The wagons rolled at a swift pace. The weather had been dry and the road proved clear and hard, no mud or ruts wearing on the wheels.
For the first time in many months, Drizzt rode Andahar, and he felt grand up there on the unicorn’s strong back, the wind in his long white hair. He put his hand to his belt pouch repeatedly, feeling the onyx figurine, longing for the day when he would call Guenhwyvar to his side once more.
“Patience,” he whispered, reminding himself that Guenhwyvar needed her rest. She would be there, Jarlaxle had assured him, and Jarlaxle was rarely wrong.
He urged Andahar on more powerfully, cantering up around the lead wagon, then riding off down the road at a gallop to scout the way ahead. He let the unicorn run for some time, caring not that he had moved out of sight of the lead wagon. He was free now, riding along a road to a place he had known as home.
Andahar barely broke a sweat, thundering along with a smooth, long stride. Around a bend, they came to a long straightaway, lined with thick trees, and Drizzt allowed the unicorn to move to a full sprint. Nostrils flaring, breath heaving in tremendous bursts, Andahar seemed all too pleased to comply, and now the sweat did bead on the unicorn’s muscled flanks.
Two-thirds of the way along the run, Andahar eased up, and Drizzt sat up straighter, rolling his body in perfect balance as the gallop became a canter, became a trot.
Drizzt bent forward and patted Andahar hard on the neck, grateful for the joy of the run. He had just begun to urge the unicorn around when something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, something large and black moving swiftly across the treetops.
Drizzt pulled Andahar up fully, and even reached for Taulmaril, until he recognized the pursuit.
A giant crow set down on the road in front of them, and the crow quickly became Dahlia, clad in her magical cloak.
“You might have passed a horde of highwaymen without ever noticing them,” the elf scolded.
Drizzt grinned at her. “The road is clear.”
Dahlia stared at him doubtfully.
“Fly along above the treetops, then,” the drow told her. “Shadow my ride and show me the error of my judgment.”
Dahlia considered the words for a moment, then shook her head and started toward Drizzt. “No,” she explained, coming up beside him and lifting her hand for him to grasp. “I prefer to ride with you, behind you.”
Drizzt pulled her up, and she came up very tight against him.
“Or under you,” she whispered teasingly in his ear.
Drizzt tensed.
“If the road is clear, then they will not need us,” Dahlia said.
But such a concern wasn’t the source of Drizzt hesitance.
“What is it, then?” Dahlia said when he didn’t reply, and when he didn’t make any more intimate move toward her at all.
“It has been a long time,” Drizzt started. “I spent months in the captivity of Draygo Quick.”
“I would have traded places with you,” the elf who had been turned to stone sarcastically replied.
“Would you?” Drizzt asked sincerely, and he glanced over his shoulder to look Dahlia in the face. “You were perfectly oblivious. In your mind and senses, there was no passage of time—tell me, when you were rescued, when you became flesh once more, did you think that months had passed? You said earlier that it seemed to you that you had gone in a blink from the entry hall to the catacombs, and instead of the medusa, you found Jarlaxle before you.”
“It is no less unsettling,” Dahlia said and looked away.
“Perhaps,” Drizzt admitted. “Nor is it a competition between us.”
“Then why start one?” Her voice grew sharp.
He nodded an apology. “The world has moved fast, and yet seems not to move at all,” he said. “I fear that I lost much of myself in those months with Lord Draygo. I have to find that first before I can even entertain—”
“What?” Dahlia interrupted. “Before you can entertain making love to me?”
“To anyone,” Drizzt tried to explain, but he realized that to be the wrong answer the moment the words escaped his lips, a point brought home only a heartbeat later as Dahlia slapped him across the face.
She rolled down off the unicorn and stood in the dirt road, staring up at him, hands on hips, looking very much like she wanted to kill him, or wanted to fall to the ground crying, for what seemed an eternity to poor Drizzt.
He didn’t know how to react, or what he might do, and finally it dawned on him to get down from Andahar and go to the woman. But as he lifted his leg to dismount, Dahlia held up a hand to ward him away. She turned and ran off a few steps, throwing her cloak up over her head as she went, and then she was a giant bird once more, flying back to the caravan.
Drizzt closed his eyes, his shoulders slumping, his thoughts spinning, his heart pained. He couldn’t lead her on. He did not love her—not the way he had loved Catti-brie, and despite the words of Innovindil, that love remained the standard for him, haunting him and warming him at the same time.
Perhaps he would never find such love again, and so be it, he decided.
He turned Andahar around and started off slowly back the way he had come, reminding himself that he had to handle Dahlia properly, for her own sake. He could not give her what she desired, but the Baenres were hunting, and he could not let her run off alone.
“I can hardly hear a word said to me,” Afafrenfere said to Drizzt a few days later, when the caravan at last broke free of the high-walled mountain pass, to come out into the tundra of Icewind Dale.
“You will become accustomed to the wind,” Drizzt shouted back at him, and truly the drow was smiling. Hearing the eternal wind of Icewind Dale in his ears again proved to be great medicine to Drizzt Do’Urden, healing him of the doubts and malaise that had infected him in the months of his captivity. He pictured the lone rocky pinnacle of Kelvin’s Cairn, which was not quite visible yet above the flat plain, but soon would be, he knew. And that imagined view, the stars seeming as if they were all around him and not high above, brought to him an image of a smiling Bruenor, standing at his side in the dark night and the chill breeze. He thought of Regis, fishing string tied around his toe as he slept on the banks of Maer Dualdon.
Aye, this was home to Drizzt, a place of physical cold and emotional warmth, a place where he had learned to trust and to love, and he couldn’t help but feel alive with the sound of the wind of Icewind Dale in his ears. He could hardly imagine the person he had become in the jails of Draygo Quick, so apathetic and hopeless.
He looked back to the caravan, to Dahlia in particular, who rode on a wagon with Artemis Entreri pacing his nightmare nearby, speaking with her. Drizzt imagined them in each other’s arms, and hoped that it would become true. Because he could never truly return her love, he knew.
Drizzt turned Andahar around and paced back to the lead wagon. “Bryn Shander?” he asked.
“Aye, that’s where we’re bound.”
“The roads will grow worse, for the melt is on, and the tundra mud is inevitable,” Drizzt explained. “Another tenday before us, likely, if the weather holds.”
The driver nodded. “Been this way many times,” he explained.
“My friends and I will escort you to Bryn Shander’s gates, but then I, at least, will turn away for Kelvin’s Cairn.”
“You will get your pay.”
Drizzt smiled. He hardly cared, and had only wanted to inform the caravan of his plans.
“The Battlehammer dwarves for you, then?” the driver added, and Drizzt nodded. “I heard you were friends o’ them.”
“Proud to be called such.”
“We’ve a wagon of goods bound for Stokely Silverstream’s boys,” the driver explained, and Drizzt was glad to hear that name again. “Might be two. I’ll begin splitting up the goods when we camp tonight, sorting them that’s for the dwarves, and you can guard those wagons to the mountain.”
Drizzt nodded again and moved up front with Afafrenfere. He paced Andahar a bit faster after that, his conversation making him anxious to walk the ways of Kelvin’s Cairn once more.
The next morning, soon after they were on the road again, the tip of that small mountain came into view, and Drizzt’s heart leaped.