The King's Players RPG

[Mnemosyne]

Rollan was relieved, actually, at the inadvertent rescue Sereth had given him. A dragon was a much easier problem to manage than the King's Players crumbling within his wife's--and his--grasp.

"Now, listen, both of you," he said, and he looked at them sharply--not cruelly, but the sort of "sit up and pay attention" look that, somehow, only he could get away with flashing to the audience. "What Brinn never managed to get out before Asta stormed off was that she'd at least think about keeping the dragon, or working it in some other way. I'm not familiar enough with this version of the tale to know how that'd work, but I do know we have to be careful about the 'Frodo' bits because one of our special guests was there."

He looked at Thiliel again. "But we were talking about the Black Land, not the Siege. And you say there were creatures like dragons there? Not, of course, that I'd want you to be more of a bother to your uncle than I'm sure a lass your age already is... but you might have given old Rollan an idea." He eyed her shrewdly. "You don't think folk here would take it badly if we made the siege a little more dramatic, do you?"

[Galadriel55]

"Not, of course, that I'd want you to be more of a bother to your uncle than I'm sure a lass your age already is..." Perhaps Rollan did not intend to, but he reminded Thiliel once again of her sins this day. I have to stop this chattering. I have work to do. I need to act my age.

"You don't think folk here would take it badly if we made the siege a little more dramatic, do you?"

Thiliel decided to end the talk with this question. "I suppose not. But many of the elder people still remember it how it was, and those who were born later or were too young to remember heard about it from their sires. You say that the dragon lives in the Black Land. I cannot tell you anything of that. I have not heard of any dragons there. But very few people dared to explore deep into the heart of the land. Who knows what may be still hiding there?"

Thiliel looked at the coin in her hand. She had another one, from Celebrindal, under her pillow. "I apologize, but I have to go now. I have lots of work still to do," she said, turnig around and putting the coin in her pocket.

[Anguirel]

Up at the Treasury


There was a good deal of disturbance going on in the offices of the Lord Warden. Clerks either dashed about or stayed preternaturally still, occasionally and mechanically practising their bowing. That horse, that calvacade, those guards had been spotted, inarguably, on their way in this direction. But he didn't typically visit the Treasury, his own Exchequer; in a manner of speaking, indeed, he wasn't supposed to; his half-forgotten predecessors had none done so since the Kin-Strife's bad old days, when need to secure the money purses had overriden princely decorum. The system was, for established and good reasons, designed to encumber any over-carefree initiative from its master...

"The King Elessar is on his...", a higher commissioner began to his superior, Lord Cirdacil, as that notable paced distractedly past him, his undermighty, compact shape juddering with impatience.

"Do be quiet, I know he is, and why he is, well, that's evidently beyond any of your wit..."

The Lord Warden concluded his response with one of the phglemy coughs that punctuated and plagued his utterances, aging in body but vigorous as ever in will.

"The King Elessar has passed..." another official, hurrying in the opposite direction, tried.

"Through the doorway?"

"Not yet, my lord."

"Then the matter is of no importance, except insofar as it seems to have disturbed you all from your proper business."

Some soldiers, the van of the guard royal, arrived with predictable lack of awareness of punctiliousness, but Cirdacil paid them back in their own coin, waved them dead silent as they came near him; they obeyed at once, for everyone accepted that the whitebeard tyrant of the taxes looked and sounded like a taskmaster to be reckoned with. As if more disdainful than pleased with their show of submission, Cirdacil strode past them without looking to either side of him, under handsome, serried arches of smartly presented ashen spears. He moved as effienctly as anyone had ever seen; and was at the main gate of his station of work to welcome his sovereign's arrival.

"Right glad meeting, your majesty," he got out quickly, extending his arm within. There, that was it. If the King chose to enter now it was at his Warden's invitation; the dangerous precedent had been scotched. King Elessar seemed to be interested in no such principled struggle after all, however. He paused, maddeningly, at Cirdacil's own level, half in and half out of the threshold, as if the Treasury's hallowed ground and the rarefied citadel dirt were all the same to him.

"Are you not over tired, Lord Cirdacil?" formed his greeting, delivered with very perfected concern.

"No more than usual, your Majesty."

"Than usual? Ha! I hate, my sprightly young playmate," (the King liked to chaff Cirdacil about his own greater age, which the Lord Warden always thought a little vulgar of him, under his special circumstances), "to be the cause of making your life always so onerous. Come," he added, putting his arm around the old Lord and steering them in together, thus undoing all Cirdacil's careful efforts to remain the driving impetus on the way into the offices.

"I gather from..., well, I gather, that you privately favour an alteration in the nature of the Cormare revels?" the King asked easily, hauling his old counsellor along in great joviality.

"The actors grow more intractably retrograde every day that passes, sire," Cirdacil replied with a sigh; he had suspected the King would pick this topic, but he didn't have to like it himself. "I thought the traditional bard might save us both - us all - a good quantity of money and time."

"Money and time," King Elessar mused. "Tell me, Lord Cirdacil, which do you prefer?"

Cirdacil recognised the pitfall in the question at once, nor did he have to lie in avoiding it. "That is no kind of choice, sire. We need money to make time endurable, yet gold is no end in itself."

"No end indeed," the King answered thoughtfully. "All that glisters...but forgive me, I am indulging in memory. I fear, Lord Cirdacil, that your joint office lies heavily upon your sense of duty?"

"It has been hard since your Majesty chose so to distinguish me," Cirdacil muttered without inflection, fighting back incipient relief. Was Elessar about to take the Players off him again? Had Hallas decided to come back? Had that absurd fellow in Dol Amroth, his daughter's father-in-law Erchirion, turned up the goods and agreed to be interested at last?

"I don't like the sound of your cough, Cirdacil," the King carried on equably, "and these Players seem to need undivided attention, relatively undemanding though they may be in principle. Tell me, who would you like best to succeed you at the Exchequer?"

It had been a conversation Cirdacil had prepared so thoroughly that he began his automatic reply without taking in its context: "Your Majesty will find my younger son, Lord Beren of Burlach, called...wait..."

Suddenly he realised fully what was going on, and enpurpled, with another sudden cough. This was certainly not supposed to happen, not yet.

"Your Majesty cannot think of removing the Exchequer from me now! I still have much service to offer you! And with every state of retrenching in a parlous and delicate..."

The King had taken a step back. He was watching Cirdacil intently. When the old man trailed his splutter off, he began to speak again, gently.

"Do you know why I gave you the Revels, my lord?"

"To try me, sire," the old lord responded hopefully, "so I could prove my view of these vagabonds' worthlessness..."

But he unstrung humself again. The King's calm expression had not changed, but it wore a strange smile, caught between mirth and sadness, but tender withal...

"Then you were joking," Cirdacil cried bitterly, "as I thought; and my son was wrong to tell me otherwise..."

"No," the King cut in, in his usual, forcefully kind tone, "he was not, my lord of Burlach. I did indeed mean to try you, not to tease you - not, at any rate, entirely. What you have just told me, when I asked you about time and money, assures me you are wise enough, if you follow your own advice, to pass my test. My lord, I can stay no longer."

And he embraced the - younger - man lightly in his strong, long arms, before turning quickly and leaving his Treasury's sanctum, and each of his guards and household with him. He left Cirdacil, Lord of Burlach, in the strange position of a man fighting to remember his own words, carelessly spoken as they had been...

[Pitchwife]

Harrenon handled the tool Asta had given him as cautiously as if it could bite him; his face betrayed some serious second thoughts about the mission he had been recruited to, but then he shrugged and tucked the thing inside his waistcoat, hiding it from casual view as best he could. Coldan did likewise with the long metal bar, its ends bent into opposite directions, he was handed, while Asta picked some smaller, more delicate looking implements to stow in her belt pouch, along with two or three tiny sachets of strange smelling powders.

The sun had sunk behind the darkened head of old Mindolluin, lending it an aureole of fading gold, when the three adventurers slunk out of the inn's courtyard as unconspicuously as they could manage and merged with the evening shadows. Most of the deep blue sky was clear, and in the east Eärendil had already launched his barque, but in the south the wind was bringing heavy clouds up from the Ethir and the sea.

[Inziladun]

Vëandur sat on his bed in the Second Circle billet he shared with three others of his ship. He was thankful none of them were there at the moment, especially that fool Darengen, with the incredibly foul odor that followed him like a pall.

Vëandur had tried to nap, mindful of his midnight rendezvous with his great-uncle, and the subsequent party that might carry on until the sun rose the next day, for all he knew. He was unable to banish the thoughts swirling in his head long enough to fall asleep. Why does he want us arriving so late, anyway? Vëandur thought. He'd always considered that nobles and high officials liked their parties to take place early in the evening, making a show of their fine clothing and elegant manners, then tottering off to bed with self-important satisfaction. Maybe that wasn't the case, at least not here. Vëandur wasn't looking forward to it much, but for the sake of his new-found kin, he would go. After all, the man had had no pressing reason to take notice of Vëandur at all, much less invite him to a gathering of his family. And it was better than what he would have otherwise been resigned to: drinking up his pay in the company of his crew, the same people he saw aboard ship for long weeks at a time.

Looking at the late afternoon sun slanting in through the windows, he thought he would take a meal at his leisure, then would have plenty of time to return and get ready. He wanted to leave about an hour before midnight, to give himself plenty of time to travel to the Sixth Circle. Did the carriages even run that late? He wasn't sure; there were enough inns and taverns near where they always stayed that the problem had not come up before.

He stretched, then stood up. Who knew? This night might be interesting, at least.

[Dimturiel]

I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t…

The words were running through Harrenon’s mind like an obsessive refrain and however hard he tried to silence them, they were still there. Yes, perhaps it would have been better if he had stayed put and let Asta and Coldan handle it – whatever it was – by themselves. But it was far too late to turn back now, since they had already left the inn. He tried to imagine the look on Asta’s face if he suddenly announced that he had changed his mind and would like to go back. That was enough to make him want to take his chances with whoever had kidnapped Aldarion.

There were few people on the streets now and most were heading towards their homes, not having much time to spare for the three conspirators. Since Harrenon was actually Gondorian and so the least to rouse too many suspicions, he had been given the task of asking those they encountered about the carriage. A few were able give them an answer and so now at least they knew where they were going. Of course, he still was not too sure what would happen once they got there. He only hoped Coldan and Asta knew what they were doing.

[Nerwen]

Night had fallen by the time the trio found the place they sought, in the Sixth Circle, but the mansion was ablaze with light that spilled out across the road so that they had to watch from quite a distance as late-arriving carriages rattled up and their bejewelled and silk-clad occupants disembarked. No doubt most of these would take them for passers-by, stopped to gawp– but "Lord" Sador might be around, and others of his sinister crew who knew them by sight.

There were swarms of servants in swan-livery darting in and out, but it was the tall ones who kept the door who held Asta's attention. They were the ones she would have to draw away with her flaming powders– but not yet, not until all the guests were inside.

Nearer than the chatter of voices and the rumble of carriage-wheels, she could hear Harry muttering to himself, as he had been doing for half the journey, "I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be doing this..." He did not even seem to realise he was speaking aloud. Asta shook her head sadly. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to bring him after all.

She herself had a sense of elation. She felt like Lúthien Tinúviel, going forth to rescue Beren from the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. The sandstone facade did not look much like the dread Sorcerer's tower as depicted on the backdrops the Players had used for that production, but if Sador were under its roof, it harboured an evildoer equally foul. (Well, almost equally. She did not want to start exaggerating, now.)

Suddenly, thinking of Lúthien's subsequent career, Asta had another of her brilliant inspirations. The original plan had a serious flaw, in that it had no provision for how they would escape notice once inside the mansion. She had vaguely hoped they might pass as guests, but now, watching all these finely-dressed aristocrats sweeping in, she had to concede that all three of them would stick out like sore thumbs. But Lúthien and Beren had faced the same problem, and they had worn–

"Disguises! That's it, as soon as we're inside, we'll grab three of the servants, strip them, bind them, stuff them in a closest, and wear their livery. I'm sure none of these lords and ladies will look twice at us!"

"Asta," Harrenon protested, "do all your schemes involve tying people up?"

[the phantom]

"Aldarion, at last. You have been too long, and too much missed among the players of the Swan."

The sound of Gloredhel's voice instantly transported Aldarion back to Dol Amroth, and it was all he could do to keep himself from rushing forward to greet her. Smiling slightly, Aldarion responded. "So, in other words, 'You're late and you shouldn't have left us!' Hardly the reception I was hoping for."

"Aldarion..." said Gloredhel, shaking her head and smiling in return, "What do you expect me to say, leaving me behind in Valinor like that?"

Aldarion swiftly noted that she had twice led off with his name- a signal that something was not right. Then she referenced being left in Valinor, and Aldarion picked up the thread without missing a beat. "It was too confined for a spirit such as mine, in such close quarters with those seeking to smother my flame."

Gloredhel answered, "But without restraints you will perish in your own fire."

Her answer left him no doubt that she was indeed pointing to a disagreement between Feanor and Nerdanel, a lover's spat, something that should be discussed privately rather than publicly. From that it was clear to Aldarion that Gloredhel needed to speak with him away from prying ears. He would be on the lookout for such an opportunity.

"What has it been... six years since we used that as an audition piece?" he asked Gloredhel.

Gloredhel nodded. "Lord Imrazôr thought it was an excellent choice, I recall."

"Though that red wig looked a bit ridiculous," laughed Aldarion.