Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(9)

“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.”





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 that this current way of things will continue on, year after year. It is so easy to speak of expectations, of what will be in a decade, perhaps, and to be convinced that the important aspects of one’s life will remain as they are, or will improve as desired.

“This will be my life in a year!”

“This will be my life in five years!”

“This will be my life in ten years!”

We all tell ourselves these hopes and dreams and expectations, and with conviction, for the goal is needed to facilitate the journey. But in the end of that span, be it one or five or ten or fifty years hence, it is the journey and not the goal, achieved or lost, that defines who we are. The journey is the story of our life, not the achievement or failure at its end, and so the more important declaration by far, I have come to know, is, “This is my life now.”