Gerin could not see the eyes of the sentry on the wall of Duren's keep, but he would have bet they were wide, too. The fellow's voice sounded more than a little awestruck as he hallooed: "Who comes to the castle of Duren Ricolf's grandson?"
He knew perfectly well who came, but the forms had to be observed. A great many men, Gerin had seen over the years, got very upset when jolted out of the smooth routine of their everyday lives. And so, as if he were an unexpected arrival, he answered, "I am Gerin the Fox, king of the north, come to guest with my son, Duren Ricolf's grandson." He didn't blame Duren for using Ricolf's name after his own: on the contrary. He found it a clever touch.
"Enter, lord king, and be welcome as lord Duren's guest-friend, and as his father," the sentry replied. The drawbridge to the keep was already down; with his holding altogether surrounded by the Fox's lands, Duren feared no sudden assault. Gerin tapped Dagref on the shoulder. Duren's half brother drove the chariot across the drawbridge, over the moat, and into the keep.
Duren was waiting in the courtyard, as Gerin had been sure he would be. Coming into this keep, Gerin saw ghosts that had nothing to do with the ones that came forth when the sun went down: Ricolf the Red and Elise and his own younger self. He saw Duren's younger self, too, coming here at about the age Dagref had now to claim this barony and make it his own. That, over these past five years, Duren had done.
He was nineteen now, and looked enough like a young version of the Fox to make Gerin wonder for a crazy instant if he hadn't somehow slipped back across the years to his own early days. Oh, Duren was a little fairer, a little stockier, but the biggest difference between him now and his father at the same age was that his face held not the slightest trace of dreaminess. Gerin had been a second son, able to afford such luxuries as thinking about whatever he chose. With five years as a baron already under his belt, Duren worried about essentials first and everything else afterwards.
That did not mean he wasn't smiling. "Good to see you, Father, by Dyaus and all the gods!" he said, his voice deeper than Gerin's. He folded the Fox into a bear hug when Gerin got down from the car. Then he nodded to Dagref, who still held the reins. "You've got him learning the trade, I see, same as you did with me at the same age. How does it feel, Dagref?"
His half brother weighed that with deliberation he'd probably got from Selatre. "Too much to do, not enough time to do it in," he answered. "Probably would be more if I were better at what I did."
"You will be," Duren told him, then turned back to Gerin. "He's shaping well, seems like." He spoke thoughtfully, in a way Gerin hadn' t heard from him before. The Fox knew what that meant: the succession was in his mind. Well, he would have been a fool if it weren't. The awkward moment passed quickly. Duren went on, "Mother's well, I trust?"
He meant Selatre. He knew she hadn't birthed him, of course, but she was the only mother he remembered; he hadn't been weaned long when Elise ran off with the horseleech. "Yes, she's fine," the Fox said, nodding. "Clotild and Blestar, too."
"And my pair as well," said Van, who had got down to stand beside Gerin and beam at the young man who was as near his nephew as made no difference. "You've grown up, that you have. Beard's thicker than mine was at the same age, I'd say."
"It's darker," Duren said judiciously, "so it will look thicker than a yellow one like yours. Come into the great hall. Drink some ale with me. So you're finally going to war with Aragis, are you, Father?"
"No," Gerin said. "He's going to war with me, or he says he is. Marlanz Raw-Meat told me he'd stopped here, so you'll have heard Aragis' side of the story. He frightened Balser into going over to me, and now he'll try to punish Balser and me both. He's welcome to try."
"Coming back from your keep, Marlanz didn't seem very happy," Duren said.
"Good," Gerin said. "He shouldn't be happy. Neither should Aragis. The Archer is strong and tough and dangerous. He can pick his time and his spot to start the war. And once he's done that, I aim to lick him."
"I'm sure you will," Duren said-as usual, more confident than the Fox himself. "What help do you want with me?"
"If your vassals will send a few chariots south with the rest of the army, that would be fine," Gerin answered. "If they don't want to do that, though, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. They don't love me, some of them, and they can say it's not their fight."
"Do you want me to go myself?" Duren asked.
"As I say, I won't turn you down, but I don't see any great need for it, either," Gerin said. He nodded toward Dagref. "You said it yourself: it's your brother's turn to learn the trade. You already know."
"Yes." Duren didn't say anything more. His eyes narrowed. Gerin's mouth tightened. Things would never be the same for Duren and Dagref. They'd be watching each other-and watching him-till the day he died. After that, regardless of the provisions he'd made, they were liable to square off against each other. For that matter, if Gerin lived long enough, Blestar was liable to square off against both of them.
Duren said, "I'll feast your leaders tonight. Will you be swinging off the Elabon Way and heading over to Ikos to find out what Biton has to say about the fight against Aragis?"
"I hadn't planned to, no," Gerin said. "When the Sibyl speaks the prophetic verses, they usually stay obscure until after the fact. And even when they aren't obscure, some people will try to make them so. You ought to know that for yourself."
"Oh, I do," Duren said. "My loving vassals, doing everything they could to keep from admitting the god had said I was meant to be baron of this holding after all." He snorted. "They've got used to the idea by now-or if they haven't, they keep quiet about it."
"That will do," Gerin said. "It will have to do. You can't control how they think, only what they do-and only so much of that." He raised an eyebrow. "A feast, eh? What does your steward have to say about that?"
"He says it will cost too much," Duren answered. "As best I can tell, that's what stewards always say." The Fox laughed and nodded.
He ate bread and honey and smoking beef ribs and berry tarts in the great hall a little later, and washed them down with ale. As he ate and drank, he thought of other, long-ago feasts he'd had in this place. Rihwin the Fox sat across the table from him. He'd feasted here, too, when he was courting Elise. With a mischievous grin, he asked, "Shall I dance for you, lord king?"
"Go howl!" Gerin exclaimed. If Rihwin hadn't got drunk and danced an obscene dance, Ricolf the Red would have wed Elise to him, and then
… Gerin didn't know and then what. The world would have been vastly different for him. He did know that.
The chamber Duren gave him for the night was only a couple of doors down from the one in which he'd slept twenty-one years before, the one in which Elise had begged him to help her escape from a marriage to Wolfar of the Axe, a marriage that, most sensibly, she did not want. Before too long, she'd been wed to the Fox, which also turned out to be a marriage she did not want. Duren couldn't have known where his father had stayed on that earlier visit. Gerin had no intention of ever telling him.
Van had been in the next room then. He was in the next room now. He'd brought a serving girl in there then. He'd brought a serving girl in there now. (The walls were thin; Gerin had no doubts.) He'd been unattached then. He was married to Fand now. Gerin hoped he wouldn't bring her back an itemized list of his infidelities on campaign, as he'd been known to do. Life was hard enough already.
The outlander didn't have the stamina he'd enjoyed two decades before. Quiet returned now sooner than it had then. Gerin took advantage of the quiet to go to sleep. He woke up in the middle of the night. In the next room, Van was snoring. So was the girl. They kept Gerin awake almost effectively as they would have, making love. After a while, he did drift off again.
He woke the next morning with a headache that wasn't quite a hangover. A jack of ale and some bread and honey made it retreat if not disappear. Van washed raw cabbage down with his ale, suggesting he had more morning pain than Gerin did. Seeing the Fox watching
him, he grinned and said, "I keep reminding myself what a good time I had last night."
"Last night, I kept reminding myself how miserable I'd be today if I let myself drink too deep." The Fox felt smugly virtuous for feeling as good as he did.
"There's the difference between us, all right," Van said. "I had the good time, and I'll take the bad that goes with it. You miss the bad, aye, but you miss the good, too, sometimes."
"Some people like mountains and valleys," Gerin replied. "Some people like flatlands better. Me, I'm one of them. Besides, I don't really want any woman but Selatre-mm, not enough to do anything about it, anyhow. And," he added with considerable dignity, "I don't snore."
"Honh!" Van said. "That's what you think."
When Adiatunnus didn't come out for breakfast as soon as Gerin thought he should, the Fox asked Duren to send a servant to pound on his door. Adiatunnus duly emerged, looking much worse for wear than Van did. "You see, son?" Gerin said to Duren. "He was slow getting up when we campaigned against the Gradi, and he still is."
"I'm not slow, Fox darling," the Trokm? said, in the cautious tones of a man who does not want to hear himself talk too loud. "What I am is dead. Be after having some respect for the corp of me."
He shuddered at the first taste of ale, but looked more lifelike after he'd downed a couple of jacks. "Since you may not have to bury him in the courtyard after all," Gerin said to his son, drawing a glare from Adiatunnus, "we'll be off soon."
"I don't know, Fox," Van said. "Remember, the rest of the woodsrunners are liable to be as sleepy as this one is. We may not be out of here for two or three days."
"And to the corbies with you as well," Adiatunnus said. "Remind me once more we're allies, so I don't go cutting your throat from the sheer high spirits of it."
"You and which army?" Van returned politely.
They were just warming to the debate, and still on this side of sword and axe and mace and spear, when Gerin said, "Slaughter each other some other time, if you must, but remember for now that we have to take on Aragis first."
"Sure and it's all the fun out of life you're stealing," Adiatunnus said, and Van rumbled agreement. The two of them united, quite happily, in complaining about the Fox till the army left Duren's keep and headed off to the south.
**
Balser Debo's son's driver brought his chariot up alongside the Fox's. "Now we're getting close to my lands," Balser said. "Better country, if you'll forgive my saying so, than what you've got up around your own keep."
"Maybe," Gerin answered. "The timber's a little different-you've got more elms and beeches and such down here, not so many pines. And your peasants can plant a few days earlier in spring and won't have to worry about frost quite so soon in the fall."
"Better country, as I said." Balser sounded smug.
"Maybe," Gerin said. "Or better some ways, might be a truer way to put it. You'll grow a few things we don't. But the Elabon Way here has gone back to gravel, because peasants and local lords plundered the stone paving when there was nobody around to tell 'em they couldn't or shouldn't." As if to prove his point, gravel kicked up from one of the wheels to Balser's chariot and hit him in the hand. He grunted. "Wasn' t even gravel here when this land first came under my suzerainty."
Balser coughed. "Well, lord king, the way that works is, you do what you think you have to do for the moment, and let later on take care of itself."
Gerin knew what that meant. It meant Balser and his vassals-and his serfs, too, if they thought they could get away with it-had been plundering the Elabon Way in his holding for building stone whenever they needed it. He wouldn't do anything about that, not when it had happened before Balser was his subject. He did say, "No more pulling up paving stone. That's all over now. If the road weren't here, Balser, we wouldn't be able to get to your holding fast enough to do you any good about Aragis."
"I suppose not." Balser, plainly, hadn't looked at it in that light before. Just as plainly, he didn't care, either.
"I mean it," the Fox said. "This is part of what you bought when you gave me homage and fealty. The Elabon Way is the one good thing the Empire left behind when it pulled back from the northern lands. I' ve done everything I could to keep it in good shape. It's turning into the backbone for my own kingdom."
"Well, yes, I have seen that you care about it," Balser admitted. "It's only a road, though, after all." He and Gerin looked at each other with complete mutual incomprehension.
"You'll have to get used to some new ways of doing things, now that you are my vassal," Gerin said, and let it go at that.
"Yes, lord king." Balser didn't sound dutiful. He sounded resigned. The Fox had no doubt about what he was thinking: something on the order of, How many of those new ways of doing things will I really have to get used to, and how many will I be able to ignore? Every one of his new vassals had thoughts like that. After a while, they-or most of them, anyhow-got the idea that the new ways-or most of them, anyhow-worked pretty well.
When Gerin had come by this road years before, on his way down to the City of Elabon with Elise and Van, he'd thought the barons here well away from the River Niffet were soft. They hadn't trimmed the brush back from the road as well as they should, they hadn't kept their castles in good repair, they'd half forgotten they were supposed to be fighting men.
The past twenty years and more had changed that. The Trokm? invasion, the eruption of the monsters from under Biton's shrine, and endless rounds of strife among the Elabonians themselves meant barons who weren't alert didn't live long. The ones who did live made sure no one ever got the chance to take them by surprise.
"Still no move from Aragis," Gerin said when they made camp that evening. "That's not like him. He's never been one to bluff and then back down. If he says he'll do something, he does it. He's a bastard, but a reliable bastard."
Not far away, an Elabonian fell on his face, as if he'd tripped over a stone in the grass. But there were no stones in the grass; the meadow was as smooth as an ornamental lawn in front of a high functionary's residence in the City of Elabon. Ferdulf giggled.
Gerin scowled. "Van said it-he does tempt you to find out just how nearly immortal he really is."
"Compose yourself, lord king," Rihwin said. "Could it not be that, by mere rumor of his presence, the demigod intimidates and inhibits Aragis the Archer from trying conclusions with you?"
Remembering how thoughtful Ferdulf had made Marlanz Raw-Meat, Gerin had to nod. "Ferdulf certainly intimidates and inhibits me," he said. "It would be nice if he did it to everyone else."
Van looked around to see if Balser Debo's son was in earshot. Not spotting him, the outlander chuckled and said, "Balser's going to be mighty unhappy if you bring this army down to his holding, eat every storeroom he has empty, lay tight hold on the land that was his, and then don't even have to do any fighting."
"Myself, I wouldn't mind that a bit," Gerin replied. "Fighting is wasteful. But you're right. Balser became my vassal so I could protect him. If he doesn't need protecting-"
"But, had he not come to you for protection, Aragis could have swallowed him at his leisure," Rihwin pointed out.
"That's so," Van agreed, "but he won't think about it. He'll think he never should have come to the Fox at all."
"If wheat and barley were as thin on the ground as thankfulness, we'd all go hungry most of the time, and that's a fact," Gerin said. " Still and all, the crop does grow. Adiatunnus told me one of the reasons he set out on this campaign with me instead of revolting-"
"Being a Trokm?, he's revolting almost by definition," Rihwin broke in.
"You keep quiet," Gerin told him, which, aimed at Rihwin, was good advice almost by definition. "As I was saying, or trying to say, one of the reasons he set out on this campaign was that he was grateful I' d gone to his aid against the Gradi five years ago."
"Aye, that was one," Van said. "The other, if I recall, was a nasty hunch you'd turn around and kick him in the ballocks if he tried stabbing you i
n the back."
"I never claimed gratitude was the only reason he chose to bring his men along with ours, just that it was a reason," Gerin said. He started to elaborate, but both his old friends were laughing too hard to pay any attention to him. After a moment, he gave up and started laughing himself.
**
They reached Balser's keep the next morning, eight days after setting out from Fox Keep. Math and Tiwaz floated in the sun-pale sky, the one at the third quarter, the other a waning crescent not far from the sun's skirts. Seeing the keep still undisturbed, Balser, who was riding at the head of the army with Gerin, let out a sigh of relief. " We won't have to try to take it back from Aragis, the gods be praised," he said.
"I hadn't thought we would," Gerin said. "The countryside, maybe, but not the keep. He hasn't had anywhere near the time he'd need to starve it out, and storming a castle is expensive even if you win. If you lose, trying it is likely to ruin you."
He looked east, then west. If Aragis the Archer hadn't come charging straight into Balser's holding, he'd probably gone and hit the Fox somewhere else along their border, with the news not having reached him yet. Try as he would, Gerin couldn't make himself believe Aragis really would stay quiet after giving such a blunt warning that he would go to war if Gerin accepted Balser's vassalage.
A look at Balser's keep suggested why Aragis might have thought it wise to launch his attack somewhere else. The keep perched atop of knob of high ground that the baron had scrupulously swept clear of all undergrowth above ankle high. A kitten would have had trouble approaching unseen. No man could have, not even afoot.
"Strong place," the Fox observed.
"Your strong place now, lord king," Balser said, "and you didn't even have to win it at war." Was that bitterness? It might have been. In Balser's shoes, Gerin, seeing peace and tranquillity in the holding, would have been wondering whether he could have gone on playing his two bigger rivals off against each other instead of finally yielding to one of them.
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