Dahlia replied with a wicked grin.
“It’s not as much fun if it isn’t as dangerous,” Drizzt answered for her.
“When there’s conviction behind your complaining, perhaps then I’ll listen more attentively, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Dahlia replied. “For now, just accept that I understand the truth of your sentiments and will welcome your blades when trouble finds us.”
“You’re walking with purpose,” Drizzt said, thinking it wise to change the subject. “Pray tell where you’re leading me.”
“Pray tell me why you brought me here. My course would’ve been south, to Neverwinter Wood, remember?”
“There are questions I need to answer first.”
“To see if Jarlaxle survived,” Dahlia replied, catching Drizzt by such surprise that he stopped walking, and had to scramble to catch up.
“It’s obvious,” she said when he neared. “Your affection for him, I mean.”
“He is helpful,” was all Drizzt would admit.
“He is dead,” Dahlia said. “We both saw him fall, and witnessed the explosive fury of the primordial right behind.”
Drizzt wasn’t sure of that, of course, since he’d known Jarlaxle as the ultimate survivor of many seemingly impossible escapes, but he could only shrug against Dahlia’s assertion.
“I would know, too, of the power of Bregan D’aerthe in Luskan,” he said.
“Diminished,” Dahlia replied without hesitation. “It had weakened considerably those ten years ago, and it’s unlikely the drow have expanded once more in the City of Sails. What’s left here for them?”
“That’s what I hope to learn.”
“You seek Jarlaxle,” Dahlia teased, “because you care.”
Drizzt didn’t deny it.
Dahlia walked past him out into the middle of the street and motioned toward an inn across the way. “Seeing all of those decrepit farms and famished farmers has spurred my appetite,” she said without looking back at Drizzt.
The drow stood there watching her back as she walked away from him and toward the inn. She’d made that statement for his benefit, he knew, just to remind him that they were not alike, to remind him that she had an understanding of the world that was different-and greater-than his own.
He kept thinking that Dahlia would glance back toward him when she noticed he wasn’t following her.
She didn’t.
By the time Drizzt entered the inn, Dahlia was already seated at a table and talking to one of the serving girls. There weren’t many patrons in the inn at this early hour, but those who were, mostly male, focused on the exotic Dahlia. Even when Drizzt entered, he garnered no more than a quick glance from any of the men.
Dahlia waved the serving girl away as Drizzt approached.
“Did you think, perhaps, that I would wish a meal as well?” Drizzt asked.
Dahlia laughed at him. “I expected your sympathies for the poor farmer folk would force your belly to grumble for days to come. So that you might properly sob for them, I mean.”
“Why would you say such a thing?”
Dahlia laughed again and looked away.
Drizzt heaved a sigh and started to stand, thinking he’d go to the bar and buy a meal, but before he’d even stepped away from his chair, the serving girl returned, bearing two bowls of steaming stew.
Dahlia motioned for him to sit, her expression conciliatory, and at last more serious.
“It troubled you to see those farms,” she said a few moments later, the bowls of stew in front of them, Drizzt stirring his with his spoon.
“What would you have me say?”
“I would have you admit the truth.”
Drizzt looked up and stared at her. “I’ve always known Luskan to be a city of ruffians. I’ve always found many of the customs here, such as the Prisoner’s Carnival, distasteful, and I realized when Captain Deudermont fell that Luskan would know even darker times. But yes, it pains me to see it. To see the helplessness of the commoners trapped in plays of power and a reality made more harsh by the proliferation of pirates and thugs.”
“Is that what pains you?” Dahlia asked, and her tone hinted at some clever insight, which drew Drizzt’s gaze once more. “Or is it that you cannot make things right? Is it their helplessness or your own that troubles you so?”
“Do you seek to enlighten me or to taunt me?”
Dahlia laughed and took a bite of stew.
Drizzt did likewise and tried to keep his attention focused on the others in the common room-folks who watched him and Dahlia quite intently. He took note of one woman leaving in a hurry, though she tried to appear casual in her departure, and of another man who slowly walked to the exit and never stopped staring at the pair, particularly Dahlia.
By the time they had at last left the inn, midday had long passed and the sun was halfway to the horizon. Once more, Dahlia took up the lead.
“How many eyes are upon us now, I wonder?” Drizzt asked, the first words they had spoken since their pre-meal conversation.
“Us?”
“On you,” the drow clarified. “Do you believe it’s your beauty that attracts such attention, or your history here?”
While her appearance had changed fairly dramatically with her hairstyle and skin alterations, this was so obviously still Dahlia, the one and only Dahlia. Anyone who had ever met Dahlia, Drizzt knew, would not be fooled by such cosmetic changes, nor would anyone who had ever met Dahlia likely forget her.
“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” Dahlia asked with a fake pout. “I am wounded.” She stopped abruptly and offered Drizzt a warm smile. “Don’t you like my disguise?”
There was a softness to her now that seemed almost magical. Her hair was more cute than seductive, and her face carried a soft glow and an innocence without the magical woad. Perhaps it was the warm afternoon light, the sun sending a warm glowing line across the waters off the Sword Coast. In that glow, Dahlia seemed unblemished, gentle and warm, through and through. It took all of Drizzt’s willpower to refrain from kissing her.
“You invite trouble,” he heard himself say.
“I’m disguised to avoid exactly that.”
Drizzt shook his head with every word. “You’re hardly disguised, and were not at all when we came through Luskan’s gate. If you truly wished to avoid trouble, you would’ve changed your appearance much more profoundly back out there, in the farmlands.”
“Am I to spend all of my days in hiding, then?”
“Has Dahlia ever spent a single day in hiding?” Drizzt asked lightheartedly.
Dahlia winced, and Drizzt recognized that he’d hit on some painful memory, yet another unknown facet of this elf.
“Come,” she said, and she walked away swiftly.
When Drizzt caught up to her, he found her expression very tight and closed, and so he said no more.
From a far corner of the tavern, two assassins watched the couple depart, one rolling a dagger eagerly in his grimy hands under cover of the table.
“Are ye sure it’s her then?” asked a skinny fellow with a face full of black stubble and one eye no more than a dull white orb.
“Aye, Boofie, I saw her come through the gate, I did,” answered the dagger-roller, Tolston Rethnor, the same guard who had watched Dahlia enter Luskan’s gate earlier in the day.
“Hartouchen’s to be paying well for she what killed his father,” said Boofie McLaddin, referring to the new high captain of Ship Rethnor, the heir of Borlann the Crow. “But so’s his anger to be great if we’re starting a fight with them damned drow elves over a mistake.”
“It’s her, I tell ye,” Tolston insisted. “She’s even got that staff. I’m not to forget Borlann’s lady friend-none who seen Dahlia forget Dahlia!”
“Half the reward, ye say?”
“Aye.”
“Well I’m wanting half o’ th’ other half, too.” When Tolston balked, Boofie went on, “Ye thinking just the two of us to fight them then? After what ye been telling me o’ Dahlia all the way here? She killed yer uncle to death, hey? And he was the boss, and got there by killing all them what stood afore him, hey? I’m to bring in me boys, a whole bunch and a wizard besides. They’ll be wanting their cut.”