D& D - Mystara 01 - Dragonlord of Mystara Read online

  Then they would go off and do amazing things, quite

  confident that making a journey of a thousand leagues to fight an army of kobolds was less odious than their usual daily chores. But the kindly folk who had raised them hardly ever sat them down by a fire one night to admit the dark secret of their true origins, gave them a ring and a key and a secret map, and sent them out to discover their destiny. Thus they generally grew up to be farmers and merchants and smiths, just like their parents.

  The difference in Thelvyn's case was that he knew he didn't belong where he was. He really did come from an unknown land somewhere far away, and he really was descended from a noble yet mysterious race, and everyone in the village knew it, too. Not that he derived any benefit from it. The villagers couldn't give him a map and any other odd artifact they might have on hand, tell him the secret of his birth, and send him home because they had no idea who he really was or where to send him. They hadn't asked for him, but they had taken him in nonetheless, and so, being generally decent folk, they felt responsible for him.

  They were often given to say that they didn't know what to do with him, but this wasn't exactly the truth. They wanted him to be just like themselves, which they naturally assumed to be the best possible thing in the world. And all the time he was trying very hard to be the person he was supposed to be, except that he had no idea what that could be.

  All in all, if Thelvyn was destined for a grand and adventurous life, he was sure that he was off to a very bad start indeed, and that soon he would be too old to begin. Perhaps because the situation was more a reality to him than fantasy, he was also more practical about it. Although he occasionally thought about it, he really didn't expect that the villagers actually knew the dark secrets of his heritage and all would be revealed when he came of age. Nor did he expect armored knights from his own lost kingdom to suddenly come upon his village and find him. His dreams didn't extend to fame or titles or great riches. He only wanted to be given a chance to make a life for himself, rather than the pointless pretense of a life that was not his.

  If Thelvyn thought from time to time that the older folk were picking on him, he was partly right. The trouble was that chance had brought him among the Flaemish settlers, who were themselves fairly new to the Highlands. If he had found himself in Darokin or distant Thyatis, being relatively old and cosmopolitan lands inhabited by folk of many different races, he would have been far less an outsider.

  The Flaem had found him and they had kept him, but they couldn't allow him completely to become one of them. He was adept at magic, but they wouldn't teach him their own version, which they considered to be the right of i heir own race. He could have been a scholar, but among the Flaem, only wizards were allowed to open the important books. Instead, they insisted that he must learn something "practical."

  There had been some speculation that he might be descended from some hearty breed of elf, and indeed that at one time had been his secret hope, since surely an elf would have a home somewhere in the world. Of course, he hadn't known at the time that elves were generally quite suspicious of foreigners, even other elves. He had long since grown too tall to be an elf anyway, and he threatened to grow taller yet and rather brawny.

  He might have been taken for one of the Flaemish settlers, for, like them, he was copper-skinned, tall, and strong, if rather angular, even noble of features. But his thick hair was as black as fresh tar, while that of the Flaems was often red or brown. He was old enough to show some sign of a beard by this time if he was going to have one, but he showed no hint of facial hair. Most remarkable were his eyes, almost certainly not the eyes of any human race, being large and as dark as night and just as deep, with an intensity that could be disconcerting, and so people called him Thelvyn Fox Eyes. One aspect that most people were likely to overlook was that the parts of his eyes that should have been white were in fact as blue as the purest sapphire. People told him that he looked just like his mother, on the rare times when they said anything about that mysterious woman.

  And so the folk of the village continued to try to make a place for Thelvyn, and also to teach him a trade that would allow him to live among them as one of their own. It was a meaningless pretense, since everyone knew that he would go off and do what he wanted when he came of age anyway, but the pretense seemed important to the Flaemish settlers, with all their concern about practicality and tradition. He could have been a mage, but that wasn't allowed. He could have been a fighter, but that also wasn't allowed. They had tried to make him a leather worker, only to find very quickly that his nose was too sensitive to the dyes and tanning agents.

  One of the village jewelers had offered to take him on, the problem there being that his vision was wrong in some odd way. He had discovered that for himself in school. He could read an open book from across the room, but not if it was right under his nose where it belonged. Perhaps he might have been a miner or a woodcutter—if it came down to doing simple hard work, he was certainly strong enough—but that was also dangerous, and none of those folk wanted a orphan about.

  In all, his prospects were looking rather grim, caught as he was between the things he wasn't allowed to do, the things nobody wanted to teach him, and the things that ran afoul of the curious qualities of his unknown race. Perhaps things might have been a little easier if he had really wanted to try, but all Thelvyn could think about was that he belonged somewhere else. So it happened that early in the spring of his fifteenth year, he found himself between prospects.

  All work had a tendency to come to a stop during the winter. First the farmers, miners, and woodcutters were forced in by the snow, and later all the craftsmen who turned their products into finished goods began to run short of supplies. The jeweler had let him go just past midwinter when his stock of gold, silver, and jewels from the mountains had diminished, and that had dropped Thelvyn right back in the mayor's lap, so to speak, until something else could be found for him. The mayor had in turn set him to watching Sir George's house while the old knight was away, mainly to have a place to send him for at least part of

  the time.

  But when the final snow had come and gone and the first warm breath of spring stirred the woods and the new green grass, then Kaarstel, the forester, had suggested that I'helvyn should accompany him as he made his rounds. the miners were going back into the mountains, and the lumbermen were back in the deep woods. All of that meant that the forester had a good deal of work to do clearing the remote paths and making certain that no evil things had come into the woods during the snows. As it happened, Kaarstel was getting a bit old, although he wasn't yet willing to admit it, and so he hadn't yet asked Duke Aalban to send an assistant. But he did find the help of a strong, hearty lad most useful, and young Thelvyn was the only one in the village to be spared.

  For his own part, Thelvyn greatly enjoyed the work, for lie liked being about in the wild. He delighted in the deep forest, with its great trees and shadows and quiet. But he especially loved the high mountains, where he could feel the cool wind and look down from the heights to see the fields and woods spreading out below him. When he looked down from some towering cliff or great pinnacle of stone, he almost felt that he could leap into the air and ride t he winds. He quickly discovered that any discussion of his becoming a forester was politely ignored or turned aside, so he assumed that this also must be one of those careers that was closed to orphans of foreign descent.

  "Were your people the first to come to this land?" Thelvyn asked one morning when he had gone high in the mountains with the old forester. He knew the answer to his question already, but that had always been a good way to get the forester talking about the olden days.

  "One of the first," Kaarstel answered as he pulled himself slowly up a steep portion of the trail. "The elves have been here much longer—as long ago as two thousand years, maybe three. Something terrible happened in these lands once a long time ago, but the elves won't talk about that. When we arrived, the better part of a century ag
o, there were just a few bands of wanderers and wild elves here in these northern parts. They left when we came."

  "Where did they go?" Thelvyn asked. Elves seldom came to the village, but he thought he liked them.

  "Some went into the south of the Highlands, or even farther south, into the dark forests of Alfheim, to live with their kinsmen. Others crossed the high mountains north into Wendar, into cold, desolate lands where only elves dwell, to live the way they always had. I think there are still a few of those original elves somewhere in these woods, although I don't know that with any certainty. I haven't seen them."

  They came to a place where a heavy branch had fallen from a tree, broken by the weight of winter snow. The branch had fallen across the path, but someone had cut it apart with an axe, then pulled the pieces off to the side of the trail. Chips of fresh wood still lay in the path, only now beginning to darken with age.

  "The miners must have removed this themselves, probably when they were bringing up their ponies with supplies," Kaarstel said, which was obvious enough. "Folk who use the trails are good about tending them for their own convenience. Still, we must go on and make certain that there are no nasty creatures that have wandered into the woods during the winter."

  "Is that likely?" Thelvyn asked as he hurried to follow. "I mean, this last winter was very hard. It seems to me that ores and goblins are no more fond of the snow than other folk."

  "That's actually quite true," the forester agreed. "We did have a few run-ins back when I was young, when we first came into these lands. Mostly we've been lucky to have been left alone, although I do see evidence of invaders from time to time. Then I fetch the garrison, and we hunt them out. Usually they're just passing through. We rarely seem to find anything."

  "Do they ever attack the farms or the mines?"

  "Not for almost three years now," Kaarstel explained. "Most of the farmers come into the village at night, and the miners build small strongholds at the entrances of their mines so that they can simply lock themselves inside until danger passes. The settlers in the northeastern corner of the

  highlands have a harder time of it, being near to a nastier part of the mountains. And of course they also have to deal with the Ethengar. I'll grant that the clans themselves generally mean no harm, but the young warriors will sometimes hand together to go exploring, and they have a way of finding trouble even if they aren't looking for it."

  They had suddenly come out of the woods onto one of the more level parts of the trail, where it cut along the side of the slope just beneath a towering cliff of bare gray stone rising above a steep pile of boulders. The forester stopped and stood for a moment, looking about, mostly up the mountainside to their right. The trail eventually wound up to a deep cut between two of the highest peaks. Thelvyn came up to look as well. He could see the ravine clearly from back in the village, although only from here did he notice that the cut wasn't just a dead-end canyon. But he would never have tried to take a horse through there, for the way was narrow and twisting and piled deep with boulders.

  "This is where I found your mother fifteen years ago," Kaarstel said at last. "The dragons were hunting her up in that pass, shooting their flames down among the rocks. I imagine she came down that way, and they thought that she was still up there. That was a dangerous night. We had no way of knowing if the dragons would come after us, but they went on to the south and never came down to the village."

  "Why?" Thelvyn asked. "Certainly the village would have been an obvious place to look."

  "Perhaps because it was obvious, and those dragons were sure that she would stay hidden rather than go to a place where there were people and lights. Sir George was always sure the dragons believed they had killed her, and so they never bothered to look further. That seems reasonable enough."

  "Do you think my mother traveled over the mountains?" Thelvyn asked. He knew the story well, but he hadn't heard it from someone who had actually been there.

  "It would seem so," the forester agreed. "But I've always wondered if she was actually coming south along the mountains rather than over them. That could explain why the dragons didn't turn aside. The trouble is there's nothing on the other side of the mountains either west or north. Just cold, desolate lands of forests and plains, and no one there except bands of wild elves, and precious few of those. There's the Sylvan Realm, by the sea on the far side of the Hyborean Reaches, but Sir George looked into that and found that the folk there are ordinary elves. You may or you may not be human, but you're not an elf."

  "In school, we learned about Blackmoor," Thelvyn said. "I know Blackmoor was supposed to have been completely destroyed and sank beneath the sea three thousand years ago, but couldn't some part of it still exist somewhere?"

  "Perhaps," the forester said. "I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other. But the folk of Blackmoor had a bad reputation, and I can't imagine you or your mother being one of them. Your mother was a lady. I've never seen her like since."

  All the same, Thelvyn often wondered if he was indeed a descendant of lost Blackmoor. There was a limit to how many unknown races from unknown lands there could be in the world, but if any did exist, then Blackmoor seemed most likely to have spawned them. But for all his dreams and desires, he was too practical to believe such things or attach too much importance to such fond speculations. It was just pleasant to think about it.

  He was quickly becoming convinced that the forester had the best job in all the village. That excluded Sir George, of course, who resided in the village but was occupied elsewhere. It seemed to Thelvyn there could be nothing better than to spend his days wandering about the forests, hills, and mountains.

  Of course, he wasn't forgetting that the forester spent many days outside in the rain and the snow and the bitter winds of autumn and winter, nor that the forester was in rather some danger when he scouted out the traces of monsters and evil folk that had come into these lands. And while he didn't speak of it, Thelvyn knew of the great risk that Kaarstel had taken getting his mother down from the heights, and he was always respectful to the old man for that reason.

  They were late coming down from the heights and didn't return to the village until just after dark. Thelvyn had a simple dinner with Kaarstel and stayed longer than he should have, listening to the old man's stories. He wasn't greatly concerned, knowing that he wasn't expected until late. He hurried by Sir George's house to make certain that it was secure, and then went on to the mayor's house where he was currently staying.

  Always mindful of his chores, he paused in the yard long enough to gather up a heavy load of firewood for the morning's fire. Large and rather strong for his age, he could carry enough wood to serve the whole house in only a couple of trips.

  I'helvyn stacked the wood in the boxes beside the hearths in the kitchen and the main room, then tended the I li es one last time for the night. Spring was still young, and the nights could be cold, especially when the sky was clear mid the wind was calm. The mayor's house was large but also rather empty now that his daughters were married and his son was away in the south. Mayor Aalsten was the wealthiest man in the village except for Sir George. Aalsten was also a successful merchant.

  While the mayor didn't use his position to unfair advantage, which was beneath the dignity of Flaemish tradition, Mill, being mayor gave him special knowledge of the folk of his village, in both the products of their craft and also their needs. But he was wealthy only relative to the rough standards of the frontier, and while he was comfortable, he also lived in a manner that would seem rustic compared to the merchants to the south in the capital.

  The mayor kept only one servant, an older girl who had been Thelvyn's classmate only a few years before, and she went home at night. Thelvyn performed such chores as tending the fires at night, for he liked being helpful and it seemed a fair return for his keep. Like forester Kaarstel, the mayor and the other people of the village had assumed a dire risk in taking in his mother and him. He was grateful for that, even t
hough he was frustrated with them for trying to make him into something he was not. That night he found the mayor sitting alone in his study, going over his trading ledgers by the golden light of an oil lamp. Thelvyn brought in a couple pieces of wood for the small iron stove that sat in one corner of the room.

  "Ah, there you are lad. So how was your day?" Mayor Aalsten asked, glancing up from his book.

  "The forester showed me where he found my mother," Thelvyn said. "I always knew that he must have taken a chance in bringing her down, but he'll never admit that."

  "He's a fine, brave man. A number of people in this village owe him their lives," the mayor agreed and settled back in his chair. "You know, Thelvyn, you will be coming of age later this year, and you're getting a little old to still be trying to find yourself an apprenticeship. You seem to greatly enjoy the time you've spent with the forester."

  "Yes, I have," Thelvyn agreed hopefully, wondering if something was finally going to go right for him.

  "Unfortunately, you aren't of Flaemish ancestry and you haven't been declared a full citizen by a lord of the land, and so, by law, you can't take a post in the duke's pay," Mayor Aalsten continued. "You can understand that, can't you?"

  "Yes, of course," Thelvyn agreed. It explained why so many promising careers weren't among his options. When he was younger, he had always accepted that Flaemish law was inherently fair to everyone, or so he had always been told. Now he was coming to realize that the Flaem were a clannish lot, and their law was designed to exclude strangers like himself.

  "The first shipments of ore are beginning to come down from the mountains," the mayor went on. "Dal Ferstaan says he can use some help at the forge now, and he wants you to go over in the morning and start work with him. You'd be put up there, of course. You can manage that, can't you?"