She came skipping down the lane, so much like a little girl, and yet so obviously a young woman. Shiny black hair bounced around her shoulders, and her green eyes flashed as brightly as the beaming smile upon her fair face.
She had just spoken to him, to Jaka Sculi, with his soulful blue eyes and his curly brown hair, one strand hanging across the bridge of his nose. And just speaking to him made her skip where she might have walked, made her forget the mud that crept in through the holes in her old shoes or the tasteless food she would find in her wooden bowl at her parents' table that night. None of that mattered, not the bugs, not the dirty water, nothing. She had spoken to Jaka, and that alone made her warm and tingly and scared and alive all at the same time.
It went as one of life's little unrealized ironies that the same spirit freed by her encounter with the brooding Jaka inspired the eyes of another to settle upon her happy form.
Lord Feringal Auck had found his heart fluttering at the sight of many different women over his twenty-four years, mostly merchant's daughters whose fathers were looking for another safe haven northwest of Luskan. The village was near to the most traveled pass through the Spine of the World where they might resupply and rest on the perilous journey to and from Ten-Towns in Icewind Dale.
Never before had Feringal Auck found his breathing so hard to steady that he was practically gasping for air as he hung from the window of his decorated carriage.
"Feri, the pines have begun sending their yellow dust throughout the winds," came the voice of Priscilla, Feringal's older sister. She, alone, called him Feri, to his everlasting irritation. "Do get inside the coach! The sneezing dust is thick about us. You know how terrible-"
The woman paused and studied her brother more intently, particularly the way he was gawking. "Feri?" she asked, sliding over in her seat, close beside him and grabbing his elbow and giving it a shake. "Feri?"
"Who is she?" the lord of Auckney asked, not even hearing his sister. "Who is that angelic creature, the avatar of the goddess of beauty, the image of man's purest desires, the embodiment of temptation?"
Priscilla shoved her brother aside and thrust her head out the carriage window. "What, that peasant girl?" she asked incredulously, a clear note of contempt sounding in her tone.
"I must know," Lord Feringal sang more than said. The side of his face sank against the edge of the carriage window, and his unblinking gaze locked on the skipping young woman. She slipped from his sight as the carriage sped around a bend in the curving road.
"Feri!" Priscilla scolded. She moved as if to slap her younger brother but held up short of the mark.
The lord of Auckney shook away his love-inspired lethargy long enough to eye his sister directly, even dangerously. "I shall know who she is," he insisted.
Priscilla Auck settled back in her seat and said no more, though she was truly taken aback by her younger brother's uncharacteristic show of emotion. Feringal had always been a gentle, quiet soul easily manipulated by his shrewish sister, fifteen years his senior. Now nearing her fortieth birthday, Priscilla had never married. In truth, she had never had any interest in a man beyond fulfilling her physical needs. Their mother had died giving birth to Feringal, their father passed on five years later, which left Priscilla, along with her father's counselor, Temigast, the stewardship of the fiefdom until Feringal grew old enough to rule. Priscilla had always enjoyed that arrangement, for even when Feringal had come of age, and even now, nearly a decade after that, her voice was substantial in the rulership of Auckney. She had never desired to bring another into the family, so she had assumed the same of Feri.
Scowling, Priscilla glanced back one last time in the general direction of the young lass, though they were far out of sight now. Their carriage rambled along the little stone bridge that arched into the sheltered bay toward the tiny isle where Castle Auck stood.
Like Auckney itself, a village of two hundred people that rarely showed up on any maps, the castle was of modest design. There were a dozen rooms for the family, and for Temigast, of course, and another five for the half-dozen servants and ten soldiers who served at the place. A pair of low and squat towers anchored the castle, barely topping fifteen feet, for the wind always blew strongly in Auckney. A common joke was, if the wind ever stopped blowing, all the villagers would fall over forward, so used were they to leaning as they walked.
"I should get out of the castle more often," Lord Feringal insisted as he and his sister moved through the foyer and into a sitting room, where old Steward Temigast sat painting another of his endless seascapes.
"To the village proper, you mean?" Priscilla said with obvious sarcasm. "Or to the outlying peat farms? Either way, it is all mud and stone and dirty."
"And in that mud, a jewel might shine all the brighter," the love-struck lord insisted with a deep sigh.
The steward cocked an eyebrow at the odd exchange and looked up from his painting. Temigast had lived in Waterdeep for most of his younger days, coming to Auckney as a middle-aged man some thirty years before. Worldly compared to the isolated Auckney citizens (including the ruling family), Temigast had had little trouble in endearing himself to the feudal lord, Tristan Auck, and in rising to the post of principal counselor, then steward. That worldliness served Temigast well now, for he recognized the motivation for Feringal's sigh and understood its implications.
"She was just a girl," Priscilla complained. "A child, and a dirty one at that." She looked to Temigast for support, seeing that he was intent upon their conversation. "Feringal is smitten, I fear," she explained. "And with a peasant. The lord of Auckney desires a dirty, smelly peasant girl."
"Indeed," replied Temigast, feigning horror. By his estimation, by the estimation of anyone who was not from Auckney, the "lord of Auckney" was barely above a peasant himself. There was history here: The castle had stood for more than six hundred years, built by the Dorgenasts who had ruled for the first two centuries. Then, through marriage, it had been assumed by the Aucks.
But what, really, were they ruling? Auckney was on the very fringe of the trade routes, south of the westernmost spur of the Spine of the World. Most merchant caravans traveling between Ten-Towns and Luskan avoided the place all together, many taking the more direct pass through the mountains many miles to the east. Even those who dared not brave the wilds of that unguarded pass crossed east of Auckney, through another pass that harbored the town of Hundelstone, which had six times the population of Auckney and many more valuable supplies and craftsmen.
Though a coastal village, Auckney was too far north for any shipping trade. Occasionally a ship-often a fisherman caught in a gale out of Fireshear to the south-would drift into the small harbor around Auckney, usually in need of repair. Some of those fishermen stayed on in the fiefdom, but the population here had remained fairly constant since the founding by the roguish Lord Dorgenast and his followers, refugees from a minor and failed power play among the secondary ruling families in Waterdeep. Now nearing two hundred, the population was as large as it had ever been (mostly because of an influx of gnomes from Hundelstone), and on many occasions it was less than half of that. Most of the villagers were related, usually in more ways than one, except, of course, for the Aucks, who usually took their brides or husbands from outside stock.
"Can't you find a suitable wife from among the well-bred families of Luskan?" Priscilla asked. "Or in a favorable deal with a wealthy merchant? We could well use a large dowery, after all."
"Wife?" Temigast said with a chuckle. "Aren't we being a bit premature?"
"Not at all," Lord Feringal insisted evenly. "I love her. I know that I do."
"Fool!" Priscilla wailed, but Temigast patted her shoulder to calm her, chuckling all the while.
"Of course you do, my lord," the steward said, "but the marriage of a nobleman is rarely about love, I fear. It is about station and alliance and wealth," Temigast gently explained.
Feringal's eyes widened. "I love her!" the young lord insisted.
"Then take her as a mistress," Temigast suggested reasonably. "A plaything. Surely a man of your great station is deserving of at least one of those."
Hardly able to speak past the welling lump in his throat, Feringal ground his heel into the stone floor and stormed off to his private room.
*****
"Did you kiss him?" Tori, the younger of the Ganderlay sisters, asked, giggling at the thought of it. Tori was only eleven, and just beginning to realize the differences between boys and girls, an education fast accelerating since Meralda, her older sister by six years, had taken a fancy to Jaka Sculi, with his delicate features and long eyelashes and brooding blue eyes.
"No, I surely did not," Meralda replied, brushing back her long black hair from her olive-skinned face, the face of beauty, the face that had unknowingly captured the heart of the lord of Auckney.
"But you wanted to," Tori teased, bursting into laughter, and Meralda joined her, as sure an admission as she could give.
"Oh, but I did," the older sister said.
"And you wanted to touch him," her young sister teased on. "Oh, to hug him and kiss him! Dear, sweet Jaka." Tori ended by making sloppy kissing noises and wrapping her arms about her chest, hands grabbing her shoulders as she turned about so that it looked as if someone was hugging her.
"You stop that!" Meralda said, slapping her sister across the back playfully.
"But you didn't even kiss him," Tori complained. "Why not, if you wanted to? Did he not want the same?"
"To make him want it all the more," the older girl explained. "To make him think about me all the time. To make him dream about me."
"But if you're wanting it-"
"I'm wanting more than that," Meralda explained, "and if I make him wait, I can make him beg. If I make him beg, I can get all that I want from him and more."
"What more?" Tori asked, obviously confused.
"To be his wife," Meralda stated without reservation.
Tori nearly swooned. She grabbed her straw pillow and whacked her sister over the head with it. "Oh, you'll never!" she cried. Too loudly.
The curtain to their bedroom pulled back, and their father, Dohni Ganderlay, a ruddy man with strong muscles from working the peat fields and skin browned from both sun and dirt, poked his head in.