Plodding along a slow and rocky trail, they had to walk the horses more than ride them. Every passing inch tor mented Catti-brie. She had seen the light of a campfire the previous night and knew in her heart that it had been Drizzt. She had gone straight to her horse, meaning to saddle up and head out, using the light as a beacon to the drow, but Fret had stopped her, explaining that the magical horseshoes that their mounts wore did not protect the beasts from exhaustion. He reminded her, too, of the dangers she would likely encounter in the mountains at night.
Catti-brie had gone back to her own fire then, thoroughly miser able. She considered calling for Guenhwyvar and sending the pan ther out for Drizzt, but shook the notion away The campfire was just a dot somewhere on the higher trails, many miles away, and she had no way of knowing, rationally, that it was indeed Drizzt.
Now, though, crossing along the higher trails, making their steady but painfully slow way in that very same direction, Catti-brie feared that she had erred. She watched Fret, scratching his white beard, looking this way and that at the unremarkable landscape, and wished they had that campfire to guide them.
"We will get there!" the tidy dwarf often said to her, looking back into her disgusted expression.
Morning turned into afternoon; long shadows drifted across the landscape.
"We must make camp, " Fret announced as twilight descended.
"We're going on, " Catti-brie argued. "If that was Drizzt's fire, then he's a day up on us already, no matter for yer magical horse shoes!"
"I cannot hope to find the cave in the darkness!" the dwarf retorted. "We could find a giant, or a troll, perhaps, and I'm sure that many wolves will be about, but a cave?" Looking into Catti brie's deepening scowl, Fret began to ponder the wisdom of his sar casm.
"Oh, all right!" the tidy dwarf cried. "We will keep looking until the night is full."
They pressed on, until Catti-brie could hardly see her horse walking beside her and Fret's pony nearly stumbled over the edge of a ravine. Finally, even stubborn Catti-brie had to relent and agree to make camp.
After they had settled in, she went and found a tree, a tall pine, and climbed nearly to its top to keep her vigil. If the light of a camp fire came up, the young woman determined, she would set out, or would at least send the panther.
There were no campfires that night.
As soon as the dawn's light permitted, the two set off again. Barely an hour out, Fret clapped his clean hands together excitedly, thinking that he had found a familiar trail. "We are not far, " he promised.
Up and down went the trail, into rocky, tree filled valleys, and up again across bare, windswept stone. Fret tethered his pony to a tree branch and led the way up the steep side of one mound, telling Catti-brie that they had found the place, only to discover, two hours of climbing later, that they had scaled the wrong mountain.
In midafternoon they discovered that Fret's earlier promise that they were "not far, " was accurate. When he had made that state ment, the cave the dwarf sought was no more than half a mile from their location. But finding a specific cave in mountain territory is no easy task, even for a dwarf, and Fret had been to the place only once, nearly twenty years before.
He found it, finally, as the shadows again grew long in the mountains. Catti-brie shook her head as she examined the entrance and the fire pit that had been used two nights before. The embers had been tended with great care, such as a ranger might do.
"He was here, " the young woman said to the dwarf, "two nights ago." Catti-brie rose from the fire pit and brushed her thick auburn locks back from her face, eyeing the dwarf as though he was to blame. She looked out from the cave, back across the mountains, to where they had been, to the location from which they had seen this very fire.
"We could not have gotten here that night, " the dwarf answered. "You could have run off, or ridden off, into the darkness with all speed, and, "
"The firelight would've shown us through, " Catti-brie inter rupted.
"For how long?" the dwarf demanded. "We found one vantage point, one hole through the towering peaks. As soon as we went into a ravine, or crossed close to the side of a mountain, the light would have been lost to us. Then where would we be, stubborn daughter of Bruenor?"
Again Catti-brie's scowl stopped the dwarf short. He sighed profoundly and threw up his hands.
He was right, Catti-brie knew. While they had gone no more than a few miles deeper into the mountains since that night, the trails had been treacherous, climbing and descending, winding snakelike around the many rocky peaks. She and the dwarf had walked a score of miles, at least, to get to this point, and even if she had summoned Guenhwyvar, there was no way the panther could have caught up to Drizzt.
That logic did little to quell the frustration boiling within Catti brie. She had vowed to follow Drizzt, to find him and bring him home, but now, standing at the edge of a forlorn cave in a wild place, she faced the entrance to the Underdark.
"We will go back to Lady Alustriel, " Fret said to her. "Perhaps she has some allies, she has so many of those!, who will be better able to locate the drow."
"What're ye saying?" Catti-brie wanted to know.
"It was a valiant chase, " Fret replied. "Your father will be proud of your effort, but, "
Catti-brie rushed up to the dwarf, pushed him aside, and stum bled down toward the back of the cave, toward the blackness of a descending tunnel entrance. She stubbed her toe hard against a jag in the floor, but refused to cry out, even to grunt, not wanting Fret to think her ridiculous. In fumbling with her pack, though, trying to get to her tinderbox, lantern, and oil, Catti-brie thought herself so just the same.