R. Salvatore - Luthien's Gamble

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 Siobhan, 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.

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.