Eydis
Everything was proceeding as fast as she was used to from the military of House Rowan. They were a disciplined bunch not remotely like the rowdy types that filled her old clan. Sure, they could be disciplined in battle but everything outside of that was mostly beyond them.
The mute woman shook her head annoyed; thoughts of her people wouldn’t help her situation in the least. Michael knew that she didn’t know where she stood, they both were aware, but Eydis refused to admit it. It took her long enough to be not looked at with suspicion by every man and woman in this castle and she would be damned if she showed any kind of uncertainty on which side she should stand.
Twenty knights were assembling in front of her in the courtyard nearly the full complement of knights that House Rowan had. A mighty force to discourage anyone from doing something foolish in this time of danger and still be small enough to move fast and quietly if needed.
Eydis sighed as she watched the knights prepare for the mission starting tomorrow, she didn’t care for most of them, not in the same way she did for the members of her clan. Sure, she liked the other members of Michael’s personal guard, and she definitely thought of the rest of the inner circle as something akin to family but was that the same or just feelings born of necessity?
It isn’t the same, she thought, I haven’t grown up with them, learned everything I knew with them, but does that mean that it is less important?
It was hard to deny, she didn’t know what she should do, fight for the family she once had or for the one she has now. Eydis didn’t know for certain who was still alive from her clan, she knew that her mother and father were dead but apart from that it was hard to say. She only remembered the soldiers coming into her house and killing her parents and then her rage after that she couldn’t remember anything.
Maybe I should have gone looking. Michael would have let me go; I know that now but back then I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a trap. Why did I never go?
Thoughts like that had plagued her since the day before, since the moment Michael had told her about the impending Rangda threat. She had been content with forgetting about the past and not dealing with it but now it came back to haunt her.
Heavy footsteps approached her, and she looked up to see Sir Zeke Tomp coming to a stop in front of her. The veteran knight inspected her with a neutral but hard expression and then said, “I have been chosen to lead the knights in this journey which means I won’t be able to put my full attention on protecting Lord Rowan. I just wanted to inform you of this so that you can make changes to the formation if you need to.”
Eydis nodded at him, their relationship was a little bit strange. Eydis was officially the leader of Michael’s guard, but Sir Zeke was defacto organizing the other knights, it helped that they looked up to him more than they did to Eydis. This was completely fine for her; she wasn’t a leader, but she was the best fighter of the group so if the knight concentrated on managing things, then she could concentrate on doing what she had to. Without him present things were a little bit more annoying but they had worked together for a long time already, so everyone knew what to do.
Sir Zeke didn’t leave after though his face became harder as he added, “It is important that we aren’t distracted by other matters when we are on duty. There is nothing more important than Lord Rowan’s life.”
Silence fell between them while Eydis stared at the knight and the knight simply looked back. It didn’t take any people skills to understand that this was a warning aimed at her.
“I don’t know what to do.,” she admitted, the knight knew anyway, and his advice had helped her before. She just wished Solon was here, she could use his wisdom right now. “Loyalty is very important in my culture but who should I be loyal to right now? The people of my birth or the people that have taken me in?”
The knight’s expression softened but he still shook his head. “I can’t tell you what to do. I was born and raised in these lands. My parents moved down here in the expansion over fifty years ago. I never had divided loyalties, I served a local baron before the rebellion and after it, with the creation of Reen County I became Lord Rowan’s knight.”
Eydis pulled a face at that, she had hoped he could tell her at least something. Zeke seemed to notice her disgruntled expression and added, “Listen, I asked my father once if he missed his home after he moved south in the expansion with my mother, he said he couldn’t think like that. We were in the frontiers now and he had to give his whole to his new home to make it better for me and my siblings and not dwell on a past that he won’t go back to.”
Zeke looked at her with an empathetic gaze that she was neither used to from the knight nor expected from him in this situation, she was pondering her loyalties after all. “The moral is I think that you will have to answer the question if you will ever want to return to the Rangda or if Reen is the home you want.”
Eydis couldn’t give him an answer and the knight simply patted her on the shoulder. “Think about it, you will have to live with your decision for the rest of your life after all.”
He left her with her thoughts and returned to the knights. Eydis couldn’t say if she was closer to an answer after this conversation or as far as she had ever been, but she would have to make a choice there was no way around that.
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Farel
Forges were living entities. They ate, breathed, and spoke. That’s how Farel felt about them at least, he had spent most of his life in forges ever since he had been old enough to drag sacks of coal around. He had seen many forges in his time, and they were like people with their own appearances and temperaments.
The new forge he was in felt young as it was, unsure of its power but powerful, nonetheless. Every tool he used was fresh, every forge clean, and the anvils unscarred. The forge didn’t know what it was capable of yet, but Farel would teach it, and it would gain confidence.
Waren always glanced at him as if he was crazy when he told him about a smithy’s personality, but Farel didn’t care. He would have expected that someone who built things for a living to understand but sometimes expectations are just that, an imagined thing.
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Lord Rowan had made his promise true and had given them whatever he could to make the best possible forge and while it was far behind the scale and sophistication of a dwarves' smithy in the capital for now it rivaled them in the artificer’s workshop, and not too soon it will exceed them of that the dwarven smith was sure.
The help of Mage Rayakan had been invaluable and even if they were still ironing out the kinks in the warding scheme even a flawed one reduced the amount of mana pollution that the artificers had to deal with. Normally he would be completely swamped in making specialized equipment now that the wards are in place, but fate had smiled upon the smith. Farel liked making things, but he loved making weapons and armor. There was just a certain weight to making things that so directly influence life-or-death situations.
He smiled as he turned the helmet he was currently working on to the side. It was a project he had been working on in his free time. Making armor was a long and complicated process even if one made mundane armor, but when making artifact armor then the effort was astonishing, which was probably the reason why they were ordered to focus on weaponry first for the knights and elite guards.
This armor was a personal project meant for the lord of the land as a little thank you for what he had done for the dwarfs. Farel sighed as he stretched and looked at the candle that indicated the time, it was two in the morning already.
“Guess I am not going home today,” Farel said to himself with a smirk. He was alone sitting in one of the enchanting booths and the only light was his. The last enchantments of the helmet were everything he had left for the armor to be usable; it wasn’t perfect, and many enchantments were still missing, but he still wanted to give it to the young lord before he went to war.
Rushing enchantment work while tired never was a good combination but Farel was good enough to deal with it or he would pay the price for his hubris with a couple of fingers or maybe his hand.
He refocused his mind on the piece of beautiful metal in front of him. It was a nasal helmet adorned with intricate details of runes that pulsed with arcane power each time the dwarf let his mana touch the metal. It was better than a closed helmet for someone who was supposed to yell orders but of course, there was a chainmail hood with an attachable piece to cover his neck and lower face in battle.
It was Blacksteel, infused with mana to the brim in the mana-powered flames, just with that it would be the most durable helmet in this county if not duchy, but Farel wasn’t done yet. He fixated the helmet in a specialized clamp so he could get a better angle at the script embedded on the inside of the helmet.
Artificing was a lot like magic at least as far as Farel understood it, the statement of intent was just much more permanent in an artifact than a mage could ever make it. The script Farel was embedding in the helmet was something inspired by augmenters, it would focus the mana in the helmet at the spot where the helmet was hit like augmenters would selectively focus their mana.
This wasn’t the only enchantment he wanted on the helmet but the only one he could manage without an assisting mage with the right affinity. For example, it should have a voice-enhancing enchantment in the future, but he needed an air mage for that, and he couldn’t really ask Pan to spend the night before her departure with him in a dimly lit workshop. Miss Rayakan would probably burn the forge down if he did.
Farel smiled at the fiery nature of the fire mage; she reminded him of his late mother who liked to throw metal pliers when she was mad at their father. She was one hell of a woman and an even greater smith. Ah, the good old times … he got lost in memories for a while until he forced them down again. As much as he would like to reminisce about better times he had work to do and little time to do it.
So, he put the magnifying glass back up and resumed carving small runes into the magic metal.
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Michael
Michael glanced out of the window, it was long dark, later than he should be awake in all honesty considering the time they were supposed to leave the next day. However, his office was perfectly illuminated by a small light sphere hanging above him.
He stopped for a moment while signing a letter and then said, “You took a while.”
In front of his table stood a petite woman, her face covered in a mask resembling a silver fox and her body completely covered in black cloth. The only reason Michael knew that she was a woman and not just a small man was that he knew who was behind the mask.
She had grown little since Michael saw her running out of the bakery back in Lionsgate, but her posture was definitely much better than he would expect from a person born and raised in the gutter.
“My apologies, Radiant Soul, I have been on a mission and saw you signal just a few minutes ago,” the woman answered with a deep bow.
Michael sighed; he had only met two of Lynx’s students but they both had insisted on calling him that strange name no matter what he had said. “It’s fine. I want you to tell Lynx to shift his focus to the West. The Rangda tribes are assembling to attack the kingdom, and I need everything there is to know about their numbers, leaders, tactics, and loyalties. This new order trumps standing directions and is his new priority.”
He hadn’t seen the masked master of the self-proclaimed Officio Umbra in a long time but one of his students was always there in a few hours once he lit a candle in a specific window.
The woman who called herself Silver bowed deeply again and replied, “We have heard. Your wish is our command, Radiant Soul. Should we cease our effort to watch the nobles for this new target?”
It was a reasonable question, there was always the chance that the nobles tried something while he was distracted by the current crisis, but Michael doubted that they would do anything that would risk the campaign's success. Neither Duke Wallsten nor Zen would let it slide if a part of their domain got ransacked just because of some noble’s petty schemes. It would mean heads on pikes, no doubt.
“Not completely, keep some eyes on them but I want Lynx’s attention on this first and foremost,” Michael instructed.
“It will be done,” the fox-masked woman said and vanished through the door. Michael smiled a thin smile; he knew how uncomfortable the agents were with using the regular door but after he nearly skewered a bull-masked man with a lance of light the first time he appeared through the window they got the point. It didn’t stop Lynx from doing it though, even if Michael could detect him.
Michael leaned back in his chair while pondering the situation. Even if he was confident that the nobles wouldn’t do anything too overt there was still the possibility of them using the opportunity to strike at him personally.
There wasn’t much of a danger there, his guard was completely loyal as far as anyone he employed could tell and there weren’t enough members of the knighthood with such questionable loyalties that they could overcome them. Maybe two or three whom Michael had such a low opinion of that they might throw away all their vows, the most eye-catching being Dittrich Plon. Michael had been so sure that the man would leave the knighthood at some point but his staying made him even more suspect in Michael’s opinion.
The problem was that he couldn’t really kick him out because the knight was careful not to do anything that would draw any ire and it would enrage the nobility if he dismissed him without any cause, strengthening the opposition.
He would also be part of the forward force as most of the knights were and Michael made a small note to instruct Sir Zeke to keep an eye on the knight.
Michael sighed again; he would very much like to leave Dittrich behind, partially out of personal animosity to the man, but he just couldn’t afford it. Every knight in the castle except Sir Godfrey and Geron were accompanying him while the few out on patrol or the borders would join the main army. The danger of his uncle trying to assassinate them was just so much higher than a single knight and he needed all the strength he could bring.
“I really wish I could have cleaned up properly before having to go into battle,” he said to himself. So many things he wished he could have already accomplished before his first war. “No plan survives contact with the enemy, huh,” he chuckled not quite knowing where he had heard that phrase from.