Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  He scowled, angry at himself for so much as entertaining that notion. Selatre said, “What’s wrong? You look as if you just bit into something sour.”

  Before he could come up with anything plausible, Van saved the day, calling, “Come over here by the fire, both of you, and bite into something that’s going to be gamy and greasy, like I said before, but better all the same than a big empty curled up and purring in your belly.”

  The duck was just as Van had predicted it would be, but Gerin fell to gratefully even so. A full mouth gave him the excuse he needed for not answering Selatre’s question, and a full belly helped him almost—if not quite—forget the thoughts which had prompted that question in the first place.

  The wagon came out from behind the last stand of firs that blocked the view toward Castle Fox. “There it is,” Gerin said, pointing. “Not a fortress to rival the ones the Elabonian Emperors built in the pass south of Cassat, but it’s held for many long years now; the gods willing, it’ll go on a bit longer.”

  Selatre leaned forward in the rear of the wagon to see better, though she was still careful not to brush against the Fox or Van. “Why are most of the timbers of the palisade that ugly, faded green?” she said.

  Van chuckled. “The lady has taste.”

  “So she does.” Gerin refused to take offense, and answered the question in the spirit in which he hoped it had been asked: “It was a paint a wizard put on them, to keep another wizard from setting them afire.”

  “Ah,” Selatre said. Thin in the distance—Gerin did not allow trees and undergrowth to spring up anywhere near the keep; if anyone set ambushes, he’d be that one—a horn from the watchtower said the wagon had been seen.

  He twitched the reins and rode forward with a curious mixture of anticipation and dread: seeing his comrades again would be good, and perhaps some of them had word of Duren. But the trouble he expected from Fand cast a shadow over the homecoming.

  “We were free peasants in the village where I grew up; we owed no lord service,” Selatre said. “Not much of what we heard about Elabonian barons was good, and I came to have a poor opinion of the breed. You tempt me to think I may have been wrong.”

  Gerin shrugged. “Barons are men like any others. Some of us are good, some bad, some both mixed together like most people. I’m bright enough, for instance, but I worry too much and I’m overly solitary. My vassal Drago the Bear, whom you’ll meet, isn’t what you call quick of wit and he hates anything that smacks of change, but he’s brave and loyal and has the knack of making his own people like him. And Wolfar of the Axe, who’s dead now, was vicious and treacherous, if you ask me, but he’d never shrink from a fight. As I say, we’re a mixed bag.”

  “You speak of yourself as if you were someone else,” Selatre said.

  “I try sometimes to think of myself that way,” the Fox answered. “It keeps me from making too much of myself in my own mind. The fellow who’s sure he can’t possibly go wrong is usually the one who’s likeliest to.”

  A couple of men came out of the gate and waved to the approaching wagon: squat Drago with slim Rihwin beside him. “Any luck, lord?” Drago called, raising his voice to a shout.

  “What did the Sibyl say?” Rihwin asked, also loudly.

  “We’re still the ripple of news furthest out from where the rock went into the pond,” Van said.

  “So we are.” Gerin nodded, adding, “I like the picture your words call to mind.” Behind them and in every other direction, others would also be spreading word of what had happened at Ikos. Soon the whole of the northlands would know. But for now, there was a dividing line between those who did and those who didn’t, and he and Van were on it.

  He raised his voice in turn to answer his vassals: “By your leave, I’ll tell the tale in the great hall and not sooner. That way I’ll have to retell it only once, and there’s a good deal to it.”

  “Is that Duren in the wagon behind you?” Rihwin asked.

  Drago’s sight had begun to lengthen as he aged. Today, that served him well. “No, loon,” he said. “That’s a man grown. No, I take it back—a woman?” The Fox didn’t blame him for sounding surprised.

  Rihwin’s agile wits let him leap to a conclusion that wouldn’t have occurred to Drago. “You’ve caught up with Elise?” he said loudly. “Did she steal the boy away, lord Gerin?” That his wits were agile, of course, didn’t necessarily mean he was right.

  At that moment, Gerin wished he’d kept quiet. The rumor would be all over the keep, all over the serf villages, and would spread faster than the truth could follow it. “No, it’s not Elise,” he said, even louder than Rihwin had spoken. “This is the lady Selatre, who up till bare days ago was Biton’s Sibyl at lkos.”

  Warriors up on the palisade, who’d already begun to gossip about Rihwin’s speculation, abruptly fell silent. Then they started buzzing again, more busily than before. Maybe Rihwin’s wild guess wouldn’t go everywhere after all, Gerin thought: the truth was so much stranger that it might take precedence.

  He drove the wagon over the drawbridge and into the keep, then got down from it. Van slipped off from the other side. They both stood back to let Selatre descend with no risk of touching either of them.

  Gerin introduced his vassals to her one by one. He wondered how good she’d be at matching unfamiliar names to equally unfamiliar faces; that often gave him trouble. But she coped well enough, and showed she knew who was who when she spoke to the men. The Fox was impressed.

  Widin Simrin’s son asked the question they all had to be thinking: “Uh, lord Gerin, how did you come to have the holy Sibyl riding with you?”

  “You felt the earthquake a few days past?” Gerin asked in turn.

  Heads bobbed up and down. Drago said, “Aye, we did, lord. Like to scare the piss out of me, it did. We lost some pots, too, and spilled ale from a couple ofbroken jars.” He sighed in sorrow at the misfortune. Then he scratched his head. “Has that aught to do with the lady here?”

  “It has everything to do with the lady here,” Gerin said. Van nodded, the crimson horsehair plume on his helm drawing eyes to him. The Fox went on, “Let’s all go into the great hall. I hope not all the ale spilled.” He waited until reassured on that before finishing, “Good, for I’ll need a mug or two to ease my throat as I—and Van, and the lady Selatre—tell you what happened, and why she’s here.”

  He waved toward the entrance to the castle. Drago and Widin and Rihwin and the rest hurried inside. Selatre waited till they’d gone through the door before she too went in. Even if she’d consciously decided not to let getting touched every once in a while bother her, she aimed to avoid it where she could.

  Gerin did not go into the great hall until even Selatre was inside. He told himself that was politeness, and so it was, but it was also anxiety: he put off for a moment the likelihood of confronting Fand.

  He knew that was foolish: putting off trouble, even for a little while, wasn’t worth the effort, and often made it worse when it finally came. But knowing that and facing up to a screaming fight with Fand were two different things. At last, bracing himself as if walking into a winter wind, he walked into the great hall.

  His stiff pose eased as his eyes adjusted to the gloom within: Fand had to be still upstairs. “Took you long enough,” Van rumbled, though he no doubt had the same concern. “If you’d stayed out there much longer, the ale would’ve been drunk by the time you got around to joining us.”

  “Can’t have that.” Gerin went over to the jar and dipped a jack full. He wet his throat, then told what had happened on the way to Ikos and after he and Van had got there. His vassal barons muttered angrily when he spoke of the peasants who’d hunted him in the night. He shook his head. “I was angry at the time, too, but it all fades away when you set it alongside what came later.”

  He spoke of the trip down to the Sibyl’s cave and of the disturbing oracular response Biton had delivered through Selatre’s lips. His listeners muttered again, this time with the same d
read he’d felt when those doom-filled words washed over him. Selatre broke in, “I remember lord Gerin and Van coming into my underground chamber, but nothing after that, for the mantic trance had possessed me.”

  Gerin went on with the rest of the story: Selatre’s continued and abnormal unconsciousness, the meeting with Aragis in the temple, the carouse afterwards (now that his hangover was gone, Van grinned in fond memory), and the earthquake the next morning.

  Sometime while he was going through all that, Fand came down and sat beside Drago the Bear. Maybe the vassal baron’s bulk kept Gerin from spotting her right away, or maybe he’d kept from looking toward the stairs on purpose. But she leaned forward when he spoke of the monsters that had emerged from the ruins of Biton’s temple. Again, he had his listeners’ complete and dismayed attention. Fand kept quiet while he spoke of the battle the creatures had had with the temple guards in the sacred precinct.

  Then he said, “We’d gone back there, Van and I, because our innkeeper said the Sibyl still hadn’t come to her senses. After the quake, we feared her cottage would burn like so many buildings in the town of Ikos. Since we’d been responsible for pitching her into the fit, we thought we should make amends for it if we could. As it happened, her dwelling hadn’t caught fire, but the monsters would have made short work of her if we hadn’t got there when we did.”

  Fand stirred but still did not speak. Selatre said, “I woke up in their wagon some hours later, with my world turned all topsy-turvy.”

  Actually hearing Selatre seemed to draw Fand’s notice to her. The Trokmê woman leaned forward, her chin on her hands, intently studying the former Sibyl. Then, to Gerin’s dismay, she got to her feet and looked from him to Van. In a voice low but no less menacing because of that, she said, “And which of you was it, now, who was after wanting to trade me for the first new bit o’ baggage you chanced upon, like a wandering tinker mending a pot in exchange for a night’s rest and a bit o’ bread in the morning?”

  “Now, lass, didn’t you listen to the Fox?” Van usually had no trouble with women, but now he sounded nervous, which didn’t help. “It wasn’t her body we had designs on, just saving her life.”

  “Likely tell,” Fand snarled. “Sure and you’d have been just as eager to go back for her had she been old and toothless, not young and toothsome, sure and you would.”

  Gerin had thought himself the most sarcastic soul in the northlands; saying one thing and meaning another was a subtle art more often practiced south of the High Kirs. But wherever Fand had picked it up, she was dangerously good at it. And her furious question made the Fox ask himself if he would have headed back toward the fane to rescue Selatre’s crone of a predecessor. He had to admit he didn’t know, and that troubled him.

  “Is this your wife, lord Gerin, thinking I’m some sort of menace to her?” Selatre asked. “I hope that is not so.” Now she looked as if she doubted anew all the assurances she’d come to trust on the road north from Ikos.

  “My leman, rather, and Van’s,” the Fox answered. Selatre raised an eyebrow at his domestic arrangements, but he ignored that; he’d worry about it later. Fand, as usual, was immediate trouble. To her, he said, “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. By the gods, I did what I did for the reasons I said I did it, and if you don’t fancy that, you can pack up and leave.”

  “Och, you’d like that, now wouldn’t you?” Fand was low-voiced no more; her screech drove Drago from the seat close by her. “Well, lord Gerin the Fox—and you too, you overthewed oaf” —this to Van— “you’ll not be rid of me so easy as that, indeed and you won’t. Use me and cast me forth, will you?”

  She picked up her drinking jack and threw it at Gerin. It was half full; a trail of ale, like a comet’s tail, followed it as it flew. The Fox had been expecting it, so he ducked in good time—you needed battle-honed reflexes to live with Fand.

  Van tried again. “Now, lass—”

  She snatched the dipper out of the jar of ale and flung it at him. It clanged off the bronze of his cuirass. He was vain about his gear; he looked down in regret and anger at the ale that dripped to the floor.

  “I ought to heat your backside for that,” he said, and took a step forward, as if to do it on the spot.

  “Aye, come ahead, thrash me,” Fand fleered, and stuck out the portion of her anatomy he had threatened. “Then tomorrow or the day after or the day after that you’ll be all sweet and poke that cursed one-eyed snake o’ yours in my face—and I’ll bite down hard enough to leave you no more’n a newborn wean has. D’you think I wouldn’t?”

  By the appalled look he wore, Van thought she would. He turned to Gerin for help in quelling this mutiny. The Fox didn’t know what to say, either. He wondered if Fand would storm out of the castle, or if he’d have to throw her out. He didn’t really want to do that; for all her hellish temper, he liked having her around, and not just because he slept with her. Till Duren was kidnapped, she’d watched over him as tenderly as if she’d given birth to him. Her wits were sharp, too, as he sometimes found to his discomfort.

  Right now, though, he wouldn’t have minded putting a hard hand to her behind, if only he’d thought that would make matters better. Unfortunately, he thought it would make them worse. If force wouldn’t help and she wouldn’t listen to reason, what did that leave? He wished he could come up with something.

  Then Selatre got to her feet. She dropped a curtsy to Fand as if the Trokmê woman had been Empress of Elabon and said, “Lady, I did not come here intending to disrupt your household in any way: on that I will take oath by any gods you choose. I am virgin in respect of men, and have no interest in changing my estate there; as lord Gerin and Van of the Strong Arm both know, any touch from an entire man would have left me religiously defiled before—before Biton abandoned me.” Her brief hesitation showed the pain she still felt at that. “I tell you once more, I am not one like to steal either of your men from you.”

  Where Gerin and Van had fanned Fand’s fury, Selatre seemed to calm her. “Och, lass, I’m not after blaming you,” she said. “By all ’twas said, you had not even your wits about you when these two great loons snatched you away. But what you intend and what will be, oftentimes they’re not the same at all, at all. Think you I intended to cast my lot with southron spalpeens?”

  “I’m no southron,” Van said with some dignity.

  “You’re no Trokmê, either,” Fand said, to which the outlander could only nod. But Fand wasn’t screaming any more; she just sounded sad, maybe over the way her life had turned out, maybe—unlikely though that seemed to Gerin—regretting her show of temper.

  “And what am I?” Selatre said. She answered her own question: “I was the god’s servant, and proud and honored he had chosen me through whom to speak. But now he has left me, and so I must be nothing.” She hid her face in her hands and wept.

  Gerin was helpless with weeping women. Maybe that explained why he got on with Fand as well as he did—instead of weeping, she threw things. He knew how to respond to that. He hadn’t known what to do when Elise cried, either, and suddenly wondered if that had been one of the things that made her leave.

  He looked to Van, who made an art of jollying women into good spirits. But Van looked baffled, too. He jollied women along mostly to get them into bed with him; when faced with a virgin who wanted to stay such, he was at a loss.

  Finally the Fox went into the kitchens and came back with a bowl of water and a scrap of cloth. He set them in front of Selatre. “Here, wash your face,” he said. She gulped and nodded. Van beamed, which made Gerin feel good; he might not have done much, but he’d done something. It was a start.

  VI

  A chariot came pounding up the road toward Fox Keep. The driver was whipping the horses on so hard that the car jounced into the air at every bump, threatening to throw out him and his companion. “Lord Gerin! Lord Gerin!” the archer cried.

  The Fox happened to be on the palisade. He stared down in dismay at the rapidly a
pproaching chariot. He was afraid he knew what news the onrushing warriors bore. But he had been back in Fox Keep only five days himself; he’d hoped he might have longer to prepare. Hopes and reality too often parted company, though. “What word?” he called to the charioteer and his passenger.

  They didn’t hear him over the rattling of the car and the pound of the horses’ hooves, or spy him on the wall. The chariot roared into the courtyard of the keep. The driver pulled back on the reins so sharply that both horses screamed in protest. One tried to rear, which might have overturned the chariot. The lash persuaded the beast to keep all four feet on the ground.

  At any other time, Gerin would have reproved the driver for using the horses so; he believed treating animals mildly got the best service from them. Now, as he hurried down from the walkway across the wall, such trivial worries were far from his mind. “What word?” he repeated. “Tomril, Digan, what word?”

  Tomril Broken-Nose tossed the whip aside and jumped out of the chariot. “Lord Gerin, I’m here to tell you I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “You didn’t come close to killing your team for that,” the Fox answered.

  “Oh, but we did, lord prince,” Digan Sejan’s son said. “Tomril and I, we both thought you were babbling like a night ghost when you came up the Elabon Way warning folk of those half-man, half-beast things that were supposed to have gotten loose from under some old temple or other—”

  “But now we’ve seen ’em, lord Gerin,” Tomril broke in, his eyes wide. “They’re ugly, they’re mean, they’ve got a taste for blood—”

  Now Gerin interrupted: “And they must be up at the bottom of Bevon’s barony by now, or you wouldn’t have seen them. What news do you have from Ricolf’s holding?”