For some odd reason, King Felix had a difficult time thinking about the Female Elven General in the same way as other members of her sex. He had seen her wielding a sword like it was an extended part of her body. He had noted the cunning intelligence of her mind. This was a woman fit for his son. Together they would breed strong sons and daughters to be proud of. She would also be able to hold her own against any man or woman. He could well imagine the task of capturing and taming her. It was something that made his own blood run hot.
“You are thinking about something diabolical,” Lorne noted.
“I am thinking about how that Female Elf would breed strong and healthy sons for the realm,” King Felix admitted.
Lorne frowned and warned, “I would push the thought out of my mind if I were you, Father. I grant you, she is beautiful in anyway a man could imagine, but she is more than just a little dangerous. She is death walking. If she can be tamed by anyone, it won’t be one of us. She would slaughter anyone of us as we slept if we tried to touch her that way.”
“No, my son,” King Felix assured Lorne he knew what he was up to. “She would never kill us in our sleep. She has too much honor in her for that. She would hit us head on, while we are fully alert.”
“No matter when she would choose to move,” Lorne stated, “She would succeed. That Elf needs to die.”
“Do you think this way because of Ricard and Evart?” King Felix wondered.
“No,” Lorne realized. “I do it for me. At first, I figured it would be fun to play with her for a while. But now that I have seen the devastation she is capable of causing, I believe we are better off with her dead. It doesn’t matter how, by fair means or foul, but she must go before she causes even more mayhem than she has.”
“In the back of my mind, I can see her encased in a tower with no exit and chained to a bed for our entertainment,” King Felix spoke.
The gleam in King Felix’s eyes told Lorne his father was currently lost to his lustful musings. It wouldn’t last for long, it hadn’t for him. He had taken a good look at how she had flowed through his fighting men, while leaving a trail of bodies behind her and let the dream die. His men were hardened warriors. They were used to seeing the worst an enemy could hand them in a fight. He had never seen them show fear or balk at facing an opponent in the past. This had been the first time any of them had ever run from fear of another soldier as they did from the High Lord General Gabriella Eagle Claw.
As much as Lorne had recognized the lustful thoughts coursing through his father’s mind, King Felix was surprised to see the first signs of fear he had ever noticed in his son’s mind. His eyes widened in sudden understanding, “You are scared of her.”
Lorne angrily rose from his chair, causing it to fall and spoke his mind. “Anyone with eyes and a brain would fear someone like her. She is an anomaly, and before you say you know and that is what attracts you to her, I am fully aware of this. For a long time both Ricard and I thought the same things about her. I have come to realize how truly ill-advised these ideas are. This world is better off without someone like Gabriella Eagle Claw in it. We need to find a way to kill her.”
“I would have a son or grandson of hers before we do what you suggest,” King Felix stated.
“What you are thinking of is sheer suicide,” Lorne warned. “She would never give us what we want. She is an Elven Female, and even in the odd mention of them, none have ever mentioned one of them producing a child for their owners. I have heard mention of men stating they heard of these creatures being captured in eons past, but no good ever came of it.”
“I have heard stories of them as well. They are considered lucky and although it is true none claimed to have ever produced children for their captors, there could be a first time,” King Felix insisted.
“Have you forgotten what she looked like when she faced us in battle?” Lorne tried to reason with King Felix.
“She was glorious,” King Felix spoke in admiration. “A battle Goddess come to life.”
“Yes,” Lorne insisted even more, “come to life to kill us. Forget her Father. She is a danger we cannot afford.”
“I can’t forget her,” King Felix roared. “She owes me a son, and I will have one of her.”
“Then brace yourself for the fight of our lives, because she will kill every one of us before bowing to your demand,” Lorne warned. “It is what she was born to do, I feel this in my bones.”
CHAPTER XXX
Lorne had mixed feelings when he left the meeting with his father. He thought King Felix was well on his way to be drunk enough to eventually pass out, but Felix wouldn’t give up on the idea of Gabriella Eagle Claw owing them a son. It was an opinion Lorne once shared, but now shuddered at the thought of. She was one female he wanted nothing to do with anymore, unless it had to do with killing her. Nothing could rid him of the feeling that anything they had to do with her would result in bad news for them and she should be left alone. There was something ominous about her presence, a sense of nothing good to come from her being amongst them. To think his father might insist on keeping her around long enough to impregnate, then for her to give birth, gave him some seriously bad vibes.
Half-drunk himself, Lorne wandered around the castle until he ended up in the lower portion of the castle where General Anton kept his workroom. General Anton was clearly upset about something and gave the impression he could use a friend to talk to. Lorne decided to see what this was all about, “You look irked about something.”
“I ordered supplies three weeks ago,” General Anton complained. “I still haven’t received any of them. I have nothing but coal to work with and that I needed to feed the fire. It is too cold to work down here without one.”
“I thought the temperature was one of the main reasons you chose these rooms,” Lorne pointed out.
“Yes, but I never expected to live in this dungeon as well as work in it,” General Anton grouched.
Lorne didn’t mean to laugh, but the foreign general sounded so funny he couldn’t have stopped if he had tried. It wasn’t long before they were both in tears of laughter over the situation.
The moment they stopped, Lorne spoke, “Perhaps it would be a good idea if you gave me the lists for supplies after this.”
“Your father does seem to be rather obsessed with his own plans at this time,” General Anton stated. “I guess I can’t blame him for that. If something like this happened to me, I would want to get a bit of my own back at them too. He has a long way to go before he reaches the point where he can do anything about it though.”
“What has he told you about his plans?” Lorne was worried his father might have mentioned the High Lord General Gabriella Eagle Claw in those and what this man might think about that.
“Enough to make me doubt his sanity,” General Anton answered with a frown. “I can only wonder what else this particular enemy has in their arsenal besides those beasts, or if they need anything else if they fight anything like that Female Elf does. I have never seen anyone capable of using swords the way she has before. The fact that she can makes me wonder how many others there are like her.”
General Anton’s remarks were deeper than anything Lorne expected, and it brought his own lack of consideration into glaring detail. He hadn’t given any of the other Elves much thought, not as he was doing now. Those Elven Warriors certainly knew how to fight. Gabriella Eagle Claw was not the only one capable of doing what she did on the field. What was even worse, he got the impression what they had witnessed wasn’t her best performance. She had fought only slightly better than those around her. He was certain he had seen her use better technique than what she showed on the field during battle this time.”
“We faced off against the Elven Army on their soil. We took two of our armies with us and got our collective asses kicked. Those that lived through the battle found themselves back on this side of the mountain range with no idea of how we got back,” Lorne admitted. It wasn’t something he wanted widely known
or spread around.
“I am sure this isn’t news you want many others to hear,” General Anton noted. “It would bring armies from every Kingdom within striking range down on you. As it is, I am sorry I brought my own men here to face the hornets’ nest you have managed to shake up.”
“Father is determined to find a way to cross those mountains with the full fighting force of his Kingdom. He not only wants their General for personal reasons. He is looking for revenge. He would kill every person and ravage the land. He thinks he knows what he is facing, but I know better. To defeat this foe, we will need the might of every Kingdom I can think of and then some. We were offered help from several of them to fight this army already, and I accepted it, but it won’t be enough.”
“I can probably think of several more Kings that would rise to the occasion than you know of,” General Anton stated. “The trick would be to get them to mobilize their forces without believing they can walk in here and take over. They wouldn’t care if your people were under attack, they would want to find out if there was a possible way of getting one of those Dragons. Just the thought of seeing one in reality would attract some. Other would definitely want to own one of them.”
“What if we were to spread the word of an Elven army in the Valley, one using Dragons to serve their purposes?” Lorne asked.
“It would take months for a messenger from here to get to most of them, then as many, if not more, to gather their troops and to march to get here,” General Anton stated.
“We would definitely need those roads if we had such a fighting force,” Lorne could feel the escalated appeal of the venture for General Anton.
“They would never ride under your father’s banner,” General Anton warned.
“They wouldn’t have to,” Lorne stated. “They only would have to acknowledge him as the spearhead of the venture and then to agree to support our cause.”
“They might agree to a combined attack against a common foe, or at least one they were convinced could become strong enough to rule over the whole world,” General Anton considered the possibility with a degree of thoughtfulness.
Lorne caught on immediately, “So what we do is spread a story saying our Kingdom was attacked by an Elven Army with the intention of taking over the world outside of their boundaries. They used Dragons and we barely were able to hold them back, but somehow we managed to drive them back across the mountains.”
“You will need to make it believable if you expect anyone to answer your plea for help,” General Anton warned. “Your people have a reputation for brutality and making unwarranted attacks on other Kingdoms. No one is going to believe a word you say without backup from a reliable source.”
“You have a plan?” Lorne asked. He knew if any of his men took his message out into the world and were recognized for who they were, no one would believe them. The reputation his men had earned over the years was for brutality, not honesty.
“I have men capable of seeding the kind of story you need spread around, but your cooperation will come at a price,” General Anton warned.
Lorne wasn’t too surprised such a service would come with strings attached. It was only to be expected. He had to wonder what this is going to cost. He didn’t know enough about General Anton to judge what he would expect from him in return. He knew nothing about his background and couldn’t guess what he might consider important enough to barter for a favor. He was half-tempted to think it might come down to a need for money. After all, it cost a lot to hire men to fight a war. His finer instincts, however, told him this wasn’t the case. “What do you have in mind?”
“I want you to marry my daughter,” General Anton stated.
Lorne was stunned. Of all the things he might have guessed, something like this didn’t occur to him. For some reason, he had gotten the impression General Anton didn’t have a family. He hadn’t heard even a hint of the possibility he had a wife or child from his men. It made him wonder even more about this man’s personal life. “I am going to assume she isn’t with you or I would have heard about her. Does she have siblings? Where is your wife?”
General Anton sighed. He had assumed there would be questions when he suggested this, but now he got the feeling this was only going to be the tip of the iceberg. He was going to need to tell this man his personal history before he was finished. He hadn’t planned on doing this. The question he had expected to hear from him was, why me? He didn’t have a straight answer for that one either, especially as he didn’t trust Lorne and wouldn’t have allowed him within one hundred miles of his daughter under normal circumstances.
“I am going to assume you want me to tell you the story from beginning to end. I will admit, it is not going to be easy, nor do I consider you a prime candidate for her hand,” General Anton stated. “I, however, fear I could be running out of time, and I want her to be safe and cared for.”
“You decided somewhere along the line to trust me?” Lorne asked in surprise.
“Not even close,” General Anton stated. “I know neither you nor your father can be trusted to keep her in the way I would like. But, at least she will be kept in the style in which she has grown up.”
That comment totally threw Lorne’s thoughts off. What on Earth was General Anton talking about? This didn’t make any sense. “I have no idea what you want or mean. If you don’t trust us, why place your most precious possession in our hands and at our mercy, especially when you don’t believe we have any to begin with?”
“Because you need her more than she does you,” General Anton answered. “Arianna is the only child of my body. When she was born, her mother died, and I was left to raise her on my own. It didn’t take very many years for me to figure out she was smarter than any woman has a right to be in the society we live in. There was no help for it. The creator gave me a child with the frail body of a female and the mind of a genius. It didn’t take long for the King to find out about her and to cultivate her trust. He is the vilest snake you could imagine.”
“He took her from you?” Lorne asked. He had no trouble emphasizing with the pain this man had to be going through. His daughters had meant the world to him, and their own Grandfather had killed them. He didn’t need to be told this was how they died. He knew King Felix well enough to understand all of his reasons for doing as he had. The comforting part was that they had not turned from him before they died.
“It has been five years since I last saw Arianna, and she was only six,” General Anton explained. “Even at three, she caught on to the King’s games and had begun to turn away from him. He kept her in line by threatening me. He did the same with me in reverse, saying if I didn’t do as he ordered, he would use her, torture her, or worse. I didn’t put any of it past him. By the time she turned six, his actions no longer had any effect on her. He ordered me to go on campaign and I left. It was a choice of doing as he said or seeing her impaled.”
The swift intake of breath that came from Lorne told General Anton he understood more than he would admit to. King Felix was a violent man, but even he could never consider impaling a six-year-old child on a pike and then leaving her to die.
“If she were only six the last time you saw her and this was five years ago, she would only be eleven now. She isn’t old enough to be married. Hell, I had daughters older than her and I considered them too young to even look at men,” Lorne admitted. He was known as a debaucher, but even he had values. He did not defile children. To hide the awkwardness coursing through him, he looked at the ground and rubbed the back of his neck with a hand. He couldn’t remember feeling so out of control ever, not even as a child.
“I bet your daughters didn’t think they were too young for men,” General Anton replied.
“They seemed to discover boys when they turned fourteen, then it was difficult to keep them in their rooms at night,” Lorne admitted. As he remembered his daughters and their antics, tears began to form in his eyes. They had been so young and innocent. They didn’t deserve to die. Then ag
ain, neither did General Anton’s daughter. He couldn’t do anything for his own girls, but he might be able to help his. He took a deep breath, then agreed to the deal. He had found his bride.
CHAPTER XXXI
With the agreement between General Anton and Lorne finalized, the two men set to work to see what could be done to defeat the Elven Army. Much to Lorne’s surprise, General Anton’s first choice was to contact was the King holding his daughter captive.
“Why would you want anyone that evil here where he might be able to work his machinations against us?” Lorne wondered.
“You can count on him to try,” General Anthon answered. The smug look he tossed Lorne hardly reassured the Prince.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that you would welcome him to our lands,” Lorne grumbled. “What if he decided to turn his army against us instead?”
“He might consider it, but his attention will be more on me, not you,” General Anton explained. “To begin with, you can count on him to know about the loss of my army to your father. He will not be happy we were defeated so easily, but he is a practical man. He understands the concept of stepping back to fight another day when faced by overwhelming odds and greater power. It won’t take him long to figure out this is exactly what happened when he gets here.”
“Something tells me this isn’t your sole reason for bringing him here,” Lorne replied with more than a little suspicion in the tone of his voice.
“Very astute of you,” General Anton smiled, as he mentally applauded Lorne’s quick thinking. “Where I come from Elves and Dragons are steeped in folklore. It is written that where they dwell there is great wealth. Dragons like to hoard jewels and gold. If you kill the Dragon, you win its treasure. Elves are supposed to be able to spin gold out of nearly anything and other such ridiculous beliefs.”
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