Jeff Grubb: Lord Toede

Groag replied, "It was nothing, I… Oh! Toede!" and with that started hauling on the chain that had disappeared into the swirling white water and (presumably) was still attached to his former master.

"Toede?" said Taywin, shaking her waterlogged head. "As in Highmaster…"

"Gotcha, you rat!" shouted the kender guard, as he smacked the back of Groag's head with a good-sized, more than adequately heavy rock. The guard's mouth was coated with drying blood, and his eyes burned with vengeance. "Teach you to take a shot at me!"

Groag perforce dropped the chain and lost his grip on the log. The force of the water dragged Toede downstream and pulled Groag in as well.

Taywin grabbed for him, but her fingers closed on empty air as the pair of chained hobgoblins disappeared in the torrent.

"Serves them right," muttered the guard, tenderly touching his swelling lower jaw. Taywin's response was most unladylike (and is best not quoted, as the main thrust of the tale had moved suddenly and precipitously downstream).

The low falls below the fallen maple was little more than a bump, and after constricting into a still-smaller chute, passed through a pair of hydraulics and into a wide, fast-moving pool. Groag's head broke the water briefly, sank again, then crested a second time. Dog-paddling madly in his chains, he could barely keep afloat.

Groag felt a tug from the connecting chain. "Toede?" Groag asked, and was rewarded with a mouthful of water as he sank slightly. The small hobgoblin sputtered and dog-paddled harder. He heard nothing in response, though whether that was because of the thunder of the river or an aftereffect of Miles's well-aimed rock was unclear.

Highmaster Toede surfaced three feet away, water streaming from his nostrils in a fine spray. He looked angry, and a little afraid.

"You all right?" sputtered Groag, gaining another mouthful of cold river water.

Toede raised an iron-shod wrist and pointed at one of the banks, slightly upstream.

Groag tried to shake his head. "Upstream? Better try to make land a little downstream."

Toede pointed again, frantically.

"If we go downstream, then we have the river going with…" Groag's voice died out once he realized that he could not hear his own words over the increasing thunder-the sound of water falling from a very high place to a very low place.

Then it suddenly became obvious why Toede wanted to swim against the current. Groag began dog-paddling madly alongside him. Both were extremely aware that the surrounding banks of the river were slipping past them, and the thunder was growing louder, until it reverberated in their very bones.

The river erupted over a high barrier of hard shale, through a narrow passage no more than five arm-spans across. The force of the water was such that it flung itself out ten feet into the air before gravity finally got its due and pulled it into a cascading plume of white tinged with rainbow drops reflecting the afternoon sun. Also spewed out this distance were two humanoid figures connected by a length of metal chain. One of them, the smaller one, was screaming at the top of his little lungs.

The falls thundered into a quiet, wide pool of deep green. The sound of the two figures striking the water was lost, and the ripple of their splash erased by the time those ripples reached the shore.

Some time later, the two hobgoblins crawled onshore, still chained together and making small motions with their arms and legs. Both were bloody and battered, but still breathing. Water streamed from Toede's nostrils as Groag panted and cursed between openmouthed gulps of air.

"We're bloody doomed," Groag panted. "We can't run. We can barely walk. Every kender in the countryside is going to want our backsides for breakfast, and I can't say I blame them. That was the kender leader's daughter you attacked, and she's going to see us put up on spikes once the guard tells her it wasn't our intent to rescue her, and we can't move with all this iron, and why are you smiling that damned smile?"

Indeed, throughout Groag's tirade, the hobgoblin high-master had been smiling beatifically, a canary-digesting feline sort of look. After Groag shouted at him, he paused a beat, then stuck out his tongue.

Resting on that pale pink expanse was an iron key, until recently worn around the neck of Taywin Kroninsdau.

Toede held the key up to the sun and laughed wearily. "I hope you don't feel like resting," he said. "I want to be in Flotsam by nightfall."

In actuality, it took three days to reach Flotsam, caused first by a miscalculation on Groag's part as to direction, and second by a necessary evasion of a kender hunting party. The latter was seen at a distance, armed with spears and accompanied by their golden and black hunting hounds. Toede recognized neither kender nor dogs, but thought it the better part of valor to evade them.

The fact of the matter was, had the hobgoblins headed in the right direction at the outset, the kender, who set out for Flotsam immediately, would have caught up with their quarry. But since Toede and Groag got slightly mislaid, the kender patrols made it to Flotsam and back before Toede and Groag even neared the vicinity.

The second night was spent in an abandoned cottage that had not seen human habitation since before the War of the Lance. There was no food other than the lizards that Groag rousted from beneath the collapsed bed. There were a few long human-sized cloaks, easily altered by the rusted but serviceable knives abandoned in a stuck drawer. Toede had seen, lived through, and dealt out worse during the war.

But Toede could not sleep, for Groag snored a saw-touched rhapsody across from him. He considered smothering him with a pillow, but Groag's likely uses in the future stayed his hand.

Also, there were no pillows in the cottage.

The long hike had given him a chance to think about what Groag had said. For six months Toede had been gone. His armor and clothing, while beaten and singed, neither wore nor smelled like he had been wearing them for six months. Perhaps he had been dead. Or put into cold storage for six months, which was one and the same for all intents and purposes. But how-and to what end?

To return and live like a noble. Clouds passed over the wafer-thin sliver of Lunitari, and Toede thought of the shadowy giants and the promise they had made to him in his dreams. He would be treated like a noble. Well, obviously not at the moment, in the tumbledown cottage, but once they reached civilization. Once they reached Flotsam.

After they reached Flotsam, then what? Obviously, when confronted with a highmaster in the flesh, Gilden-tongue would have to step down. Although since Toede wasn't truly a high lord, officially recognized as such, there might be question of his right to rule. The perils that a lack of nobility caused were obvious to the hobgoblin.

Perhaps he would have to call in his favors with the true highlords, and the dragonarmy itself, still billeted in the northern half of the city.

Ah, but Gildentongue always had a way with the great reptiles, being draconian himself. There might have to be a few bloody discussions in the barracks, but in the end, Toede had a dragon (of sorts) in Hopsloth, and Gildentongue would be vanquished.

Perhaps after all this, the highlords would grant him a real, permanent title, and award him Flotsam as his enfiefment. His own duchy. Perhaps that's what the dream meant.

Duchy of Flotsam. Duke of Flotsam. Had a nice ring to it, he thought, leaning against the windowsill.