The Dragon King

6 The Duchess of Mannington

She was a small woman, slender and with her golden hair neatly cropped. She wore many valuable jewels, including a diamond hairpin and a brooch that glittered in the softest of lights. By all measures, Deanna Wellworth, the duchess of Mannington, was most elegant and sophisticated, undeniably beautiful, and so she seemed out of place indeed in the cold and rugged Iron Cross, surrounded by smelly, burly cyclopians.

The one-eyed leader, a three-hundred-pounder that stood halfway between six and seven feet, towered over Deanna. The brute could reach out with one hand and squash her flat, so it seemed, and, considering the tongue-lashing Deanna was now giving, the cyclopian appeared as though it wanted to do just that.

But Deanna Wellworth was hardly concerned. She was a duchess of Avon, one of Greensparrow’s court, and with Duke Paragor of Princetown killed by Brind’Amour of Eriador, she was perhaps the strongest magician in all of Avon except for the king himself. She had a protection spell ready now, and if Muckles, the cyclopian leader, swung a hand out at her, it would burst into flames that the one-eye could not extinguish in any way short of leaping into the Avon Sea.

“Your murderers are out of control,” Deanna ranted, her blue eyes, soft in hue to appear almost gray, locked on the face of ugly Muckles.

“We kill,” the cyclopian responded simply, which was about the only way Muckles could respond. What flustered Deanna most about this assignment in the God-forsaken mountains was the fact that stupid Muckles was probably the smartest of the cyclopian group!

“Indiscriminately,” Deanna promptly added, but she shook her head, seeing that the one-eye had no idea of what that word might mean. “You must choose your kills more carefully,” she explained.

“We kill!” Muckles insisted.

Deanna entertained the thought of calling in Taknapotin, her familiar demon, and watching the otherworldly beast eat Muckles a little bit at a time. Alas, that she could not do. “You killed the dwarfs,” she said.

That brought howls of glee from all the cyclopians nearby, brutes who hated dwarfs above anything. This tribe had lived in the Iron Cross for many generations and had occasionally run into trouble with the bearded folk of secret DunDarrow. The cyclopians thought that the woman’s statement was the highest compliment anyone could pay them.

Deanna hardly meant it that way. The last thing Greensparrow wanted was an alliance between Eriador and DunDarrow. By her reasoning, any threat to DunDarrow would only strengthen the dwarfs’ resolve to ally with Brind’Amour.

“If the result of your killing the dwarfs . . .”

“Yerself helped!” Muckles argued, beginning to catch on that Deanna was truly angered about the massacre.

“I had to finish what you stupidly started,” Deanna retorted. Muckles began to counter, but Deanna snapped her fingers and the brute staggered backward as though it had been punched in the mouth. Indeed, a small line of blood now trickled from the side of Muckles’s lip.

“If your stupidity has brought the dwarfs together with our enemies in Eriador,” Deanna said evenly, “then know that you will face the wrath of King Greensparrow. I have heard that he is particularly fond of cyclopian skin rugs.”

Muckles blanched and looked around at his grumbling soldiers. Such rumors about fierce Greensparrow were common among the cyclopians.

Deanna looked across the encampment, to where the dozen dwarf heads were drying out over a smoky firepit. Disgusted, she stormed away, leaving Muckles with her threats and a score of nervous subordinates. She didn’t bother to look back as she passed from the small clearing into a wider meadow, where she was expected.

“Do you truly believe that the killings will ally DunDarrow with Brind’Amour?” asked Selna, Deanna’s handmaid, and the only human out here in the wretched mountains with her.

Deanna, thoroughly flustered, only shrugged as she walked by.

“Do you really care?” Selna asked.

Deanna stopped dead in her tracks and spun about, curiously regarding this woman, who had been her nanny since childhood. Did Selna know her so very well?

“What do you imply by such a question?” Deanna asked, her tone openly accusing.

“I do not imply anything, my Lady,” Selna replied, lowering her eyes. “Your bath is drawn, in the cover of the pine grove, as you commanded.”

Selna’s submissive tone made Deanna regret speaking so harshly to this woman who had been with her through so very much. “You have my gratitude,” the duchess said, and she paused long enough for Selna to look up, to offer a smile of conciliation.

Deanna was very conscious of the shadows about her as she undressed beside the steaming porcelain tub. The thought of cyclopians lewdly watching made her stomach turn. Deanna hated cyclopians with all her heart. She thought them brutish, uncivilized pigs, as accurate a description as could be found, and these weeks in the mountains among them had been nothing short of torture for the cultured woman.

What had happened to her proud Avon? she wondered as she slipped into the water, shuddering at the intensity of the heat. She had given Selna a potion to heat the bath, and feared that the handmaid had used too much, that the water would burn the skin from her bones. She quickly grew accustomed to it, though, and then poured in a second potion. Immediately the water began to churn and bubble, and Deanna put her weary head back on the rim and looked up through the pine boughs to the shining half-moon.

The image brought her back through a score and two years, to when she was only a child of seven, a princess living in Carlisle in the court of her father the king. She was the youngest of seven, with five boys and a girl ahead of her, and thus far removed from the throne, but she was of that family nonetheless, and now remained as the only surviving member. She had never been close to her siblings, or to her parents. “Deanna Hideaway,” they called her, for she was ever running off on her own, finding dark places where she could be alone with her thoughts and with the mysteries that filtered through her active imagination.

Even way back then, Deanna loved the thought of magic. She had learned to read at the age of four, and had spent the next three years of her life immersed in all the tomes detailing the ancient brotherhood of wizards. As a child, she had learned of Brind’Amour, who was now her enemy, though he was thought long-buried, and of Greensparrow, and how thrilled the young girl had been when that same Greensparrow, her father’s court mystic, had come to her on a night such as this and offered to tutor her privately in the art of magic. What a wonderful moment that had been for young Deanna! What a thrill, that the lone surviving member of the ancient brotherhood would choose her as his protégée!

How then had Deanna Wellworth, once in line for the throne of Avon, wound up in the Iron Cross, serving as counsel to a rogue band of bloodthirsty cyclopians? And what of the folk of the Eriadoran villages they had routed, and of the dwarfs, massacred for reasons purely political?

Deanna closed her eyes, but couldn’t block out the terrible images of slaughter; she covered her ears, but couldn’t stop the echoing screams. And she couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

“Are you all right, my Lady?” came the stark question, shattering Deanna’s visions. Her eyes popped open wide to see Selna standing over her churning tub, the woman’s expression concerned, but in a way that seemed strange and unsettling to Deanna.

“Are you spying on me?” the duchess demanded, more sharply than she had intended. She realized her error as soon as she snapped out the words, for she knew that her tone made her appear guilty.

“Never that, my Lady,” Selna replied unconvincingly. “I only returned with your blanket, and saw the glisten of tears in the moonlight.”

Deanna rubbed her hand across her face. “A splash from the tub, and nothing more,” she insisted.

“Do you long for Mannington?” Selna asked.

Deanna stared incredulously at the woman, then looked all around, as though the answer should be obvious.

“As do I,” Selna admitted. “I am glad that is all that is troubling you. I had feared—”

“What?” Deanna insisted, her tone razor sharp, her soft eyes flashing dangerously.

Selna gave a great sigh. Deanna had never seen her act this cryptic before, and didn’t like it at all. “I only feared,” the handmaid began again, but stopped short, as if searching for the words.

Deanna sat forward in the tub. “What?” she demanded again.

Selna shrugged.

“Say it!”

“Sympathy for Eriador,” the handmaid admitted.

Deanna slumped back in the hot water, staring blankly at Selna.

“Have you sympathy for Eriador?” Selna dared to ask. “Or, the God above forbid, for the dwarfs?”

Deanna paused for a long while, trying to gauge this surprising woman she had thought she knew so well. “Would that be so bad?” she asked plainly.

“They are our enemies,” Selna insisted. “Sympathy for Eriador . . .”

“Decency for fellow humans,” Deanna corrected.

“Some might see it as weakness, however you describe it,” the handmaid answered without hesitation.

Again Deanna was at a loss for a reply. What was Selna implying here? The older woman had often served as Deanna’s confidante, but this time Selna seemed removed from the conversation, as though she knew something Deanna did not. Suddenly, Deanna found that she didn’t trust the woman, and feared that she had already revealed too much.

The water was cooling by this time, so Deanna rose up and allowed Selna to wrap her in the thick blanket. She dressed under cover of the pine grove and went to her tent, Selna following close behind.

The duchess’s sleep was fitful, full of images that she could not block out or explain away. She felt a coldness creeping over her, a darkness deeper than the night.

She awoke in a cold sweat, to see a pair of red-glowing eyes staring down at her.

“Mistress,” came a rasping, familiar voice, the voice of Taknapotin, Deanna’s familiar demon.

The groggy duchess relaxed at once, but her relief lasted only as long as the second it took her to realize that she had not summoned the demon. Apparently, the beast had come from the fires of Hell of its own accord!

She saw Taknapotin’s considerable array of gleaming teeth as the demon, apparently recognizing her concern, smiled widely.

No, not of its own accord, Deanna realized, for that simply could not be. Demons were creatures brought to the world by human desires, but who, other than Deanna Wellworth, could so summon Taknapotin? For a moment, Deanna wondered if she had somehow called to the fiend in her sleep, but she quickly dismissed that possibility. Bringing a demon to the material world was never that easy.

There could be only one answer then, and it was confirmed when next Taknapotin spoke.

“You are relieved of your duties here,” the beast explained. “Go back to your place in Mannington.”

Greensparrow. Only Greensparrow was powerful enough to summon Deanna’s familiar demon without the duchess knowing about it.

“Duke Resmore of Newcastle will guide the cyclopian raiders,” Taknapotin went on.

“By whose command?” Deanna asked, just because she needed to hear the name out loud.

Taknapotin laughed at her. “Greensparrow knows that you have little heart for this,” the fiend said.

Selna, Deanna realized. Her handmaid, among her most trusted confidantes for the last twenty years, had wasted no time in reporting her sympathies to Greensparrow. The notion unsettled Deanna, but she was pragmatic enough to set her emotions aside and realize that her knowledge of the informant might be put to profitable use.

“When may I leave this wretched place?” Deanna asked firmly. She worked hard to compose herself, not wanting to appear as though she had been caught at anything treasonous. Of course it was perfectly logical that she would not want to be here with the one-eyes—she had protested the assignment vehemently when Greensparrow had given it to her.

“Resmore is outside, talking with Muckles,” the fiend answered with a snicker.

“If you are finished with the task for which you were summoned, then be gone,” Deanna growled.

“I would help you dress,” Taknapotin replied, grinning evilly.

“Be gone!”

Instantly the beast vanished, in a crackling flash that stole Deanna’s eyesight and filled her nostrils with the thick scent of sulfur.

When the smoke, and Deanna’s vision, cleared, she found Selna at the tent flap, holding Deanna’s clothing over her arm. How much this one already knew, the duchess mused.

Within the hour, Deanna had wished Resmore well and had departed the mountains, via a magical tunnel the duke of Newcastle had conveniently created for her. Trying to act as if nothing out of place had happened, indeed, trying to seem as though the world was better now that she was in her proper quarters in Mannington’s palace, she dismissed Selna and sat alone on the great canopy bed in her private room.

Her gaze drifted to the bureau, where sat her bejeweled crown, her trace to the old royal family. She thought back again to that day so long ago, when drunk with the promise of magical power she had made her fateful choice.

Her thoughts wound their way quickly through the years, to this point. A logical procession, Deanna realized, leading even to the potential trouble that lay ahead for her. The cyclopians were not happy with her performance in the mountains, and rightly so. Likely, Muckles had complained behind her back to every emissary that came out of Avon. When Cresis, the cyclopian duke of Carlisle, heard the grumbles, he had probably appealed to Greensparrow, who had little trouble getting to Selna and confirming the problem.

“As it is,” Deanna said aloud, her voice full of grim resignation, “let Resmore have the one-eyes and all their wretchedness.” She knew that she would be disciplined by Greensparrow, perhaps even forced to surrender her body to Taknapotin for a time, always a painful and exhausting possession.

Deanna only shrugged. For the time being, there was little she could do except shrug and accept the judgments of Greensparrow, her king and master. But this was not the life Deanna Wellworth had envisioned. For those first years after her family’s demise, she had been left alone by Greensparrow, visited rarely, and asked to perform no duties beyond the mostly boring day-to-day routines of serving the primarily figurehead position as duchess of Mannington. She had been thrilled indeed when Greensparrow had called her to a greater service, to serve in his stead and sign the peace accord with Brind’Amour in Princetown. Now her life would change, she had told herself after delivering the agreement to her king. And so it had, for soon after Greensparrow had sent her to the mountains, to the cyclopians, staining her hands with blood and shadowing her heart in treachery.

She focused again on the crown, its glistening gemstones, its unkept promises.

The dwarf howled in pain and tried to scamper, but the hole he was in was not wide and the dozen cyclopians prodding down at him with long spears scored hit after stinging hit.

Soon the dwarf was on the ground. He tried to struggle to his knees, but a spear jabbed him in the face and laid him out straight. The cyclopians took their time in finishing the task.

“Ah, my devious Muckles!” roared Duke Resmore, a broad-shouldered, rotund man, with thick gray hair and a deceivingly cheery face. “You do so know how to have fun!”

Muckles returned the laugh and clapped the huge man on the back. For the brutal cyclopian, life had just gotten a little better.