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most beauteous in all Hylor, the most fair and comely in all their deeds and doings.
    On other nights, the Druda told darker tales. North of the River Bal lay the Kingdom of Lien, ruled by King Kelen and Queen Fideth. Here the Druda’s telling lost its playful tone, and Gael was brought back to the sharp looks he and Hem Duro had exchanged after the examination at Hackestell Fortress. Mel’Nir and its rough warriors yet held Lien to be a small, tame land—but there was also a history of magic, intrigue, and violence. Who had not heard of the Grand Vizier, the archmage Rosmer of Lien, who, not yet ten years past, had gathered in many lands—Mel’Nir’s own Balbank included—to transform Lien into a kingdom?
    The Mark of Lien had been the home of poets, actors, painters, scribes, and makers of books, a land of palaces and pleasure boats. Rosmer’s unbounded ambition had remade more than its borders. For now the Kingdom of Lien lay under the ban of a new religion: pastime and merriment were at an end.
    Rosmer had taken the life of Kelen’s truelove, Zaramund of Grays—his lovely but barren wife. He had taken Zaramund’s father, her brothers, all the core of the family who would have avenged her. In her place he set a young girl—foolish and hot-blooded—a woman who could give Kelen the heir his vizier so dearly wanted.
    But the gods take as easily as they bequeath, and the archmage had died the triumphant day Kelen rose to wear his kingly crown. As the Druda told the story, Rosmer’s life served as the final pledge that raised his liege to a king’s throne—and Kelen of Lien’s spirit was not strong enough to bear up beneath the burden of this last gruesome token.
    Life in Lien after the coronation soon turned bitter and hard. Rudderless after Rosmer’s death, the new-made king was turned by his then-young, but also penitent and implacable queen to follow the bright torches of Inokoi, the Lame God, also called the Lord of Light, and Matten his prophet. Now, instead of an archmage, the state was served by the Brotherhood of the Lame God, a fellowship who scourged the queen for her past sins—for all the world knew she had lain with Kelen and got herself with child while the king was still married to Zaramund—and preached that all the world must renounce the pleasures of earthly life and of the flesh. Queen Fideth, remorseful now, had even gone so far as to dedicate her son, Lien’s heir, to the brotherhood’s ranks, and there were rumblings that the day Matten—the boy had been named for the great Prophet himself—inherited the Kingdom, he would take a Brown Priest’s robes, and become himself one of the Brown Order.
    This was about as much stuff from the scrolls as the band of recruits could bear—a prince, the heir to all his nation’s riches, voluntarily wearing sackcloth and spurning carnal pleasures! They could not—would not—believe it.
    They sidetracked Druda Strawn into talk of battles. Everywhere upon the plateau, he could point out memorials of his greatest hero, Yorath Duaring. The Druda had tears in his eyes when he spoke of the cruel ambush far to the west, in the very last days of the war. In the month of chaos while Ghanor of Mel’Nir lingered on his deathbed, the great Yorath was set upon and killed by rogue warriors of the Great King’s army, driven over the cliffs into the western sea, as if only the ocean could subdue his proud spirit. A sad mark of fate indeed to open Good King Gol’s reign, for Yorath Duaring had been—though every recruit knew this story, they gasped to hear it told again—Yorath Duaring had been King Gol’s only trueborn son, stolen from the cradle and brought to manhood in secret from his murderous grandsire, that unnatural grandfather who would have seen the child strangled at birth for a prophecy that touched at his own death.
    The aftermath at least was happy: Gol lost his son, but he made peace with the Lords of the Westmark, where his son had seen