronwyn knew, before a word was spoken, what Tyr's answer had been.
'Little Bronwyn,' Hronulf murmured, studying her with desperately hungry eyes. 'Now that I see the truth of it, I understand that my heart knew you at once. You are the very image of… of your mother.'
This both pleased and saddened Bronwyn. She lifted one hand to her cheek, as if seeking in her own face what she had lost. 'I do not remember her.'
Hronulf took a step forward, both hands outstretched. 'My poor child. Can you ever forgive me for what you have endured?' he asked, his voice quavering, pleading. 'The fault is mine, though I did not lightly let you go. When you were not found among the slain, I… I sought you for many months. I would never have given up… until the day I wept over the remains of a girl child that I believed to be my own.'
His terrible guilt smote her heart, and she took both his hands in hers. 'I don't blame you,' she said hastily. 'For many years I've been trying to find the truth of my past. There weren't many paths to follow, and every one ended against an alley wall. I make a living finding lost things, things that most people despair of finding. If I could not fmd my way back to my own past, how could you, who had every reason to believe your quest had ended, be expected to do better?'
Hronulf smiled faintly. 'You have a good heart, child, your mother's heart.'
'Tell me of her,' she urged.
They sat down together, and the paladin began to speak of the past, slowly and with strange awkwardness. At first Bronwyn thought the source of the difficulty was the barrier formed by lost years, but soon she realized that the reason ran deeper still. Hronulf had been seldom at home, and thus he had few memories of her in the scant time they had been a family. He did not know her. She wondered if he could ever have known her better, even if the raid had never occurred.
Not much time passed before he ran out of remembrances. He rose, looking relieved to have some plan of action in mind. 'Come,' he said. 'I will show you the castle.'
Ebenezer's luck, which had been notably bad of late, took a happy turn. At just the right time, he had met up with a southbound caravan and arranged with its master to have the paladin's horse returned to the Halls of Justice at Waterdeep. It took some talking and some coin, but the dwarf parted company with the merchant satisfied that all would be done as he had asked. Ebenezer headed north with a clear conscience, his debt discharged. It seemed likely that sooner or later, the young man who was so all-fired fond of Tyr would end up at that god's temple and would there reunite with his lost steed. No harm done him, other than a bit of wear to his boot soles.
Ebenezer veered off the trade road into the foothills. The entrance to the Stoneshaft tunnels was not far off the road and so cleverly hidden that only a dwarf could see it. He found the place-a steep hillock surrounded by a dense stand of young pines-and ran his hands over the rocky wall until he found the subtle pattern in the stone. He put his shoulder to the rock door, heaving and grunting until it eased inward. He ducked quickly through the opening, which slid shut behind him with a solid thud.
He stood for a moment or two, giving his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness and rubbing at his numb backside with both hands. He hadn't been on a horse for some time, and his legs and rump burned with fatigue. But he shrugged off the stiffness and took off down the tunnels at a steady, rolling run. Most humans Ebenezer knew thought of dwarves as slow and quick to tire, but any dwarf worth a pile of fingernail pairings could roll along at a smart pace for as long as he had to.
Ebenezer figured it was getting near to sunset by the time he reached the river. He strained his ears, trying to hear something, anything, over the infernal din of the rushing water. The closer he got to the clanhold, the more anxious he felt about his kin. Quickening his pace and ignoring the treachery of the wet, uneven path, he sprinted full out past several caverns and passageways toward the tunnel that led to the heart of the dwarven clanhold.
The smell hit him suddenly, twisting his stomach and sending his heart plummeting into his boots. There was no mistaking that smell; any dwarf who had ever raised an axe in battle knew it well. Coppery, heavy, strangely sweet, and utterly sickening-the smell of spilled blood turned black and dry, bodies gone cold.
Terrible, numbing dread swept through Ebenezer like a winter storm, robbing him of strength and will and forward motion. He skidded to a stop. A single keening cry burst from his throat-the first and last mourning he would allow himself before he knew the whole of it. He forced himself into a run while he could still trust his legs to carry him where he needed to go.
He stopped again at the entrance to the Hall of Ancestors, stunned by the destruction of a monument that had stood for untold centuries. The ancient stone dwarves had toppled and lay in broken pieces among the dwarves their fall had slain.
Ebenezer stooped by the nearest dwarf and clamped his jaw shut to bite off a cry. The Stoneshaft patriarch, his Da, had led the charge. The old dwarf had not been killed by the falling statues; that was horrifyingly clear. Stone dwarves did not wield swords and spears with such slow, cruel expertise.
Ebenezer lifted his gaze, blinking hard to clear his suddenly blurred vision. Several humans lay sprawled nearby, bearing the unmistakable marks of a dwarven axe. Ebenezer took some comfort in this. His father had not died easily, but he had died well.
He rose and wandered through the chamber, his rage building with every dwarf he identified-and growing hotter still with each dwarf that he could not. Ebenezer was no stranger to battle, but the carnage here was of a sort seldom seen. The stamp of unmistakable pleasure, of long and lingering evil, was upon each cold and tormented dwarf.
Ebenezer found more of the same inside the great hall. Not a single dwarf lived. Stoneshaft Hold had been decimated, and the bodies of his brutally slain kin left to molder in the empty halls.
Grief numbed him, mercifully slowing his wits and numbing his heart. He moved in a daze through the devastation, tending the dead, marking their names in his memory. Time slowed down, became utterly without meaning. His face was as set as granite, his eyes dry and hard as he gathered the bodies of kith and clan into a single grave.
Hours passed. In some dim corner of his mind, Ebenezer marked the time, and knew that far above him, a plump waxing moon rose over the Sword Mountains. But in this place, the dwarf knew only darkness and the terrible task before him. He did not stop for rest until all of Clan Stone-shaft had been decently laid to rest beneath a pile of mountain stone.
When the task was done, he slumped to the ground and tried to put words to the nagging fear in the back of his mind.
The ruined face of young Frodwinner rose up in memory Of all the Stoneshaft dwarves, he had died the hardest and best. He'd taken enough wounds to kill a trio of dwarves and kept on fighting. Seven humans and four half-orcs had fallen to his axe. Of course, Frodwinner had more to lose than nearly anyone else in the clan. He was just two days into a wedding feast, wed to the prettiest, feistiest dwarf maid in a hundred warrens. Frodwinner and Tarlamera should have had centuries of life before them. Frodwinner had been barely fifty. He was just a kid. Just a kid.
And with that lament, Ebenezer found words for his concern:
There had been no children among the slain.
This realization slammed into Ebenezer like a hobgoblin's fist. His first response was relief-like most dwarf
