A Crown Imperiled Read Free Page A

our men stay close to the tents and tell my sons to be ready to fight, but we should keep our swords sheathed unless attacked first. No one is to look for trouble. Anyone who starts a fight, answers to me.’ He grew thoughtful for a moment as he gazed into the distance. Then he said, ‘I don’t think Narab is ready to crown himself yet. Tonight he was merely showing the unallied clans who held the most power here by breaking a few heads. I doubt more than two or three warriors will die before morning.
    ‘Tell Goran that if I discover his sword has been drawn before I get back I’ll personally make him eat it.’
    ‘Your son won’t like that.’ observed Morgeth with a wry, half-smile.
    ‘He doesn’t like a lot of things, which is why Antesh is my heir,’ answered Arkan. ‘Make sure Cetswaya stays close to my sons.’
    Morgeth nodded. Cetswaya was their shaman and always a calm voice and wise counsel.
    ‘If I don’t return by sunrise tomorrow, have Goran and Antesh take the men north, then west. Find the rest of our people and take them back into the icelands, then wait until it’s safe to return to our normal range.’
    ‘And how will we know when that time arrives?’
    ‘That will not be my problem, for if you must flee tomorrow, I will likely be dead. If I don’t find you in the north by next spring, I will certainly be dead.’ Arkan put his heels to his horse and shouted, causing the other mounts to shy. Some pulled up stakes.
    As Morgeth watched his chieftain ride off into the deepening gloom of the hills around Sar-Sargoth, he said to no one, ‘They’re not going to like this much.’
    Then weighing Clan Bighorn’s ire at finding their mounts scattered against the wrath of Narab discovering that Arkan wasn’t among those chieftains in the square, he decided his chieftain had the better bargain. He shouted at the horses nearby without enthusiasm, then turned his mount down towards the plains. There, twenty thousand moredhel warriors awaited the return of their chieftains, and he wondered if it was possible for the Ardanien to somehow get away intact.
    Arkan rode for more than an hour, circling the vast array of camps outside the walls of Sar-Sargoth. A thousand fires or more burned as the main host of the moredhel nation had gathered outside the walls of the massive city.
    Despite being the closest thing to a moredhel capital, the city was deserted for most of the year. Delekhan, the last moredhel chieftain who had attempted to occupy the city as a symbol of his supremacy, had been killed by Arkan’s father, Gorath, during the second abortive attempt to seize the Kingdom city of Sethanon.
    Since then, Delekhan’s heir, Narab, had occasionally moved his clans into the vicinity, but had avoided the vanity of occupying any of the palaces scattered through the city. Today, it appeared, was to be the day he decided to advance his claim to pre-eminence, if only symbolically.
    And so Arkan rode through the night, seeking the one leader among the moredhel with enough power to balk Narab’s ambition for a crown that no moredhel in history had dared to wear. The Ardanian chief hoped what he saw tonight was just another tribal conflict, one quickly resolved, rather than the beginning of a true dynastic struggle. For in the first instant he had seen them, Arkan knew that the true threat came from the elves from the distant stars.
    Their presence beside Narab told the chieftain all he needed to know: Narab would rather stand in good stead with them than confront them as enemies, so they were powerful and very dangerous. Arkan knew it was Narab’s nature to plot, but he was clearly overmatched if he thought he could court them and make them serve his ends, or even count them as true allies. The taredhel might be content to allow those living north of the Teeth of the World to think themselves free, but eventually they would seek to put their boot on the necks of the moredhel. The strange elves wanted to