Free The Ghost King by R.A. Salvatore Page B

nodded.
“As do I! I have met him many times, and fought beside him on occasion
—
and woe to those who stand before his scimitars!”
    That last bit didn’t go over well with the orcs, and one of them growled threateningly.
    “Drizzt is wounded in his heart,”
said the orc, and the creature grinned as if that fact pleased him immensely.
    Jarlaxle stared hard and tried to decipher that notion. “Catti-brie?”
“A fool now,”
the orc explained.
“Touched by magic. Daft by magic.”
A couple of the others chuckled.
    The Weave, Jarlaxle realized, for he was not ignorant of the traumatic events unfolding around him. Luskan, too, a city that once housed the Hosttower of the Arcane and still named many of the wizards of that place as citizens—and allies of Bregan D’aerthe—had certainly been touched by the unraveling Weave.
    “Where is she?”
Jarlaxle asked, and the orc shrugged as if it hardly cared.
    But Jarlaxle surely did, for a plan was already formulating. To defeat Hephaestus, he needed Cadderly. To enlist Cadderly, he needed Drizzt. Could it be that Catti-brie, and so Drizzt, needed Cadderly as well?
    * * * * *
    “Guenhwyvar,” the young girl called. Her eyes leveled in their sockets, showing their rich blue hue.
    Drizzt and Bruenor stood dumbfounded in the small chamber, staring at Catti-brie, whose demeanor had suddenly changed to that of her pre-teen self. She had floated off the bed again, rising as her eyes rolled to white, purple flames and crackling energy dancing all around her, her thick hair flowing in a wind neither Drizzt nor Bruenor could feel.
    Drizzt had seen this strange event before, and had warned Bruenor, but when his daughter’s posture and demeanor, everything about the way she held herself, had changed so subtly, yet dramatically, Bruenor nearly fell over with weakness. Truly she seemed a different person at that moment, a younger Catti-brie.
    Bruenor called to her, his voice thick with desperation and remorse, but she seemed not to notice.
    “Guenhwyvar?” she called again.
    She seemed to be walking then, slowly and deliberately, though she didn’t actually move. She held out one hand as if toward the cat—the cat who wasn’t there.
    Her voice was gentle and quiet when she asked, “Where’s the dark elf, Guenhwyvar? Can ye take me to him?”
    “By the gods,” Drizzt muttered.
    “What is it, elf?” Bruenor demanded.
    The young girl straightened, then slowly turned away from the pair. “Be ye a drow?” she asked. Then she paused, as though she heard a response. “I’ve heard that drow be evil, but ye don’t seem so to me.”
    “Elf?” Bruenor begged.
    “Her first words to me,” Drizzt whispered.
    “Me name’s Catti-brie,” she said, still talking to the wall away from the pair. “Me dad is Bruenor, King o’ Clan Battlehammer.”
    “She’s on Kelvin’s Cairn,” said Bruenor.
    “The dwarves,” Catti-brie said. “He’s not me real dad. Bruenor took me in when I was just a babe, when me real parents were …” She paused and swallowed hard.
    “The first time we met, on Kelvin’s Cairn,” Drizzt breathlessly explained, and indeed he was hearing the woman, then just a girl, exactly as he had that unseasonably warm winter’s day on the side of a faraway mountain.
    Catti-brie looked over her shoulder at them—no, not at them, but above them. “She’s a beautiful ca—” she started to say, but she sucked in her breath suddenly and her eyes rolled up into her head and her arms went out to her sides. The unseen magical energy rushed back into her once more, shaking her with its intensity.
    And before their astonished eyes, Catti-brie aged once again.
    By the time she floated down to the floor, both Drizzt and Bruenor were hugging her, and they gently moved her to her bed and laid her down.
    “Elf?” Bruenor asked, his voice thick with desperation.
    “I don’t know,” replied the trembling Drizzt. He tried to fight back the tears. The moment