“Impressive,” Montolio muttered.

Drizzt only laughed and shook his white mane. “May I go back to sleep now?” he asked, turning back to his bedroll.

Montolio had other ideas. He had come to further feel out his companion, to find the limits of Drizzt’s abilities, wizardly and otherwise. A new plan came to the ranger, but he had to set it into motion before the sun went down.

“Wait,” he bade Drizzt. “You can rest later, after sunset. I need you now, and your ‘abilities.’ Could you summon a globe of darkness, or must you take time to contemplate the spell?”

“A few seconds,” Drizzt replied.

“Then get your armor and weapons,” Montolio said, “and come with me. Be quick about it. I do not want to lose the advantage of daylight.”

Drizzt shrugged and got dressed, then followed the ranger to the grove’s northern end, a little used section of the woodland complex.

Montolio dropped to his knees and pulled Drizzt down beside him, pointing out a small hole on the side of a grassy mound.

“A wild boar has taken to living in there,” the old ranger explained. “I do not wish to harm it, but I fear to get close enough to make contact with the thing. Boars are unpredictable at best.”

A long moment of silence passed. Drizzt wondered if Montolio simply meant to wait for the boar to emerge.

“Go ahead then,” the ranger prompted.

Drizzt turned on him incredulously, thinking that Montolio expected him to walk right up and greet their uninvited and unpredictable guest.

“Do it,” the ranger continued. “Enact your darkness globe—right in front of the hole—if you please.”

Drizzt understood, and his relieved sigh made Montolio bite his lip to hide his revealing chuckle. A moment later, the area before the grassy mound disappeared in blackness. Montolio motioned for Drizzt to wait behind and headed in.

Drizzt tensed, watching and listening. Several high-pitched squeals issued forth suddenly, then Montolio cried out in distress. Drizzt leaped up and charged in headlong, nearly tripping over his friend’s prostrate form.

The old ranger groaned and squirmed and did not answer any of the drow’s quiet calls. With no boar to be heard anywhere about, Drizzt dropped down to find out what had happened and recoiled when he found Montolio curled up, clutching at his chest.

“Montolio,” Drizzt breathed, thinking the old man seriously wounded. He leaned over to speak directly into the ranger’s face, then straightened quicker than he had intended as Montolio’s shield slammed into the side of his head.

“It is Drizzt!” the drow cried, rubbing his developing bruise. He heard Montolio jump up before him, then heard the ranger’s sword come out of its scabbard.

“Of course it is!” Montolio cackled.

“But what of the boar?”

“Boar?” Montolio echoed. “There is no boar, you silly drow. There never was one. We are the opponents here. The time has come for some fun!”

Now Drizzt fully understood. Montolio had manipulated him to use his darkness merely to take away his advantage of sight. Montolio was challenging him, on even terms. “Flat of the blade!” Drizzt replied, quite willing to play along. How Drizzt had loved such tests of skill back in Menzoberranzan with Zaknafein!

“For the sake of your life!” Montolio retorted with a laugh that came straight from his belly. The ranger sent his sword arcing in, and Drizzt’s scimitar drove it harmlessly wide.

Drizzt countered with two rapid and short strokes straight up the middle, an attack that would have defeated most foes but did no more than play a two-note tune on Montolio’s well-positioned shield. Certain of Drizzt’s location, the ranger shield-rushed straight ahead.

Drizzt was pushed back on his heels before he managed to get out of the way. Montolio’s sword came in again from the side, and Drizzt blocked it. The old man’s shield slammed straight ahead again, and Drizzt deflected its momentum, digging his heels in stubbornly.

The crafty old ranger thrust the shield up high then, taking one of Drizzt’s blades, and a good measure of the drow’s balance, along with it, then sent his sword screaming across at Drizzt’s midsection.

Drizzt somehow sensed the attack. He leaped back on his toes, sucked in his gut, and threw his rump out behind him. For all his desperation, he still felt the rush as the sword whisked past.

Drizzt went to the offensive, launching several cunning and intricate routines that he believed would end this contest. Montolio anticipated each one, though, for all of Drizzt’s efforts were rewarded with the same sound of scimitar on shield. The ranger came on then and Drizzt was sorely pressed. The drow was no novice to blind-fighting, but Montolio lived every hour of every day as a blind man and functioned as well and as easily as most men with perfect vision.

Soon Drizzt realized that he could not win in the globe. He thought of moving the ranger out of the spell’s area, but then the situation changed suddenly as the darkness expired. Thinking the game over, Drizzt backed up several steps, feeling his way with his feet up a rising tree root.

Montolio regarded his opponent curiously for a moment, noting the change in fighting attitude, then came on, hard and low.

Drizzt thought himself very clever as he dove headlong over the ranger, meaning to roll to his feet behind Montolio and come back in from one side or the other as the confused human spun about, disoriented.

Drizzt didn’t get what he expected, though. Montolio’s shield met the drow’s face as he was halfway over, and Drizzt groaned and fell heavily to the ground. By the time he shook the dizziness away, he became aware that Montolio was sitting comfortably on his back, sword resting across Drizzt’s shoulders.

“How… ” Drizzt started to ask.

Montolio’s voice was as sharp-edged as Drizzt had ever heard it. “You underestimated me, drow. You considered me blind and helpless. Never do that again!”

Drizzt honestly wondered, for just a split second, if Montolio meant to kill him, so angry was the ranger. He knew that his condescension had wounded the man, and he realized then that Montolio DeBrouchee, so confident and able, carried his own weight upon his old shoulders. For the first time since he had met the ranger, Drizzt considered how painful it must have been for the man to lose his sight. What else, Drizzt wondered, had Montolio lost?

“So obvious,” Montolio said after a short pause. His voice had softened again. “With me charging in low, as I did.”

“Obvious only if you sensed that the darkness spell had ended,” Drizzt replied, wondering how disabled Montolio truly was. “I would never have attempted the diving maneuver in the darkness, without my eyes to guide me, yet how could a blind man know that the spell was no more?”

“You told me yourself!” Montolio protested, still making no move to get off Drizzt’s back. “In attitude! The sudden shuffle of your feet—too lightly to be made in absolute blackness—and your sigh, drow! That sigh belied your relief, though you knew by then that you could not best me without your sight.”

Montolio got up from Drizzt, but the drow remained prone, digesting the revelations. He realized how little he knew about his companion, how much he had taken for granted where Montolio was concerned.

“Come along, then,” Montolio said. “This night’s first lesson is ended. It was a valuable one, but there are other things we must accomplish.”

“You said that I could sleep,” Driazt reminded him.

“I had thought you more competent,” Montolio replied immediately, casting a smirk the prone draw’s way.

While Drizzt eagerly absorbed the many lessons Montolio set out for him, that night and in the days that followed, the old ranger gathered his own information about the drow. Their work was most concerned with the present, Montolio teaching Drizzt about the world around him and, how to survive in it. Invariably one or the other, usually Drizzt, would slip in some comment about his past. It became almost a game between the two, remarking on some distant event, more to measure the shocked expression of the other than to make any relevant point. Montolio had some fine anecdotes about his many years on the road, tales of valorous battles against goblins and humorous pranks that the usually serious-minded rangers often played on one another. Drizzt remained a bit guarded about his own past, but still his tales of Menzoberranzan, of the sinister and insidious Academy and the savage wars pitting family against family, went far beyond anything Montolio had ever imagined.