“Leave,” she instructed the dwarf and the monk as she descended.
“Aye, but we’re too close to be takin’ such a gamble as that,” Ambergris warned.
Dahlia didn’t blink, and didn’t regard the dwarf, her eyes locked on the small figure reclining in a hammock across the way.
“Tie him, then,” Ambergris instructed the monk, but before Afafrenfere took a step toward Effron, Dahlia repeated, “Leave,” her tone leaving no room for debate.
The dwarf and the monk exchanged looks and shrugs, and neither seemed to care much at that time.
“Ye do what ye need do,” Ambergris offered, moving up to the deck behind her monk companion.
“We are almost in port,” Dahlia said when she and Effron were alone in the small aft hold.
He didn’t even look her way.
“Memnon,” she explained, moving to a chair beside his hammock. “An exotic city, from what I have heard. Southern and very different from—”
“Why would I care?” he interrupted, though he didn’t turn to regard her.
“Look at me,” she bade.
“Get out,” he replied.
Dahlia moved in a rush, leaping up, grabbing Effron and yanking him so roughly that he tumbled out of his hammock to crash down to the floor. He came up at once, violence shining clearly in his distinct eyes, one tiefling red, one elf blue.
“Sit down,” Dahlia commanded, motioning to a second chair.
“Jump into the sea,” he replied.
Dahlia took her seat anyway, and stared up at this half-elf, half-tiefling.
“I need to tell you, and you need to listen,” she said quietly.
“And then?”
Dahlia shrugged.
“And then you kill me?” Effron asked.
“No,” Dahlia answered, her voice thick with resignation.
“And then I kill you?”
“Would that please you?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t believe him, but understood why he had to say that. “Then perhaps I will let you, or maybe I will just let you walk away.”
Effron looked at her incredulously. “In Memnon?”
Dahlia shrugged as if it didn’t matter and motioned again to the chair, but Effron remained standing.
It didn’t matter. The elf woman took a deep breath. “For every moment since I learned who you truly were, in the bowels of Gauntlgrym, I have dreaded this,” she said, hardly able to keep her voice from cracking apart.
“Dreaded? Your admission? Did we not already have this conversation, in the hold of another boat in dock at Baldur’s Gate?”
“No,” she said, looking down in shame. “You already have my admission. You didn’t need it, because everything Herzgo Alegni has told you about that day when he first caught sight of you is no doubt true. There would be no need for him to embellish my crime.” She gave a helpless snort. “I did it.”
Dahlia took a deep breath, steeled herself, and looked Effron directly in the eye. “I threw you from the cliff. I denied your existence and wanted it … obliterated.” She took another deep breath to stop herself from simply falling over and dissolving on the floor. “I denied you. I had to.”
“Witch,” he muttered. “Murderess.”
“All true,” she said. “Do you even care why?”
That comment knocked Effron off balance, it seemed, and Dahlia had expected as much. Effron hadn’t killed her, hadn’t even tortured her, when he had her at his mercy in the hold of the scow in Baldur’s Gate. Most of all, he yelled at her, and asked her questions that had no answers.
But perhaps she had an explanation, and perhaps that was what the young warlock truly wanted.
“I was barely more than a girl,” Dahlia went on. “It wasn’t so long ago, but it seems like an eternity. And still I remember the day, every moment, every step—”
“The day you tried to murder me.”
Dahlia shook her head and looked down. “The day Herzgo Alegni tore my body and my heart.” A sob shivered her, but she would not give it credence, would not allow herself to go there. Not now.
She took another deep and steadying breath, and she determined to look him in the eye again, and was surprised when she at last glanced up to find him sitting in the chair across the way, staring back at her.
“I went to the river to fetch some water,” she began. “That was my morning chore, and one I relished.” She gave a helpless little laugh. “To be out in the forest alone, in the sunshine and with the birds and the small animals all around. Could an elf lass ask for more?”
Another uncomfortable laugh escaped her lips as she looked down once more.
She told her tale, and never once looked up at Effron. She told of the surprise she found waiting at her clan’s small village, of the marauding Shadovar, led by Herzgo Alegni. She didn’t hold back anything for Effron’s sensibilities or her own as she told of Alegni’s reaction to her, and fully detailed his violation, and his ultimate betrayal in the decapitation of her beloved mother.
Tears dripped from her eyes as she continued, describing the months that followed, the pain and the fear, honestly and in full, nor did she shy from the truth of that fateful day when she went to pay back Herzgo Alegni for his crimes.
“You didn’t matter,” she whispered. “It was not about you, even though it was in reality all about you. But I didn’t see that.”
“You could have run!” he shouted at her, and there was a profound shakiness to his voice.
“I know,” she whispered. “But I didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t you just leave me? Do you know the pain I have suffered?”
“You were my only weapon,” Dahlia said, and that was enough, she realized, for that was all she had. Before Effron could reply, she stood up and walked for the ladder.
“You can leave us in Memnon,” she told him, “and I will not stop you. You can find me and kill me if you choose. I will not resist, and I will demand of my companions that they exact no revenge upon you, whatever my torment or ultimate fate.”
Looking up the ladder and not back at him, she paused and waited for a tirade that did not come.
So Dahlia left him there.
“Do you wish to talk about it?” Drizzt asked Dahlia that night when he came to her as she sat alone on the deck. Guenhwyvar paced wearily beside him.
Dahlia turned to Drizzt and stared at him, considering the question, trying to fathom something from the tone. There was no hostility there. He knew about her tryst with Entreri, she knew without doubt, for Ambergris had warned Entreri of Effron’s revelations, and he in turn had told Dahlia.
But neither was there comprehension in Drizzt, Dahlia believed, and apparently that showed in her expression, for Drizzt then remarked, “I grew up in a dark place. Perhaps I do not understand that which you have suffered, but my own life, for longer than you have been alive, was spent among a culture that thought nothing of murder and deception.”
Dahlia licked her lips, a bit off guard by this uncharacteristic display. Drizzt was reaching out to her. Despite the distance that had grown between them—a gulf that had driven her to Artemis Entreri, no less!—the drow seemed to be honestly trying here. The elf woman reached over and patted Guen and the panther curled up at her feet, gave a great, toothy yawn, and sank down to the deck.
She appreciated Drizzt’s integrity, but still, there was nothing for her to say. Not then.
Drizzt reached out his arms and Dahlia accepted the invitation. She was truly grateful for the hug. She even admitted to herself that if Drizzt tried to take that hug to further intimacy, she wouldn’t stop him.
But he didn’t, and in a roundabout way, that seemed to Dahlia a rejection in and of itself. She moved to line up with Drizzt’s face and kissed him passionately.
Or tried to, for he turned away at the last moment.
Dahlia gave a little cry and grabbed at him forcefully, trying to push herself upon him. Drizzt was too strong for that, however, and he held her there.
So she punched him and pulled back instead, and he grabbed her and hugged her close again, tighter this time, pinning her arms.
She wanted to kill him!
Nay, she wanted to, needed to, make love to him. She needed him against her and inside her. She needed to devour him, to use him as her emotional anchor, to know that he loved her as she …
Dahlia stopped struggling and found it hard to breathe.
After a short while, Drizzt pushed her back to arms’ length, and said, “Go and see Effron again, as often as you can.”
Dahlia felt her jaw drop open, and she held that pose as Drizzt turned to the mainmast. “Be gone, Guen,” he said, dismissing Dahlia as surely as he was the cat, for he then scrambled up to his post—a post that had become his most customary perch, even throughout the nights.
Dahlia didn’t know what to think, or what to feel. She needed Drizzt at that moment, but he had left.
She needed her lover.
Dahlia had never needed a lover.
Never!
Until now, and she needed him and he had walked away, and it was her fault. Why had she gone to Entreri that night in Baldur’s Gate? Was it anger that had driven her to his bed? Or was it fear of these startling and undeniable feelings toward this rogue drow?
She felt as if she were on that cliff again, throwing Effron to the wind. She had ruined him on that fateful day, but she had invariably ruined herself as well.
Had she done the same in going to Entreri?
She watched Guenhwyvar dissolving into gray mist, into nothingness, and she saw that as an appropriate representation of her relationship with Drizzt.
“Go to Effron,” Drizzt called down to her, and she felt as if he were reading her inner turmoil. “You can repair this.”
Effron.
“Effron,” she whispered under her breath.
Dahlia found herself terrified of even daring to hope. She wanted nothing more than to cut her own wrist and melt down onto the deck and sob until death mercifully ended this cruel torment.
But Drizzt’s words kept echoing in her thoughts, denying the despair.
Eventually, the elf woman managed to turn and look over her shoulder, in the direction of the aft hatch and the small room where Effron remained.
She went there, quietly, and didn’t even rouse the sleeping dwarf and monk, or Effron, who tossed and turned in his hammock with troubled dreams. She quietly set the chair near that hammock, and eventually put her hand on Effron’s twisted shoulder, whispering for him to be still.
She fell asleep there, and when she woke up, she found Effron staring back at her from the hammock, but making no move to push her hand away, for it remained on his shoulder.
She tried to decipher the young warlock’s expression, but found she could not. Certainly, the pain remained etched on his thin and angular features, but what she could not then see, however, was the venom that had been so clear previously.
Dahlia swallowed hard. “We put into Memnon this day,” she said. “I hold to my word, if that is your choice.” Her voice nearly broke apart as she finished, “I hope you will sail back out with us.”
