1Uncle Wulfgar“Many shadows,” Wulfgar whispered to Breezy. He shook his head. The sun hadn’t broken the eastern horizon before them, but the snowy mountaintops were beginning to glisten, and the sky beyond them was brightening.
“I prefer the shadows,” Breezy replied. She reached for the buckle of her belt, a very special buckle, and uttered a simple command word while pressing a button just underneath its lip. With a few clicks and a whooshing sound, the seemingly normal belt buckle unrolled, producing a polished compound bow, ready and strung with a bowstring that shimmered with lightning energy.
Wulfgar glanced back at her. “Do you know how to use that?” he asked, nodding his chin toward that bow, a fabulous weapon called Taulmaril the Heartseeker.
“Pull back the string,” she answered with a noncommittal shrug.
The giant man, standing nearer to seven feet than six, his arms as thick as Breezy’s thighs, brushed long wavy blond hair back from his stubbled face, narrowing eyes the color of a cloudless Icewind Dale sky to offer a look both sour and intimidating. “Shoot at nothing that I am fighting,” he quietly instructed. “Shoot at nothing that is near to me. Shoot at nothing at all unless you must.”
“You’ve killed three of the savage beasts in the week we’ve been out of Kelvin’s Cairn,” she reminded, giggling at uncle Wulfgar’s sorry attempt to cow her. “You said you’d take me hunting, not sitting to the side cheering you on.”
“Then you’ve seen how formidable the yetis are.”
“I have and remain unimpressed. Give me one fight. You said we were heading back tomorrow.” She meant every word, for Breezy knew that she needed the experience and the trial of this battle. The most important fight of her young life was fast approaching, mere months away, and its outcome would determine her reality for the next decade or more, likely, as she climbed the monastic ranks in the far-distant Monastery of the Yellow Rose.
Wulfgar looked around. The two had come far to the south and east of Ten-Towns in their pursuit of the tundra yetis, venturing into the boulder tumbles that comprised the northern foothills of the Spine of the World mountain range. Out here lay many hiding places—and many monsters, no doubt, not limited to the yetis.
But Wulfgar thought that this monster he had spotted in the crevice between the boulders across the way was indeed a yeti, for the four-toed tracks of the heavy creature that had led him here were unmistakable and almost unique to the hulking creatures.
“I’ll consider it, but not for this one,” he said, and Breezy gave a low growl. “There are too many hidey-holes about, perhaps concealing other yetis. We must be done with this fight quickly.”
“Together, then.”
Wulfgar shook his head and shuffled uneasily. “Too many caves and shallows.” He glanced back the way they had come, and it seemed clear to Breezy that he was thinking of retreating.
If there are two, we can defeat them,” Breezy insisted. “If there are three, I will call in a friend.”
“And if there are four?”
“We fight harder,” the young woman said with an impish grin. She couldn’t let him change his mind and turn them about. She just couldn’t. She needed this, and not simply as a training exercise for her considerable fighting skills—indeed, she would battle here with weapons that would not be available to her when she fought for the rank of Master of Dragons. What she needed was the experience of the stress, the very edge of catastrophe, the forced movements and reactions with her life on the line.
For even though her physical life would not be in great jeopardy in her coming trial, her identity, her pride, her growing sense of independence surely would.
Wulfgar shook his head, but he was looking back at the dark crevice ahead, his warhammer Aegis-fang in hand, his fingers flexing eagerly.
“If I tell you to run, just run,” he whispered.
“Of course.” Breezy stared at him and sensed his uneasiness. There was evil about—she could feel it, too, a quiet hush. Too quiet.
But she wanted her fight.
She had watched Wulfgar put that powerful warhammer to swift and deadly use, dispatching each of the three yetis they had come upon in their earlier days out from Ten-Towns with seeming ease.
There was more than one here, she believed.
And hoped.
“Don’t shoot me in the back,” Wulfgar said, not turning to regard her and instead beginning a low skulk toward the pair of giant boulders. He veered to the left, the northernmost giant stone and the one with the most open ground around it.
Breezy nodded knowingly. If others were coming, they would be farther from him, emerging from the larger boulder tumbles south of their position, giving Wulfgar and her a fine head start. She didn’t want to flee, but she understood and appreciated the caution. Despite her earlier declaration, Breezy understood the truth of their enemies. Tundra yetis were huge beasts, resembling large white-and-light-brown gorillas, but more upright, like a gnoll. They had huge curving claws on ten fingers and smaller, thicker triangular daggers on the four toes of each foot. Their flat apish faces were dominated by huge mouths with long, massive canines. As much as she said she wanted to fight one, Breezy understood that it was nothing to be trite about. Tundra yetis were all muscle and natural weapons, which they regularly and efficiently put to deadly use.
Wulfgar stopped and turned about. “They aren’t animals,” he said to Breezy, perhaps the tenth time he’d told her that on this hunting excursion.
Breezy nodded. She understood his emphasis, as she had made it quite clear to him that she had no desire to hunt animals for anything other than food, and even for that necessity, she really didn’t want to kill them.
But these weren’t animals. They were malignant monsters. Hateful and savage and living only to inflict pain and death.
She told herself that repeatedly. There would be no hesitance here, no pang of guilt. For indeed, Breezy knew guilt. Her thoughts catapulted back to the journey that had taken her and the others to Icewind Dale. They had traveled the pass through the mountains and had been assaulted by a small army of orcs under the command of drow. Lolthian drow from the city of her father’s birth.
Breezy winced as she recalled what she had been forced to do.
“Not now!” she scolded herself under her breath, and she shook the troubling memories, the distractions, away. She stared at the darkness between the boulders. Her thoughts reached into the shadows, into the tangible swirl of darkness she now knew them to be. She felt the movements of the air within them. She felt . . .
The yeti.
No, two yetis. She was surprised by how clearly she knew that, as if the shadows were translucent to her. She thought to call out a warning to Wulfgar but held her tongue, instead swinging her gaze to the south, scanning the other shallows and caves and crevices.
A third yeti. A fourth.
A fifth.
It was an ambush—the clever monsters had led them to this place!
Breezy did speak out then, but not to Wulfgar. She pulled an onyx figurine from her pouch and called to Guenhwyvar, the spirit panther from the Astral Plane, the longtime companion, longtime friend, to her father.
The first yeti exited the nearest crevice, veering straight for the enormous Wulfgar. Breezy didn’t watch, focusing instead on the second creature in the crevice. She did hear the first yeti’s roar, though, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught a silvery flicker in the air before the rampaging beast. How that yeti’s roar changed so suddenly into something less ominous.
Aegis-fang, she knew, and she nodded, lifting and leveling Taulmaril. Yetis were broad-shouldered behemoths, and the crevice wasn’t much wider than the beast that had exited it.
The shadows told Breezy that another yeti was in that crevice. All she had to do was shoot at the center of the darkness.
She let fly.
Copyright © 2025 by R.A. Salvatore. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
