Luthien's Gamble

27 Diplomacy

Luthien didn’t know how to approach her. She sat quiet and very still on the bed in the room she had commandeered, across the hall and down one door from Duke Paragor’s bedchamber. She had let him in without argument, but also without enthusiasm.

So now the young Bedwyr stood by the closed door, studying Katerin O’Hale, this woman he had known since he was a boy, and yet whom he had never really seen before. She had cleaned up from the fight and wore only a light satin shift now, black and lacy, that she had found in a wardrobe. It was low cut, and really too small for her, riding high on her smooth legs.

An altogether alluring outfit on one as beautiful as Katerin, but there was nothing inviting about the way the woman sat now, back straight, hands resting in her lap, impassive, indifferent.

She had not been wounded badly in the fight and had not suffered at the hands of Duke Paragor. No doubt the abduction had been traumatic, but certainly Katerin had been through worse. Since the fight, though, after those first few moments of elation, the woman had become quiet and distant. She had reacted to Luthien as her savior for just a moment, then moved away from him and kept away from him.

She was afraid, Luthien knew, and probably just as afraid that he would come to her this night as that he would not. Until this moment, Luthien had not truly considered the implications of his relationship with Siobhan. Katerin’s jealousy, her sudden outburst that night at the Dwelf, had been an exciting thing for Luthien, a flattering thing. But those outbursts were gone now, replaced by a resignation in the woman, a stealing of her spirit, that Luthien could not stand to see.

“I care for Siobhan,” he began, searching for some starting point. Katerin looked away.

“But not as I love you,” the young man quickly added, taking a hopeful stride forward.

Katerin did not turn back to him.

“Do you understand?” Luthien asked.

No response.

“I have to make you understand,” he said emphatically. “When I was in Montfort . . . I needed . . .”

He paused as Katerin did turn back, her green eyes rimmed with tears; her jaw tightened.

“Siobhan is my friend and nothing more,” Luthien said.

Katerin’s expression turned sour.

“She was more than my friend,” Luthien admitted. “And I do not regret . . .” Again he paused, seeing that he was going in the wrong direction. “I do regret hurting you,” he said softly. “And if I have done irreparable harm to our love, then I shall forever grieve, and then all of this, the victories and the glory, shall be a hollow thing.”

“You are the Crimson Shadow,” Katerin said evenly.

“I am Luthien Bedwyr,” the young man corrected. “Who loves Katerin O’Hale, only Katerin O’Hale.”

Katerin did not blink, did not offer any response, verbal or otherwise. A long, uncomfortable moment passed, and then Luthien, defeated, turned toward the door.

“I am sorry,” he whispered, and went out into the hall.

He was down at the other end, nearing his door, when Katerin called out his name behind him. He turned and saw her standing there, just outside of her door, tall and beautiful and with a hint of a smile on her fairest of faces.

He moved back to her slowly, guardedly, not wanting to push her too far, not wanting to scare her away from whatever course she had chosen.

“Don’t go,” she said to him, and she took his hand and pulled him close. “Don’t ever go.”

From a door across the hall, barely cracked open, a teary-eyed Oliver watched the scene. “Ah, to be young and in Princetown in the spring,” the sentimental halfling said as he closed his door after Luthien and Katerin had disappeared.

The halfling waited a moment, then opened the door again and exited his room, dressed in his finest traveling clothes and with a full pack over his shoulder, for though it was night, Oliver had a meeting with Brind’Amour, and then a long, but impossibly quick, road ahead.

The next morning, the proud Princetown garrison marched out of the city to much fanfare. The long line moved swiftly, out to the east and south, meaning to swing through the easy trails of Glen Durritch and then turn north to Malpuissant’s Wall, where they would put down the rebels.

But the rebels were not at the wall. They were waiting, entrenched in the higher ground of the glen, and the Princetown garrison never made it out the other side.

The length of the cyclopian line was barraged with missile fire, elvish bowstrings humming, each archer putting three arrows in the air before the first had ever hit its mark. After the first few terrible moments, the cyclopians tried to form up into defensive position, and the Riders of Eradoch came rushing down upon them, cutting great swaths through their lines, heightening the confusion.

Then there was no defense, no organized counterattack, and the slaughter became wholesale. Some cyclopians tried to run out the eastern end of the glen, but the jaws of the fierce Eriadoran army closed over them. Others, near the back of the long line, had an easier time getting out of the glen’s western end, but they found yet another unpleasant surprise awaiting them, for in the mere hour they had been out of the city, an army of dwarfs had encircled Princetown.

Not a single cyclopian got back to the city’s gates that fateful morning.

Greensparrow shifted in his seat, a smile painted on his face, trying to appear at ease and comfortable, though the high-backed and stiff, stylish Gascon chair was anything but comfortable. The Avon king had to keep up appearances, though. He was in Caspriole, in southwestern Gascony, meeting with Albert deBec Fidel, an important dignitary, one of the major feudal lords in all of Gascony.

For some reason that Greensparrow could not understand, deBec Fidel had turned the conversation to events in Eriador, which Greensparrow truly knew little about. As far as the vacationing king of Avon was aware, Belsen’Krieg was in Montfort, though the last message from one of his underling wizards, Duchess Deanna Wellworth of Mannington, had hinted at some further trouble.

“What do you mean to do?” deBec Fidel asked in his thick accent, his blunt question catching Greensparrow off his guard. Normally deBec Fidel was a subtle man, a true Gascon dignitary.

“About the rebels?” the Avon king replied incredulously, as though the question hardly seemed worth the bother of answering.

“About Eriador,” deBec Fidel clarified.

“Eriador is a duchy of Avon,” Greensparrow insisted.

“A duchy without a duke.”

Greensparrow controlled himself enough not to flinch. How had deBec Fidel learned of that? he wondered. “Duke Morkney failed me,” he admitted. “And so he will be replaced soon enough.”

“After you replace the duke of Princetown?” deBec Fidel asked slyly.

Greensparrow gave no open response, except that his features revealed clearly that he had no idea what the lord might be speaking about.

“Duke Paragor is dead,” deBec Fidel explained. “And Princetown—ah, a favorite city of mine, so beautiful in the spring—is in the hands of the northern army.”

Greensparrow wanted to ask what the man was talking about, but he realized that deBec Fidel would not have offered that information if he had not gotten it from reliable sources. Greensparrow’s own position would seem weaker indeed if he pretended that he did not also know of these startling events.

“The entire Princetown garrison was slaughtered on the field, so it is said,” deBec Fidel went on. “A complete victory, as one-sided as any I have ever heard tell of.”

Greensparrow didn’t miss the thrill, and thus, the threat, in deBec Fidel’s voice, as though the man was enjoying this supremely. An emissary from Eriador had gotten to the man, the wizard-king realized, probably promising him trade agreements and free port rights for Caspriole’s considerable fishing fleet. The alliance between Avon and Gascony was a tentative thing, a temporary truce after centuries of countless squabbles and even wars. Even now, much of Greensparrow’s army was away in lands south of Gascony, fighting beside the Gascons, but the king did not doubt that if Eriador offered a better deal concerning the rich fishing waters of the Dorsal Sea, the double-dealing Gascons would side with them.

What had started as a riot in Montfort was quickly becoming a major political problem.

Behind one of the doors of that very room, his ear pressed against the keyhole, Oliver deBurrows listened happily as deBec Fidel went on, speaking to Greensparrow of the benefits of making a truce with the rebels, of giving Eriador back to Eriador.

“They are too much trouble,” the feudal lord insisted. “So it was when Gascony ruled Avon. That is why we built the wall, to keep the savages in the savage north! It is better for all that way,” deBec Fidel finished.

Oliver’s smile nearly took in his ears. As an ambassador, a Gascon who knew the ways of the southern kingdom’s nobles, the halfling had done his job perfectly. The taking of Princetown might nudge Greensparrow in the direction of a truce, but the not-so-subtle hint that mighty Gascony might favor the rebels in this matter, indeed that the Gascons might even send aid, would surely give the wizard-king much to consider.

“Shall I have your room prepared?” Oliver heard deBec Fidel ask after a long moment of uncomfortable silence.

“No,” Greensparrow replied sharply. “I must be on my way this very day.”

“All the way back to Carlisle,” Oliver snickered under his breath. The halfling flipped an amber gemstone in his hand, agreeing with Greensparrow’s sentiments, thinking that it might be time for him, too, to be on his way.