The Half Dwarf Prince: 02 - The Dwarf War

by J. M. Fosberg

Commander Boris approached the men and the huge dwarf at the front of the Patria army. He looked up to the man still sitting on a horse. He bowed to him, guessing he was the king.

  “Your Highness, I am Commander Boris. Master Rupert informed us that King Bergmann intended to have all of the men in our army killed in order to weaken the city of Portwein, and then have king Merwein killed. He informed me of his plan to turn on King Bergmann, and I agreed to help him. King Bergmann treated our men very poorly, and we were barely able to prevent an all-out mutiny as it was.”

  King Patria looked down, and Grundel and Jerrie reached up and helped him off the horse. Jerrie had to help hold him up. His leg was throbbing in pain, and it had taken every bit of effort he had just to stay in the saddle. He couldn’t put any weight on the broken limb.

  “Commander, thank you for seeing reason. King Bergmann made promises to me as well, but it was clear that he had no intention of keeping them once he had what he wanted. Do you know if Master Rupert made it through the battle?”

  “Master Rupert told us only that he would deal with King Bergmann. I do not know what happened to him once the fighting started, Your Highness,” Commander Boris answered.

  “Commander, if you would send a couple of men who would recognize Master Rupert with my men, I would like him found, whatever his condition. He is, after all, the one who organized this whole ambush,” King Patria said. Jerrie sent a couple of the White Dragons with the soldiers from Portwein to carry out the king’s order.

  The Portwein army was opening up, and the dwarves were coming down the center. In the front was King Grizzle Stoneheart, leaning heavily on King Kimmel Kraft; on their left was Rundo and on their right was Queen Frau Gemcutter.

  Grundel saw that his father was limping, but he quickly figured out that it wasn’t too serious. Jabaal was standing next to him; he must have come to help him with his father couldn’t fight anymore. With him and Jerrie both fighting in circles around him at the end, he had barely had an enemy to fight. But when Grundel looked at Frau, all of that was pushed from his mind. She walked toward him in hard leather armor that Anwar must have made for her. She had a crossbow hanging on her right hip and a sword sheathed on her left hip.

  Her hair hung down and stuck to her face with sweat. He locked eyes with her, and the world around him disappeared. He stared into her eyes as she grew closer and closer. She stopped a few feet away, standing between them and the commander of the Portwein army.

  “I apologize for this, Commander, but there is something that needs to happen,” Grizzle said, and then he turned to Grundel. “Well, let’s get this over with, boy.”

  Grundel looked to his father, who nodded back to Frau. Grundel went to her. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. For the first time he kissed her without worry about what anyone else might think, or how it would affect her position as queen. She kissed him back. When they pulled away from each other she had blood on her face. He tried to wipe it away, but he just rubbed more on. Then he realized that his nearly white hair, hanging down in his face, was red with blood. The moment was over, and he turned back toward the others.

  Grizzle reached out a hand to King Patria. “King Patria, I am Grizzle Stoneheart, King of Evermount, husband to your cousin and father to your nephew. It is an honor to finally meet you.”

  King Patria took his hand and smiled. “The honor is mine. I guess neither of us really made it out of this in the best shape.”

  “You both made it out better than Bergmann,” Kraft said.

  Grizzle turned to his companions. “This is King Kraft of Haufen, and this is Queen Gemcutter of Shinestone. Seeing as introductions are made and there are quite a few of us who will need some medical attention, I say we get on with this.”

  Frau stepped up. “Commander Boris, your men can stay in the field to the left of the entrance. King Patria, your men can stay in the field to the right, at the base of the stairs that lead up to the mountain. I will send escorts with you both to ensure you have everything you need. Once your men are settled, we would like you to come up to Shinestone with any of your men you wish to accompany you.”

  She had barely finished talking when Rundo took off running past the Patria army back toward the outside of the wall.

  “Where’s he going?” Kraft asked.

  “To meet with his druid friends, I would guess,” Jerrie said.

  “And his girl,” Grizzle said.

  “Should we wait for them?” Frau asked.

  “No, they won’t all come. He will bring the ones who want to come when they are ready. Druids aren’t big on crowds or caves. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came back with only the girl,” Grizzle said.

  With that said, Grizzle, Jabaal, Frau, Grundel, and Kraft prepared to head toward Shinestone.

  “You should go, Your Highness,” Jerrie told King Patria. “I will make sure that the men get settled, then I will come up. You should really get that leg looked at.”

  King Patria looked back at the army, but Grundel reached under his arm, supporting the king’s wounded leg, and started walking toward the mountain.

  Rundo had been searching for Evelyn’s aura as the others talked. When he sensed her getting close, he took off running through the Patria army. He came out onto the road and saw her standing on the other side of it, at the edge of the tree line. He ran across the road toward her, and she met him halfway. He wrapped his arms around her and she bent down and kissed him. The fact that there were dead bodies all around them didn’t even register as they shared the embrace.

  “I love you,” Rundo told her.

  “I love you, too,” Evelyn said. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “It just was never real before this,” she said.

  “What wasn’t real?” he asked.

  “The danger. I knew that you were off fighting and everything, but I had never seen a war in person. It was never real to me how much danger you were in,” she answered.

  He pulled her in close. Someone else slammed into them. He looked up to see Erica wrapping her arms around them.

  “I am so glad you are both okay,” she said. “I helped, Rundo, did you see?” she asked.

  Rundo looked at her, confused.

  “I was with the others on the ground,” she said. “We pushed the army into the big hole over there with blast of wind.”

  Rundo looked over to where the soldiers of Patria lined the long trench that ran along the edge of the wall. A lot of the dwarves who fell in there would still be alive. Dwarves from Shinestone were already coming out to relieve the men guarding the area. Jerrie was guiding the soldiers inside the walls.

  “You saved hundreds of men’s lives, maybe even thousands,” Rundo told Erica. Her face lit up with excitement.

  “Brother Rundo,” said a voice behind Evelyn and Erica. Rundo looked around them to see Brother David.

  “Brother David, thank you for your help,” Rundo said.

  “We did it because it was best. That army cut down trees and killed animals unnecessarily all the way here. We couldn’t allow someone like that to establish themselves in an area with so much life around it. The Elders have asked me to come on their behalf. The rest of the community is already moving back to the forest. We would like to know what comes next,” Brother David said.

  “Of course,” Rundo said. “Let’s get up to Shinestone. There are a lot of people who will need healing, and the dwarves in those trenches who are still alive will need to be dealt with, so we probably won’t meet about what comes next until tomorrow, but we can get you settled in the mountain, and I can introduce you to the others.”

  “Will they be killed?” Erica asked.

  Rundo looked over to the where the dwarves were taking up places guarding the trenches. “I don’t know. I think it will depend on the individuals.”

  Erica stared over at the trenches. “Let’s go, Erica,” Evelyn said, trying to divert her attention. “We are goi
ng to get to see a real dwarven kingdom.”

  Erica turned and looked up at the looming mountain. Rundo led them through the bodies and toward the mountain.

  Jerrie walked over to where the White Dragons were standing. “That is King Bergmann,” one of the Portwein soldiers was saying. “The dwarf king bled to death from a cut in his neck.”

  “And this is Master Rupert,” another soldier said, pushing a dwarf off of the man lying a few feet from the fallen dwarf king. Rupert still had the knife in his hand, but he also had three crossbow bolts in him, one in the shoulder, one in the leg, and the one that killed him, which had gone through his chest and punctured his lung.

  “Well, he took care of King Bergmann like he promised,” Jerrie said. “Pick them both up. We will take them up the mountain.”

  After that he turned and walked back toward Shinestone. He had already talked to Captain Thompson, who was getting the soldiers settled inside the walls. He would wait until the captain was ready and then lead him up into Shinestone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dressing the Wounds

  Grizzle bent over the table as Hellen pulled the bolt out of the back of his leg. She had to cut around it a little because it had lodged in the bone. It was unbelievable that he had continued to put weight on the leg after that, but after dealing with other dwarves, and Grundel with his nearly fatal wounds, she had learned that dwarves could withstand quite a bit more than humans, and Stonehearts even more so than the average dwarf. Once the bolt was out, she packed the wound with a clean piece of linen. It was more a hole than a cut, so it would just have to be cleaned and packed every day while it healed. From her experience with dwarves she expected that it would only take about a week to heal, while it would have taken two to three weeks for the same wound to heal on a human. Grizzle also had a nasty cut in his leg that he had packed with dirt to slow the bleeding. He didn’t even flinch as she cleaned out that wound. By the time she had it clean, the wound was bleeding pretty heavily, and she stitched the cut up. With Grizzle taken care of she moved on to King Patria.

  “This is going to hurt a lot, Your Highness. You should probably bite down on this,” she told the king, handing him a roll of hard leather. He looked at it suspiciously, but then he put it in his mouth. Grundel held the king’s legs down and then Hellen pulled and shifted the lower half of the leg, realigning the bones. The king grunted, biting down on the leather in his mouth. He laid his head back and breathed out heavily when she let go of the leg.

  “We need to splint the leg now, so that it stays in place. It won’t hurt nearly as much, I promise.”

  The king just nodded, keeping the leather in his mouth. Hellen had Grundel hold flat pieces of wood along the king’s leg. She measured them and then broke off the ends. Grundel held them against the king’s leg again as she wrapped a long, thin length of cloth around the leg, holding the wood in place.

  “You’re all set, Your Highness, but you should avoid putting weight on that leg as much as possible for the next few weeks. The next few days you should avoid putting weight on it at all.”

  King Patria looked at Hellen and forced himself to talk. “Thank you.”

  “Now for you,” Hellen said, turning on Jabaal.

  “I am fine, my love, really,” Jabaal said, stepping back.

  “That’s why there are half a dozen cuts in your pants soaked in blood? If nothing else they need to be cleaned out. You know that better than anyone,” she scolded him.

  Jabaal shook his head and climbed up on the table. He slid his pants off so she could inspect his leg. His missing leg had returned when he called on his Kalime, but when he released the blessing of Kalime the leg had gone with it.

  “This one will need a couple of stitches, but the rest just need to be cleaned,” she said. She put a couple of stitches in the deep cut on Jabaal’s leg and then spent another twenty minutes cleaning all of the others.

  “What about you?” Hellen asked, turning to Grundel.

  “I am fine,” Grundel answered.

  “She’s going to check anyway,” Frau said.

  Kraft and Grizzle both burst into laughter. Grundel just shook his head. He went over to the big stone table and sat down where Jabaal had just been.

  “Take off your shirt and pants so I can look at you,” Hellen told him.

  Grundel did as he was told.

  “What happened?” Frau asked so loudly she was almost yelling, which caused everyone else to look. Grundel’s arms and legs were covered in blood, so it was hard to tell how many cuts he might have, but on the inside of his leg a few inches above his knee was a very angry-looking burn.

  Grundel shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  “That is a pretty bad burn,” Hellen said. “How did you get that?”

  “Somebody got lucky with a sword. I was bleeding badly, so I pressed Firebringer against the cut for a second. The bleeding stopped,” he said dismissively.

  Hellen didn’t let it be dismissed. “This is a bad burn, but if you were cut here, you would have bled to death in a couple of minutes.”

  Everyone was staring at Grundel.

  “What? I said it was bleeding badly.”

  “Ha ha, that’s my boy, stubborn to the end. You’d better get used to it, Frau,” Grizzle said.

  Frau turned and gave him an angry look, and he smiled and threw his hands up. Hellen moved on, cleaning all the blood off. Grundel had dozens of cuts on his arms and legs, but none of them were very bad. There were a few that could use a couple of stitches.

  “What happened here?” she asked about the bruise that covered his entire side. It had faded to yellow and was almost gone, but she noticed it.

  “Oh, that’s from when he tackled a wizard out of a window and fell forty feet to the street,” Rundo said, walking into the room. Grundel turned to look at his friend and then shook his head.

  “You did what?” Frau said.

  “It was nothing,” Grundel said. “Rundo, who is this?” he asked, trying to turn the attention away from him.

  “Is that her?” Grizzle said, coming to his feet to meet the new arrivals.

  Rundo nodded, and the taller woman on the right blushed slightly. “Everyone this is Evelyn, her little sister Erica, and this is Brother David. He has come as the representative for the druids of the Einode Forest.”

  Frau turned to them after giving Grundel one last angry look. “Welcome to Shinestone. I am Frau Gemcutter. I am the queen of Shinestone. This is King Kraft of Haufen, and this is King Stoneheart, of Evermount, and king over the dwarven kingdoms.”

  Everyone shook hands and then they moved on, introducing the others.

  “What about me?” Jerrie said, walking into the room. Rundo looked behind him. “Jerrie, this is Evelyn; Evelyn, this is Jerrie.”

  “Of course it is,” Jerrie said, wrapping his arms around the woman and lifting her off the ground as he hugged her. “I have heard a lot about you. It is nice to finally meet you,” he said, setting her down. “Everyone, this is Captain Thompson, the leader of King Patria’s army. Captain Thompson, these are the most important dwarves in all of Gegend.”

  “Jerrie, have Hellen look you over,” Frau told him.

  “Yes, Queen Gemcutter,” Jerrie said, smiling as he saluted the dwarf queen.

  He took his pants and shirt off and he saw that the other girl who had come with Rundo blushed as she stared at him. He winked at her and then turned to Hellen, holding out his arms.

  “You don’t have a mark on you,” Hellen said.

  “Now you know why I am in such a good mood,” he said, putting his pants back on.

  Grundel smiled at his friend. Jerrie had successfully diverted all the attention away from him.

  Jerrie turned back to Frau. “Queen Gemcutter, the dwarves have replaced the men surrounding that deep canal that Rundo’s friends so cleverly trapped them in. Both armies have set camp, and the commander of Portwein’s army will be brought up shortly. We found the man who turned
the Portwein army on King Bergmann, but he was already dead. His name was Master Rupert. He was apparently King Merwein’s personal advisor. He is the one who killed King Bergmann; he still had the knife in his hand that he stabbed him in the neck with. I told the men to have both of the bodies brought up.”

  “Thank you, Jerrie,” Frau replied. “I think we will leave the dwarves of Tiefes Loch in their prison for the night. Today has been eventful enough; we will deal with them tomorrow. We will have to think about what to do about King Bergmann’s body. I think that we should send Master Rupert’s body back to King Merwein with his army, but we will talk to the commander about it later.”

  “Good, I think we could all use sometime to reunite, and I would like to get to know the woman who has captured the heart of our halfling,” Grizzle said.

  Everyone turned to Rundo and Evelyn. She was blushing deeply.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Delvidge Dwarves

  First thing in the morning, they all went out to the landing at the top of the stairs that led into Shinestone. They looked at King Bergmann’s body.

  “What is this?” Grundel asked, pointing to the black mark on the king’s chest just barely showing above his shirt.

  Grizzle reached down and pulled the shirt down further. “Bordin’s furnace! It can’t be!”

  Kraft came over, pulling the shirt down. “We have to talk to those dwarves!”

  “What is that?” Grundel asked.

  “That is the mark of chaos,” Frau said. “It is the mark of Delvidge.”

  “Bergmann abandoned Bordin?” Grundel asked.

  “That’s what it looks like. I haven’t heard of a dwarf abandoning the father in centuries. We have to go see the other dwarves,” Grizzle said, and started down the stairs.

  They all followed. Grizzle was limping and leaning on a cane that was basically just a rod of steel that he had bent at the top. The two human armies were carrying their soldiers’ bodies inside the wall and piling them up. The Portwein army had far fewer casualties and theirs had all been nearby. They had already collected all of their dead and wounded, and they were now going out helping the Patria army bring in theirs.