“What is it?” Regis asked, stumbling down past him, and the halfling would have gone headlong into a small pond had Drizzt not caught him by the shoulder and held him back.
“I don’t remember this pond,” Drizzt said, and glanced back in the general direction of the Ivy Mansion to try to get his bearings. “I don’t believe it was here the last time I came through, though it was only a couple of years back.”
“A couple of years is an eternity where the Harpells are concerned,” Regis reminded him. “Had we come here and found a deep hole where the town had once stood, would you have been surprised? Truly?”
Drizzt was only half listening. He moved to a clear, flat space and noted the dark outline of a forested island and the light of a larger fire showing through breaks in the thick foliage.
Another ruckus of arguing sounded from the island.
Cheers came from the right bank, the protests from the left, both groups hidden from Drizzt’s view by thick foliage, with only a few campfire lights twinkling through the leaves.
“What?” the perplexed Regis asked, a simple question that accurately reflected Drizzt’s confusion as well. The halfling poked Drizzt’s arm and pointed back to the left, to the outline of a boat dock with several craft bobbing nearby.
“Be gone, Guenhwyvar,” Drizzt commanded his panther companion. “But be ready to return to me.”
The cat began to pace in a tight circle, moving faster and faster, and dissipating into a thick gray smoke as she returned to her extraplanar home. Drizzt replaced her small onyx likeness in his belt pouch and rushed to join Regis at the dock. The halfling already had a small rowboat unmoored and was readying the oars.
“A spell gone awry?” Regis asked as yet another yell of pain sounded from the island.
Drizzt didn’t answer, but for some reason, didn’t think that to be the case. He motioned Regis aside and took up the oars himself, pulling strongly.
Then they heard more than bickering and screams. Whimpers filled in the gaps between the arguing, along with feral snarls that prompted Regis to ask, “Wolves?”
It was not a large lake and Regis soon spotted a dock at the island. Drizzt worked to keep the boat in line with it. They glided in unnoticed and scrambled onto the wharf. A path wound up from it between trees, rocks, and thick brush, which rustled almost constantly from some small animals rushing to and fro. Drizzt caught sight of a fluffy white rabbit hopping away.
He dismissed the animal with a shake of his head and pressed onward, and once over a short rise, he and Regis finally saw the source of the commotion.
And neither understood a bit of it.
A man, stripped to the waist, stood in a cage constructed of vertical posts wrapped with horizontal ropes. Three men dressed in blue robes sat behind him and to the left, with three in red robes similarly seated, only behind and to the right. Directly before the caged man stood a beast, half man and half wolf, he seemed, with a canine snout but eyes distinctly human. He jumped about, appearing on the very edge of control, snarling, growling, and chomping his fangs right in front of the wide eyes of the terrified prisoner.
“Bidderdoo?” Drizzt asked.
“Has to be,” said Regis, and he stepped forward—or tried to, for Drizzt held him back.
“No guards,” the drow warned. “The area is likely magically warded.”
The werewolf roared in the poor prisoner’s face, and the man recoiled and pleaded pathetically.
“You did!” the werewolf growled.
“He had to!” shouted one of the blue-robed men.
“Murderer!” argued one wearing red robes.
Bidderdoo whirled and howled, ending the conversation abruptly. The Harpell werewolf spun back to the prisoner and began chanting and waving his arms.
The man cried out in alarm and protest.
“What…?” Regis asked, but Drizzt had no answer.
The prisoner’s babbling began to twist into indecipherable grunts and groans, pain interspersed with protest. His body began to shake and quiver, his bones crackling.
“Bidderdoo!” Drizzt yelled, and all eyes save those of the squirming, tortured man and the concentrating Harpell wizard, snapped the drow’s way.
“Dark elf!” yelled one of the blue-robed onlookers, and all of them fell back, one right off his seat to land unceremoniously on the ground.
“Drow! Drow!” they yelled.
Drizzt hardly heard them, his lavender eyes popping open wide as he watched the prisoner crumble before him, limbs transforming, fur sprouting.
“No stew will ever be the same,” Regis muttered helplessly, for no man remained in the wood and rope prison.
The rabbit, white and fluffy, yipped and yammered, as if trying to form words that would not come. Then it leaped away, easily passing through the wide ropes as it scurried for the safety of the underbrush.
Spell completed, the werewolf snarled and howled as it spun on the intruders. But the creature quickly calmed, and in a voice too cultured for such a hairy and wild mein said, “Drizzt Do’Urden! Well met!”
“I want to go home,” Regis mumbled at Drizzt’s side.
A warm fire burned in the hearth, and there was no denying the comfort of the overstuffed chair and divan set before it, but Drizzt didn’t recline or even sit, and felt little of the room’s warmth.
They had been ushered into the Ivy Mansion, accompanied by the almost continual flash of lightning bolts, searing the darkness with hot white light on either side of the pond below. Shouts of protest dissipated under the magical explosions, and the howl of a lone wolf—a lonewerewolf—silenced them even more completely.
The people of Longsaddle had come to understand the dire implications of that howl, apparently.
For some time, Drizzt and Regis paced or sat in the room, with only an occasional visit by a maid asking if they wanted more to eat or drink, to which Regis always eagerly nodded.
“That seemed very un-Harpell-like,” he mentioned to Drizzt between bites. “I knew Bidderdoo was a fierce one—he killed Uthegental of House Barrison Del’Armgo, after all—but that was simply tor—”
“Justice,” interrupted a voice from the door, and the pair turned to see Bidderdoo Harpell enter from the hallway. He no longer looked the werewolf, but rather like a man who had seen much of life—too much, perhaps. He stood in a lanky pose that made him look taller than his six-foot frame, and his hair, all gray, stood out wildly in every conceivable direction, giving the impression that it had not been combed or even finger-brushed in a long, long time. Strangely, though, he was meticulously clean-shaven.
Regis seemed to have no answer as he looked at Drizzt.
“Harsher justice than we would expect to find at the hands of the goodly Harpells,” Drizzt explained for him.
“The prisoner meant to start a war,” Bidderdoo explained. “I prevented it.”
Drizzt and Regis exchanged expressions full of doubt.
“Fanaticism requires extreme measures,” the Harpell werewolf—a curse of his own doing due to a badly botched polymorph experiment—explained.
“This is not the Longsaddle I have known,” said Drizzt.
“It changed quickly,” Bidderdoo was fast to agree.
“Longsaddle, or the Harpells?” Regis asked, crossing his arms over his chest and tapping his foot impatiently.
The answer, “Both,” came from the hallway, and even the outraged halfling couldn’t hold his dour posture and expression at the sound of the familiar voice. “One after the other, of course,” Harkle Harpell explained, bounding in through the door.
The lanky wizard was dressed all in robes, three shades of blue, ruffled and wrinkled, with sleeves so long they covered his hands. He wore a white beret topped by a blue button that matched the darkest hue of his robes, as did his dyed beard, which had grown—with magical assistance, no doubt—to outrageous proportions. One long braid ran down from Harkle’s chin to his belt, flanked by two short, thick scruffs of wiry hair hanging below each jowl. The hair on his head had gone gray, but his eyes held the same luster and eagerness the friends had seen flash so many times in years gone by—usually right before some Harkle-precipitated disaster had befallen them all.