“We are still badly outnumbered,” Shayleigh put in, “but our enemy is disorganized and confused. With both Ragnor and Dorigen dead—”
Cadderly’s sudden grunt stopped her and turned all eyes toward the young scholar.
“Dorigen is not dead,” he admitted. The looks all around him turned sour, but the most painful retort to Cadderly, by far, was the sharpness of Danica’s tone.
“You did not finish her?” the young woman cried. “You had her down and helpless.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I’m doomed!” Rufo wailed. “Dorigen will see to our end—to my end, you fool!” he yelled at Cadderly.
“Are ye looking for another nap?” Ivan asked him, and Rufo realized from Danica’s scowl that he would be wise to remain silent.
But Kierkan Rufo did have an ally.
“Fool indeed!” roared Elbereth. “How?” he demanded of Cadderly. “Why did you let the wizard escape?”
Cadderly couldn’t begin to explain, knew that his admission of compassion would not be appreciated by the new elf king. He was truly amazed at how quickly Elbereth had apparently forgotten his actions in the battle, in Syldritch Trea and against Ragnor, and in saving Tintagel.
“Dorigen cannot use her magical powers,” the young scholar offered weakly. “She is sorely wounded and stripped of her magical devices.”
Cadderly unconsciously dropped a hand into his pocket to feel the rings he’d taken from Dorigen. He had considered giving them and Dorigen’s wand to Tintagel, to learn if they might aid in the fighting, but he had dismissed the notion and resolved to check out the dangerous devices himself when he found the time.
Cadderly’s claims did nothing to alleviate Elbereth’s anger. “Her presence will bring unity to our enemies!” the elf growled. “That alone dooms Shilmista!” Elbereth shook his head and stalked away, Shayleigh at his side. The others, too, dispersed, Pikel sadly, leaving Cadderly and Danica alone by the campfire.
“Mercy,” Cadderly remarked. He looked at his love, and caught her brown eyes in a gaze that would not let go. “Mercy,” he whispered again. “Does that make me weak?”
Danica spent a long moment considering the question. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
They stood quietly, watching the fire and the stars for a very long time. Cadderly slipped his hand into Danica’s and she accepted the grasp, if somewhat hesitantly.
“I will remain in the forest,” she said finally, dropping Cadderly’s hand. Cadderly looked at her, but she didn’t return the stare. “To fight beside Elbereth and Shayleigh. The priests will arrive tomorrow, so it’s rumored. Likely they will stay a few days to forge pacts with the elves, and some might remain to fight on. But most, I assume, will return to the library. You should go with them.”
Cadderly found no words to reply. Was Danica sending him away? Had she, too, perceived his compassion as weakness?
“This is not your place,” Danica whispered.
Cadderly took a step away from her. “Was Syldritch Trea my place, then?” he grumbled coldly, as angry with Danica as he’d ever been. “And have you heard of how mighty Ragnor met his end? Or have you forgotten Barjin?”
“I don’t question your value,” Danica answered, finally turning to regard him, “in this fight, as in anything. You will find no comfort in the continuing battle for Shilmista, just more violence, more killing. I don’t like what that will do to you. I don’t like what it’s done to me.”
“What are you saying?”
“There is a coldness here,” Danica replied, poking a finger to her heart. She crossed her arms in front of her as if to ward off a wintry blast. “A numbness,” she continued. “A fading of compassion. How easily I told you to kill Dorigen …” She stopped, choked by the admission, and looked away.
Cadderly’s visage softened with sincere pity.
“Go away,” Danica begged. “Go back to the library. Go home.”
“No,” Cadderly replied. “That place was never my home.”
Danica turned back and eyed him curiously, expecting some revelation.
“This is not my place, that much is true,” Cadderly went on, “and I have little fight left in me, I fear. I will leave with the priests when they depart, but to the library only long enough to retrieve my belongings.”
“Then where?” Danica’s voice hinted, just a tiny bit, of desperation.
Cadderly shrugged. He wanted desperately to beg Danica to come away with him, but he knew that he must not, and that she would refuse in any case. It struck them both then that this was farewell, perhaps forever.
Danica embraced Cadderly and kissed him hard then moved back and pushed him away.
“I wanted to stay beside you when the fighting began in earnest,” she said, “after the trees had come to life. But I knew I couldn’t, that the situation would not allow me my wishes.”
“And so it is now,” Cadderly said, “for both of us.”
He ran his fingers through Danica’s strawberry-blond hair, matted and tangled from so many days of battle.
Danica started to kiss him again, but changed her mind and walked away instead.
Cadderly remained at Deny Ridge for five more days, but he did not see her again.
EPILOGUE
You should have stayed in the forest,” Aballister said, pacing the length of his small room at Castle Trinity.
Dorigen wisely kept her stare locked upon him. Unlike Barjin’s demise, the defeat in Shilmista had brought a somber mood to the head of Castle Trinity, a real fear that his plans for conquest might not be so easily accomplished. He still had more than three thousand soldiers at his command, and many more might be salvaged from the tribes returning to their mountain homes, but Shilmista was lost, at least for the time being, and the new elf king was determined and valorous. Dorigen had heard, and recounted for Aballister, many tales concerning mighty Elbereth’s exploits in the battle for the wood.
“You should have stayed!” the older wizard growled again, more forcefully.
“I would not remain among such treacherous rabble with my fingers broken,” Dorigen answered, holding up her bandaged hands. “Do you really believe that I would have been safe among goblins and orcs?”
Aballister couldn’t deny the truth of her observations. He had seen firsthand what wild goblinoids might do to a woman.
“Without you to guide them, Ragnor’s army is no more than scattered bands,” he reasoned, “easy targets for the organized elves and this new king they hold so dear. We will be months in recovering our losses.”
“The goblins will find a leader amongst them,” Dorigen replied.
“One loyal to us?” Aballister asked.
“We still have time before the onset of winter to go back and set things in Shilmista to our advantage,” Dorigen snapped back at him, not conceding an inch regarding her decision to leave. “The elves are not many, no matter how well organized and how well led they might be. For all their gains now, they’ll surely have a long road in ridding Shilmista of the dark plague Castle Trinity has dropped upon it.”
“You should have stayed.”
“And you should have watched out for your son!” Dorigen rejoined before her better judgment could overrule her actions.
Druzil, perched on Aballister’s desk, groaned and folded his leathery wings around him, certain that his master was about to blast Dorigen into little pieces.
Nothing happened. After several moments of silence, Dorigen, also fearful, realized that she had hit a sensitive area, one where even mighty Aballister felt vulnerable.
“Cadderly,” the wizard mumbled. “Twice he has wandered into my way—and I had thought myself rid of the boy. Well, the first inconvenience could be forgotten. I wasn’t so certain I wanted Barjin to conquer the library in any case,” the wizard admitted. “But this! No, Cadderly has become too much a threat to be tolerated.”
“How do you intend to end that threat?” Dorigen asked. She could hardly belie
ve the coldness on Aballister’s face when he spoke of his long-lost son.
“Boygo Rath has some helpful connections in Westgate,” Aballister answered, his thin lips curling up in a wicked smile.
Dorigen winced, suspecting what the wizard had in mind.
“You have heard of the Night Masks?” Aballister asked.
Dorigen winced again at the mention of the assassins guild. Of course she had heard of them—everyone from the Dragon Reach to Waterdeep had heard of them. She nodded, her expression openly revealing her disbelief that Aballister would be wicked enough to hire such a band to kill his own son.
Aballister laughed at that incredulous expression. “Let us just say,” he remarked, “that Cadderly, too, will soon hear of them.”
Dorigen took the news with mixed feelings. She was angry with Cadderly, to be sure, for what he had done to her, but she could not ignore the fact that the young priest easily could have killed her. She shrugged her thoughts away and reminded herself that it was none of her affair, that what transpired next was between Aballister, Boygo, and Cadderly.
And the Night Masks.
“Them goblin things are to be dancing in the trees tonight when they hear that ye’re a dead one,” Ivan remarked, cutting an easy swipe with his great axe.
“More likely, they shall sing of the death of a dwarf,” Elbereth retorted, easily backing from the lazy swing. He rushed in behind the swipe, looking for an opening, but Ivan’s defenses were back in place before the elf got within reach.
“What’s an Elbereth?” Ivan taunted, white teeth shining through his yellow beard.
“I shall use that phrase for your epitaph!” the elf roared, and he played his sword through a dazzling display of feints and thrusts, ending up with its point sinking through Ivan’s armor, toward the dwarf’s chest.
Ivan fell back and blinked stupidly.
“Oo,” moaned Pikel from the side, a sentiment echoed by Shayleigh, Tintagel, and many of the other gathered elves, including even Elbereth.
“Ye killed me, elf,” Ivan grunted, his breath coming hard. He stumbled backward, barely holding his balance.
Elbereth lowered his sword and rushed in, terrified at what he’d done. When he got two steps from Ivan, bending low to examine the wound, he noticed Ivan’s lips curl up in a smile and knew he had been deceived.
“Hee hee hee,” came a knowing chuckle from the side.
Ivan turned his axe sideways and thumped Elbereth on the forehead, sending him tumbling backward. The elf threw his weight into the roll and came back to his feet some distance away. He watched curiously as two images of Ivan Bouldershoulder steadily closed.
“Ye think yer skinny blade’d get through me dwarven armor?” Ivan huffed. “Silly elf.”
They joined in melee again, Ivan taking the lead. Elbereth learned his lesson well, and he used his superior speed and agility to parry Ivan’s attacks and keep out of the dwarf’s shorter reach. Every time the cunning elf found an opening, he slapped the side of his sword against the side of Ivan’s head.
He might as well have been banging stone.
After many moments, the only somewhat serious wound came when Ivan tripped and inadvertently dropped the head of his heavy axe on Elbereth’s toes.
A sound spread around the perimeter of the battle, where nearly the entire elven camp had by then gathered:
“Hee hee hee.”
Cadderly looked out the open window, beyond the rooftops of Carradoon, toward Impresk Lake, but his thoughts were many miles away, back in the forest he had left a month before. The morning fog rose from the still water, and a distant loon uttered its mournful cry.
Where is Danica now? Cadderly wondered. And what of Ivan and Pikel?
The young scholar dearly missed his friends and lumped that emptiness into the same void he’d discovered when he realized that the Edificant Library was not his home, and never had been.
He had gone back to the library with Headmaster Avery, Kierkan Rufo, and a score of other priests after leaving Shilmista. Avery had begged him to stay and continue his studies, but Cadderly would not, could not. Nothing about the place seemed familiar to the young scholar anymore. He couldn’t help but view the library as a lie, a facade of serenity in a world gone mad.
“There are too many questions,” Cadderly had told the headmaster. “And here I fear that I will find too few of the answers.”
So young Cadderly had taken his purse and his walking stick, and all the other possessions he had considered worthwhile, and left the library, doubting he would ever return.
A knock on the door broke the young scholar from his contemplations. He moved across the small room and cracked open the portal just enough to retrieve the breakfast plate that had been left for him.
When he’d finished his meal, he replaced the plate outside his door, leaving a silver coin as a tip for obliging Brennan, son of the innkeeper of the Dragon’s Codpiece. Cadderly had asked for his privacy and the innkeeper had given it to him without question, delivering his meals and leaving him alone.
The calls in the street began again shortly after, as Cadderly expected they would. Carradoon was being roused for war; a force was quickly being mustered to organize a defense of the town. At first, the call was for soldiers to go to the aid of the elves in their noble battle for Shilmista, but the latest reports had changed that. Shilmista was secured, it seemed, with most of the scattered goblinoids fully on the run.
Still the force in Carradoon swelled, and restrictions, including a curfew, had been placed on the town.
Cadderly didn’t enjoy the rising level of anxiety, but he thought the town wise in making preparations. The evil that had inspired Barjin’s attempt on the Edificant Library and Ragnor’s invasion of Shilmista was not fully defeated, Cadderly knew, and it would no doubt soon descend over Carradoon.
Cadderly didn’t close his window against those calls. The wind coming off the lake was comfortably cool and gave him at least some tie to the outside world. Reverently, the young scholar took out his most valuable possession, The Tome of Universal Harmony, opened it on his small desk, and sat down to read.
Too many questions filled his mind.
CONTINUE YOUR
ADVENTURE
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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. ©2011 Wizards.
R.A. Salvatore
R.A. Salvatore was born in Massachusetts in 1959. His love affair with fantasy, and with literature in general, began during his sophomore year of college when he was given a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift. He promptly changed his major from computer science to journalism. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Communications in 1981 then returned for the degree he always cherished, the Bachelor of Arts in English. He began writing seriously in 1982, penning the manuscript that would become Echoes of the Fourth Magic.
His first published novel was The Crystal Shard from TSR in 1988 and he is still best known as the creator of the dark elf Drizzt, one of fantasy’s most beloved characters.
His novel The Silent Blade won the Origins Award, and in the fall of 1997, his letters, manuscripts, and other professional papers were donated to the R.A. Salvatore Library at his alma mater, Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
FORGOTTEN REALMS, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, their respective logos, and THE LEGEND OF DRIZZT are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Other tradem
arks are property of their respective owners. ©2011 Wizards.
R. A. Salvatore, In Sylvan Shadows
(Series: The Cleric Quintet # 2)
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