Canticle (Forgotten Realms: The Cleric Quintet, #1)

by R.A. Salvatore

“You should not underestimate,” he pointed out to the imp, “the advantages in convincing people that there is a higher purpose to their actions, a higher authority guiding their leaders’ decisions.”

Pikel was a bit more round-shouldered, an attribute exaggerated by his loose-fitting, drooping robes. His beard was green that tenday, for he had dyed it in honor of the visiting druids. Pikel liked druids, a fact that made his brother roll his eyes and blush. It wasn’t usual that a dwarf would get on well with woodland folk, but Pikel was far from usual. Rather than let his beard hang loose to his toes, as did Ivan, he parted it in the middle and pulled it back over his huge ears, braiding it together with his hair to hang halfway down his back. It looked rather silly to Ivan, but Pikel, the library’s cook, thought it practical for keeping his beard out of the soup. Besides, Pikel didn’t wear the boots common to his race; he wore sandals—a gift from the druids—and his long beard tickled his free-wiggling, gnarly toes.

Eagerly, the imp reached under the bed and pulled the items out, recognizing the telepathic source as Barjin’s magical mace. “Screaming Maiden,” Druzil said, echoing the item’s telepathic declaration and examining the crafted item. Its obsidian head was that of a pretty young girl, strangely innocuous and appealing, but Druzil saw through the grotesque facade. He knew it was not a weapon crafted on the Prime Material Plane, but one that had been forged in the Abyss, or in the Nine Hells, or in Tarterus, or in one of the other lower planes.

“I cannot change who I am,” Danica replied quietly, but without compromise, “nor will I surrender the path I have chosen for my life.”

As with the animals, the druid did not fear the weather. He would walk in a downpour and call it a bath, skip and slide along snow-covered trails and call it play.

Druids considered themselves the guardians of nature and the natural order. Unlike wizards and priests of many other sects, druids accepted that they were the watchdogs of the world and that the powers they brought were more a call for help to nature than any manifestation of their own internal power.