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The Bloody Governors
Although the Bloody Governors caused the last major bloodspilling between the Tangled Kingdoms of Langmyr and Oakharn, the region's tentative peace may also be credited to their manipulations.
The Bloody Governors were Sir Almouron of Narrowpoint, for Langmyr, and Sir Payence of Battlesbridge for Oakharn. Five years ago, each held a small but strategically-placed fief on the hotly disputed border between their kings' realms. Sir Almouron was aged, childless, and confined to a bitter bed in his last years; Sir Payence was young, hot-headed, and inordinately proud of his newly earned knighthood. Both relied heavily on their advisors, and both had very bad ones.
The exchange of atrocities collectively known as "the Bloody Governors" in local lore began with a painfully everyday event.
There are two versions of the story. The one told in Oakharn is that a Langmyrne trader, across the border to do some business in Battlesbridge, made a lewd proposition to a married woman. After she rebuffed him, he tried to grope her in public. Incensed, she told her husband, who challenged the merchant to a duel and won in a fair, but regrettably fatal, fight.
The version told in Langmyr is that the same Langmyrne trader was across the border in Battlesbridge when a local woman, who had been indiscreet in her affections and was on the verge of being discovered by her husband, leveled a false accusation of rape against the unlucky merchant in order to cover her own tracks. Her husband, as brutish and thoughtless as all Oakharne men, gathered up a mob and lynched the poor trader.
As with so many grievances passed down in the Tangled Kingdoms, there is no way of knowing whose story -- if either -- is true. What is known is that a Langmyrne trader was killed by the citizens of Battlesbridge on a hot summer's day some five years ago, and that Sir Almouron of Narrowpoint was the dead man's liege.
Sir Almouron demanded justice on behalf of his dead citizen; Sir Payence flatly refused to intervene, saying that the dead man had brought his fate upon himself and that the matter was therefore closed. A week later, a trio of musicians from Oakharn were knifed in a tavern dispute near Narrowpoint, and Sir Almouron refused to track down the killers in turn. As summer turned to autumn that year, bodies dropped like leaves in the streets of both towns. The provocations became more minor, and the deaths more gruesome, each time.
The Bloody Governors tacitly colluded in these atrocities, and later actively encouraged them. Several of the killings were carried out by their men-at-arms, often without taking the least trouble to hide their identities. Others, of ostensible culprits, were carried out as public executions after the most cursory pretenses of accusation and trial. Had their respective lords not been exhausted from the last spasm of war to wrack the Twelve Kingdoms, the Bloody Governors would probably have caused another open war between Langmyr and Oakharn.
Instead, their lords quietly dispatched adventurers and diplomats to bring the killings to an end. Those agents discovered that both Sir Almouron and Sir Payence were receiving counsel from advisors working for a shadowy figure known to them only as Sadakhor, whose goals involved using both knights as puppets to foment chaos and violence in the region. It was the advisors' influence, both persuasive and magical, that pushed the Bloody Governors into their spiral of retribution. What greater purpose this Sadakhor may have had was never determined, and he himself was never apprehended; the diplomats made their reports to their kings, and both sides swiftly intervened to bring the Bloody Governors to heel.
The disgrace of being revealed as a puppet was too much for the aged Sir Almouron to bear. He passed away soon after. Sir Payence lost his knighthood and was sent into exile over it, and where he went from Battlesbridge, no one knows. Both were replaced by knights that their kings had more reason to trust. Since then, an uneasy peace has held over the Tangled Kingdoms' borders, as both sides are reluctant to let themselves be played for pawns again.
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