By mid-morning of the next day, Brind’Amour would have fifty thousand on the field encircling Carlisle, with supply lines stretching the breadth of Avon and the fruitful southern coast open to his warships.
Among the Eriadoran allies, there remained only one voice of dissent, a certain Huegoth leader who could not be put off any longer.
Luthien was with Brind’Amour when the king went to Asmund’s longship. The younger Bedwyr hardly noticed the principals at the initial greeting, when he looked again upon his older brother. Ethan offered a hand to Luthien, but did not accompany it with a smile, nor a flicker of recognition in his cinnamon-colored eyes. Even after weeks moving in common cause, Ethan seemed as cold to Luthien as he had when the brothers had first found each other on the Isle of Colonsey.
Could it be that Ethan would never remember, or admit, who he truly was?
They had no time to discuss their personal situation, though, for Asmund descended on Brind’Amour like a great bear.
“We are warriors!” the Huegoth king roared. “And yet we have been sitting on the empty waves for weeks, our foodstuffs delivered by Eriadoran ships that have touched the shores of Avon!”
“We could not reveal—” Brind’Amour began, but Asmund cut him short.
“Warriors!” the barbarian roared again, looking for support from Torin Rogar, standing at his side. The huge Rogar nodded and grunted.
“I have not lifted my spear in many days,” Torin complained. “Even the Avon warships turned from us and would not fight.”
Brind’Amour tried to appear sympathetic, but in truth, after the beating his forces had taken all the way from Caer MacDonald, such eagerness for battle left a bitter taste in his mouth. The old wizard held little love for Huegoths, and for a moment seriously considered granting Asmund’s desires, throwing the king and all his brutal warriors against Carlisle’s high walls.
“I pain for battle,” Asmund said hungrily.
“That you might replenish your slave stocks?” Luthien said bluntly. He noted Brind’Amour’s scowl, and Ethan’s, and he understood. Prudence told the young Bedwyr that they should keep the alliance solid at this critical juncture, but Luthien could no longer hold back his ire—at the Huegoths and at Ethan.
Asmund grabbed at the handle of the great axe that was strapped to his back; Luthien likewise put a hand to the hilt of Blind-Striker.
“You dare?” Asmund began. He thrust his fist into the air, a signal to his sturdy men that the meeting was at its end. Brind’Amour sucked in his breath, but Luthien did not blink.
“Perhaps Eriador would be wise to guard its coast,” Asmund threatened.
“Is your pledge of honor so fragile that it might be broken by a few words spoken in anger?” Luthien asked, giving Asmund pause.
The king squared against Luthien, came very close to the young man, glaring down at him ominously. Luthien didn’t back away an inch, and didn’t blink.
“Friends do not fear to point out each other’s faults,” Luthien said in all seriousness, and he was taken aback a moment later, when Asmund suddenly bellowed with laughter.
“I do like you, young Luthien Bedwyr!” the king roared, and all his warriors stood more easily.
Luthien started to respond, again with grim confidence, but this time, Brind’Amour’s scowl became an open threat and the young Bedwyr held his tongue.
The alliance was solid, for the time being, and after Asmund extracted a promise from Brind’Amour that the Huegoths could lead the charge against Greensparrow’s fortress—a promise the Eriadoran king was more than happy to give—Brind’Amour and Luthien took their leave.
“When Greensparrow is properly dealt with, we will turn our eyes to the Huegoths,” Luthien said as soon as he and Brind’Amour were back on land and away from Huegoth ears.
“What would you do?” Brind’Amour asked. “Wage war on all the world?”
“Promise me now that you will not let them leave the Stratton on ships rowed by slaves,” Luthien begged.
Brind’Amour looked long and hard at the principled young man, wearing a stern and determined expression that the old wizard could not ignore. That dedication to principle was Luthien’s strength. How could he possibly refuse to follow such an example?
“Asmund will be properly dealt with,” Brind’Amour promised.
THE SIEGE OF CARLISLE
They stood on the forward masts of the warships closest to Carlisle and on the hills outside of the city. Some brave ones rode their horses dangerously close to the white walls, waging a battle of words.
“We have fifty thousand on the field against you,” they all said, as instructed by Brind’Amour and Deanna Wellworth. “Among our ranks is Deanna Wellworth, rightful queen of Avon. Surrender Greensparrow, the murderer of King Anathee Wellworth!”
Every hour of every day, those words were called out to the besieged people of Carlisle. Brind’Amour didn’t really expect the Avonese within the city to rise up against their king, but he was looking for every possible advantage once the fighting did start. And that would take some time, the old wizard understood. An army could not simply charge the walls of a fortified bastion such as Carlisle.
They did wage a few minor battles, with the Eriadorans testing the strength of various points along Carlisle’s perimeter. Asmund’s Huegoths took the lead in most of these, but even the fierce Isenlanders knew when to turn about, and casualties remained light on both sides.
Meanwhile, other, more important preparations were underway, foremost among them the old wizard’s work to keep Greensparrow busy. The Eriadorans could not afford to have the dragon coming out at them every night, or to have the wizard-king launching magical attacks into their ranks. Thus, Brind’Amour took it upon himself to engage Greensparrow, to test his strength, the powers of the ancient brotherhood, against this new-styled wizard. Alone in his tent the first night of the siege, Brind’Amour created a magical tunnel, reaching from his chamber to the tower Deanna had identified as Greensparrow’s. This tunnel was not like the ones the wizard had used to transport Asmund or Katerin and Oliver, but one that would take him in spirit only to face the wizard-king.
Greensparrow was surprised, but not caught off guard, to see the ghostly form of the old wizard hovering before his throne.
“Come to scold?” the Avon king snarled. “To tell me the error of my ways?”
Brind’Amour’s response was straightforward, a burst of crackling red sparks that burned, not into Greensparrow’s physical body, but into his soul. A moment later, Greensparrow stepped from his corporeal form, spirit leaping forward to engage the old wizard. And thus they battled, as Brind’Amour and Paragor had battled, but in spirit form alone. It went on for exhausting hours, neither truly hurting the other, but draining each other, and when Brind’Amour broke the connection the following morn, he was weary indeed, sitting on the edge of his bed, head down and haggard-looking.
Deanna found him in that position. “You met with him,” she reasoned almost immediately.
Brind’Amour nodded. “And he is powerful,” he confirmed. “But not compared to what we wizards once were. Greensparrow came to power through treachery because he could not gain the throne through sheer might. So it is now. He rules, iron-fisted, but that iron fist is not one of magic, nor even one of his dragon alter-form, but of allies, cyclopian mostly.”
“Do not underestimate his power,” Deanna warned.
“Indeed I do not,” Brind’Amour replied. “That is why I went to him, and why I will go to him again this night, and the next, and the next, if need be.”
“Can you defeat him?”
“Not in this manner,” Brind’Amour explained, “for I go to him in spirit only. But I can keep him occupied, and weary! This battle will be one of swords.”
Deanna liked that prospect far greater than the thought of waging a magical battle against Greensparrow. Five armies had joined against Carlisle, and the besieged city had no apparent prospects for reinforcement.
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In this situation, the biggest advantage for the Eriadorans was their dwarvish allies. Carlisle had been built to withstand the charge of an army, most likely a straightforward cyclopian force, but the designers had not foreseen the tunneling expertise of an enemy such as the bearded folk of DunDarrow. The dwarfs worked tirelessly, taking shifts so that the digging never stopped. They went down low, right under the river, so that the people within the city would not hear their work. Ashannon worked tirelessly as well, using his magic to shield the dwarvish work from Greensparrow’s prying eyes.
On the sixth day of the siege, the first decisive encounter took place, in the smaller city across the eastern branch of the Stratton from Carlisle proper. Asmund led the Huegoth charge from the north, Siobhan’s cavalry and the Riders of Eradoch in strong support. Several galleons braved the catapult fire from both banks to come in at the city along the river to the west, while Shuglin led two thousand dwarfs through their crafted tunnels, popping up at various strategic points within the fortress. Even more importantly, the dwarvish burrowing had weakened the substructure of the walls.
The north wall, its bottom carved out, crumbled under the weight of the charge, and in poured the vicious Huegoths and the cavalry. Luthien, Oliver, and Katerin, already within the city through dwarvish tunnels, spent more time sorting out innocents and ushering them out of harm’s way than in fighting, for in truth there wasn’t much fighting to be found. The garrison fled the minor city, along the bridges to Carlisle proper, almost as fast as the invaders entered it. And Greensparrow, who they assumed to be weary from his nightly encounters with Brind’Amour, made no appearance.
The place was conquered within an hour, and fully secured before the day was out.
The noose around Carlisle had tightened.
That same night, Luthien and Oliver, using the crimson cape and Oliver’s magical grapnel, a puckered ball that could stick to any surface, made their stealthy way into Carlisle and walked the streets of Greensparrow’s domain. They ventured into taverns, met with people in alleys, always whispering the name of Deanna Wellworth, planting the rumors that the invading army was, in fact, a force raised by the rightful queen of Avon.
The pair were out of the city again long before the dawn.
Also that night, Brind’Amour went again in spirit to meet the Avon king, but he failed, finding the way blocked by a disenchantment barrier akin to the one he had used on Resmore and again in the castle at Warchester. Up to that point, Greensparrow had been more than willing to battle the old wizard, but now, Brind’Amour realized, the wily Avon king had come to understand their strategy. His engagements with Brind’Amour were in part to blame for the fall of the section across the river; he could no longer afford the distraction of a nightly stand-off with his adversary.
The realization did not greatly worry Brind’Amour. He understood his foe better now, the man’s strengths and limitations, and he was confident that his forces could strike hard and decisively, and that he, along with his fellow wizards, Deanna and Ashannon, would effectively neutralize the overburdened Avon king.
As he had proclaimed to Deanna on the second morning of the siege, this would be a battle of swords, not of magic.
“He cannot come at us across the river when our ships hold the waterway,” Brind’Amour explained at a strategy meeting early the next morning. “And with us so close to his walls, he would not dare open the city’s gates and try to break out to the north.”
“We would be in Carlisle in a matter of minutes,” Katerin reasoned, and though her estimate seemed overly optimistic, the point was well-taken.
“Time favors us,” Siobhan thought it would be prudent to add.
“Does it?” asked Deanna Wellworth.
“The seeds of rebellion are being sown within Carlisle,” Luthien answered before Siobhan could respond. “Oliver and I found many folk willing to hear of Avon’s rightful queen, and of the treachery of Greensparrow.”
“Of course, that might be only because I am so convincing,” added the halfling.
That brought a chuckle—from all but surly Asmund, who was fast growing weary of this siege.
“I will not sit on the field and wait for the first snows of winter,” the Huegoth said. Indeed, Asmund and his forces could not wait much longer. They had a long way to sail to get home, in waters that would grow more inhospitable with the changing season. Soon the winds would shift to the north, blowing in the face of Huegoth longships trying to make their return to Isenland and Colonsey, where a fair number of their women and children waited.
Brind’Amour sat back and let the chatter continue around him. Asmund wanted action; so did Kayryn Kulthwain and especially Bellick, who assured the others that at least twenty openings would be burrowed into Carlisle that very night, and that the substructure of several key points along the eastern and southern walls had already been compromised.
“They’re thinking that we’ll come from the north and east,” the dwarf king remarked with a wink at Brind’Amour. “But they’ll be only half-right. Mannington’s and Luthien’s riders will fake the attack from the north, while our ships put an army in the shallows of the river delta south of the city. We’ll be in so fast, the one-eyes will still be standing at the north wall, wondering when your folk will attack,” he said to Deanna. “And the rest of us will poke them from behind!”
It wouldn’t be quite that easy, Brind’Amour knew, but it was a good point. Carlisle was ripe for plucking, and if they attacked and were not successful, they could always retreat to their current position and take up the siege once more, this time against a city weakened by battle. The coordination would be tricky, though, since so many various factions were together on the field, but the old wizard, the king of Eriador, decided then and there that the time for action had come at last.
“With the dawn,” Brind’Amour said unexpectedly, silencing conversation and turning all eyes upon him. “Even before the dawn,” he corrected, then paused to better sort out the plan, and the emotions of all of those staring at him.
And so it began, an hour before the eighth dawn of the siege, when Shuglin the dwarf came out of a tunnel into a quiet house just east of the plaza of Carlisle Abbey. All throughout the silent city, Bellick’s forces slipped into position, while on the plain north of Carlisle, Deanna Wellworth’s five thousand, along with the first army of Eriador, including Luthien, Siobhan, Katerin and Oliver and the Cutter cavalry, formed a long and deep line. South of Carlisle, Huegoths crowded into their longships, ready to storm the river fork, and in the east, Kayryn prepared her gallant riders for the mighty charge across the bridges.
The dawn was heralded by the blowing of a thousand horns—Eriadoran horns, Huegoth horns, Mannington horns—and by the thunder of cavalry in the north and on the stone of the eastern bridges, and by the roars of charging armies.
Luthien led the rush from the north, a feigned attack that kept the massive cyclopian force along Carlisle’s northern wall distracted until the dwarfs within the city could organize. Then Carlisle’s south wall crumbled in several places and on came the Huegoth charge, the army of Baranduine rolling in behind them. Kayryn herself led the thunder across the fortified bridges.
For more than an hour, little ground was gained, with Luthien and his forces stuck out on the northern fields, unable to find a breach in the intact and well-defended northern wall. In the south, Asmund’s Huegoths met stiff resistance just inside the wall, and the Riders of Eradoch took brutal casualties on those narrow bridges. The waters of the Stratton ran red; the white walls of Carlisle were splattered with the blood of defender and invader alike.
Five of the leaders, Brind’Amour, Bellick, Deanna, and Ashannon, along with Proctor Byllewyn of Gybi, stood watching from the captured eastern region throughout that terrible hour, wondering if they had erred. “Did I underestimate Greensparrow?” Brind’Amour asked many, many times.
But then came the turning point, as Bellick’s dwarfs, led by mighty Shuglin, gain
ed the main courtyard and threw wide Carlisle’s massive northern gates. Now Luthien’s charge was on for real, the young Bedwyr and his forces pouring into the city, spreading wide in every direction like the finger flames of a wildfire.
Greensparrow, too, watched it all, from a high chamber in Carlisle Abbey. Duke Cresis came to him many times over the first hour, assuring him that the city was holding strong.
Then the cyclopian came in to report that the northern gate had fallen, and Greensparrow knew that the time had come for him to act. He dismissed Cresis (and the one-eye was glad to be away from the dangerous and unpredictable tyrant!) and went alone up the stairs of the Abbey’s main tower.
From that rooftop, King Greensparrow saw the ruin of his life. There was fighting in every section of the city. The north was lost, and the dwarfs were sweeping east to open the bridges, while the cavalry was thundering along the streets, winding its way to join in the fierce fighting at the south wall.
“Fools, all,” the wizard-king sneered.
Greensparrow spotted a curious group of riders, noted particularly a man on a shining white stallion, a crimson cape billowing out behind him.
“At least, this,” the king remarked, and his hands began weaving semicircles in the air, touching thumb to thumb, then little finger to little finger, the tempo gradually increasing as Greensparrow gathered his magical energies that he might strike dead the troublesome Crimson Shadow once and for all.
But before he could execute the spell, Greensparrow found his feet knocked right out from under him as the tower trembled under a tremendous magical assault.
Looking to the east, Greensparrow noted three forms: an old wizard in blue robes and holding an oaken staff, the duke of Baranduine, and the woman who would be queen. Brind’Amour struck repeatedly at the tower, lightning bolts reaching out from his staff to slam at the foundations beneath Greensparrow. Deanna and Ashannon were not so powerful, but still they threw every ounce of their strength at the king.
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