The King's Players RPG

[Anguirel]

The Lord Warden returned to his duties as if nothing had happened as soon as the King had departed; but something had happened, and the revolving of his thoughts, nay, the very twitching of his quill, was fevered and fretful.

The King had issued what would, in any lesser man, have been a threat - the prospect of Cirdacil being deprived of the Exchequer, the office that game him regular, grinding satisfaction. Yet somehow - such was the insubstantial grace of that strange, elven-wise, uncanny man, the King Elessar - he had contrived to make his speech sound loving, even generous.

What was unpleasantly clear was that the King would not allow him to treat this matter of the Players with the triviality he believed with every policy in his bones that it deserved. No, he had insisted on binding everything up in the round, so now the play appeared to bleed into the Exchequer, Cirdacil's clever son's plotting coalescing with his dull son's banqueting.

For there was some enormous drawback to come tonight, Cirdacil was beginning to feel sure. The Dol Amroth girl was in the city, and sometimes the Lord of Burlach faintly regretted that marriage which had yoked his children to that family. They were high-born, and they were rich, the family of Erchirion; and neither of those things seemed to matter to them. Each of them had other cares, quite separate to his own; quite separate sources of desire, and of pride. Had it been wise to knot them into his own practical blood?

So many unsettling things had happened today, and Lord Cirdacil laid down his pen now, or dropped it more precisely, not caring where it fell. He could toil no longer today in this grim, beloved, safe land of honest work - a land that might be debarred from him, quite soon, for reasons beyond his ken.

The King wanted him to show a wisdom he was not certain he possessed. All he knew, for his part, was that this strangest of days had brought an outweighing positive. He felt an overwhelming urge for the counsel, witting or not, of the elder brother's blood. Let the accounts stew as they did on every lazier public servant's watch! He would find his nephew, and reunite his family, and then, perhaps, matters would stand clearer in general.

So foreign was his abandonment of his diurnal work to his habits that not one clerk suspected him of leaving. He was mounted, on a placid, slow-tiring brown palfrey, before anyone marked it; headed first to the Office of Naval Ordinance, to find if he would where the ship's crew was berthed that counted amongst it Vëandur, son of Falastur, of the Fleets...