Nearly ten thousand hearty souls lived in those ten settlements, all but those in Bryn Shander on the banks of one of the three lakes.
The approach of a dark elf and a halfling elicited excitement and alarm in the young guards manning Bryn Shander’s main gate. To see anyone coming up the caravan route at such a late date was a surprise, but to have one of those approaching be an elf with skin as black as midnight…!
The gates closed fast and hard, and Drizzt laughed aloud—loud enough to be heard, though he and Regis were still many yards away.
“I told you to keep your hood up,” Regis scolded.
“Better they see me for what I am before we’re in range of a longbow.”
Regis took a step away from the drow, and Drizzt laughed again, and so did the halfling.
“Halt and be recognized!” a guard shouted at them in a voice too shaky to truly be threatening.
“Recognize me, then, and be done with this foolishness,” Drizzt called back, and he stopped in the middle of the road barely twenty strides from the wooden stockade wall. “How many years must one live among the folk of Ten-Towns before the lapse of a few short years so erases the memory of men?”
A long pause ensued before a different guard called out, “What is your name?”
“Drizzt Do’Urden, you fool!” Regis yelled back. “And I am Regis of Lonelywood, who serves King Bruenor in Mithral Hall.”
“Can it be?” yet another voice cried out.
The gates swung open as quickly and as forcefully as they had closed.
“Apparently their memories are not as short as you feared,” Regis remarked.
“It’s good to be home,” the drow replied.
The snow-covered trees muffled the wind’s mournful song as Regis silently padded through them down to the banks of the partially frozen lake a few days later. Maer Dualdon spread out wide before him, gray ice, black ice, and blue water. One boat bobbed at the town of Lonelywood’s longest wharf, not yet caught fast by the winter. From dozens of small houses nestled in the woods, single lines of smoke wafted into the morning air.
Regis was at peace.
He moved to the water’s edge, where a small patch remained unfrozen, and dropped a tiny chunk of ice into the lake, then watched as the ripples rolled out from the impact, washing little bits of water onto the surrounding ice. His mind took him through those ripples and into the past. He thought of fishing—this had been his favorite spot. He told himself it would be a good thing to come back one summer and again set his bobber in the waters of Maer Dualdon.
Hardly thinking of the action, he reached into a small sack he had tied to his belt and produced a palm-sized piece of white bone, the famous skull that gave the trout of Icewind Dale their name. From his other hip pouch, he produced his carving knife, and never looking down at the bone, his eyes gazing across the empty lake, he went to work. Shavings fell as the halfling worked to free that which he knew to be in the bone, for that was the true secret of scrimshaw. His art wasn’t to carve the bone into some definable shape, but to free the shape that was already in there, waiting for skilled and delicate fingers to show it to the world.
Regis looked down and smiled as he came to understand the image he was freeing, one so fitting for him at that moment of reflection on what had once been, of good times spent among good friends in a land so beautiful and so deadly all at once.
He lost track of time as he stood there reminiscing and sculpting, and soaking in the beauty and the refreshing chill. Half in a daze, half in the past, Regis nearly jumped out of his furry boots when he glanced down again and saw the head of a gigantic cat beside his hip.
His little squeak became a call of, “Guenhwyvar!” as the startled halfling tried to catch his breath.
“She likes it here, too,” Drizzt said from the trees behind him, and he turned to watch his drow friend’s approach.
“You could have called out a warning,” Regis said, and he noted that in his startled jump, he’d nicked his thumb with the sharp knife. He brought it up to suck on the wound, and was greatly relieved to learn that his scrimshaw had not been damaged.
“I did,” Drizzt replied. “Twice. You’ve the wind in your ears.”
“It’s not so breezy here.”
“Then the winds of time,” said Drizzt.
Regis smiled and nodded. “It’s hard to come here and not want to stay.”
“It’s a more difficult place than Mithral Hall,” said Drizzt.
“But a more simple one,” Regis answered, and it was Drizzt’s turn to smile and nod. “You met with the spokesmen of Bryn Shander?”
Drizzt shook his head. “There was no need,” he explained. “Proprietor Faelfaril knew well of Wulfgar’s journey through Ten-Towns four years ago. I learned everything we need from the innkeeper.”
“And it saved you the trouble of the fanfare you knew would accompany your return.”
“As you avoided it by jumping a wagon north to Lonelywood,” Drizzt retorted.
“I wanted to see it again. It was my home, after all, and for many, many years. Did fat old Faelfaril mention any subsequent visits by Wulfgar?”
Drizzt shook his head. “Our friend came through, praise Tempus, but very briefly before going straightaway out to the tundra, to rejoin his people. The folk of Bryn Shander heard one other mention of him, just one, a short time after that, but nothing definitive and nothing that Faelfaril remembers well.”
“Then he is out there,” Regis said, nodding to the northeast, the open lands where the barbarians roamed. “I’d wager he’s the king of them all by now.”
Drizzt’s expression showed he didn’t agree. “Where he went, where he is, is not known in Bryn Shander, and perhaps Wulfgar has become chieftain of the Tribe of the Elk, his people. But the tribes are no longer united, and have not been for years. They have only occasional and very minor dealings with the folk of Ten-Towns at all, and Faelfaril assured me that were it not for the occasional campfires seen in the distance, the folk of Ten-Towns wouldn’t even know that they were constantly surrounded by wandering barbarians.”
Regis furrowed his brow in consternation.
“But neither do they fear the tribes, as they once did,” Drizzt said. “They coexist, and there is relative peace, and that is no small legacy of our friend Wulfgar.”
“Do you think he’s still out there?”
“I know he is.”
“And we’re going to find him,” said Regis.
“Poor friends we would be if we didn’t.”
“It’s getting cold,” the halfling warned.
“Not as cold as the ice cave of a white dragon.”
Regis rubbed Guenhwyvar’s strong neck and chuckled helplessly. “You’ll get me there, too, before this is all done,” he said, “or I’m an unbearded gnome.”
“Unbearded?” Drizzt asked and Regis shrugged.
“Works for Bruenor the other way,” he said.
“A furry-footed gnome, then,” Drizzt offered.
“A hungry halfling,” Regis corrected. “If we’re going out there, we’ll need ample supplies. Buy some saddlebags for your cat, or bend your back, elf.”
Laughing, Drizzt walked over and draped his arm around Regis’s sturdy shoulders, and started turning the halfling to leave. Regis resisted, though, and instead forced Drizzt to pause and take a good long look at Maer Dualdon.
He heard the drow sigh deeply, and knew he’d been taken by the same nostalgic trance, by memories of the years they had known in the simple, beautiful, and deadly splendors of Icewind Dale.
“What are you carving?” Drizzt asked after a long while.
“We’ll both know when it reveals itself,” Regis answered, and Drizzt accepted that inescapable truth with a nod.
They went out that very afternoon, packs heavy with food and extra clothing. They made the base of Kelvin’s Cairn as twilight descended, and found shelter in a shallow cave, one that Drizzt knew very well.