R. Salvatore - Luthien's Gamble

After a moment of studying the old creature, tucked protectively, even mysteriously, under a heavy blanket, even though he was sitting near the burning hearth, Oliver shrugged and gave it up. He couldn’t place the man.

Despite that, Oliver thought it a perfectly grand gathering, and Katerin felt at home, more so than she had since she had left Hale at the age of fourteen to go into training in the arena at Dun Varna.

“There, then,” Gretel announced after one particularly bawdy tale concerning ships that didn’t quite make it past each other in the night. “Seems we’ve all gathered.”

“This is your ruling council?” Oliver asked.

“These are all the ones too old to be out in the boats,” Gretel corrected. “And not old enough yet to be stuck lying in their beds. Them soon returned with the day’s catch will hear what we’ve to say.”

She looked at Katerin and nodded, indicating that the floor was hers.

Katerin rose slowly. She tried to remember her own proud village and the reactions of her people if they were faced with a similar situation. The folk of Hale didn’t much care for Greensparrow, didn’t talk much about him, didn’t waste many words on him—neither did the folk of Port Charley—but what she needed here and now was action, and ambivalence was a long way from that.

She rose slowly and moved to the center of the room, leaning on the small round table for support. She thought of Luthien in Caer MacDonald and his stirring speech in the plaza beside the Ministry. She wished that he was here now, dashing and articulate. Suddenly she blamed herself for being so arrogant as to think to replace him.

Katerin shook those negative thoughts from her mind. Luthien could not reach these folk—Katerin’s folk. His words were the sort that stirred people who had something to lose, and whether it be Greensparrow, or Luthien or anyone else claiming rulership of Eriador, and thus, of Port Charley, the folk here recognized only one king: the Avon Sea.

Katerin continued to hesitate, and the fisherfolk, men and women who had spent endless hours sitting quiet on open, unremarkable waters, respected her delay and did not press her.

The young woman conjured an image of Port Charley, considered the neat rows and meticulous landscaping, a pretty village cut from the most inhospitable of places. So much like Hale.

But not so much like most of the more southern Eriadoran towns, Katerin realized, especially those in the shadows of the Iron Cross. The young woman’s face brightened as she realized the course of her speech. The folk of Port Charley cared little for the politics of the land, but they, as much as any group in Eriador or Avon, hated cyclopians. By all accounts, very few of the one-eyes lived in or near Port Charley; even the merchants here usually kept strong men as guards, not the typical cyclopian escort.

“You have heard of the rebellion in Caer MacDonald,” she began. She paused for a moment, trying to gauge the reaction, but there was none.

Katerin’s eyes narrowed; she stood straight and tall away from the table. “You have heard that we killed many cyclopians?”

The nods were accompanied by grim, gap-toothed smiles, and Katerin’s course lay open before her. She spoke for more than an hour before the first questions came back at her, then answered every one, every concern.

“All we need is time,” she finally pleaded, mostly to Gretel. “Keep the Avon fleet bottled in your harbor for a week, perhaps. You need not risk the life of a single person. Then you will see. Caer MacDonald will fend off the attack, destroy Greensparrow’s army in the field, and force a truce from the southern kingdom. Then Eriador will be free once more.”

“To be ruled by . . . another king,” one man interrupted.

“Better he, whoever it may be,” Katerin replied, and she thought she knew who the next king of Eriador would be, but saw no sense in speaking of him specifically at this time, “than the demon-allied wizard. Better he than the man who invites cyclopians into his court and appoints them as his personal Praetorian Guard.”

The heads continued to nod, and when Katerin looked at Oliver, she found that he, too, was nodding and smiling. Quite pleased with her performance, the young woman turned directly to Gretel, her expression clearly asking for an answer.

At that moment, a middle-aged man, his hair salt-and-pepper, his face ruddy and showing a few days of beard, burst into the cottage, wide-eyed and out of breath.

“Ye’ve seen them,” Gretel stated more than asked.

“Anchorin’ five miles to the south,” the man explained.

“Too close in to sail through the dark.”

“Warships?” Katerin asked.

The man looked at her, and then at Oliver, curiously. He turned his gaze to Gretel, who motioned that he should continue.

“The whole damned Avon fleet,” he replied.

“As many as fifty?” Katerin needed to know.

“I’d be puttin’ it more at seventy, milady,” the man said. “Big ’uns, too, and low in the water.”

Katerin looked again at Gretel, amazed at how composed the old woman, indeed the whole gathering, remained in light of the grim news. Gretel’s smile was perfectly comforting, perfectly disarming. She nodded, and Katerin thought she had her answer.

“The two of yer will stay with Phelpsi Dozier,” Gretel said. “On the Horizon , a worthy old tub.”

Dozier, the oldest man at the gathering, perhaps the oldest man Katerin had ever seen, stepped up and tipped his woolen cap, smiling with the one tooth remaining in his wide mouth. “She’s mostly at the docks nowadays,” he said, almost apologetically.

“I’ll have my boy see to yer horses,” Gretel continued, and her tone seemed to indicate that the meeting was at its end. Several of those gathered stood up and stretched the soreness out of their muscles and headed for the door. Night had fallen by then, dark and chill, the wind groaning off the sea.

“We have many preparations,” Katerin tried to put in, but Gretel hushed her.

“The folk of Port Charley’ve made them preparations before yer were even born, dear girl,” the old harbormaster insisted. “Yer said yer needing a week, and we’re knowing how to give it to yer.”

“The depth of the harbor?” Katerin asked, looking all around. She didn’t doubt Gretel’s words, but could hardly believe that seventy Avon warships could be taken this lightly.

“Shallow,” answered the old man by the hearth, the one Oliver thought he recognized. “The ships will have only the last forty feet of the longest two piers beside which to dock. And that section can be easily dropped.”

The halfling noted then that the man’s accent didn’t match the salty dialect of the others, but that clue only left Oliver even more befuddled. He realized that he should know this man, but for some reason, as though something had entered his brain and stolen away a memory, he could not call him to mind.

He dismissed it—what else could he do?—and left with Katerin and Phelpsi Dozier. They found the Horizon tied up near to shore on the next pier in line and Phelpsi let them into the hold, surprisingly well furnished and comfortable, considering the general condition of the less-than-seaworthy old boat.

“Get yer sleep,” old Dozier invited them, tossing pillows out to them from a closet. He nodded and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Oliver was confused, for he thought that this was the man’s home.

Dozier wheezed out a somewhat lewd laugh. “Gretel’s to let me stay with her this night,” he said. He tipped his wool hat once more. “See yer at the dawn.”

Then he was gone, and Oliver tipped his hat toward the door, hoping that he would possess such fires when he was that old. The halfling kicked off his high boots and fell back onto one of the two cots in the tiny hold, reaching immediately to turn the lantern down low. He noted Katerin’s look of a caged animal and hesitated.