Dahlia shrugged, clearly confused by the seemingly pointless reference to Innovindil, given his answer.
“Innovindil was wrong,” Drizzt said. “Perhaps not entirely, and perhaps not for everyone, but for me, in this regard, I know now, and admit now, that Innovindil was wrong.”
“In this regard?”
“Regarding love,” Drizzt said.
“The auburn-haired witch of the wood.”
Drizzt nodded. “My heart remains with Catti-brie. I gave it to her wholly and cannot take it back.”
“She is dead a hundred years.”
“Not in my heart.”
“Ghosts are cold comfort, Drizzt Do’Urden.”
“So be it,” he replied, and he had never been more certain of his road in all of his two centuries. “I’m not saddened by this realization, by this admission that I remain in love with a woman lost to me a century ago.”
“Saddened? I would think you insane!”
“Then I hope for you, dear Dahlia, for I wish you nothing but the best road, that one day you will understand my … insanity. Because I do truly care for you, as my friend, I hope that you will one day be so afflicted as am I. Catti-brie died, but my love for her did not. Innovindil was wrong, and I will live my life happier in the warm memories of Catti-brie’s embrace than in a foolish and impossible effort to replace her.”
“So there is only one love? There can be no other?”
Drizzt considered that for a moment, then honestly shrugged. “I know not,” he admitted. “Perhaps this is, at long last, the time when I will find closure. Perhaps there will come in my path someday another to so warm me. But I do not seek that. I do not need it. Catti-brie remains with me, very much alive.”
He watched Dahlia swallow hard, and it pained him to hurt her—but how much greater would he be wounding her by living a lie out of cowardice?
“Then take our relationship for what it is,” Dahlia offered at length, and there seemed to be a bit of desperation creeping into the edges of her voice.
“And what is that, a distraction?”
“Play,” she said as lightly as she could manage, and she put on a too-wide smile. “Let us enjoy the road and each other’s body. We fight well together and we love well together, so take it for what it is and let it have no meaning beyond—”
“No,” Drizzt interrupted, though he could not deny that Dahlia’s offer was enticing. “Not for your sake and not for my own. My heart and home are here, in Icewind Dale, and here I will stay. And here, you should not stay.”
The crestfallen expression that enveloped Dahlia nearly had Drizzt running to embrace her, but again, for her own sake, he did not.
“You would send me away with Entreri?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed, and her facial woad seemed to heighten then, reflecting a growing anger. “He is a fine lover, you know.”
Drizzt recognized that she was just lashing out here, just trying to sting him back for the rejection he had shown her. He did well to offer no response.
“I have shared his bed many times,” Dahlia pressed, to which Drizzt merely nodded.
“You do not care?” Dahlia asked, her tone on the edge of outrage.
Drizzt swallowed hard, seeing this breakup devolving into a matter of foolish pride, and he knew that he should allow Dahlia to salvage some of that. Or should he, and again, for her own sake?
“No,” he answered flatly. “I do care, but not as you imagine. I am glad that you have found each other.”
“You are walking a dangerous path, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Dahlia warned.
Drizzt wasn’t sure how to take that at first. Was she referring to his own emotional state, given his dramatic choice? Was she taking up Innovindil’s mantle of long-searching wisdom to appeal to him on some philosophical level?
She lifted her walking stick before her and snapped her wrists expertly to break it in half, into two four-foot lengths, and these she broke in half into flails—“nun’chuks,” Afafrenfere had named them—and sent them into easy spins at her side.
“You do not get to so easily dismiss me,” Dahlia informed him. “I am not a plaything for the whims of Drizzt Do’Urden.”
Drizzt thought better of reminding her that she had just offered to be exactly that, and instead focused on how he might diffuse this strange situation. “I seek only that which is best for us both.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shut up and draw your blades.”
Drizzt held his hands out unthreateningly, as if that request was absurd.
“Diamonds do not move so easily from one ear to the other,” she said. “And this one, the black diamond, is to be the most difficult of all.” She began circling to Drizzt’s left, moving up the incline near to the edge of the rock. “That is why I chose you, of course. Or do you still not understand?”
“Apparently, I don’t—” he started to answer, his words cut short as he ducked and dodged back, one of Dahlia’s weapons whipping suddenly at his head—and had it connected, it surely would have cracked open his skull.
“Dahlia!”
“Draw your blades!” she shouted back at him. “Do not further disappoint me! You were the one, the lover I could not beat! You were the one to serve me my just reward. You are a failure as a lover, as a man, with your precious witch ever in your foolish heart. Do not doubly disappoint me by failing at the one thing I know you do well!”
On she came in a rush, and despite himself, Drizzt found his scimitars in his hands as he fended the sudden, brutal attacks, the flails spinning in at him from every conceivable angle. Instinct alone had Drizzt parrying and twisting away from the assault, for his brain could not fathom the situation unfolding before him. Instinct alone had him countering Dahlia’s movements, even striking out at her with a reflexive riposte after one clean parry.
Drizzt sucked in his breath and retracted his scimitar at the same time, horrified that he had nearly skewered Dahlia, to the point where blood had begun to stain her torn shirt.
She didn’t seem the least bit bothered, though, and pressed the attack with apparent glee, swinging her right-hand flail back in at Drizzt’s retracting blade. And when the pole struck the scimitar, Dahlia released some lightning energy, which coursed Twinkle and sparked into Drizzt’s left hand and arm.
The drow’s teeth clenched involuntarily, and it was all he could do to hold onto his weapon, the muscles in his forearm clenching and knotting under the tingling and burning sensation.
“Stop!” Drizzt yelled at her between the ring of his blades blocking her swinging poles. “Dahlia!”
His calls only made her attack all the more ferociously, however. She went into a spin, coming around with her flying weapon swinging across for Drizzt’s head. He ducked the blow, then leaped as she turned a second circuit, this time bending as she came around and sweeping a backhand of her other weapon for his legs.
She had left him an opening. With him up high and Dahlia down low, Drizzt could have charged in and put her at a tremendous, likely insurmountable, disadvantage then and there, and indeed he started that way.
But he didn’t lead with his blades. He hadn’t the heart to cut her again, and instead tried to wrap her in a hug as she tried to stand back up, moving in too close for her to strike at him with those deadly flails.
She seemed to lose all strength then, and Drizzt reached out for her, hopeful that this insanity had come to its end.
Dahlia smashed her forehead into his nose and drove a knee up into his groin as he fell back, and before he had even fully straightened again, she lashed out at him once more with her weapons.
He blocked right with Icingdeath, left with Twinkle, then brought Twinkle across to block again to the right, and turned around away from Dahlia, coming around with Icingdeath angled diagonally to lift up her second attack from the left.
He dived under that raising nun’chuk, just ahead of her next trailing strike. He rolled easily to his feet, tasting blood from his smashed nose, and fell into a crouch as Dahlia turned to pursue.
But again, suddenly, she seemed to lose all strength for the fight, and her arms slumped to the side and she looked at Drizzt with a clear sense of helplessness, of anguish and sadness. She offered a shrug and a sniffle.
Then snapped her right hand, her nun’chuk lashing straight ahead like a serpent.
Drizzt fell for the ruse because he desperately needed to believe in the ruse. For all his training and all his speed and honed reflexes, Drizzt couldn’t quite catch up to that attack. The nun’chuk’s tip cracked into his forehead, knocking him upright, and Dahlia released the rest of Kozah’s Needle’s magical lightning, throwing him forcefully backward. He flipped off the edge of the rocky outcropping, spinning right over as he fell from the ledge. He slammed down on the sloping ground some ten feet below the rock, and bounced and rolled his way down the slope, crashing through brush, wet snow, and rocks alike.
He finally settled against a rock, his thoughts spinning, burning pain assailing him from many different wounds.
“Fool!” he heard Dahlia shout from above, and he knew she was coming for him. He couldn’t see her, for she had moved to the trail behind the rock, but she continued her verbal tirade, “This is to the death, yours or mine! So fight better or be damned, Drizzt Do’Urden!”
Drizzt climbed to all fours, or to three, at least, for he wound up tucking his right hand in close to his chest. He looked down at the hand, already swelling and bruised around the thumb and index finger. He tried to clench his fist, but could barely move the fingers.
He spotted his dropped scimitar, Icingdeath, on the slope just up above him, and climbed to his feet to retrieve it.
Such waves of pain washed over him that he nearly fell back to the ground. As he recovered, he settled his weight onto his right foot and glanced down at his left leg, noting a bulge against the leather at mid-calf. Drizzt swallowed hard, amazed that he was upright at all, for in the fall, he had surely broken the bone in his shin.
Slowly he put his foot back to the ground and eased some weight onto it. Again the waves of pain assaulted him. He looked around for a splint, but heard Dahlia’s approach and realized that he had no time.
He scrambled for his scimitar, retrieved it, and spun around to watch the woman’s determined approach, her weapons swinging easily at her sides.
“You were supposed to win,” she said through gritted teeth, tears streaming down her angry face. “In so many ways have you disappointed me!”
Her words didn’t make any sense to Drizzt, and he could barely keep his eyes focused on her. He knew that she was coming closer, ever closer. He knew that he couldn’t begin to fight her now. He had no speed and no balance, and the pain …
She was so close.
A dark form rushed by, carrying Dahlia with it off to the side.
“Enough!” Drizzt heard, Artemis Entreri’s voice. He followed the sound to see the two of them, and only then realized that he was sitting once more, and was only looking out of one eye now, as the other was covered with the blood pouring from the wound on his forehead.
Dahlia struggled against the man, but Entreri held her back, talking to her, though Drizzt could not hear the words. But Entreri remained insistent—even in his desperate and dazed state, Drizzt could recognize that—and he pushed Dahlia away, step-by-step.
“Farewell,” Drizzt heard him call back, and then something around them leaving Icewind Dale.
Drizzt couldn’t be sure. His face was in the dirt by that time, and all he heard was his own pulse, pounding in his head, images both real and imagined intertwining in a place far removed from consciousness.