The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [1]
Flaeros had come to the fabled Glittering City to behold the Moot of the master bards. Every two years they gathered at Sirlptar to exchange news, decide which towns and baronies were to go "under the ban" and hear no tales or harping for a time, and consider which bans should be lifted. For a score of nights they bought and sold instruments, sang to crowds who paid far too much to cram shoulder-close into taverns, took on or exchanged students, confirmed a few new bards… and in rare years, named a precious handful of harpists to the maroon mantle of Mastery.
Flaeros Delcamper was years away from such a wondrous fate, and he knew it. Yet he was giddy with the sheer joy of his venture, sitting in a tavern in fabled Sirlptar with wonders on all sides. Small, but more worldly than the best tavern in Ragalar, filled with folk from far sailings… folk more confident than the anxious coin-pinching merchants of Ragalar the Stern. Aye, he was alone and far from home, in a city of ready swords and, the tales ran, expert thieves… but was he not near invincible, with the Vodal on his finger?
He looked down at it-a twisted and battered nail spotted with black tar, roughly banged into a finger ring long ago. It looked as worthless as the seaman's bauble it had been before the best mages the Delcampers of old could hire laid a score of enchantments on it and made it… the Vodal. He glanced away quickly, afraid he'd drawn attention to it. It had done the Delcampers much service and was worth (he'd been told, sharply) ten younger sons of the blood, and more. He casually closed his hand over it, feeling its familiar tingle. The Vodal could do many things, but Flaeros had been properly shown only one of its powers: when he stared at a person or a thing and set his will just so, he could see through all magical guises and gaze on the truth. Not that he expected to encounter many spell-cloaked mages… but why else waste a truly powerful heirloom on a wayward son?
Suddenly impatient with kin and home, Flaeros heard himself asking, "So where exactly did Aglirta lie, and how fare its remnants? I've heard tales of its fall, and I'm sure I'll hear them told better and broader in the nights ahead, but merchants are fond of wild gossip, and I'd rather hear some truth."
The lion-maned old man slowly lost his smile. "You honor me, lad, to think my words hold truth. Know, then: all the mountain-girt vale of the Silverflow that comes down to the sea here, cutting Sirlptar in two, was once proud Aglirta. You probably know the water better as the River Coiling. Somewhere in the depths of green Loaurimm it rises. No baron ever ruled those silences, but from where the woodcutters left off, down its windings through a dozen baronies, was Aglirta. All between the Windfangs to the north, and the Talaglatlad-the peaks you see from Ragalar-to the south, is now the Kingless Land: a lawless string of battling baronies. A good place to stay out of until the Sleeping King wakes."
Flaeros raised an eyebrow. "That's more than a child's tale?"
The old man shrugged. "You know how such things are… yet it's curious; with bards spinning new words for centuries, that tale never changes: the last true king of Aglirta will awaken when the Dwaerindim are set just so, at the right place."
"Yes," Flaeros recalled eagerly. "The enchanted stones-are they just, well, stones? I was told they were gems: huge jewels that could each fill a man's palm!"
The old man spread his hands. "Four old stones, he who saw them said… and being a bard, Elloch would have embroidered his tale if what he'd seen left him room to do so."
"But that was but a dream," Flaeros protested.
Golden eyes flashed sudden fire. "'But a dream'? Lad, what do you think bards-and mages-and lovers high and low feast on? What do you think barons and kings heed and hunger for? Dreams drive us all!"
"But I want to hear truth. Dreams aren't truth!"
"They can be the goblet that holds it."
The young Delcamper frowned at that. Raking the air as if waving the thought aside to consider later-or never-he asked fiercely,