The thrall suddenly stiffened. Grus tensed, wondering if another spell had gone awry. But then Immer blinked. He twisted one arm free of the guard who held it. He brought his hand up to his face and began to weep. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
Awe prickled through Grus. “He sounds like… like a man,” he whispered.
Immer nodded. “Man,” he echoed, and pointed at himself with that free hand. “Man!” he said again, proudly this time.
“By the gods, Alca, I think you’ve done it,” Grus said.
“It’s a beginning,” Alca said. “I don’t know how much more than a beginning it is, but it’s a beginning.”
“Man!” Immer repeated, and nodded once more, so vigorously that locks of his grimy, greasy, matted hair bounced up and down. “Thrall?” This time, he violently shook his head, and his hair flew out around his head. Had he known the word before? Who could guess?
“If he’s free of this horrible enchantment, Mistress Alca, why doesn’t he talk like a proper man now?” one of the guards asked.
“Because he doesn’t know how,” the witch replied. “He still knows what he knew when he was a thrall. The spell I used doesn’t turn him into a man all by itself. I don’t think any spell could do that. It lets him learn the things he needs to become a man, the same way a child would. Before, he couldn’t.”
“Will he take as long as a child would to learn all those things?” Grus asked in some alarm. If a freed thrall needed fifteen or twenty years to become fully mature, what point to breaking the spell?
But Alca shook her head. “I’m sure he won’t,” she answered. “In many ways, he already has a man’s experience. He’ll learn what he needs to know quickly. He can learn now, where he couldn’t before.”
“Learn!” Immer used the word with an avid hunger Grus had never heard attached to it up till that moment. “Learn!”
“You’ll have your chance,” Grus told him. The thrall—ex-thrall?—frowned in confusion. He didn’t understand what Grus meant. “Yes. Learn,” Grus said, making it as simple as he could. “You learn.” Immer smiled broadly. He understood that. He liked it, too.
“Shall we take him back down with the others, Your Majesty?” one of the guards asked.
Grus shook his head. “No. If he’s a man, or on the way to being a man, he shouldn’t have to go back in with thralls.”
“No thrall!” Immer jabbed a thumb into his own skinny chest. He shook his head, too. “No thrall!”
The guard didn’t look convinced. Grus hoped Immer meant it. He glanced at Alca. She gave back a tiny shrug and said, “Whatever he is, I don’t think he’s a spy for the Banished One.”
“All right, then.” That made up Grus’ mind for him. He told the guards, “Take him to the barracks. Clean him up. Show him what being a man means. If he doesn’t learn fast enough to suit you, give him lumps. Don’t give him bad ones—that wouldn’t be fair. Just enough to keep his attention, you might say.”
“Like we would with a little boy?” the guard asked.
“That’s right,” Grus agreed. “Just like that.” Would Ortalis have turned out better if I’d given him more lumps? Who knows? How can you tell? But how can you keep from wondering, either? He sighed. Ortalis was what he was. Grus wished he were something else, but he wasn’t and never would be. Too bad, Grus thought. Oh, by the gods, too bad!
At supper that night, Alca said, “I never dreamt it would be so easy. The spell of thralldom really can be lifted. And I don’t know what the Banished One can do to stop it from being lifted, either. It’s not the sort of spell where he can find a handle and turn it against me.”
“The way he did with the spell where you used crystals?” Grus asked.
“Yes.” The witch shuddered at the memory of those misfortunes. “But this is different. By the gods, it is.”
“Good.” Grus got up, came around the table, and kissed her. She responded eagerly. When she was pleased with herself, she was pleased with the world around her, too. And the world around her included him.
When morning came, Alca left his bed even before sunrise and hurried to the amphitheater. Grus got there later. The witch didn’t look at him. She was intent on the business at hand. The guards brought out another thrall. Alca set to work on the woman, whose name, she learned, was Crecca. Grus watched her conjuration. It seemed to go as smoothly as Immer’s unbinding had. That afternoon, Alca broke the ties of darkness that subjected another man.
She might not have had any idea how the Banished One could keep her—and, eventually, other Avornan wizards—from freeing thralls. But he did find a way to stop her. A few days after she started her work, a messenger rode in from the west. “Your Majesty!” he cried.
“What is it?” Grus asked. Whatever it was, he didn’t think he would like it.
And he didn’t. The messenger said, “Your Majesty, Prince Evren’s Menteshe have crossed the Stura! They’re burning everything they can reach!”
King Lanius shook his head. Everyone in the royal palace kept asking him the same question. He had no good answer for it. “I don’t know much about Prince Evren, Bubulcus,” he told the latest questioner.
As several people had before, his servant looked indignant. “You’re supposed to know these things, Your Majesty!” Bubulcus exclaimed.
“Why?” Lanius said. “All I know about Evren is that his riders had been quiet lately. Up till now, the Menteshe prince whose men have given us the most trouble is Ulash.”
“Well, why isn’t Ulash giving us trouble now?” Bubulcus asked. “King Grus is across the river from the land Ulash rules, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Lanius admitted. That was a good question, a sensible question. He wouldn’t have thought Bubulcus had it in him. He had to answer, “I don’t know why Ulash is sitting quiet and Evren isn’t, either.”
“Hmph!” Bubulcus said. “All I can tell you is, if you don’t have the answers when we need them, you’ve wasted an awful lot of time in the archives.” He let out another loud, disdainful sniff.
For reasons Lanius never could fathom afterward, he didn’t pick up the nearest blunt instrument and brain the servant with it. He didn’t send Bubulcus to the Maze, or even send him out of the palace. All he did was glare, and even his glare was on the sickly side.
Not knowing what a close brush with disaster he’d had, Bubulcus went right on grumbling. Lanius ignored him more and more ostentatiously. At last, the servant stuck his nose in the air and said, “Well, I can take a hint.” He flounced off, still muttering under his breath.
“You can take it and…” Lanius stopped, shaking his head. Falling to Bubulcus’ level—falling below Bubulcus’ level— wouldn’t do him any good. But the temptation felt almost overwhelming.
So did the temptation to retreat to the archives and find out everything he could about Prince Evren and the principality he ruled. King Lanius wasn’t and never had been a man who yielded to many temptations. Wine held no great allure. Neither did women, except for Queen Sosia. Song? He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But the prospect of getting dusty in the archives was something else again.
Even in the archives, Avornan writers had more to say about the principality Ulash ruled these days than they did about Evren’s. Ulash’s domain was larger. It sat along a more important stretch of the Stura. And it had been ruled by a series of strong princes. Evren’s predecessors, on the other hand, seemed the most ordinary of men. Some of them seemed a little smarter than average, others a little more foolish. Taken all in all… Taken all in all, Evren’s predecessors seemed deserving of a long, heartfelt yawn, and nothing more.
Evren himself hadn’t attracted much notice, either. He hadn’t led many raids over the river into Avornan territory—not until now. He hadn’t started any fights with his neighbors, though he hadn’t lost any they’d started with him. Maybe that was worth noting. Or—who could be sure?— maybe it wasn’t.
Avornan traders who’d gone down into Evren’s pr
incipality noted that he ran things with a rough justice they liked. One of them had actually prevailed in a quarrel with a Menteshe merchant. The Avornan seemed to regard that as something not far from a miracle. Reading it, so did Lanius.
The more he learned about Prince Evren, the more he wondered why Evren had decided to attack Avornis. Evren never had before—not once in his long reign. His sudden assault left Lanius more puzzled now than he had been before he started digging. Things weren’t supposed to work like that.
He wrote down what he had managed to dig up and sent it to Grus in the hope that it would prove useful. He also added a note that said, Do you have any idea why Evren is fighting us? Everything I can find out here argues that he shouldn’t be.
He wondered if Grus would bother answering. The other King of Avornis often went out of his way not to take him seriously. But Lanius did get a reply, and a very prompt one. Thanks for giving me this, Grus wrote. It tells me more about Evren than I already knew, and I used to patrol the miserable son of a whore’s northern border. Lanius read that several times. It made him proud.
Grus went on, And yes, Your Majesty, I can tell you just why Prince Evren has gone to war against us just now. He’s fighting us because he’s the creature of the Banished One. It’s exactly that simple.
Lanius doubted anything was as simple as Grus made it out to be. He wrote back to his father-in-law, asking, Why would the Banished One set Evren in motion against you when you’re across the border from the lands Prince Ulash holds?
A reply, this time, took much longer coming back than had been true before. But Grus did answer, about when Lanius had begun to give up hope that he would. Why? he wrote. I’ll tell you why. To keep me busy.
That was all Grus said. Lanius stared at the note, trying to tease more sense out of it. After a while, he decided there was no more sense to tease. Muttering to himself, he wrote back, What do you mean?
I mean what I said, Grus replied. What did you think I meant?
Letters took a couple of weeks to get down to the south. Answers took another couple of weeks to return, plus however long Grus waited before responding. Lanius thought that was much too slow for word games. If Grus happened not to agree with him, though, what could he do about it? Nothing he could see.
No, that wasn’t quite right. He could complain. He could, and he did, saying to Sosia, “Why doesn’t your father make more sense?”
“Father usually does make sense,” she answered. “Why don’t you think he does this time?”
Lanius recounted the exchange he’d had with Grus. “If he’s making any sense there, I think he’s doing his best to hide it,” he declared.
His wife frowned. “It seems straightforward enough to me. The Banished One is trying to keep the witch and him too busy with this war to go on with whatever they were doing at Cumanus.”
“The witch!” Lanius exclaimed. “That’s it! That must be it!”
“Now you’re the one who’s not making sense,” Sosia said.
“Don’t you see? It’s obvious!” Lanius said. “Alca must be doing something the Banished One doesn’t like. That’s why the Banished One made the Menteshe start this war. It has to be why.”
“Nothing has to be anything,” Sosia said tartly; maybe she hadn’t liked that It’s obvious! She went on, “If the Banished One was that eager to start trouble, why didn’t he have Ulash attack, and not this Prince Evren?”
“Why? Well, because…” Lanius’ voice trailed away as he realized he had no good answer for that. “I don’t know why. I wonder if getting a straight answer to the question would be worth another letter to your father.”
In the end, after some hesitation, he did send the letter. If Grus wanted to ignore it, he could. Grus had had a lot of practice ignoring things Lanius said and wrote. But he didn’t ignore this. In due course, he wrote, That is an interesting question if you want to go into detail, isn’t it? If you’ve got any interesting answers, please send them along. One thing I will say is that Evren is a handful all by himself, even without Ulash. I wonder more and more why the foxy old bugger is sitting this one out. He’d written bastard first, but scratched it out almost but not quite to illegibility and replaced it with the other word. Unlike Petrosus, he watched Lanius’ feelings, if not quite well enough.
Lanius drummed his ringers on his thigh. He didn’t have an answer, whether interesting or otherwise. Only one thing occurred to him—that Ulash had ruled his principality for a very long time, much longer even than Evren had held his. Lanius didn’t write that. Grus would know it as well as he did.
When he went in to see how the moncats were doing, Spider laid a present at his feet: the not very neatly disemboweled carcass of a mouse. The moncat stared up at him out of amber eyes.
The worst of it was, Spider expected to be praised and made much of for his hunting prowess. Lanius did the job, petting him till he purred and, while purring, tried to nip the King of Avornis’ hand.
“Don’t you bite me!” Lanius said, and thwapped him on the nose. This time, the stare Spider gave back sent only one message. If I were big enough, it said, I’d eat you. That stare went a long way toward explaining why people weren’t in the habit of making pets of lions and tigers and leopards.
Spider also took a long, thoughtful look at Lanius’ leg, as though wondering if he could avenge himself for that thwap. An ordinary cat wouldn’t have done that. An ordinary cat would either have run away or tried to bite him again right then. Yaropolk the Chernagor had warned Lanius that moncats were smarter than their everyday cousins. Not for the first time, the king saw that Yaropolk was right.
And Spider very visibly decided he couldn’t get away with biting Lanius on the leg. Instead, he picked up the mouse that was to have been a present and carried it away, climbing quickly up toward the roof of the room where he and his relatives lived. There, glowering down at Lanius, he finished dismembering the little animal and ate it.
It’s a good thing your kind isn’t bigger, Lanius thought. Otherwise, you might be the ones who kept us for pets. That was an idea to make a man modest. Then he had another, worse, one. Or you might keep us so you could treat us the way you treat mice.
A moment later, the mouse’s tail fell from Spider’s perch up near the ceiling and landed on the floor. Two moncats sprang forward to pounce on it. They saw each other, and both of them snarled. During that standoff, a third, smaller, moncat sneaked up and made away with the tail. They both chased him, but he escaped with the prize.
“That’s what happens,” Lanius said. “You weren’t paying enough attention, so that other little fellow got a snack.”
The two who’d confronted each other both eyed the king. It wasn’t—it couldn’t have been—that they spoke Avornan. But they gave the impression of listening alertly to whatever he might say. He slowly nodded to himself. He’d seen that before.
He wondered if anyone else would believe him. Moncats were much smarter than most people thought they were. Lanius was convinced of that.
How much smarter? he wondered. He didn’t know much about monkeys, but what little he did know made him suspect the moncats had wits of similar level. Monkeys, from what little he knew, were social animals. That was much less true of moncats—they differed from monkeys as ordinary cats differed from people.
“Interesting,” Lanius murmured. Again, the moncats watched him. They paid close attention when he spoke. What did that mean? How could a mere human being know? With a sigh, Lanius admitted to himself that he couldn’t.
He wished he knew more about monkeys. Only old records in the archives spoke of them. Since the days when the Menteshe swarmed out of the south, Avornis hadn’t ruled lands where the monkeys lived. One more reason to wish we could start retaking the lands south of the Stura, Lanius thought.
He didn’t have the chance to go prowling through old parchments after monkeys, not then. A well-founded suspicion that Sosia would clout him if he didn’t pay some occasional attention to Cr
ex and Pitta sent him back to his own chamber. He even enjoyed playing with his own children. They loved him without reservation, which was true of no one and nothing else in the world—not Sosia herself, and not the moncats, either. His wife had ties other than the ones that bound her to him; the animals cared for him—to the extent that they did care for him— because he tended them, not because of who he was.
But, being who he was, he didn’t forget what he wanted to find out. After a while, Sosia said, “You’ve got something on your mind—I can tell.”
“Monkeys,” Lanius answered.
“Monkeys?” Sosia echoed. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. “What about them?”
“Anything you can tell me,” Lanius said. “Anything anybody can tell me.”
“You’ve got that look in your eye again,” Sosia said, which was undoubtedly true. She went on, “All I know about monkeys is that they live in trees and look like ugly little people with tails and too much hair.”
“Except for the tails, you’re talking about half the courtiers in the city of Avornis,” Lanius said. “More than half.”
That startled laughter from his wife, who said, “Well, what do you know about monkeys? What do you want to find out?”
“I don’t know much,” Lanius said. “I want to find out what I don’t know—what I don’t know and what’s true.”
“Why do you want to know about monkeys?” Sosia asked. “You never did say.”
“I want to find out how they’re like moncats and how they’re not,” Lanius answered.
“Oh, you do?” Sosia sounded tolerantly amused. She’d seen such moods come on her husband before. Even so, she asked, “Why do you want to know that?”
She must have known what Lanius would say before he said it. And, sure enough, he did say it. “I’m just curious.”
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