As that message sank in, a smile widened over Catti-brie's face as well.
"And we of a family with a dwarf father who raises two human children as his own," she replied.
"And should I begin to list the ironies of Drizzt Do'Urden?" Wulfgar asked.
Catti-brie's laughter had her holding her sides then.
"Can we be saying," she said, "that Regis is the most normal among us?"
"Then be afraid!" Wulfgar replied dramatically, and Catti-brie laughed all the harder. "Perhaps it is just those ironies about us that drive us on along this road we so often choose."
Catti-brie sobered a bit at that remark, then stopped her giggling, her expression going suddenly more grim—and Wulfgar understood that the conversation had led her right back to where they had started, right back to the state of Bruenor Battlehammer.
"Perhaps," the woman agreed. "Until now, with Bruenor gone and Drizzt out there alone."
"No!" Wulfgar insisted, and he came up from the rock, standing tall before her. "Still!"
Catti-brie sighed and started to reply, but Wulfgar cut her short.
"I think of my wife and child back in Mithral Hall," the warrior said. "Every time I walk out of there, I know that I might not see Delly and Colson again. And yet I go, because the road beckons me—as you yourself just admitted it so beckons you. Bruenor is gone, so we must accept, and Drizzt… well, who can know where the drow now runs? Who can know if an orc spear has found his heart and quieted him forever? Not I, and not you, though we both hold fast to our prayers that he is all right and will return to us soon.
"But even should he not, and even if Regis accepts a permanent position of steward, or counselor, perhaps, if Banak Brawnanvil becomes King of Mithral Hall, I will not forsake the road. This is my life, with the wind upon my face and the stars as my ceiling. This is my lot, to wage battle against the orcs and the giants and all others who threaten the good folk of the land. I embrace that lot and revel in it, and I shall until I am too old to run about the mountain trails or until an enemy blade lays me low.
"Delly knows this. My wife accepts that I will spend little time in Mithral Hall beside her." The barbarian gave a self-deprecating chortle and asked, "Can I really call her my wife? And Colson my child?"
"You're a good husband to her and a fine father to the little one."
Wulfgar gave a nod of thanks to the woman for those words.
"But still I will not forsake the road," he said, "and Delly Curtie would not have me forsake the road. That is what I have come to love most about her. That is why I trust that she will raise Colson in my absence, should I be killed, to be true to whomever it is that Colson is meant to be."
"True to her nature?"
"Independence is what matters," Wulfgar explained. "And it is more difficult by far to be independent of our own inner shackles than it is of the shackles that others might place upon us."
The simple words nearly knocked Catti-brie over. "I said the same thing to a friend of ours, once," she said.
"Drizzt?"
The woman nodded.
"Then heed your own words," Wulfgar advised her. "You love him and you love the road. Why does there need to be more than that?"
"If I'm wanting to have children of me own…."
"Then you will come to know that, and so you will redirect the road of your life appropriately," Wulfgar told her. "Or it might be that fate intervenes, against all care, and you get that which you're not sure you want."
Catti-brie sucked in her breath.
"And would it truly be such a bad thing?" Wulfgar asked her. "To mother the child of Drizzt Do'Urden? If the babe was possessed of half his skills and but a tenth of his heart, it would be among the greatest of all the folk of the northland."
Catti-brie sighed again and brought a hand up to wipe her eyes.
"If Bruenor can raise a couple of human brats as troublesome as us. . " Wulfgar remarked with a smirk, and he let the thought hang in the air.
Catti-brie laughed and smiled at him, with warmth and gratitude.
"Take your love and your pleasure as you find it," Wulfgar advised. "Do not Worry so much of the future that you let today pass you by. You are happy beside Drizzt. Need you know more than that?"
"You sound just like him," Catti-brie answered. "Only not when he was advising me, but when he was advising himself. You're asking me to go to the same place that Drizzt found, the same enjoyment in the moment and all the rest be damned."
"And as soon as Drizzt found that place, you began to doubt," Wulfgar said with a coy smile. "When he found the place of comfort and acceptance, all obstacles were removed, and so you put one up—your fears—to hold it all in stasis."
Catti-brie was shaking her head, but Wulfgar could tell that she wasn't disagreeing with him in the least.
"Follow your heart," the big man said quietly. "Minute by minute and day by day. Let the course of the river run as it will, instead of tying yourself up in fears that you may never realize."
Catti-brie looked up at him, her head beginning to nod. Glad that he had brought her some comfort and some good advice, Wulfgar bent over and kissed his friend on the forehead.
That elicited a wide and warm smile from Catti-brie, and she seemed to him, for the first time in a long time, to be at peace with herself. He had forced her emotions back into the present, he knew, and had released her from the fears that had taken hold. Why would she sacrifice her present joys—the wild road, the companionship of her friends, and the love of Drizzt—for fear of some uncertain future wishes?
He watched her continue to visibly relax, watched her smile become more and more genuine and enduring. He could see her emotional shackles falling away.
"When'd you get so smart?" she asked him.
"In Hell and out of it," Wulfgar replied. "In a hell of Errtu's making, and in a hell of Wulfgar's making."
Catti-brie tilted her head and stared at him hard.
"And are you free?" she asked. "Are you really free?"
Wulfgar's smile matched her own, even exceeded it, his boyish grin so wide and so sincere, so warm and, yes, so free.
"Let's go kill some orcs," he remarked, words that were truly comforting music to the ears of Catti-brie.
CHAPTER 12 SUBTERFUGE
They swept across the vale between Shallows and the mountains north of Keeper's Dale like a massive earthbound storm, a great darkness and swirling tempest. Led by Obould-who-was-Gruumsh and anchored by a horde of frost giants greater than any that had been assembled in centuries, the orc swarm trampled the brush and sent the animals small and large fleeing before it.
For the first time in tendays, King Obould Many-Arrows met up with his son, Urlgen, in a sheltered ravine north of the sloping battleground where the dwarves had entrenched.
Urlgen entered the meeting full of fury, ready to demand more troops so that he could push the dwarves over the cliff and back into their holes. Fearing that Obould and Gerti would blame him for his lack of a definitive victory, Urlgen was ready to go on the offensive, to chastise his father for not giving him enough force to unseat the dwarves from the high ground.
As soon as he entered his father's tent, though, the younger ore's bluster melted away in confusion. For he knew, upon his very first glance, that the brutish leader sitting before him was not his father as he had known him, but was something more. Something greater.
A shaman that Urlgen did not know sat in place before, below, and to the side of Obould, dressed in a feathered headdress and a bright red robe. To the side, against the left-hand edge of the tent, sat Gerti Orelsdottr, and she seemed to the younger orc leader not so pleased.