Quotes from the session:
"I shall not say I am sorry. I am not. But I shall take you to the infirmary. I am not vindictive."Hazard.
"When you have quite finished bleeding all over the floor, William, I would be grateful if you should explain to me exactly why you and your reprobatile cousinry feel you have to wake me at three o'clock in the morning. I shall not even ask what you are doing in Jessica's room at this sort of time, for fear you should answer." Benedict, in sarcasm mode.
"Um, er, er, I er, that is, I... He shot me! It wasn't my fault."William, feeling he had to explain certain matters."That, William, is not how to win friends and influence people."Hazard, binding up William's wounds.
Eagle kept the Amberites in hysterics for weeks, with his attempts to bring in an army and various types of technology to attack the place. The machine guns failed to fire, and he broke the artillery in his rage. The tank broke down. The ironclad broke down and sank. The plane was bit of a mistake, in retrospect. It broke down, fell out of the sky, and sank. At least the ejector seat worked.
After this, Eagle went to the Courts of Chaos, where he begged for help from the Chaosites. They refused to get involved, on the not unreasonable grounds that Eagle was a terrible general and would lead them to their deaths.
However, the boy managed to accidently free his Uncle Osric from his prison at that end of things. (This was an encounter that I had planned for later, but was delighted to run alongside the beginnings of Patternfall, which Eagle seemed determined to instigate. It had seemed obvious to Osric's gaolers that nobody would be mad enough to tunnel through a castle wall from the inside, merely to see what was on the other side... Eagle, however, failed to see the problem, roasting his slaves as he forced them to dig through the traps in the middle of the wall. Osric disappeared into Shadow to plan his return.
As if the wretched idiot hadn't done enough, he then started bringing soldiers in. The first army didn't get more than a mile into Arden. The second one, rather better trained than the first, got almost to the treeline. The third, numbering only two thousand by the time it had passed Julian's men, was stopped by a force of a thousand of Benedict's guard. Not that there was any fighting. Eagle just turned them around and brought them back home. By the time the fourth army was sighted, Hazard had won a small fortune in side bets about its size and make-up from William. (He had never seen the film "Hustler", and had no idea that Hazard was a mathematical genius.) The fourth army, although it outnumbered Benedict's elite three to one, decided not to attack either. The fifth time Eagle brought in an army, Benedict cut it to pieces. (He had not done so beforehand because Eagle would have escaped, as the boy rather liked to stay at home in his castle and direct through a Trump gate. For this attack, however, Eagle was at the forefront of the vanguard.) He chose to take the pass above Arden where the moonriders had met their fate centuries before. This time, it wasn't just Benedict in the pass, but it might as well have been. And, just as a precaution, he sent three flanking attacks into Eagle's army simultaneously, to panic them. It worked.
His army surrounded and suing for surrender, Eagle approached Benedict, and tried to attack him. Obviously enough, he died. Benedict, even afterwards, was never sure if that laugh had been a Blood Curse, or just insanity surfacing.
Silence and relaxation reigned again until... the peace of the kingdom was shattered by a black road appearing from out of nowhere, leading to Shadows unknown. Jessica rode out to try and see what was going on, Hazard Trumped her real father, Merlin, to inquire if this was a Chaos thing, and he told her that it had just appeared, but then, he didn't know all that much about intrigues, so he couldn't tell her.
"On the other hand, the army is only just mobilising, so they couldn't have been prepared in advance. What? Oh, the army under Sorith that wants to advance on Amber, of course. Which army would it be?"
Before they stopped talking, he gave her a Trump of Ghostwheel.
Oops, thinks Hazard, and tries to Trump Benedict, who has left the castle already. No answer, so she Hellrides to try and find him. He is in a land called Lorraine, fighting demons.
(Certain astute individuals will have noticed that these plots are not entirely mine, but at this point none of the characters had read any of the books. So they enjoyed them, and I twisted things slightly for my own enjoyment.)
At the end of the session, Jessica is examining the black road, William is hanging around Amber wishing somebody would tell him what to do, and Hazard has joined the army, where she is distinguishing herself in battle, and having a great time, if worrying a little over what her father had said. Meanwhile, Osric was preparing to come back to the throne. If possible, he would lubricate his passage there with the blood of his two younger brothers, Finndo and Benedict, whom he thought guilty of betrayal of his little foibles to their father.