Pawns and Queens--A 15th Century Gwynedd Story--Chapter Eighteen

[Evie]

I can see how things develop because this chapter generated so many questions. What did Alarikos do with the spies he weeded out of his forces? He was already halfway to joining the Duke of Corwyn's force so where did they go?
Another question, not for this story but for another one. What happened that resulted in the splitting up of Torenth into separate kingdoms? Is that what Dr M has in mind for Gwynedd in his AU?

That first question is easy enough to answer. As enemy spies and infiltrators, they were probably summarily executed, quite possibly in the same way that the men whose places they had attempted to take were killed (by hanging), though of course not as a sacrifice for Odin, just as a regular means of capital punishment for spies in wartime. There is a small chance Alarikos might have sent them to his father's Court in Beldour for sentencing and execution, but as he would be well within his rights to do it himself in his father's name, he likely just gave those orders on the field and continued on his way to Corwyn once the executions had been carried out.

As for how the Kingdom of Torenth ended up splitting in half, there are different ways that might have happened (and no, I haven't given much thought as to what happened in this particular case, just that it likely happened at least a century earlier, long enough that the two halves are pretty well established as separate at this point, but still close enough that they would have retained similar cultures and still speak the same language). The split might have happened along cultural lines (for instance, if the people north of the line have traditionally tended to have what our world might think of as a more Russian-style culture but the ones in the South tended to have a more Germanic style), or perhaps it became a means of solving an inheritance dispute (possibly between twins, like the one that sparked the Mearan conflict, especially if there was some similar dispute about which one was born first). It could also be that there was a civil war, perhaps between those who supported an older brother who was the legal claimant but extremely unpopular and others who wanted to depose him to put a much more popular and/or benevolent younger brother on the throne, and the kingdom ended up getting divided between them. It might be that at some earlier point, half the original kingdom ended up falling to an invading force, with the unconquered half remaining but changing its name to reflect its reduced circumstances, or perhaps both halves doing so. In the case of the Kingdom of Israel dividing in two in Biblical times, IIRC the King tried to raise taxes so high, his people essentially said "Oh heck no! Bye, Felicia, we'll just pick a new king," and he went high-tailing it off to some corner of the kingdom he could still manage to hold while licking his wounds. (That is, of course, a wildly paraphrased version of that story, and possibly not entirely accurate, but hopefully sufficiently so to get the point across. 😄) So there are several different ways it could have happened, but the characters haven't told me how it happened in Torenth's case. It's also not outside the realm of possibility that the old Kingdom could reunite in future. By the time of the events in "Balance of Power," that part of the world is known as the Torenthi Federation in 2021.

As for what our good Doctor M has in mind for his AU, you shall have to ask him. I'll just be sitting here in the theater seats with my popcorn. 🍿

[drakensis]

Nordmarcke is, IIRC, one of the duchies usually held by branches of the house of Furstan, but it's also subject to salic succession. (The Deryni Codex demonstrates this because while Charissa inherited her father's other lands, the Nordmarcke was inherited by her great-uncle as the next male successor to the previous duke).

It's fairly plausible that the title got granted out again to some ambitious younger brother or cousin who, with no convenient neighbour to coup for a crown of his own (see Festil I) got to play at home, didn't quite manage to do to the reigning king what Wencit did to Aldred, but was too entrenched to get rid of.