“You gave me your word,” Drizzt gasped, and his words came out unevenly-Yvonnel played with the wheel throughout his sentence.
“And so two will leave, and the third … I will make it an easy death. A simple beheading.”
“Damn you,” Drizzt said again, and he settled back and closed his eyes.
“Choose,” Yvonnel instructed.
He didn’t answer.
But then she was there, right above him, one knee up on his chest and pressing down, increasing his pain. He opened his eyes to find her face very near his own, and with one hand raised.
“I admire your bravery,” she said, and snapped her fingers. In her palm a small ball of fire flared to life.
Yvonnel kept her smile very close as she reached her hand down lower, and lit the rat box.
“You will choose,” she whispered.
Drizzt felt the creature scrambling within the box, the front claws digging against his flesh.
“Choose!” Yvonnel demanded.
“Take me!” Entreri shouted. “Let him go and take me, you witch.”
Drizzt opened his eyes and strained to see in the direction of the voice, and there was the cage of lightning, Entreri up near the bars, Jarlaxle beside him with a hand on his shoulder.
Yvonnel had turned away to regard them, too, and she began to laugh. “Shut up!” she commanded. When Entreri began to yell at her, she waved her hand and the cage faded away, and so, too, did his protests.
Yvonnel was back at Drizzt’s face, so close. “Choose,” she whispered.
He shook his head, growling and grinding his teeth against the pain of the rack and the claws of the terrified rat.
“It is all a lie anyway, Drizzt Do’Urden, as you know,” she said. “So why does it matter?” She leaned on his chest and his elbows and knees felt as if they would simply explode. “Why does anything matter more than stopping the pain? Pick a friend.”
“No!”
“Pick a friend!” she said more insistently.
The rat bit him hard and began to burrow.
“No!”
“Why? It is all a lie.”
“No.”
“It is! So choose.”
“No!”
“Then tell me, Drizzt Do’Urden,” she said, her voice going softer. “Before you die, tell me why. It is all a lie, so why will you not choose?”
Drizzt opened his eyes and looked into Yvonnel’s colorful amber orbs, fighting to maintain control as the rat burrowed.
“Because I am not a lie,” he insisted through gritted teeth.
Yvonnel fell back from him, the pressure of the rack easing, at least. She stared at him for a long heartbeat, her expression one of confusion, perhaps, or of disbelief.
“Get those three out of here,” she turned and told Quenthel, then spun back to stare at Drizzt, shaking her head with a crooked smile, as if she had just learned something.
She slapped the burning box and the rat off of him and cast a spell with a wave of her hand that pulled the locking pin from the rack crank. Drizzt fell heavily to his back, where he lay gasping, too broken to even pull his arms down.
Yvonnel fell over him once again, her face close.
“They are free, all three,” she whispered. She kissed him, and in that kiss was a spell of healing and of slumber. “Sleep well, hero,” she added as Drizzt faded back into welcomed blackness.
“Do what?” Gromph demanded. “Do you mean to clear that chamber and free the primordial?”
Catti-brie didn’t blink.
“You have forgotten Neverwinter?”
Again, no answer.
“You do not understand the power of this creature.”
“But I do.”
“Yet you mean to free it!”
“In a controlled-”
“You cannot control such a beast as this, fool!”
Catti-brie grinned. “Come,” she bade him.
He looked at her curiously, puzzled.
“I will allow you into my thoughts,” she explained, “where once you were comfortable. I will show you.”
Gromph made no move for a long while, then narrowed his amber eyes and projected his thoughts into the waiting mind of Catti-brie.
And from there, she took him through her ring, to converse with the primordial, to see what she had seen from ancient times, when the volcano had roared through the tendrils and through the stone of Cutlass Island, melting the crystal of the limestone into something stronger, something magical, and pressing it out of the ground to grow. Squeezing it, hollowing it, pushing it farther, more and more crystal. Bubbles became holes became branches, flowing and growing.
A long while later, she cut off the communication and images, then abruptly dismissed Gromph from her thoughts and opened her eyes to stare at him once more.
The archmage licked his lips. He tried to appear nonchalant, but, judging by Catti-brie’s smirk, unsuccessfully.
For the second time in a span of hours, Gromph had witnessed something beyond his understanding, something terrifying and alluring all at once.
He returned her grin.
What else could he do?
She was right. For all the danger, all the chance of complete disaster, to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane, she was right.
“We cannot leave him,” Artemis Entreri said out in the tunnels just beyond Menzoberranzan. He was with Jarlaxle and Dahlia, and with all their gear returned.
Jarlaxle laughed. “We surely cannot go and get him!”
“He would have died for us.”
“He is probably already dead,” the mercenary replied with a shrug. “Would you dishonor him and get all of us killed, as well? Or do you not understand the limits of a drow matron mother’s mercy?”
Entreri spat on the ground and spun away, then stood up straight when he noted the approach of two dark elves.
Jarlaxle, too, noted them, and was not as surprised by the appearance of Yvonnel as he was by the other. “It cannot be,” he said.
“Use your magic, then,” Yvonnel answered. “You have the mask back in your possession. Is there another item that could so deceive the clever Jarlaxle?”
Braelin Janquay walked up in front of Jarlaxle and bowed. “Thank you for trying to end my misery,” he said.
“You were a drider,” Jarlaxle said. He looked past Braelin to Yvonnel. “You cannot undo a drider.”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “Or I can. I doubt others would have the courage to try.”
“But Lolth …”
“She is celebrating the fall of Demogorgon,” Yvonnel said. “She will forgive me.”
“But why?” a suspicious Entreri demanded.
Yvonnel looked at him, and even tilted her pretty head to regard him more closely, then began to laugh and waved him aside. She motioned for Jarlaxle to follow, and walked back the way she had come.
“I do this for you,” she said when Jarlaxle caught up to her. “A measure of good faith in expectation that you will serve my purpose.”
“And that purpose is?”
“We will see, in time.”
“Is he dead?” Jarlaxle asked, more seriously.
“Of course not.”
Jarlaxle walked around to face the strange young drow squarely.
“You envy him,” he dared to say.
Yvonnel snorted.
“You do!” Jarlaxle insisted. “You envy him. Because he is content in his heart that there is something more, some better angels and greater reason, and because he so easily finds his rewards, treasures as great as anything I or even you might know, in the contentment of moral clarity and personal honor.”
“I envy him?” Yvonnel scoffed. “And what of Jarlaxle?”
The mercenary assumed a pensive pose, considering the words before finally nodding. “How many times might I have killed Drizzt for easy personal gain?” he asked rhetorically, with a helpless laugh. “And yet he lives, and I find that I would defend this Houseless rogue at the cost of my own life.”
“Why?” Yvonnel asked, and sincerely. “Why you, and why that filth named Entreri?”
“Perhaps because secretly we all want to believe what Drizzt believes,” said Jarlaxle. He waited for Yvonnel to look him in the eye. “You couldn’t break him. You cannot break him.”