by Dragon Lance
As Governor of Pax Tharkas, I can also report to Your Majesty that things go smoothly here.
The dwarves are admirable allies, and since the arrival of the Second Regiment of the Guards of the Sun, banditry has entirely ceased in the Kharolis Mountain region. The King of Thorbardin is greatly pleased. I enclose with this letter a missive from the king, in which he expresses his gratitude to Your Majesty for the garrison of guards. The king also hopes to begin mining nearby and says the mineral wealth of the mountains will greatly enrich both kingdoms.
Now, if I may, Great Speaker, I would like to beg a personal favor of you.
For many years, I have admired the person of General of the Guards, Lady Verhanna, but she has not returned my attention. Now that the period of mourning for Speaker Kith-Kanan has passed, I wonder if you would broach the subject of marriage to your esteemed sister on my behalf? I ask this for two reasons, Majesty. First, she is of royal blood and therefore requires your permission to marry, and second, she is my fellow officer, and I dare not approach her on such a delicate matter. It would be a breach of military discipline.
If you think it wise and prudent, Great Speaker, to do this for me, my happiness and gratitude would be boundless. I have loved Lady Verhanna for many years, but I dared not reveal myself to so formidable a warrior maiden. With you to sponsor me, I feel I may have a real chance at winning her hand.
That is all I have to tell you at this time. May the gods smile on Your Majesty, grant you wisdom, and continue the good fortune and happiness your young reign has already begun.
Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,
Kemian, Lord Ambrodel,
Governor
Pax Tharkas
Vinas Solamnus
(1817 PC)
Great lives rarely make great stories. The reverse is also true. Even so, my advisors have decided I am too old to do much more than recount my days of greatness. They have virtually ordered me to write my memoirs. (Old soldiers and tired kings are often ruled by their valets.) I do not imagine the resulting story will be great, but perhaps it will prove diverting.
I am Vinas Solamnus. The nation of Solamnia bears my name, as do the Knights of Solamnia. I have traveled Ansalon, from Karthay of the minotaurs to Sancrist of the gnomes. I have led Ergoth’s vast armies and slain men in their thousands. I have flown griffon-back and besieged cities and drunk from the chalice of the gods.
Such things may be entertaining for readers, but they are decidedly hazardous to heroes. For heroes – anyone who rises upon the face of Krynn to stand against evil – true greatness lies not in adventures, but in honor.
Est Sularus oth Mithas – my honor is my life.
It took me a long time to learn that. I had always wanted to be a warrior, thinking sword skill was all a great man needed. But swords are only cold steel if they are not wielded with honor.
Honor is an inheritance. My father passed it to me with the name Solamnus, and I hope I have not sullied it too much before passing it to the nation and the knights.
True, I have not always been worthy of the name Solamnus. I have, in fact, fought on the side of evil. The following account will make these failings clear. But thankfully, greatness is not limited to those with perfect character. Greatness embraces all those who struggle for perfect character. No war I ever waged was more perilous than my struggle to become worthy of the name Solamnus.
This is the story of that struggle, that quest for honor. This is the story of my life. If readers can learn from my failings, they will have many teachers, indeed.
Heroes of Krynn... gather and hear!
Vinas Solamnus
Vingaard Keep
22 Argon, 1267 Age of Light
Part I
COURAGE
Prelude
27 Chislmont, 1183 Age of Light
Scintillating motes of magic fire circled the room. The sparks danced among the hammer beams in the ceiling. They bounced along the marble floor. They engulfed Emperor Emann and his court sorcerer.
“Remember, Caitiff,” the emperor said, oblivious to the sparks that smoldered in his black goatee,” she must be beautiful.”
The Black-Robed Wizard continued to circle his bony hands over the cauldron of lamb’s blood. His voice emerged from the shadowy hood he wore. He spoke with the unmistakable hauteur of an ancient Silvanesti elf. “Oh, she will be beautiful, Master. She will be.”
That response appeased the emperor for some moments. He drank deeply of the blood-red spirits in his pewter grail and deliriously watched the swirling specks of arcane power. They coalesced into a spinning column above the blood pool. Some of the sparks hissed down into the calm liquid. They sent up acrid smoke that thickened the column of motes.
“Passionate,” the emperor blurted. “My empress must be passionate. No woman is truly beautiful unless she has passion.”
“Yes, yes,” the old elf assured, “she will be passionate, even for you hot-blooded humans.”
Emperor Emann stared querulously at the warlock, wondering again if an elf could truly be trusted to work for the great human empire of Ergoth.
The sorcerer seemed to sense his master’s unease. “She will serve His Highness – and His Highness’s empire – well.”
Fevery and sweating, the emperor watched a form take shape in the pillar. It was a maiden sitting beside a stream. She was comely, yes, but in the soft way of country nobles. Emann had always imagined himself with an exotic woman, her legs and fingers and eyes as sharp as stilettos.
“No, Caitiff, you fey fool!” Emann shouted into the vision. The lass there seemed to hear him, looking up startled. “She is plump as a pigeon and just as dowdy I want a firebird, a phoenix, not this country chickadee.”
She had heard, somehow. Frightened, the girl of spark and smoke rose from the stream bank and ran. The scrying magic of the old elf followed her. Fleeing, she wept.
“Oh, Highness, she is sweet in look but cunning of mind,” said the sorcerer soothingly. “Young, now – but in a few years she will be a full woman, with a passion that could level all Ansalon. She is the one you will want.”
The poor girl clamped hands over her ears and screamed silently. Still, she could not block out the harsh voices that haunted her from afar.
“She is a fatted calf, no more!” the emperor snarled, and threw his grail through the image. Though the cup clanked against the opposite wall, the girl reacted as if she had been struck and fell. She huddled there, holding her head and sobbing.
“A fatted calf?” echoed the mage darkly. “I will tell you about this one. She has unmeasurable power in her. And that power is corruptible. Win her to your side, Emperor, and your reign of iron will become a reign of mithril steel!”
Caitiff had never been wrong. He had advised young Emperor Emann well in the massacre of the peasants, in the disavowal of the senate, and in the plan to dominate all of western Ansalon. He could hardly be wrong about one poor, trembling girl.
“If I wed this little trifle, I shall never fall?” Emann asked avidly.
“If you wed her,” the mage promised, “it would take a champion of the gods to bring you down....”
I
Two Months Hence, 17 Argon, 1183 Age of Light
The young man’s look was tender.
Luccia returned it. Her eyes had always been big and bright, like shiny plates streaked with cerulean glaze. Those eyes caught the morning sun from her gold-brown hair and made the freckles on her cheeks glow like dandelions. Luccia had a bright elven face – energetic, passionate, flirtatious.
“More mud,” Vinas said, smearing a thumb’s worth of the alley’s moist earth across one of those cheeks. Her inner glow was undimmed by the grainy stuff. Even covered in grime and clothed as a laborer and standing in a stone-walled alleyway, she was radiant. At this rate, she’d never pass as a boy. “And your hair is coming out from beneath the cap. You’ll have to let me shear it off.”
Luccia bit her lip in genuine regret. Th
e gleam that mud could not remove from her face was gone now. She was fifteen, one year his younger, and precious little could dull the light of her smile. This did. “You don’t know how hard it is for me to have long hair. Washing it in the river, combing it out with fish bones, tying it up with whatever fresh rag falls from one of you nobles...”
He laughed. It was a broad, hearty laugh that he’d not grown into yet. His chest and belly would one day be a great bulwark of muscle and heart. Now they were only the thin scaffolding of youth. “Well, what of those breeches and that tunic you’re wearing? They’re no rags. I snatched the best clothes I could find in your size.”
“That you did,” Luccia replied. She gestured at a certain tightness in the gray fabric adorning her chest. “But you don’t seem to notice that my size is changing.”
He didn’t laugh at that, but he did blush. He tried to hide his embarrassment by stretching and yawning. The move brought his own servant’s tunic up from his breeches and showed a fish-white strip of belly. His color only deepened. “Mine don’t fit any better.”
His expression hardened. Keen focus came to his eyes, as though he were looking right through the world to the thing he wanted on the other side. “Enough fooling around. If we want to be accepted into the infantry and march off to battle gnolls and ogres, you’ll have to look like a man – like me. That means a shorn head and a little less beauty.”
She nodded, equally grim. “And you’re going to have to look like an orphan – a peasant, like me. So the mud belongs on your face!” She lunged for him. Though he reared back, her fingers traced quick, feral lines of dirt across his cheeks. Vinas somehow looked more handsome for that mud.
He caught Luccia’s hands and whirled her around, holding her arms behind her back. His serious demeanor cracked just slightly as he pushed her away and snatched up the sheep shears he had borrowed from a farm shed. He advanced on her. “I’ve taken my medicine. Now you take yours.”
Luccia started a playful retreat down the alley toward the murmur of Daltigoth’s peasant hordes. The snick, snick, snick of the shears, though, brought her up short. She crossed arms over her chest and seemed to consider whether to fight or flee.
“I could always join up without you and march on out of here,” Vinas warned.
Luccia’s resistance dissolved. She pouted. “Just make it quick.” She dragged the ragged hat from her head, revealing the slight points of half-elven ears. “Just don’t cut it too short. And don’t snip off the tips of my ears.”
He did, and didn’t, and didn’t. The shearing was soon done.
Luccia looked up at her young friend as though his green eyes were twin mirrors. “Well. How do I look, then?”
He blinked. “I don’t know if you look much like a boy, but you look fine, all the same.” He stood there, a silken handful of her long tresses clutched in one palm. She was alluring, even with her hair in a blocky wedge.
“Fine. I look fine,” she said, deflated, and donned her ragged cap.
“And how do I look?” Vinas asked. He turned slowly and held his arms out for her perusal.
Luccia pursed her lips. In a fit of pique, she knocked the clump of hair from his hand. “Fine. You look fine, too. The mud can’t hide the fact that you’re a milk-fed, soft-fingered boy, though. And it can’t put crooks and kinks in the way you talk, either. My guess is I’ll be marching out of here without you.”
He nodded, suddenly somber.
Luccia cuffed his shoulder and grabbed his elbow. “Let’s go. The foes of Ergoth are begging for a fight.”
Vinas didn’t know about the foes, but he knew about himself. He was begging for something to fight for, or at least against. As the two friends marched side by side down the mud-packed alley, Vinas thought how he could fight for this city. For Daltigoth, his home.
They stepped out into a cobbled road that ran between his father’s villa and the statehouses of the upper quarter. The city below the road was well awake, with peddlers and hawkers, gypsy children and guards. They huddled in the sunlit spaces beneath leaning shops of stone or wood, breathing white clouds of life into the chill morning.
“Look at them,” Vinas said sadly. “They look like they are bowing to somebody. They look like they’ve got something heavy on their backs, something that might press them into the ground.” He shook his head. “Even my dad looks like that. I’m glad to be getting out before I do, too.”
“You could carry half of Ansalon on your shoulders and still skip along,” Luccia said, tweaking his side.
Many of those huddled folk smiled in recognition at the disguised friends. Vinas caught a wink or two. He and Luccia were well known in this quarter, and their disguises and escapades were canonized in low legends. Vinas wondered, though, if even a stranger could see right through the peasant garb and dirtiness. As the old saying ran, “It is easier to clean an old silver spoon than to tarnish a new one.”
“There,” said Vinas, changing the subject. He pointed at a mounted griffon circling in the fiercely blue sky. “That’s what I want. I’m not going to be a spear-carrier any longer than it takes me to get a griffon. Imagine riding into battle on the back of one of those creatures! Magnificent!”
Luccia watched the distant silhouette. It hung motionless like a dead leaf on a still branch. “What’s the good of that?” she wondered. “The griffon’ll do all the fighting and you’ll end up a tick on a war dog.”
“You can fight from a griffon’s saddle,” Vinas said. “Why else does he have that lance there, and the holster for it, and the sword?”
“Every warrior’s got a sword – at least the ones that’ve got to shave do. And that lance – so what? You use it once and it’s gone,” Luccia said. “Now, the horse cavalry, on the other hand...”
She drew him up beside her. One glance at her pale, dirty face told him that everything had changed. “We’re here, Vinas,” she said simply.
He looked, and saw. The high street ended before them. Shops and houses shied back from what lay at the head of the hill – the martial esplanade that fronted the gates of Castle Daltigoth. The stony expanse was pitted. Its flagstones of granite and slate and quartzite had worn unevenly under centuries of boots. Any Ergothian foot that ever stomped upon an enemy throat stomped first upon those stones.
Just now, the esplanade was filled with ragged lines of recruits and straight ranks of soldiers. The soldiers wore the red and black tabards of the Ergothian Guard over battle-scarred field plate mail. The recruits wore rags.
Feeling a lump of apprehension in his throat, Vinas watched them. Each new man would nod when spoken to. At some unseen sign, he would bolt across the plaza and shimmy up a log leaning against a bulwark. Others dangled like wretched spiders from scaffold ropes, or jabbed poles into haystacks until collared badgers charged them. Such were the ordeals of recruits.
“There it is,” reiterated Luccia. All levity was gone from her freckled face. She looked pale, as any recruit should. “We can turn back now,” she joked nervously.
Vinas felt the same fear, but he had rehearsed this moment and knew how to win past it. “I doubt the ogres will be turning back,” he said brusquely. He strode onward. She followed.
They reached the first and longest line of new recruits and fell into position. At the other end of the queue sat a colonel behind a three-legged field table. His balding pate was crossed by no more than three strands of black hair. He was questioning the enlistees, writing in a slim book beneath his talonlike hands. The recruit before him was a thin, middle-aged farmer in clothes so ragged that his breechcloth showed through.
Now, it would be only a long, wordless wait. In the hush, Vinas listened to the distant slap of feet on stone, the tug and grunt of peasants climbing ropes, the occasional barked command.... He somehow knew that these sounds – the harsh, impersonal bustle of military life – would surround him the rest of his days.
In time, he stood before the man at the table, a mean-eyed colonel with black hair and sa
llow, pockmarked skin.
“Name?” asked the man curtly.
Oddly, Vinas had not until that moment expected to need an alias. “Tobe,” he ventured. He winced and shifted from foot to foot. “That’s what my friends call me. Tobe. I s’pose you could put down Tobias, though – spelt with a I-A-S. No surname.”
“Where was it, Tobias with an I-A-S, that you learned how to read?” the colonel asked, his hawklike eyes rising from the volume.
“Oh,” Vinas said, flushing, “I never did. Only my master had two Tobe’s, but only one Tobe with an I-A-S. That’s what he called us. Just plain Tobe and then Tobe with an I-A-S.”
The colonel’s stare was piercing. “You have run off from your master, then? Are you an indentured servant or slave?”
“We didn’t run off,” broke in Luccia. “We earned out our time. We got free, the legal way. But then we find out ‘free’ means you don’t eat.”
The colonel laughed a little. “You must be —”
“Tobe, yes, without a I-A-S,” she said, and then bowed with tramp-like decorum. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
The colonel nodded, and wrote again. “I don’t believe you. Why is it that you, Tobe without an I-A-S have callused hands while your friend, Tobe with an I-A-S has soft, white hands?”
Vinas spouted, “I did silversmithing – detail work. Tobe, here, did ironmongery – heavy pounding and such.”
The soldier looked skeptical. “Do you know what happens to colonels who enlist noble brats among the peasant division?”
“We aren’t nobles,” Luccia insisted.
“Good,” said the colonel. “It would go very bad for you if you were.” His look was inscrutable, his eyes black. “I have a test for you, one that will measure balance, courage, and ingenuity.” He gestured across the proving grounds to a great, rough-barked tree, stripped of branches and leaning up against a stout, short wall. Many other recruits scampered or crawled up the sloped tree trunk. Few reached the other end, a hundred feet along the bole and thirty feet in the air. At one point or another, most of the recruits slipped off.
