“And perhaps also a low-flying arrow fired by some unseen assailant,” Drizzt remarked sourly.
Montolio tilted his head helplessly against Drizzt’s unending stream of pessimism. It pained him deeply to see the good-hearted drow so scarred. “He might indeed,” Montolio said, a bit more harshly than he had intended, “but the loss of life is only great to those who chance to live it! Let your arrow come in low and catch the huddler on the ground, I say. His death would not be so tragic!”
Drizzt could not deny the logic, nor the comfort the old ranger gave to him. Over the last few weeks, Montolio’s offhanded philosophies and way of looking at the world—pragmatically yet heavily edged with youthful exuberance, put Drizzt more at ease than he had been since his earliest training days in Zaknafein’s gymnasium. But Drizzt also could not deny the inevitably short life span of that comfort. Words could soothe, but they could not erase the haunting memories of Drizzt’s past, the distant voices of dead Zaknafein, dead Clacker, and the dead farmers. A single mental echo of “drizzit” vanquished hours of Montolio’s well-intended advice.
“Enough of this cockeyed banter,” Montolio went on, seeming perturbed. “I call you friend, Drizzt Do’Urden, and I hope you call me the same. What sort of friend might I be against this weight that stoops your shoulders unless I know more of it? I am your friend, or I am not. The decision is yours, but if I am not, then I see no purpose in sharing nights as wondrous as this beside you. Tell me, Drizzt, or be gone from my home!”
Drizzt could hardly believe that Montolio, normally so patient and relaxed, had put him on such a spot. The drow’s first reaction was to recoil, to build a wall of anger in the face of the old man’s presumptions and cling to that which he considered personal. As the moments passed, though, and Drizzt got beyond his initial surprise and took the time to sift through Montolio’s statement, he came to understand one basic truth that excused those presumptions: He and Montolio had indeed become friends, mostly through the ranger’s efforts.
Montolio wanted to share in Drizzt’s past, so that he might better understand and comfort his new friend.
“Do you know of Menzoberranzan, the city of my birth and of my kin?” Drizzt asked softly. Even speaking the name pained him. “And do you know the ways of my people, or the Spider Queen’s edicts?”
Montolio’s voice was somber as he replied. “Tell me all of it, I beg,”
Drizzt nodded—Montolio sensed the motion even if he could not see it—and relaxed against the tree. He stared at the moon but actually looked right past it. His mind wandered back through his adventures, back down that road to Menzoberranzan, to the Academy, and to House Do’Urden. He held his thoughts there for a while, lingering on the complexities of drow family life and on the welcomed simplicity of his times in the training room with Zaknafein.
Montolio watched patiently, guessing that Drizzt was looking for a place to begin. From what he had learned from Drizzt’s passing remarks, Drizzt’s life had been filled with adventure and turbulent times, and Montolio knew that it would be no easy feat for Drizzt, with his still limited command of the common tongue, to accurately recount all of it. Also, given the burdens, the guilt and the sorrow, the drow obviously carried, Montolio suspected that Drizzt might be hesitant.
“I was born on an important day in the history of my family,” Drizzt began. “On that day, House Do’Urden eliminated House DeVir.”
“Eliminated?”
“Massacred,” Drizzt explained. Montolio’s blind eyes revealed nothing, but the ranger’s expression was clearly one of revulsion, as Drizzt had expected. Drizzt wanted his companion to understand the horrible depths of drow society, so he pointedly added, “And on that day, too, my brother Dinin drove his sword through the heart of our other brother, Nalfein.”
A shudder coursed up Montolio’s spine and he shook his head. He realized that he was only just beginning to understand the burdens Drizzt carried.
“It is the drow way,” Drizzt said calmly, matter-of-factly, trying to impart the dark elves’ casual attitude toward murder. “There is a strict structure of rank in Menzoberranzan. To climb it, to attain a higher rank, whether as an individual or a family, you simply eliminate those above you.”
A slight quiver in his voice betrayed Drizzt to the ranger. Montolio clearly understood that Drizzt did not accept the evil practices, and never had.
Drizzt went on with his story, telling it completely and accurately, at least for the more than forty years he had spent in the Underdark. He told of his days under the strict tutelage of his sister Vierna, cleaning the house chapel endlessly and learning of his innate powers and his place in drow society. Drizzt spent a long time explaining that peculiar social structure to Montolio, the hierarchies based on strict rank, and the hypocrisy of drow “law,” a cruel facade screening a city of utter chaos. The ranger cringed as he heard of the family wars. They were brutal conflicts that allowed for no noble survivors, not even children. Montolio cringed even more when Drizzt told him of drow “justice,” of the destruction wreaked upon a house that had failed in its attempt to eradicate another family.
The tale was less grim when Drizzt told of Zaknafein, his father and dearest friend. Of course, Drizzt’s happy memories of his father became only a short reprieve, a prelude to the horrors of Zaknafein’s demise. “My mother killed my father,” Drizzt explained soberly, his deep pain evident, “sacrificed him to Lloth for my crimes, then animated his corpse and sent it out to kill me, to punish me for betraying the family and the Spider Queen.”
It took a while for Drizzt to resume, but when he did, he again spoke truthfully, even revealing his own failures in his days alone in the wilds of the Underdark. “I feared that I had lost myself and my principles to some instinctive, savage monster,” Drizzt said, verging on despair. But then the emotional wave that had been his existence rose again, and a smile found his face as he recounted his time beside Belwar, the most honored svirfneblin burrow-warden, and Clacker, the pech who had been polymorphed into a hook horror. Expectedly, the smile proved short-lived, for Drizzt’s tale eventually led him to where Clacker fell to Matron Malice’s undead monster. Another friend had died on Drizzt’s behalf.
Appropriately, by the time Drizzt came to his exit from the Underdark, the dawn peeked through the eastern mountains. Now Drizzt picked his words more carefully, not ready to divulge the tragedy of the farming family for fear that Montolio would judge him and blame him, destroying their newfound bond. Rationally, Drizzt could remind himself that he had not killed the farmers, had even avenged their deaths, but guilt was rarely a rational emotion, and Drizzt simply could not find the words—not yet.
Montolio, aged and wise and with animal scouts throughout the region, knew that Drizzt was concealing something. When they had first met, the drow had mentioned a doomed farming family, and Montolio had heard of a family slaughtered in the village of Maldobar. Montolio didn’t believe for a minute that Drizzt could have done it, but he suspected that the drow was somehow involved. He didn’t press Drizzt, though. Drizzt had been more honest, and more complete, than Montolio had expected, and the ranger was confident that the drow would fill in the obvious holes in his own time.
“It is a good tale,” Montolio said at length. “You have been through more in your few decades than most elves will know in three hundred years. But the scars are few, and they will heal.”
Drizzt, not so certain, put a lamenting look upon him, and Montolio could only offer a comforting pat on the shoulder as he rose and headed off for bed.
Drizzt was still asleep when Montolio roused Hooter and tied a thick note to the owl’s leg. Hooter wasn’t so pleased at the ranger’s instructions; the journey could take a week, valuable and enjoyable time at this height of the mousing and mating season. For all its whining hoots, however, the owl would not disobey.