Grand Duke Lukins

The grand duke who sent Knights Chevany and Henned with four thousand soldiers to crush the Norton family on Lorist's return. The expedition was annihilated, and the duke's coalition lost the Battle of Tverdynya soon after.

**The opening blow.** Lukins sent Chevany and Henned with four thousand soldiers in ch 133. The campaign was wiped out, Chevany killed, Henned captured, and the duke seized Chevany's family estate in fury. Baron Camora — the duke's own envoy — was thrown into a water dungeon for failing to recover the captured knights.

**Defeat at Tverdynya.** When Henned defected with five thousand Northern Corps soldiers the duke gathered the southern Northern Lands lords for a second campaign. They were broken outside Tverdynya; the duke survived but his political grip on the southern Northern Lands collapsed.

Neither warrior nor scholar — mediocre at everything, and on top of that greedy for money, weak to women, fond of luxury and chronically indecisive. He had one real virtue, though, and it was no small one: a sharp eye for men. It was he who spotted and raised the lowborn Camora, handing him taxes, supply and the building of the Northern Corps.

That greed was his undoing. Learning that the Nortons had seized a hundred thousand fordes from Viscount Kemmes's secret treasury, he lost his head and reached for the money, sending an armed party to House Norton on a manufactured pretext.

House Lukins were once mere viscounts. Emperor Crissen III, for his own ends, raised them to Grand Dukes and granted them the southern Northern Lands as a hereditary domain — while stripping away their rich viscounty in the imperial heartland. To the family this was rank ingratitude: tenfold the land, but tenfold the lost income. Ever after the Lukinses nursed a deep hatred of the House of Crissen.

Over the long centuries in the barren north the line decayed from chancellors who had once ruled the whole empire into provincial warrior-landlords — mocked as 'the house that abandoned the pen for the sword.' Ducal revenue barely covered the twenty-thousand-strong Northern Corps, which Lukins could not afford to enlarge.

The opening blow against the Nortons (ch 133): through a slave-trader Lukins lured Knights Chevany and Henned together and sent them with four thousand men to crush the returning House Norton. The expedition was wiped out — Chevany killed, Henned captured. In fury the duke confiscated the Chevany family's property and turned them out to beg.

When Lorist freed the captured knights by chivalric custom and the envoy Camora came home empty-handed, the duke tore into him. Then Henned defected with five thousand Northern Corps soldiers as Baron Shahin — which broke Lukins's patience entirely; he blamed it all on Camora, stripped his title and threw him into a water dungeon to starve.

Gathering over sixty Northern Lands lords — two thirds of all the nobility there — the duke marched a coalition of forty-six thousand against the Nortons. On 9 May 1768, beneath Rockcastle, his coalition was routed; the duke fled under cover of his gold knight Bitson (who died) east into Kemmes lands. While he hid, Lorist ran his 'three annihilations' policy — loot, burn, resettle — and stripped the whole duchy bare.

Returning in August to find hundreds of li of burnt-out villages, a looted palace and crowds of nobles demanding restitution, the duke spat blood three times, collapsed and fell gravely ill. Viscount Kemmes summed it up: 'Grand Duke Lukins is finished' — and House Kemmes stopped obeying him.