“Would King Bellick desire revenge for Sougles’s Glen?” Luthien asked Shuglin, and the dwarf’s face brightened immediately, shining wherever it showed around his tremendous bluish-black beard.
“Then arrange for a dwarvish force to accompany me into the mountains,” Luthien went on.
“You have spoken to Brind’Amour about this?” Oliver put in.
“He will not oppose it,” Luthien assured the halfling.
Oliver shrugged and went back to his wine, obviously not convinced.
Neither was Luthien, actually, but the young Bedwyr would take his problems one at a time.
And he found another one waiting for him when he caught up to Brind’Amour later that same evening, the wizard standing atop the highest tower of the Ministry, alone with the stars. Brind’Amour politely listened to all of Luthien’s plans and arguments, nodding his head to keep the young man talking, and it took some time before Luthien even began to understand that something was deeply troubling his friend.
“All in good order,” Brind’Amour said when Luthien decided that he had babbled enough. “Fine idea including the dwarfs; they’re the best in the mountains, after all, and eager to spill cyclopian blood. And if Greensparrow is behind the raids—and we both know that he is—let Bellick’s folk see the proof, if there is any proof, firsthand.”
Luthien’s smile was blown away a moment later.
“You cannot go.”
Luthien’s jaw dropped open. “But . . .”
“I need you,” Brind’Amour said plainly. “We have more trouble, worse trouble, brewing in the east.”
“What could be worse than cyclopians?”
“Huegoths.”
Luthien started to protest, until the response truly sank in. Huegoths! Among Eriador’s, among all of Avonsea’s, oldest enemies and worst nightmares.
“When?” Luthien stammered. “A rogue vessel or coordinated raid? Where? How many ships . . . ?”
Brind’Amour’s steady hand, patting the air gently before the young Bedwyr, finally calmed him to silence. “I have spoken with an emissary from the village of Gybi on Bae Colthwyn,” the king explained. “It was a substantial attack, more than a score of longships. They did not come ashore, but they would have, except for the courage of Gybi’s folk.”
Luthien did not immediately reply, trying to collect his wits in the face of such disturbing news.
“We know in our hearts that Greensparrow uses the cyclopians to daunt the solidarity of our kingdom,” Brind’Amour went on, “and to destroy any potential alliance between Eriador and DunDarrow. I suspect that the king of Avon has not in any way surrendered Eriador to the Eriador-ans, as the truce would indicate.”
“And thus you believe that Greensparrow might also be in league with the Huegoths,” Luthien reasoned.
Brind’Amour shook his head halfheartedly. He did indeed fear that to be the case, but he honestly couldn’t see how the wizard-king of Avon could have forged such an alliance. Huegoths respected physical might. They had little use for the “civilized” folk of Avon, and open hatred for wizardry. Brind’Amour, a sturdy northman himself, might be able to deal with them, but by all appearances Greensparrow was a fop, a physical weakling, who made no secret of his magical powers. Furthermore, even though an alliance with the Huegoths would strengthen Avon’s position, Brind’Amour didn’t believe that Greensparrow would want to deal with the barbarian Isenlanders.
“The man will gladly deal with cyclopians,” Luthien reminded him when he spoke that thought aloud.
“He will gladly dominate stupid one-eyes,” Brind’Amour corrected. “But no king who is not Huegoth will bend the will of the fierce Isenlanders.”
“Even with wizardry?”
Brind’Amour sighed, having no answer. “Go to Gybi,” he bade Luthien. “Take Oliver and Katerin with you.”
The request disappointed the young Bedwyr, who sorely wanted to go into the mountains in search of the raiding cyclopian forces, but he did not complain. Luthien understood the importance of handling the Huegoths, though he wanted badly to believe that the raid on Gybi might be a coincidence, and not a long-term threat.
“I have already sent word to the Riders of Eradoch,” Brind’Amour explained. “A fair-sized force is nearing Gybi now, to bolster their defenses, and watches have been ordered along all the eastern coast as far south as Chalmbers.”
Luthien saw then how important Brind’Amour considered the appearance of the Huegoths, and so the young Bedwyr did not argue the command. “I will make my preparations,” he said and bowed, then turned to leave.
“Siobhan and the Cutters will accompany Shuglin into the mountains,” Brind’Amour said to him, “to gather as much information as possible on the cyclopians. They will be waiting for you when you return.” Brind’Amour gave a wink. “I will use some magic to facilitate your journey, that you might get your chance to put Blind-Striker to good use on the bloodshot eyes of cyclopians.”
Luthien looked back to the old king and smiled, genuinely grateful.
Brind’Amour’s return smile disappeared the moment Luthien was out of sight. Even if Greensparrow wasn’t behind the Huegoth raid, the fledgling kingdom of Eriador was in serious trouble. Brind’Amour had brought about his victory over Avon in large part through hints to Greensparrow from the Gascons that they favored a free Eriador, that they might even enter the war on Eriador’s side. But Brind’Amour had received such subtle aid from the vast southern kingdom of Gascony only by promising some very favorable port deals. Now, with the presence of the Huegoths, the new king had been forced to send word south to Gascony that the eastern stretches of Eriador, including the important port of Chalmbers, were not to be approached without heavy warship escort.
The Gascons would not be pleased, Brind’Amour knew; they might even come to the conclusion that Eriador was a safer place for their merchant ships under the protective rule of Greensparrow. One word to that effect from Gascony to the Avon king might launch Eriador back into an open war with Avon, a war that Brind’Amour feared they could not win. Avon had many more people, with a better trained and better equipped army and vicious cyclopian allies. And though Brind’Amour believed himself a wizardous match for Greensparrow, he couldn’t ignore the fact that, as far as he could tell, he was Eriador’s sole magical strength, while Greensparrow had at least four wizard-dukes and the duchess of Mannington in his court.
And if the mighty Huegoths, too, were in Greensparrow’s hand . . .
The situation in Gybi had to be dealt with at once and with all attention, Brind’Amour knew. Luthien, Katerin, and Oliver were his best emissaries for such a mission, and the king had already dispatched nearly two-score of his own warships, almost half of his fleet, from Diamondgate, to sail around the northern reaches of Eriador and meet up with Luthien in Gybi.
The king of fledgling Eriador spent all that night atop the Ministry, thinking and worrying, looking for his answers in the stars, but finding nothing save potential disaster.
THE DUCHESS OF MANNINGTON
She was a small woman, slender and with her golden hair neatly cropped. She wore many valuable jewels, including a diamond hairpin and a brooch that glittered in the softest of lights. By all measures, Deanna Wellworth, the duchess of Mannington, was most elegant and sophisticated, undeniably beautiful, and so she seemed out of place indeed in the cold and rugged Iron Cross, surrounded by smelly, burly cyclopians.
The one-eyed leader, a three-hundred-pounder that stood halfway between six and seven feet, towered over Deanna. The brute could reach out with one hand and squash her flat, so it seemed, and, considering the tongue-lashing Deanna was now giving, the cyclopian appeared as though it wanted to do just that.
But Deanna Wellworth was hardly concerned. She was a duchess of Avon, one of Greensparrow’s court, and with Duke Paragor of Princetown killed by Brind’Amour of Eriador, she was perhaps the strongest magician in all of Avon except for the king himself. She had a protection spell re
ady now, and if Muckles, the cyclopian leader, swung a hand out at her, it would burst into flames that the one-eye could not extinguish in any way short of leaping into the Avon Sea.
“Your murderers are out of control,” Deanna ranted, her blue eyes, soft in hue to appear almost gray, locked on the face of ugly Muckles.
“We kill,” the cyclopian responded simply, which was about the only way Muckles could respond. What flustered Deanna most about this assignment in the God-forsaken mountains was the fact that stupid Muckles was probably the smartest of the cyclopian group!
“Indiscriminately,” Deanna promptly added, but she shook her head, seeing that the one-eye had no idea of what that word might mean. “You must choose your kills more carefully,” she explained.
“We kill!” Muckles insisted.
Deanna entertained the thought of calling in Taknapotin, her familiar demon, and watching the otherworldly beast eat Muckles a little bit at a time. Alas, that she could not do. “You killed the dwarfs,” she said.
That brought howls of glee from all the cyclopians nearby, brutes who hated dwarfs above anything. This tribe had lived in the Iron Cross for many generations and had occasionally run into trouble with the bearded folk of secret DunDarrow. The cyclopians thought that the woman’s statement was the highest compliment anyone could pay them.
Deanna hardly meant it that way. The last thing Greensparrow wanted was an alliance between Eriador and DunDarrow. By her reasoning, any threat to DunDarrow would only strengthen the dwarfs’ resolve to ally with Brind’Amour.
“If the result of your killing the dwarfs . . .”
“Yerself helped!” Muckles argued, beginning to catch on that Deanna was truly angered about the massacre.
“I had to finish what you stupidly started,” Deanna retorted. Muckles began to counter, but Deanna snapped her fingers and the brute staggered backward as though it had been punched in the mouth. Indeed, a small line of blood now trickled from the side of Muckles’s lip.
“If your stupidity has brought the dwarfs together with our enemies in Eriador,” Deanna said evenly, “then know that you will face the wrath of King Greensparrow. I have heard that he is particularly fond of cyclopian skin rugs.”
Muckles blanched and looked around at his grumbling soldiers. Such rumors about fierce Greensparrow were common among the cyclopians.
Deanna looked across the encampment, to where the dozen dwarf heads were drying out over a smoky firepit. Disgusted, she stormed away, leaving Muckles with her threats and a score of nervous subordinates. She didn’t bother to look back as she passed from the small clearing into a wider meadow, where she was expected.
“Do you truly believe that the killings will ally DunDarrow with Brind’Amour?” asked Selna, Deanna’s handmaid, and the only human out here in the wretched mountains with her.
Deanna, thoroughly flustered, only shrugged as she walked by.
“Do you really care?” Selna asked.
Deanna stopped dead in her tracks and spun about, curiously regarding this woman, who had been her nanny since childhood. Did Selna know her so very well?
“What do you imply by such a question?” Deanna asked, her tone openly accusing.
“I do not imply anything, my Lady,” Selna replied, lowering her eyes. “Your bath is drawn, in the cover of the pine grove, as you commanded.”
Selna’s submissive tone made Deanna regret speaking so harshly to this woman who had been with her through so very much. “You have my gratitude,” the duchess said, and she paused long enough for Selna to look up, to offer a smile of conciliation.
Deanna was very conscious of the shadows about her as she undressed beside the steaming porcelain tub. The thought of cyclopians lewdly watching made her stomach turn. Deanna hated cyclopians with all her heart. She thought them brutish, uncivilized pigs, as accurate a description as could be found, and these weeks in the mountains among them had been nothing short of torture for the cultured woman.
What had happened to her proud Avon? she wondered as she slipped into the water, shuddering at the intensity of the heat. She had given Selna a potion to heat the bath, and feared that the handmaid had used too much, that the water would burn the skin from her bones. She quickly grew accustomed to it, though, and then poured in a second potion. Immediately the water began to churn and bubble, and Deanna put her weary head back on the rim and looked up through the pine boughs to the shining half-moon.
The image brought her back through a score and two years, to when she was only a child of seven, a princess living in Carlisle in the court of her father the king. She was the youngest of seven, with five boys and a girl ahead of her, and thus far removed from the throne, but she was of that family nonetheless, and now remained as the only surviving member. She had never been close to her siblings, or to her parents. “Deanna Hide-away,” they called her, for she was ever running off on her own, finding dark places where she could be alone with her thoughts and with the mysteries that filtered through her active imagination.
Even way back then, Deanna loved the thought of magic. She had learned to read at the age of four, and had spent the next three years of her life immersed in all the tomes detailing the ancient brotherhood of wizards. As a child, she had learned of Brind’Amour, who was now her enemy, though he was thought long-buried, and of Greensparrow, and how thrilled the young girl had been when that same Greensparrow, her father’s court mystic, had come to her on a night such as this and offered to tutor her privately in the art of magic. What a wonderful moment that had been for young Deanna! What a thrill, that the lone surviving member of the ancient brotherhood would choose her as his protégée!
How then had Deanna Wellworth, once in line for the throne of Avon, wound up in the Iron Cross, serving as counsel to a rogue band of bloodthirsty cyclopians? And what of the folk of the Eriadoran villages they had routed, and of the dwarfs, massacred for reasons purely political?
Deanna closed her eyes, but couldn’t block out the terrible images of slaughter; she covered her ears, but couldn’t stop the echoing screams. And she couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.
“Are you all right, my Lady?” came the stark question, shattering Deanna’s visions. Her eyes popped open wide to see Selna standing over her churning tub, the woman’s expression concerned, but in a way that seemed strange and unsettling to Deanna.
“Are you spying on me?” the duchess demanded, more sharply than she had intended. She realized her error as soon as she snapped out the words, for she knew that her tone made her appear guilty.
“Never that, my Lady,” Selna replied unconvincingly. “I only returned with your blanket, and saw the glisten of tears in the moonlight.”
Deanna rubbed her hand across her face. “A splash from the tub, and nothing more,” she insisted.
“Do you long for Mannington?” Selna asked.
Deanna stared incredulously at the woman, then looked all around, as though the answer should be obvious.
“As do I,” Selna admitted. “I am glad that is all that is troubling you. I had feared—”
“What?” Deanna insisted, her tone razor sharp, her soft eyes flashing dangerously.
Selna gave a great sigh. Deanna had never seen her act this cryptic before, and didn’t like it at all. “I only feared,” the handmaid began again, but stopped short, as if searching for the words.
Deanna sat forward in the tub. “What?” she demanded again.
Selna shrugged.
“Say it!”
“Sympathy for Eriador,” the handmaid admitted.
Deanna slumped back in the hot water, staring blankly at Selna.
“Have you sympathy for Eriador?” Selna dared to ask. “Or, the God above forbid, for the dwarfs?”
Deanna paused for a long while, trying to gauge this surprising woman she had thought she knew so well. “Would that be so bad?” she asked plainly.
“They are our enemies,” Selna insisted. “Sympathy for Eriador . . .”
“Decency for fellow humans,” Deanna corrected.
“Some might see it as weakness, however you describe it,” the handmaid answered without hesitation.
Again Deanna was at a loss for a reply. What was Selna implying here? The older woman had often served as Deanna’s confidante, but this time Selna seemed removed from the conversation, as though she knew something Deanna did not. Suddenly, Deanna found that she didn’t trust the woman, and feared that she had already revealed too much.
The water was cooling by this time, so Deanna rose up and allowed Selna to wrap her in the thick blanket. She dressed under cover of the pine grove and went to her tent, Selna following close behind.
The duchess’s sleep was fitful, full of images that she could not block out or explain away. She felt a coldness creeping over her, a darkness deeper than the night.
She awoke in a cold sweat, to see a pair of red-glowing eyes staring down at her.
“Mistress,” came a rasping, familiar voice, the voice of Taknapotin, Deanna’s familiar demon.
The groggy duchess relaxed at once, but her relief lasted only as long as the second it took her to realize that she had not summoned the demon. Apparently, the beast had come from the fires of Hell of its own accord!
She saw Taknapotin’s considerable array of gleaming teeth as the demon, apparently recognizing her concern, smiled widely.
No, not of its own accord, Deanna realized, for that simply could not be. Demons were creatures brought to the world by human desires, but who, other than Deanna Wellworth, could so summon Taknapotin? For a moment, Deanna wondered if she had somehow called to the fiend in her sleep, but she quickly dismissed that possibility. Bringing a demon to the material world was never that easy.
There could be only one answer then, and it was confirmed when next Taknapotin spoke.
“You are relieved of your duties here,” the beast explained. “Go back to your place in Mannington.”