Maestro (19 page)

It was obvious to the other two that Sos’Umptu wasn’t very happy with that answer, but she said nothing to deny it. She stood there shaking her head, again studying the paintings as if looking for clues. Finally she simply shrugged and sighed and let it go.

What could be said, after all?

Matron Mother Zhindia’s audience chamber was right next to the chapel, close enough for her, First Priestess Kyrnill Melarn, and their guest to hear the screams from Braelin as his long and excruciating transformation began.

“You are interested in the ceremony?” Zhindia asked her guest, seeing the priestess staring at the wall with clear intrigue.

“I have only witnessed it once,” Kiriy Xorlarrin replied, “when I was much younger. I have heard that it is quite satisfying.”

“Immensely,” Zhindia confirmed.

“But it would not do,” said Kiriy. “We cannot have Braelin seeing me here with you now.”

“There is no danger,” Kyrnill explained. “When Braelin walks as a drider, he will remember nothing but the agony of this day. And for the rest of his miserable days, if any thoughts against Lolth or the matron mother he serves enter his head, he will revisit that agony. He could never find the strength to betray your secret.”

“Do they suspect House Melarn?” Zhindia asked.

“House Do’Urden is full of clever nobles now,” Kiriy replied. “I have led them astray, as we agreed, into thinking that Bregan D’aerthe likely ambushed their patrol, but that theory will not hold long, particularly if the wizard Jaemas is somehow in league with Jarlaxle, as we believe.”

“We should move quickly then,” said Kyrnill.

“We must move quickly, particularly if these other whispers from the tunnels prove true,” said Zhindia.

Kiriy looked at her curiously.

“A sickness of the mind,” Matron Mother Zhindia explained. “Some say it is the thinning of the Faerzress. Others pose that the presence of the demon lords in the Underdark is the cause of the madness. But we know better. It is House Do’Urden, its mere existence, that so offends Lady Lolth. It will not stand.” She looked directly at the First Priestess of House Xorlarrin and qualified the remark, “Not in its present form.”

Kiriy nodded. They were going to tear down the hierarchy of House Do’Urden, murder that abomination Matron Mother Baenre had placed on the throne, and replace it with a House to the liking of the Spider Queen. It would be a House devout, in Melarn’s own image, a House that would correct both the abomination of Matron Mother Baenre and the wayward path Matron Mother Zeerith had steered for House Xorlarrin at the same time. And it would be a House with males put in their proper place in accordance with the edicts of Lolth, at long last.

If the fall of the abominable House Do’Urden also led to the fall of House Baenre, might the new Xorlarrin quickly ascend the city’s ranks? The thought teased Kiriy, particularly if they could wrangle an alliance with their once arch-rival, House Barrison Del’Armgo.

The promise of glory for the Xorlarrins remained, if the family had the foresight and the courage.

The promise of a new House devout, in Lolth’s favor, and in alliance with the new powers of Menzoberranzan: House Melarn and House Barrison Del’Armgo.

House Xorlarrin, led by Matron Mother Kiriy.

“What else did you give to the child beyond the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal?” Quenthel asked Methil later on when they were alone.

“I did as I was instructed,” the illithid answered in his gurgling voice. “Much as I did for you.”

“Much, but not all,” Quenthel accused. “There is more than simple illusion at play with that one. But it is not magical illusion at all, is it?”

“I am quite sure that it is,” Methil answered. “Your mother had some understanding of the old illusionary magic, and I know that this child was quite attentive when those memories were imparted.”

“More than that!” a frustrated Quenthel retorted. “A simple illusion would alter Yvonnel’s appearance somewhat. Even I can do that, and I cared little for that part of your . . . instruction. It’s not difficult for one skilled in the Art to simply alter her appearance, but what Yvonnel is doing is beyond that. She is not merely altering her appearance, but subtly managing the expectations and desires of each individual who looks upon her, even multiple individuals in the same room with her at the same time. And she’s doing it in a way that will gain her the greatest individual advantage over each observer.”

“Indeed, and she is doing it continually.”

“How?”

“I do not know,” the illithid replied. “Her sensitivity to the perceptions of others is instinctual.”

“No, she took this from you,” Quenthel said. “When your tentacles were in Minolin Fey’s womb, this baby, this creature, took more than you were offering. She borders on the mind magic of the illithids, if she is not fully there.”

“You would be better served in directing this to Lady Lolth,” Methil replied. “I do not doubt the power of Yvonnel. She is as strong as the Eternal.”

“
I
am as strong as the Eternal!” Quenthel snapped back.

Methil didn’t answer, and the matron mother understood that as a clear repudiation of her claim—and she knew, to her ultimate frustration, that Methil was correct in his assessment.

“The powers come so easily to her,” Quenthel lamented, more to herself than to the mind flayer. “To maintain such a ruse . . .”

H
e was a little older, a little thicker, his head a bit shinier, but Catti-brie recognized Niraj’s brilliant and inviting smile. She flew above the Desai encampment, just a short distance south of the mountainous area where the floating city of Shade Enclave had tumbled from the sky to crash and break apart in the foothills. He tended some sheep, filling a water trough and taking the time to speak to and pat each and every one.

The giant crow remained up high and circling. Catti-brie allowed herself a few moments to remember the earliest days of her second life. She had slept so peacefully in the arms of Kavita, and had enjoyed, with the perspective of an adult, the unconditional love and fatherly protection of Niraj as he fawned over her.

She would have her own children this time around, she told herself, and her crow head nodded. In that first life, there had been so many pressing needs—one adventure after another. Catti-brie didn’t regret any bit of that existence, didn’t lament her lack of progeny, but this time, it felt right to her. She was determined that she would share with Drizzt the warmth of familial love she had shared with these two.

But she had a terrible feeling that it wouldn’t come to pass, that Drizzt wouldn’t return to her this time. Had she waited too long already?

She shook aside her doubts and circled lower. When she was halfway to the ground, Niraj looked up at her. His eyes went wide and he stumbled back a step—this crow descending upon him and the tribe’s sheep was as large as he!

“Ah, back!” he stammered, and he backstepped and tried to shoo the sheep behind him.

Catti-brie swerved to the far end of the field and set down, transforming back into her human form. She approached an apprehensive Niraj, her face brightly smiling, her arms out to her sides.

For a moment, he seemed confused, but the word “Zibrija” slipped from his mouth.

Zibrija, the desert flower, the nickname Niraj had placed on his beloved daughter two decades ago.

Catti-brie held her arms out wider and shrugged, the sleeves of her magical garment dropping loosely above her elbow, revealing her spellscars. He sprinted at Catti-brie and crushed her in such a hug it lifted her from the ground and sent them both a few steps back the way Catti-brie had come.

“Zibrija, my child!” he said, his voice thick with emotion, his cherubic brown cheeks already wet with tears. “Zibrija!”

“Father,” she replied, and she hugged him back just as tightly. She loved this man, her father, with all her heart.

“Oh, the tales I have to tell you,” she whispered in his ear. She could tell he wanted to respond, but didn’t dare try to talk for fear that his voice would issue only a happy wail. He hugged her all the closer.

“Tell me that my mother is well,” Catti-brie whispered, and Niraj squeezed tighter and nodded emphatically.

Finally the brown-skinned man took a deep breath and steadied himself, and managed to push Catti-brie back to arms’ length.

“My Ruqiah,” he whispered, using the name she had been given at her second birth. “We never surrendered hope that we would see you again, but still . . . I cannot tell you how my heart wants to push right out of my chest!”

“You need not tell me,” Catti-brie replied. “I know.”

Niraj pulled her in close for another lengthy, tight hug.

“My mother,” Catti-brie whispered after a few moments, and the man nodded again and moved back, turning to the side and never letting go of her hand as he led her away.

Many eyes turned upon them as they entered the tent encampment of the Desai tribe, and many whispers erupted in their wake. Catti-brie resisted the temptation to cast a spell to heighten her hearing. She heard her name, Ruqiah, several times. The tribe remembered her.

“Whatever happened to that boy?” she asked Niraj. “The one who threw me into the mud?”

“Tahnood,” Niraj said solemnly, his tone alerting her. He turned to meet her concerned stare as he finished, “He did not survive the war.”

Catti-brie’s regret washed away almost immediately on deeper concerns as she registered the last word.

“The war?” she echoed.

“The Netherese,” Niraj explained. “The plains were afire with battle for many months. The crows of our lands are fatter now.”

He turned to her and gave a sly wink. “Not as thick as the crow who spied upon me at the sheep pen, though.”

Catti-brie managed a smile, but her heart was heavy. “Did you fight?”

“We all fought.”

The woman didn’t know what to say, and settled on, “I am sorry, Father. I should have returned to you.”

“My greatest joy in that dark time is that you were not here. Would that Kavi, too, had found another home for those dark years.”

“Not with me,” Catti-brie remarked. “I assure you my own road was no brighter.” She stopped the march and tugged Niraj’s hand to force him to stop, too, and to look at her. “I have so much to tell you. I don’t know if you’ll enjoy my tale or not, but it is one I must share honestly.”

“You are alive and seem well.”

She smiled and nodded.

“Then no tale you tell me can wound me, my little Zubrija.”

When they entered the family tent, Catti-brie had to leap across the floor to catch Kavita, who gasped and collapsed in joy at the sight of her.

Catti-brie gladly buried her face in Kavita’s thick black hair, and she drank in the smell of the woman, the smell of her childhood.

“You haven’t aged,” Catti-brie whispered in the woman’s ear.

Kavita kissed her on the cheek.

“Nayan keeps her young,” Niraj said, and when Catti-brie looked back at him, he nodded his chin toward the far end of the room.

Catti-brie’s gaze locked on the small bed, and her jaw drooped open.

“Nayan?” she whispered, pulling back from Kavita. She looked to her mother, who smiled and nodded then motioned for her to go and see.

Catti-brie quietly moved across the room. She saw a bit of movement first, under some blankets, and she paused, overwhelmed by the thought that she had a brother—overwhelmed and not sure how to even consider this child. Was he really her brother? Similarly, were Niraj and Kavita actually her parents? She had come back to the world fully conscious of her previous life, a life where she had been born to other parents, though she had barely known, and remembered nothing of, her father, and had known her mother not at all.

Still, where did she fit here with this Desai family? She did not even consider herself Desai! Was Kavita no more than a carrier for the will of Mielikki?

These questions had followed Catti-brie since her earliest days in this strange second life.

The blankets moved and the little boy, Nayan, rolled over into sight, his head covered in thick black hair like Kavita, his mouth and jowls wide and expressive like Niraj.

And Catti-brie had her answer, to all of it. The explosion in her heart offered no room for doubt.

This was her baby brother. And these were her parents, her mother and her father, and that it was her second life mattered not at all.

She was home. This was her family, as much as Mithral Hall had been her home and Bruenor was forever her Da.

Whether she was Desai or not mattered not at all, no more than the fact that she wasn’t a dwarf—nay less, she decided, because she was human, just like this family, just like this tribe. The rest of it—skin color, hair color, homeland—was nonsense, fabricated by people who needed to pretend that they were somehow superior for such superficial reasons.

None of it mattered. This was her family, and she could only love them as such.

Nayan opened his dark eyes then. He looked right at her and his whole face smiled, his mouth all crooked and wide and with just a couple of tiny teeth showing.

Catti-brie, charmed, turned back to her parents, who stood together now, leaning on each other.

“May I?”

Kavita laughed. “I will be angry with you if you do not!”

Catti-brie scooped Nayan up in her arms, lifted him up in front of her eyes, and made giggling, nonsensical noises. She had no idea why she might be doing that, but she surely was, and as Nayan thoroughly enjoyed it and laughed aloud, she didn’t stop for a long while, until her arms got tired and she brought the young mister in close on her hip.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, turning back to Niraj and Kavita. “He has just enough of both of you, the best features of both.”

“We are just glad he got Kavita’s hair,” the bald-headed Niraj laughed and winked.

“Tell me you are returned to us,” Kavita bade her. “The threat of Shade Enclave is no more. We are safe now, and so much happier will we be with our Ruqiah with us.”

The smile disappeared from Catti-brie’s face and she gave a resigned sigh. “Mother, Father . . .” she began, shaking her head. “I have so much to tell you, so much I can tell you now. I left you confused.”

“Speaking of the goddess Mielikki and spouting prophecy about the return of Anauroch,” said Niraj.

“You are a chosen, so you claimed,” Kavita added.

“You remember.”

“Remember?” Kavita echoed incredulously, and she rushed across the floor. “Every heartbeat, I remember,” she said, and she seemed as if she was about to wail. “It was the day I lost my baby girl.” Her voice began to crack. “It has haunted my dreams for twenty years.”

“We always hoped you would come back to us,” Niraj added, moving beside Kavita and taking her arm.

“Let us sit,” Catti-brie bade them. “And I will tell you everything. All of it. And you must believe me, and you must understand that none of it changes the way I feel about you, the love I know here from you. That love sustains me. I need you now, both of you.”

On her hip, Nayan gurgled a spit-filled response.

“And you, too!” Catti-brie said with a laugh. She jostled Nayan, and that was all it took to get him laughing yet again.

“All of it,” she said more seriously to Niraj and Kavita, “the truth of the past, the truth of my arrival into your home, and the promise of the future.”

She motioned to the small table and chairs in the tent and the three sat down, Catti-brie placing Nayan on a rug right beside her chair, Kavita tossing her a bunch of plains-grass dolls Niraj had made for the child, to toy with or chew on as he chose.

And so Catti-brie somberly told her parents the truth—everything, from the details of her previous life to the journey that had led her from Mithral Hall to the divine forest of Iruladoon to Kavita’s womb. These two were not simple nomads; both were trained in the Art, and though Catti-brie noted the doubts expressed initially on their faces—surely they thought their daughter had lost her mind—she could see that she was clearly breaking down the barriers of denial. She watched as Kavita’s hand crept nearer and nearer to Niraj’s, finally clasping his hand tightly and squeezing as if to save her very sanity.

And he was no less glad of the grasp.

Catti-brie told them of her departure from the Desai, trapped and dragged to her time in Shade Enclave with Lady Avelyere and the Coven. She told them of Longsaddle and her journey to fulfill her promise to Mielikki and go to Drizzt, her drow husband—which raised a few eyebrows—on Kelvin’s Cairn. She told them of the war in the west, the Silver Marches.

She told them of Gauntlgrym, of her other father who was now king, of her current quest to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane, and the mission that had brought her back to their side.

She finished and leaned forward, placing a hand on the knee of each. “Every word I told you was the truth. You deserve that much at least from me.”

Kavita nodded, but Niraj just sat there staring blankly, trying to digest the amazing story.

For a long while, they sat in silence, other than when Nayan found something particularly amusing or tasty.

“The Netherese remain in the hills below where Shade Enclave once floated,” Niraj confirmed for her, finally.

“You cannot go to them,” said Kavita, shaking her head. “The war is over, but they are no friend to Desai. They will throw you in shackles and use you—”

“I go with the imprimatur of a very powerful friend, who is allied with Lord Parise Ulfbinder,” Catti-brie replied. “An urgent request the Netherese lord will not ignore, and so he will not dare threaten me in any way.”

“You cannot know!” Kavita retorted, but Niraj put his hand on her leg and nodded comfortingly to the rightly-worried mother.

“Perhaps our little Ruqiah has earned our trust,” he said.

Kavita looked into Catti-brie’s eyes. “Our little Ruqiah,” she echoed in a whisper. “Can we even call you that?”

“Of course you can,” said Catti-brie, grinning happily, but that smile did not charm Kavita.

“A mother wishes to pass on wisdom to her child,” she said. “A mother hopes to give to her child all she will need to be happy in life. How can I call you my Ruqiah? You needed nothing from me other than nourishment in your earliest years. You needed none of my wisdom or experience. It seems that your life—
both
your lives—were more filled with experience than my own.”

Catti-brie shook her head through every word.

“I wish you were my Ruqiah,” Kavita finished. She lowered her head and Niraj grabbed her close.

“You are wrong,” Catti-brie flatly declared. “I thought the same thing, even when I was leaving you. I was grateful—how could I not be?—but I, too, saw this life here with you as a stopover, and feared in my own heart that you, that you both, were no more than innkeepers along the road of my journey.”

She could see from Niraj’s shocked expression and from Kavita’s bobbing shoulders that her honesty stung them, but she pressed on.

“But now I know I was wrong,” she said. “I knew it from the moment I returned to this land on a separate matter, not so long ago, and now again that I have come back. I knew it without doubt when I looked upon Niraj, my father, and upon you, my mother, and upon my baby brother.”

Kavita looked up and stared into her eyes.

“There was little you could teach me about being an adult, true,” Catti-brie went on, and she gave a little laugh. “Even then as your infant, I was older than you by two decades! But being a parent, being a family, is much more than simple education. What you gave to me was your love. Even when I put you in danger, were your thoughts anywhere but upon my safety?”