He does the right thing,” Siobahn remarked, coming up on the wall beside Katerin. Katerin didn’t turn to regard the half-elf, though she was surprised that Siobahn had chosen this particular section of the wall, so near to her.
Below the pair, Oliver and Luthien rode out from the gates, Oliver on his yellow pony and Luthien tall and proud on the shining white Riverdancer. They had already said their farewells, all that they had cared to make, and so they did not look back. Side by side, they trotted their mounts across the courtyard to the fallen outer wall, the area still dotted with several cyclopian corpses that the burial details hadn’t been able to clear away, black-and-silver lumps in the diminishing snow.
“They have a long ride ahead of them,” Siobahn remarked.
“Who?” Katerin asked.
Siobahn glanced at her skeptically and took note that her gaze was away to the east, to the horizon still pink with the new dawn. Pointedly, the proud woman did not look at Luthien.
“Our friends,” Siobahn answered, playing the foolish, adolescent game.
Now Katerin did look to Luthien and Oliver, just a casual glance. “Luthien is always on the road,” she answered. “This way and that, wherever his horse takes him.”
Siobahn continued to study the woman, trying to fathom her purpose.
“That is his way,” Katerin stated firmly, turning to look at the half-elf directly. “He goes where he chooses, when he chooses, and let no woman be fool enough to think that he will remain for her, or by her.” Katerin looked away quickly, and that revealed more than she intended. “Let no woman be fool enough to think that she can change the ways of Luthien Bedwyr.”
The words were said with perfect calm and control, but Siobahn easily read the underlying bitterness there. Katerin was hurting, and her cool demeanor was a complete façade, while her words had been uttered in just the right tones to make them a barbed arrow, shooting straight for the half-elf’s heart. Rationally, Siobahn understood and knew that Katerin had spoken out of pain. In truth, the half-elf was not insulted or wounded in any way by Luthien’s departure, for in her mind, she and the young Bedwyr had come to terms with the realities of their relationship.
Siobahn remained silent for a long moment, considered her sympathy for Katerin and the words the woman had just thrown her way. The verbal volley had been strictly out of self-defense, Siobahn knew, but still she was surprised that Katerin would attack her so, would go to the trouble of trying to make her feel worse about Luthien’s departure.
“They have a long ride ahead of them,” Siobahn said once again. “But fear not,” she added, with enough dramatic emphasis to grab Katerin’s gaze. “I do know that Luthien does well on long rides.”
Katerin’s jaw slackened at the half-elf’s uncharacteristic use of double entendre and Siobahn’s sly, even lewd, tone.
Siobahn turned and slipped easily down the ladder, leaving Katerin, and the specter of Luthien and Oliver riding away to the north and east.
Katerin looked back to the now-distant riders, to Luthien, her companion all those years back in Bedwydrin, where they had lost their innocence together, in the ways of the world and in the ways of love. She had wanted to hurt Siobahn, verbally if not physically. She cared for the half-elf, deeply respected her and in many ways called Siobahn a friend. But she could not ignore her feelings of jealousy.
She had lost the verbal joust. She knew that, standing up on Caer MacDonald’s wall in the chill of an early spring day, watching Luthien ride away, her face scrunched in a feeble attempt to hold back the tears that welled in her shining green eyes.
• • •
“You are so very good at running from problems,” Oliver remarked to Luthien when the two were far from Caer MacDonald’s wall.
Luthien eyed his diminutive companion curiously, not understanding the comment. “Likely, we’re running into trouble,” he replied. “Not away from it.”
“A fight with cyclopians is never trouble,” Oliver explained. “Not the kind that you fear, at least.”
Luthien eyed him suspiciously, guessing what was to come.
“But you have done so very well in avoiding the other kind, the more subtle and painful kind,” Oliver explained. “First you send Katerin running off to Port Charley—”
“She volunteered,” Luthien protested. “She demanded to go!”
“And now, you have arranged to be away for perhaps two weeks,” the halfling continued without hesitation, ignoring Luthien’s protests.
Those protests did not continue, for Luthien realized that he was guilty as charged.
“Ah, yes,” Oliver chided. “Quite the hero with the sword, but in love, alas.”
Luthien started to ask what the halfling might be gibbering about and deflect Oliver’s intrusions, but he was wise enough to know that it was already too late for that. “How dare you?” the young Bedwyr asked sharply, and Oliver recognized that he had opened a wound. “What do you know of it?” Luthien demanded. “What do you know of anything?”
“I am so skilled and practiced in the ways of amour,” the halfling replied coolly.
Luthien eyed his three-foot-tall companion, the young Bedwyr’s expression clearly relating his doubts.
Oliver snorted indignantly. “Foolish boy,” he said, snapping his fingers in the air. “In Gascony, it is said, a merchant is only as good as his purse, a warrior is only as good as his weapon, and a lover is only as good as—”
“Oliver!” Luthien interrupted, blushing fiercely.
“His heart,” the halfling finished, looking curiously at his shocked companion. “Oh, you have become such a gutter-crawler!” Oliver scolded.
“I just thought . . .” Luthien stammered, but he stopped and waved his hand hopelessly. With a shake of his head, he kicked Riverdancer into a faster canter, and the horse leaped ahead of Threadbare.
Oliver persisted and moved his pony to match the Morgan highlander’s speed. “Your heart is not known to you, my friend,” he said as he came up alongside Luthien. “So you run, but yet, you cannot!”
“Oliver the poet,” Luthien said dryly.
“I have been called worse.”
Luthien let it go at that, and so did Oliver, but though the conversation ended, Luthien’s private thoughts on the matter most certainly did not. Truly the young man was torn, full of passion and full of guilt, loving Katerin and Siobahn, but in different ways. He did not regret his affair with the half-elf—how could he ever look upon those beautiful moments with sadness?—and yet, never had he wanted to hurt Katerin. Not in any way, not at any time. He had been swept up in the moment, the excitement of the road, of the city and the budding rebellion. Bedwydrin, and Katerin, too, had seemed a million miles and a million years removed.
But then she had come back to him, a wonderful friend of another time, his first love—and, he had come to realize, his only love.
How could he ever tell that to Katerin now, after what he had done? Would she even hear his words? Could he have heard hers, had the situation been reversed?
Luthien had no answers to the disturbing questions. He kept a swift pace toward the northernmost tip of the Iron Cross, trying to put Caer MacDonald far behind him.
• • •
The snow that had so hampered the cyclopians and left so many one-eyes dead on the field as they tried to flee became a distant memory, most traces of white swallowed by the softening ground of spring. Only two weeks had passed since the battle, and the snow, except in the mountains, where winter hung on stubbornly, was fast receding, and the trees were thickening with buds, their sharp gray lines growing red and brown and indistinct.
Luthien and Oliver had been out of Caer MacDonald for five days, and now, with several hundred soldiers filtering in from the west to join the campaign, Port Charley folk mostly, Brind’Amour began his march. Out they marched in long lines, many riding, but most walking, and all under the pennants of Eriador of old—the mountain cross on a green field.
At the
same time, Shuglin and his remaining dwarfs, some two hundred of the bearded folk, left Caer MacDonald’s southern gate, trudging into the mountains, their solid backs bent low by enormous packs.
“Luthien has passed through Bronegan,” the wizard said to Katerin, who was riding at his side.
The young woman nodded, understanding that this was fact and not supposition, and not surprised that the wizard could know such things.
“How many soldiers has he added?” she asked.
“A promise of a hundred,” the wizard replied. “But only to join with him if he returns through the town with many other volunteers in tow.”
Katerin closed her eyes. She understood what was going on here, the most unpredictable and potentially dangerous part of the whole rebellion. They had won in Caer MacDonald and had raised the pennants of Eriador of old, which would give people some hope, but the farmers and the simple folk, living their quiet existence, hardly bothered by Greensparrow and matters politic, would only join in if they truly believed not only in the cause but in the very real prospect of victory.
“Of course they need to see the numbers,” Brind’Amour said, as though that news should neither surprise nor dismay. “We expected that all along. I hate Greensparrow above all others,” the old wizard said, chuckling. “And am more powerful than most, yet even I would not join an army of two, after all!”
Katerin managed a weak smile, but there remained a logical problem here that she could not easily dismiss. Not a single town north of Caer MacDonald, not another town in all of Eriador, except perhaps for Port Charley, could raise a significant force on its own. Yet the towns were independent of each other, under no single ruler. Each was its own little kingdom; they were not joined in any way, had not been even in the so-called “glorious” days of Bruce MacDonald. Eriador was a rugged land of individuals, and that is exactly what Greensparrow had exploited on his first conquest, and exactly what he would likely try to exploit again. The young woman tossed her shining red hair and looked around at the mass moving in fair harmony behind her. Here was a strong force—enough to take the wall, likely. But if Greensparrow struck back at them, even when they were secured behind the wall, even with the barrier of the mountains, even with the newly acquired fleet to hamper the king’s efforts, they would need many more soldiers than this.
Many more.
“Where will Luthien turn?” Katerin asked, unintentionally voicing the question.
“To the Fields of Eradoch,” Brind’Amour answered easily.
“And what will he find in that wild place?” Katerin dared to ask. “What have your eyes shown you of the highlanders?”
Brind’Amour shook his head, his shaggy white hair and beard flopping side to side. “I can send my eyes many places,” he replied, “but only if I have some reference. I can send my eyes to Luthien at times, because I can locate his thoughts, and thus use his eyes as my guide. I can find Greensparrow, and several others of his court, because they are known to me. But as it was when I was trying to discern the fleet that sailed north from Avon, I am magically blind to matters wherein I have no reference.”
“What have your eyes shown you of the highlanders?” Katerin pressed, knowing a half-truth when she heard it.
Brind’Amour snickered guiltily. “Luthien will not fail,” was all that he would say.
THE FIELDS OF ERADOCH
To the casual observer, the northwestern corner of Eriador was not so different in appearance from the rest of the country. Rolling fields of thick green grass—“heavy turf,” the Eriadorans called it—stretched to the horizon in every direction, a soft green blanket, though on a clear day, the northern mountains could be seen back to the west, and even the tips of the Iron Cross, little white and gray dots, poked their heads above the green horizon far in the distance to the southwest.
There was something very different about the northeast, though, the Fields of Eradoch, the highlands. Here the wind was a bit more chill, the almost constant rain a bit more biting, and the men a bit more tough. The cattle that dotted the plain wore coats of shaggy, thick fur, and even the horses, Morgan highlanders like Luthien’s own Riverdancer, had been bred with longer hair as a ward against the elements.
The highlands had not seen as much snow this winter as normal, though still more fell here than in the southern reaches of Eriador, and the snow cover was neither complete nor very deep by the time Luthien and Oliver crossed through MacDonald’s Swath and made their way into the region. Everything was gray and brown, with even a few splotches of green, as far as their eyes could see. Melancholy and dreary, winter’s corpse, with still some time before the rebirth of spring.
The companions camped about a dozen miles east of Bronegan that night, on the very edge of the Fields of Eradoch. When they awakened the next morning, they were greeted by unusually warm temperatures and a thick fog, as the last of the snow dissipated into the air.
“It will be slow this day,” Oliver remarked.
“Not so,” Luthien replied without the slightest hesitation. “There are few obstacles,” he explained.
“How far do you mean to go?” the halfling asked him. “They have left Caer MacDonald by now, you know.”
Oliver spoke the truth, Luthien realized. Likely, Brind’Amour and Katerin, Siobahn and all the army had already marched out of the city’s gates, flowing north and west, along the same course Luthien and Oliver had taken. Until they got to MacDonald’s Swath. There, they would cross and go to the south, into Glen Albyn, while Luthien and Oliver had turned straight north, across the breadth of the swath, to Bronegan, and now, beyond that and into Eradoch.
“How far?” Oliver asked again.
“All the way to Bae Colthwyn, if we must,” Luthien replied evenly.
Oliver knew the impracticality of that answer. They were fully three days of hard riding from the cold and dark waters of Bae Colthwyn. By the time they got there and back, Brind’Amour would be at the wall, and the battle would be over. But the halfling understood and sympathized with the emotions that had prompted that response from Luthien. They had been greeted warmly in Bronegan, with many pats on the back and many toasts of free ale. Yet the promises of alliance, from the folk of Bronegan and from several other nearby communities who sent emissaries to meet with Luthien, had been tentative at best. The only way that these folk of the middle lands would line up behind the Crimson Shadow, in open defiance of King Greensparrow, was if Luthien proved to them that the whole of Eriador would fight in this war. Luthien had to go back through Bronegan on his journey south, or at least send an emissary there, and if he and Oliver had not mustered any more support, then they would ride alone all the way back to Glen Albyn.
And so they were in the highlands, to face perhaps their most critical test of the unity of Eriador. The highlanders of Eradoch were an independent group, tough and hardy. Many would call them uncivilized. They lived in tribes, clans based on heritage, and often warred amongst themselves. They were hunters, not farmers, better with the sword than the plow, for strength was the byword of the Fields of Eradoch.
That fact was not lost on the young Bedwyr, the general who had engineered the defeat of Belsen’Krieg outside of Caer MacDonald. All the highlanders, even the children, could ride, and ride well, on their powerful and shaggy steeds, and if Luthien could enlist a fraction of the thousands who roamed these fields, he would have a cavalry to outmatch the finest of Greensparrow’s Praetorian Guards. But the highlanders were a superstitious and unpredictable lot. Likely they had heard of Luthien as the Crimson Shadow, and so he and Oliver would not be riding into Eradoch unannounced. Their reception, good or bad, had probably already been decided.
The pair rode on through most of that day, Luthien trying to keep them headed northeast, toward Mennichen Dee, the one village in all the region. It was a trading town, a gathering point, and many of the highland clans would soon be making their way to the place, with excess horses and piles of furs to swap for salt and spices and glittering
gemstones brought in by merchants of the other regions.
The fog didn’t lift all that day, and though the pair tried to keep their spirits high, the soggy air and the unremarkable ground (what little of it they could see) made it a long and arduous day.
“We should camp soon,” Luthien remarked, the first words either of them had spoken in some hours.
“Pity us in trying to build a fire this night,” Oliver lamented, and Luthien had no words to counter that. It would indeed be a cold and uncomfortable night, for they’d not begin a fire with the meager and soaked twigs that they might find in the highlands.
“We’ll make Mennichen Dee tomorrow,” Luthien promised. “There is always shelter available there to any traveler who comes in peace.”
“Ah, but there’s the rub,” the halfling said dramatically. “For do we come in peace?”
The ride seemed longer to Luthien, who again had no real answers for his unusually gloomy friend.
They traveled on as the sun, showing as just a lighter patch of gray, settled into the sky behind them, and very soon, Luthien felt that subtle tingle of alarm, that warrior instinct. Something just beyond his conscious senses told him to be on guard, and the adrenaline began to course through his veins.
He looked to Oliver and saw that his halfling companion, too, was riding a bit more tensely in the saddle, ready to spring away or draw his blade.
Riverdancer’s ears flattened and then came back up several times; Threadbare snorted.
They came like ghosts through the fog, gliding over the soft grass with hardly a sound, their bodies so wrapped in layers of fur and hide, and with huge horned or winged helms upon their heads, that they seemed hardly human, seemed extensions of the shaggy horses they rode, seemed the stuff of nightmares.
Both companions pulled up short, neither going for his weapon, transfixed by the spectacle of this ghostly ambush. The highlanders, huge men, every one of them dwarfing even Luthien, came in from every angle, slowly tightening the ring about the pair.
“Tell me I am dreaming,” Oliver whispered.