The Half Dwarf Prince (13 page)

Fredin looked from the human to his uncle. “Put two at the front of
Uncle’s force, and two at the front of mine. When the dwarves get past Hure’s forces they will clear those tunnels again and Dungins will fill those tunnels. By that time the dwarves should be mostly finished. Dungins will kill them or force them out. We are going to lose a lot of orcs holding the mountain. But more orcs are coming. We will be twice as big before the dwarves can send another army. That is, if they have the stomach for it. Maybe they keep sending them. Let Evermount get weak, then there can be two Dungin Mountains.”

The plan decided
, Fredin dismissed everyone. It was time Hure made up for her outburst. Crone was the last to leave. He stopped at the door and looked back. “My nephew has his own wizard.” He smiled and shook his head as he walked out of the room.

Fredin turned to Hure. He had basically just planned to sacrifice all of her orcs. He didn’t need to ask her and she knew it.
But it didn’t mean she had to like it. She still wasn’t used to not being in charge.

“You
’re angry,” he said more than asked.

Hure didn’t answer.

“Good. This will be exciting, then,” he said as he moved toward the bed.

After the first night
, the day that followed was uneventful. The sun was barely cresting the horizon on the second morning when they heard the dwarves coming down the road. They couldn’t see them yet, but a thousand dwarves with weapons and armor made a lot of noise. It wasn’t long before the advance party came down the road and out into the open. A hundred dwarves led the army. They stopped and greeted Grundel and the others. They took large chunks of cheese and bread before pushing on to the trees at the other end of the field. They had come out of the woods, but there were thinner groves of trees and smaller wooded areas off the side of the road between here and Shinestone. The grove of trees ahead was about a mile away. Shortly after the dwarves reached that tree line, the main body of the dwarves came out onto the field. A couple dozen dwarves pushed into the field before Grundel saw her.

Frau
halted the movement and moved off the road to meet them. Fuhrung followed behind her. He might be older, but he wasn’t old and he looked every bit the warrior now in his full plate. He had a small hand axe on each hip and a war axe on his back. The war axe could be carried one- or two-handed. Fuhrung’s had a nice rounded blade that came to a long point at the bottom. The blade curved up over the top just barely. On the backside was a single six-inch spike. Fuhrung wasn’t the biggest or most threatening dwarf, but he wore his armor and carried his weapon with experience. This wouldn’t be the first time he had gone into battle with them.

Grundel hardly noticed him. He had spent most of the previous day going over the rational reasons why nothing could ever come of his crush. He had felt so foolish even thinking about it. She was a queen
, and the human blood in him had nearly cost his father his throne. The same problem would occur if anything ever were to happen between him and Frau. That was assuming she would ever want anything to do with him. Even if she ever were interested, she would put her duty first. It couldn’t happen and he understood that. He had felt foolish for even thinking it. After hours of thinking about all the reasons why it couldn’t be, he had finally convinced himself that he was over the whole thing.

But e
very argument, every rational line of thinking fell from his mind when he saw her. When her eyes met his, she reached inside him and smashed that wall of reason.

“Where is the halfling
?” she asked him.

Her voice snapped him out of his trance. He looked around as if trying to find him, and then his mind returned to him. “He had something to take care of. He will catch up before we get there.”

“Or he just got scared and ran away,” said a dwarf who had followed Frau over to them. Grundel recognized him as the angry little dwarf from Tiefes Loch. It was Verrator.

“He is bonded to that pony. You would abandon your sword before he
would abandon the pony.” The sword Verrator carried looked very well made and very old. It had likely been handed down through the generations.

“I would die before I abandon
ed this blade,” he said, putting his hand on the pommel.

“Then you understand that he will be back.” He turned back to Frau. “This is Jerrie. He helped us a lot in Ambar. He saved my life, and gave us information about Shinestone. We will need to come up with a plan,” he told her as he motioned toward Jerrie.

Jerrie stepped forward and bent a knee, putting one fist to his chest. “Your Highness.”

Frau hadn’t even begun to respond when
Verrator jumped in. “Or he staged everything so that he could get close to us and sabotage our plans. I say we get rid of him.”

Grundel turned on him but Frau cut him off. “You will not speak again.
Go back and get in line with the others.” She didn’t wait for him to comply; she just turned back to Grundel. Grundel kept his eyes on Verrator who stared at the back of Frau’s head for a second, obviously trying to figure out a way to deny her. When he couldn’t think of one he turned and stomped back to the road.

“What happened in Ambar
?” she asked when she heard Verrator moving away.

Grundel began his story. He told her about the attack of the Black Dragons first. He told her of his wounds and how Jerrie had jumped in to save them. He left out the part about the magical item, and Jerrie’s personal vendetta with the Black Dragons. He went on to tell her how Jerrie had given them the wagons
, how they had been attacked again, and how Rundo had ended up buying a stable with the money the assassins had been paid to kill them. He finished with the attack at the bridge and how Rundo had gone off into the woods to work on his druid abilities.

“It sounds like you have earned our trust
, Jerrie. Thank you for helping Grundel. I can’t imagine losing him now.” Jerrie had stood when Grundel began telling the story and he lowered his head in acknowledgment of the queen’s thanks. She nodded her head to Jerrie before turning back to Grundel. “Now, let’s get back on the road. Do you need any help with the wagons?”

“No
, they are all set. We hooked them up when we heard you coming,” Grundel answered her, but his eyes darted toward the dwarf running toward them from where the advanced party stood, across the field. He turned back to his queen.

“Go
,” she said, understanding his intent. He unhooked the reins of one of the horses tethered to the wagons. He kicked the horse into a sprint. He wasn’t very experienced on horseback, but he had ridden with Anwar and the others, and he had spent the last couple days on horseback. The horses had just been walking or lightly jogging then. Now he had his horse in a full sprint, and he was bouncing around on its back, just barely hanging on. He didn’t slow, though, and it didn’t take long before he reached the dwarf. Jerrie had mounted as well and caught up to him easily.

“Orcs, a couple hundred. They started running east when we spotted them,”
the dwarf said to the huge dwarf sitting on the back of a full-grown horse.

Grundel turned his horse around
and held on tight as the horse bounced him all the way back to the wagon. He slid down off the horse when he reached Frau. “A couple hundred orcs ahead. They were watching us. They took off to the east when the advance party spotted them.”

Frau thought about it for a minute. “Grundel
, go tell the advance party to hold. Fuhrung, I want their numbers increased by a hundred. Then we will move on. If the orcs are already on the run, then we’re not going to catch them. If they saw two hundred, then there is probably a whole clan that ran, too. Make sure we double the watch at night. If we don’t run into them before we reach Shinestone we will clear them out of our halls with the rest.”

Half an hour later the wagons were on the road with a
dwarf army in tow. Frau chose to sit on the bench next to Grundel. Being close to her was hard for him. Being so close to her that he could smell her was likely to drive him to insanity. Even after two weeks on the road, the smell of her was maddening.

“Let me see your arm,” she demanded once they were moving and everyone was behind them. Well
, everyone but Jerrie, who was riding on the road in front of them. Grundel pulled his sleeve up past his elbow, exposing the six-inch line down the outside of his forearm. He had popped one of his stitches struggling in the water, but the wound was still stitched up well, and it was healing. Frau put her finger at the top of the line and ran it along the stitches. “Looks like it was pretty nasty. It still hurt?”

He was in an argument with himself. Having her touch him was driving him mad. Half of him wanted to confront her about the touch. He wanted it to be more th
an her just checking on him. The other half of him fought that it was wrong, that it could never be no matter what the meaning of the touch. In the end he held on to duty, at least for the moment.

“It
’s not bad, I’m fine,” he said, not looking at her.

She moved back away from him
, sitting back on the bench. The next hour seemed very awkward to Grundel. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but he felt like he had upset her. Eventually she began asking him about Ambar again. He explained everything in more detail and answered her questions along the way. Even the dwarves knew about the Black Dragons, and her questions led him to explain his previous experiences with them. That led to him telling her about his trip with Anwar. He spent the rest of the day telling her about their fight with the goblins. He told her about the city of Freeman and his trip into the fairy forest. He told her about their fight with the Black Dragons in Kampar, and he finished with the battle at Evermount. In each of those fights he had played a very minor role in comparison with Anwar, who had been the one to win out in each event. By the time he finished, the sky was already turning shades of pink and orange.

Frau sent a dwarf to call back the advance party. They all pushed
off the road. They were in the open now. From here to Shinestone there were only a few small hills and small wooded areas. They dwarves set camp. Watches were established and food was prepared, and it wasn’t long before the songs of dwarves danced around fires and rode on the night air. Grundel heard songs of battles won long before any of these dwarves were born. He heard songs about the battle at Evermount. He listened as the story of his own grandfather’s death was sung. Many of the songs were just drinking songs or songs about women.

After a while Grundel noticed that the dwarves of Tiefes Loch were mostly silent. They had segregated themselves, and they sat around their fires talking quietly amongst themselves. He hadn’t expected them to be cheerful
, really, but the level of their disengagement was more then he had expected. He saw Verrator sitting at the Tiefes Loch fire nearest the fire of the queen. Verrator was staring at him with a look of pure hatred. This didn’t disturb Grundel, though. The dwarves of Tiefes Loch had been more and more disengaged over the years. Their prejudices had grown, and they had become more and more isolated. Grundel knew that when the fighting was done none of the dwarves of Tiefes Loch would stick around to serve in a mountain ruled by a queen.

Grundel
returned to the queen’s fire. She was talking cheerfully with Fuhrung about something, but every once in a while she would look across the fire at him. The looks she gave him were short, barely more then a glance, but each one felt like she was looking into his soul and exposing more of him. After one of these glances Jerrie bumped him with his elbow.

“What was that
?” he asked.

“What was what
?” Grundel answered, looking around to see what Jerrie had seen.

Jerrie nodded his head toward Frau. “That look, that whole thing that just happened between you and the queen. What was that?”

“What look? What are you talking about?” Grundel deflected, but his heart raced in his chest. So it hadn’t been his imagination, then. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. It would be easier if the queen showed no interest in him at all.

Jerrie actually laughed at him. “You
’re going to play that game. are you? Okay, pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Grundel whispered so no one else would hear. “There is nothing going on between me and Frau. Even if I wanted to
, I couldn’t be with her. She is the queen. I am only half dwarf. That human blood almost cost my father his throne. You think I would go through that again?”

He stood up and walked over to Bumbo. He rubbed the little pony’s muzzle. He wished Rundo were back. Rundo was always able to distract him. He hadn’t realized it before, but Rundo had quickly become the closest friend he had ever had. Since he had left with Rundo
and the others to try to save the life of Anwar’s wife in the fairy forest, he had spent most of every day with the halfling until now.

“He’ll be back soon
,” he told Bumbo.

“Worried about your friend?”
he heard Frau say from behind him. He turned around to look at her.

“He’s not worried
, so neither am I. If anything was wrong that pony would know it, and would be running as fast as it could toward Rundo,” he answered honestly. He really wasn’t worried about his friend. He just missed him. He realized that just thinking about Rundo had made it easier to talk to her without all the weirdness between them.

“And you would be off as fast as you could
to go after him, I imagine.”

The declaration rang true in his own mind as he realized she was right. If
Bumbo took off back the way they had come, he would leap on the back of the nearest horse and run right after him. That realization led to another. He was more like his father then he had thought. He had played the part of duty back in Evermount when his sacrifice was easy. He had never really cared about being king, and giving that up was easy to do for the good of his father and dwarves. Abandoning Rundo was something he wouldn’t be able to do regardless of his responsibilities to the dwarves and the obligation he had to his queen. When it came to loyalty, he and his father both put personal loyalties over duty.

His silence must have confirmed her assumption. “I hope that one day our own relationship will be as strong as yours and the halfling
’s.” She didn’t wait for a response, but walked back and sat by the fire again.