“Save your breath, boy,” said the goblin leader.
-The prince has already told us who he is. He has promised to have us all drawn and quartered and then boiled in oil for daring to lay hands on his royal person.- He chuckled. “No one but a prince could possess such arrogance at so young an age.”
Aedan silently cursed Michael for a fool. If only he’d known enough to keep his mouth shut! “What did you tell them that for, you little idiot?” he said to Michael angrily. ‘If they think you are the prince, they’ll only demand a higher ransom, more than our father could ever hope to pay!” He turned back to the goblin leader. ‘Don’t listen to him; he’s just a child! He must have hoped to frighten you into releasing him. He didn’t know that goblins would not fear the power of the emperor, as we do!”
The goblin leader smiled. “A good attempt, young lord,” he said. ‘And I might even have believed you had I not had the prince described to me in detail, nor seen the royal signet graved in gold on his left hand.”
He held up the ring. “I shall keep this as a trophy. Our quest has gone far more easily than I could ever have expected. Who would have thought that our quarry would come riding straight into our waiting arms?”
The goblin leader’s words sent a chill through Aedan. They had not merely stumbled onto a raiding party. These wolfriders had come specifically for the purpose of kidnapping the prince! They knew the royal seal, and they had a description of the prince, as well. They must have been waiting in the forest for an opportunity to seize Prince Michael as
he was out hawking or riding, and they had come prepared to do battle with an armed escort that, Aedan realized miserably, he should have brought along with him as he usually did. All that could only mean one thing-someone had given them that information. There was a traitor in the Imperial Court! But who?
Who stood to gain the most from some tragedy befalling Michael? Arwyn of Boeruine, of course.
Aedan’s father had considered the possibility of Arywn’s ambition leading him to treachery, but he had not considered that Arwyn could be so bold and black-hearted as to ally himself with goblins. But then, if Arwyn wanted Michael dead, why go to such lengths? Why not just hire some brigands or some mercenaries to perform the task, or else entrust it to some of his own men, whose loyalty to him was beyond question? Why involve the goblins? And why, for that matter, would goblins enter into any plot with a human warlord? There had to be some reason that would benefit both parties. Aedan tried to think clearly.
If he could reason out their motives, it might help him figure out what to do.
If the goblins planned to hold the prince for ransom, as seemed likely from their behavior and what the goblin leader said, Arwyn of Boeruine would be the logical choice to deliver that ransom. And since the emperor was at Seaharrow and not Anuire, he had no immediate access to the treasury, which meant Lord Arwyn would have to raise the ransom himself. And that would put the emperor-and more significantly, the empress-in his debt. But what would be in it for the goblins? Well, the ransom itself, obviously. That could be enough. The only heir to the imperial throne would bring, literally, a princely ransom.
However, if no ransom was forthcoming, Michael would probably be killed.
The goblins would get all the blame, and no suspicion would ever fall on Lord Arwyn. All he had to do was fail to deliver the ransom, or claim the goblins had killed Michael anyway, in spite of the ransom being paid. And that, of course, would mean war.
That had to be the answer, Aedan thought. A war would benefit both Lord Arwyn and the goblin prince of Thurazor. If the Archduke Boeruine declared a war of retribution against Thurazor for the murder of the prince, the empire would surely unite behind him, for any noble who refused the call to arms would appear to be taking the side of the go lins. And the same thing would unite the goblin kingdoms behind Thurazor. The elves living in the Aelvinnwode would be caught squarely in the middle, and it would be impossible for them to remain neutral in the conflict. They would have to choose one side or the other. There would be no question of their siding with the goblins, their ageold enemies. Even at the height of the gheallie Sidhe, the elves had hated the goblins just as much as they had hated humans, if not more.
Besides, since then, the elves of Tuarhievel had established tenuous trading ties with the outposts of the empire.
It was a foregone conclusion that, caught between two warring armies, the elves would take the empire’s side. Regardless of which side they chose, however, they would be the losers in the end, for the war would be fought upon their lands, which lay between the goblin kingdom of Thurazor and the
empire’s northern frontier. It would mean the end of Tuarhievel’s independence. Because of geographical factors alone, the elves would suffer the greatest death toll, and when, at length, the war was concluded with a negotiated peace that would allow both sides to claim victory, the elven lands would be partitioned between the empire and the goblin kingdom, and any elves who had survived would either be forced to flee or else live in
