“You’ve a keen eye,” said Drizzt.
“For shades, yes indeed, and with good reason,” answered a clearly relieved Kale. “I’ve fought my share-”
“What did you mean when you said ‘also’?”
Kale looked to Stuyles.
“We found a shade, a tiefling no less, along the road just a few days ago,” Stuyles explained. “A formidable creature, though he certainly doesn’t appear as such. Some … associates of mine waylai-err, encountered him along the road, but he soon gained the upper hand. He claimed himself an orphan of society, and so became the least expected member of our band since Skinny the half-ogre and his kin found their way to us not long after you had gone.”
“Devils, ogres, tiefling Shadovar,” Drizzt remarked. “You should take care the company you keep.” He was trying to figure a way to garner more information about this newcomer, when Stuyles volunteered all that Drizzt needed to hear.
“It is good that you didn’t have Effron along with you this day,” Stuyles said to Kale. “The encounter along the road might have gone much differently, and much more dangerously!”
He said it with a lighthearted flair, and was smiling quite widely, until he looked at the grim-faced drow.
“Effron the warlock,” Drizzt said. “Take care with that one, I beg. For your own sake.”
“You know him?”
“Take me to him.”
Stuyles started to talk again, to question the drow’s sudden change in demeanor, no doubt, but he swallowed hard and bade Kale to find the twisted warlock.
“What do you know?” Stuyles asked Drizzt when they were alone.
“I know that Effron Alegni is a troubled and angry young warlock. He carries a great burden upon his broken shoulders.”
“Will they accept him in Port Llast, then, should we accept your generous offer?”
Drizzt shook his head. “It will not likely get to that point.”
He moved to the tent flap and pulled it open, peering out. He didn’t want to get caught by surprise in an enclosed place against the likes of Effron. He noted immediately, though, that Kale stood perplexed, hands on hips, with many others around him, all shaking their heads and some pointing off into the woods.
“He saw my approach and likely fled,” Drizzt said, turning back to Stuyles.
“You and he are avowed enemies, then?”
Drizzt shook his head. “It is far more complicated than that, and trust me when I say that I would love nothing more than to find reconciliation with Effron, for myself and for-” he almost mentioned Dahlia, but decided not to go that far down the road.
He just blew a sigh instead. “It is a good offer for you and your band,” he said. “You will find community there, and a better way.”
“Some might think we’re doing well as it is,” Stuyles said.
“You live in tents in the snowy forest in the Sword Coast winter. Surely the houses of-” He paused as Stuyles held up his hand.
“It is not as easy as that, I fear,” he explained. “For myself, the offer is tempting, but not all in my band are likely to be welcomed openly by the folk of-well, of any town. Some have found us because they quite simply have nowhere else left to go.”
“They do now.”
“You offer amnesty? Just like that?”
“Yes,” Drizzt said evenly. He wasn’t about to let this idea fall apart when he seemed so close to actually making a difference here. “A clean handshake, with no call to divulge any unseemly history.” He paused on that for a moment and looked Stuyles directly in the eye. “So long as you can vouch for them, in that they will cause no mayhem in Port Llast. I’ll not insert more danger into the lives of those goodly folk.”
Farmer Stuyles thought on it for a few moments, as Kale entered the tent.
“I can,” he said, motioning for Kale to hold his news for the moment. “For almost all, at least. One or two might need some questioning, but I will leave that to you.”
Drizzt nodded, and both he and Stuyles looked to Kale.
“Gone,” the man informed them. “It would seem that Effron has flown away. I have sent out scouts.”
“Recall them,” Drizzt said. “He is likely back in the Shadowfell. And I would ask of both of you, as a friend, please mention nothing of Effron to my companions.”
“Not even Lady Dahlia?” Stuyles asked.
“Especially not Lady Dahlia,” said Drizzt.
A single wagon had departed Port Llast a couple days earlier, but nearly a score now rumbled down the last road to the town, though most of those had been stolen along the road over the previous months. Stuyles’s band had done quite well, for there was no shortage of people in the region left behind by the designs of the high captains of Luskan, forgotten by the lords of Waterdeep, and expelled from the turmoil of Neverwinter. The band of highwaymen numbered well over a hundred, for they had joined with another similar group of civilization’s refugees.
It hadn’t taken much convincing from Stuyles, for almost all had readily accepted Drizzt’s invitation: the promise of a new life, and true homes once more, as they had known in better times.
At the head of the caravan rode Farmer Stuyles, driving a wagon beside Drizzt and Andahar. They took their time along the last stretch of road, the long descent between the cliffs to the city’s guarded gate, and by the time they arrived, word had spread before them and much of the town was waiting to greet them.
Dorwyllan came out from the gate to stand before Drizzt and Stuyles.
“Refugees,” Drizzt explained. “Folk abandoned by the shrinking spheres of civilization.”
“Highwaymen,” Dorwyllan replied with a grin.
Farmer Stuyles turned a concerned glance at Drizzt.
“Former highwaymen,” Drizzt corrected.
“Port Llast citizens, then,” the elf agreed, and his smile widened as he extended his hand to Farmer Stuyles. “Throw wide the gates!” Dorwyllan cried, looking back over his shoulder. “And tell the minions of Umberlee that they’ll find no ground within Port Llast uncontested!”
A great cheer went up inside the wall, and following that rose an answering cheer among the weather-beaten and beleaguered folk of Stuyles’s renegade band.
“There’ll be more to join us,” Stuyles explained to the elf. “Coming from all parts.”
“The farmlands outside of Luskan, mostly,” Drizzt explained to the nodding Dorwyllan.
“I’ve sent runners,” Stuyles explained.
“We’ve many empty homes, and a plentiful harvest to be culled from the sea,” Dorwyllan replied. “Welcome.”
Drizzt had always suspected it, but now it was confirmed, that “welcome” was his favorite word in the Common Tongue, and a word, he understood, with no equivalent in the language of the drow.
PART II
Freedom. I talk about this concept often, and so often, in retrospect, do I come to realize that I am confused about the meaning of the word. Confused or self-deluded.
“I am alone now, I am free!” I proclaimed when Bruenor lay cold under the stones of his cairn in Gauntlgrym.
And so I believed those words, because I did not understand that buried within my confusion over the battling shadows and sunlight of the new world around me, I was in fact heavily shackled by my own unanswered emotions. I was free to be miserable, perhaps, but in looking back upon those first steps out of Gauntlgrym, that would seem the extent of it.
I came to suspect this hidden truth, and so I pressed northward to Port Llast.
I came to hope that I was correct in my assessment and my plans when that mission neared completion, and we set out from Port Llast.
But for all my hopes and suspicions, it wasn’t until the caravan led by me and Farmer Stuyles approached the gate of Port Llast that I came to fully realize the truth of that quiet irritation that had driven me along. I asked myself which road I would choose, but that question was wholly irrelevant.