“This splendid news calls for an equally splendid celebration!” Rihwin shouted, which raised more cheers from the warriors gathered in the courtyard around Utreiz. Even Gerin clapped his hands, not wanting to be thought a wet blanket. If his men felt like roistering where no fight impended, that was all right with him. But then Rihwin went on, “What say we break out the wine with which Schild was generous enough to buy our aid?”
Some of the troopers clapped again. Others—notably Van and Drago—looked to Gerin instead. “No,” he said in a voice abrupt as an avalanche.
“But, my fellow Fox—” Rihwin protested.
Gerin cut him off with a sharp, chopping gesture. “No I said and no I meant. Haven’t you had enough misfortunes with wine and with Mavrix, my fellow Fox?” He freighted Rihwin’s ekename with enough irony to sink it.
Rihwin flushed, but persisted, “I hadn’t intended to summon the lord of the sweet grape, lord prince, nor had I intended to do aught more with his vintage than sip it, and not to excess.”
“No,” Gerin said for the third time. “What you intend and what turns out have a way of being two different things. And I trust that gift of wine from Schild about as far as I’d trust so many jars full of vipers.”
“What, you think the whoreson’s out to poison us?” Van rumbled. “If that’s so—” He didn’t go on, not with words, but pulled his mace free and whacked the shaft against the palm of his left hand.
But Gerin shook his head and said, “No,” yet again. Van looked puzzled. Rihwin looked as dubious as he had just before Gerin gave him an ass’ ear in place of his own. Gerin went on, “What I mean is, I fear that Mavrix seeks a foothold in my lands.” He explained how the Sithonian god of wine and fertility and creativity had repeatedly cropped up of late, finishing, “Given what’s passed between the god and me—and between the god and Rihwin—these past few years, the less presence he has here, the happier and safer I’ll feel. I didn’t dare refuse the wine of Schild, for that would have offered Mavrix insult direct. But I shan’t invite his presence by broaching those jars, either.”
“I had not considered the matter in that light,” Rihwin admitted after rather more thought than usual. “So far as men can, you may well have wisdom there, lord prince. But one thing you must always bear in mind: the lord of the sweet grape is stronger than you are. If it be his will that he establish himself in your holding, establish himself he shall, whether you will or not.”
“I am painfully aware of that,” Gerin said, sighing. “But what I can do to prevent it, I will. I’m on good terms with Baivers. Drink all the ale you please, Rihwin, and I’ll say not a word. The wine jars stay closed.”
“Sense, lord prince,” Utreiz Embron’s son said, Van nodded. After a moment, so did Drago. After a longer moment, so did Rihwin.
“Good,” Gerin said, all the same, he quietly resolved to take the wine jars from the cellar—where they resided with the ale—and find a more secret place for them. Rihwin’s intentions were surely good, but his actions lived up to them no more than anyone else’s—less than those of a few people who crossed the Fox’s mind.
The warriors trooped into the great hall, still loudly congratulating Utreiz. “It’s not as if I won the fight all by my lonesome,” he protested, much as Gerin might have in the same circumstances. Nobody paid any attention to him. He’d taken part in the victory and brought news of it, and that was plenty.
Seeing the invasion, servants hurried downstairs and into the kitchens. They quickly returned with ale (no wine; the Fox checked each amphora to be sure of what it held), meat from the night before, and bread to put it on. Some of the warriors called for bowls of the pease porridge that simmered in a big pot above the hearth.
The troopers made enough racket to bring people down from upstairs to see what was going on. Van caught Fand in his arms, planted a loud, smacking kiss on her mouth, and then sat down again, pulling her into his lap. He grabbed for his jack of ale. “Here, sweeding, sweetling!” he cried, almost spilling it down her chin. “We’ve beaten Bevon and his boys proper, that we have.”
“Is it so?” she said. “Aye, I’ll drink to that, and right gladly, too.” She took the jack from his hand, drained it dry. Gerin wondered if she would have been so ready to toast a triumph over Adiatunnus—he, after all, was of her own folk, not just an Elabonian on the wrong side. The Fox shook his head. She’d never been disloyal to him that way. When Van kissed her again, she responded as if she meant to drag him upstairs in a moment—or possibly not bother with dragging him upstairs. But then she got off his lap to claim a drinking jack of her own and fill it full of ale.
Selatre came down into the great hall in the middle of that. She too got a jack of ale. Gerin stood to greet her, but hesitated to do so much as take her hand; she remained leery of publicly showing affection. Unlike many, she didn’t assume her own standards applied to everyone: she watched Fand and Van with much more amusement than disapproval.
She sat down on the bench by the Fox. “I take it the news is good?” she said. Then she saw Utreiz. “Now I know the news is good, and what sort of news it is. We’ve beaten Bevon and his sons and taken back the full length of the Elabon Way, not so?”
Gerin nodded. “That’s just what we’ve done.” He gave her an admiring look. “You don’t miss much, do you? Next time I have to ride out in a sweep against the monsters, I think I’ll leave you in charge back here.”
For the first time since they’d become lovers—maybe for the first time since she’d come to Fox Keep—Selatre got angry at him. “Don’t mock me with things you know I can’t have,” she snapped. She waved to the crowd of noisy, drinking warriors. “The only use they have for women is to tumble them, or maybe to have them fetch up another jar of ale from the cellar. As if they’d pay heed to me!” She glared.
Taken aback at her vehemence, the Fox said slowly, “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose I meant that altogether seriously, but I didn’t mean to mock you with it, either.” He plucked at his beard as he thought. “If you wanted to badly enough, you could probably bring it off. All you’d need to do is remind them that you’d once been Sibyl and give them the feeling your eye for what needed doing was better than theirs even now.”
“But that would be a lie,” Selatre said.
Gerin shook his head. “No, just a push in the right direction. There’s a magic to getting people to do what you want that doesn’t show up in any grimoire. It uses what a person has done and who he is to show that he—or she—is apt to do well, or to come up with the right answer, or whatever you like, the next time, too. That’s what I was talking about here. You could do it. Whether you’d want to or not is another question.”
“Some of me is tempted,” she said in a small voice. “The rest, though, the bigger half, wants no part of it. I’m not fond of having people tell me what to do, so I don’t think I have any business giving orders to anyone else, either.”
“Good for you,” Gerin said. “I never intended to be a baron, much less somebody who calls himself a prince. I just aimed at being a scholar, studying what I wanted when I wanted to do it.” Self-mockery filled his laugh. “What you aim at in life and what you end up with are often two very different things.”
That made him think of the jars of wine Schild had sent him. They still sat down in the cellar, sealed and innocuous, and he’d move them somewhere safer yet as soon as he got round to it. But with Mavrix immanent in that wine, who could say how much his own aims mattered?
The moons coursed through the sky, Tiwaz swiftly, Nothos so slowly that his phase seemed to change but little from day to day, Elleb and Math in between. Gerin paid them close heed for two reasons: to gauge the time when the four moons would come full in the space of three days, and to see how many days Aragis the Archer had left to fulfill the promise his envoys had made.
Golden Math was two days past first quarter when word came to Fox Keep that the monsters had attacked a village near the southern boundary of Gerin�
��s holding. Cursing under his breath—why wouldn’t things ever hold still long enough for him to catch his breath?—he readied a force of chariotry and set out to sweep the countryside. He had no great hope of sweeping it clean, but refused to sit idly by and let the creatures hold the initiative.
The sweep actually went better than he’d expected. His warriors caught three monsters feeding on a cow they’d dragged down in the middle of a meadow close by the road. With joyous whoops, they sent their chariots jouncing over the grass to cut the monsters off from the safety of the woods. The creatures were slow to flee, too, staying at the carcass for a last couple of mouthfuls of meat before they tried to get away. Thanks to that, the Fox’s men were able to bring them all down with no loss to themselves.
One of the monsters still tried to crawl toward the woods despite having taken enough arrows to give it the aspect of a hedgehog. Van got down from the car he shared with Gerin and smashed in its head with his mace. Then he and some of the other men began the gory business of reclaiming shafts from the bodies of the creatures.
Raffo turned to Gerin and said, “Here’s another way keeping the trees well back from the side of the road did you a good turn, lord prince. If you’d let them grow up close, as other barons do, those stinking things might have made good their escape.”
“That’s true,” Gerin said. “After a while, you sometimes get to wonder whether something’s more trouble than it’s worth, but when you see the work you’ve spent pay for itself, it reminds you that you might have known what you were doing all along.”
The war party reached the ravaged village a little before sunset. The serfs there had fought back as well as they could; they’d lost a man, two women, and some livestock, but they’d also managed to kill a monster. Gerin sent his troopers out on a short foray into the forest surrounding the village, ordering them to be back in the open before night took them. That was one command he was sure they’d obey—no one wanted to meet the ghosts away from blood and fire.
A deadfall of branches and sticks caught the Fox’s eye. “There’s a likely place,” he said, pointing.
Van and Raffo both nodded. “Aye, you’re right,” Van added, and probed the brush with his spear.
With a scream, a monster burst out and hurled itself at him. He held it off with his shield, though its charge forced him back two steps. Among them, he and Gerin and Raffo made short work of the creature. “Female,” Gerin noted.
“Aye, so it was. Mean enough, all the same,” Van said, sounding embarrassed at having to give ground. He sighed. “They’re all mean enough, and to spare.”
Inside the deadfall, something yowled—two somethings, by the sound. Gerin stared in dismay at Van. “It had cubs,” he said, as if accusing his friend.
“Aye,” the outlander answered, and then, after a moment, “No reason we should be surprised, I suppose. The creatures must have been having cubs for the gods only know how long, down in their caves. They’ll have kept right on doing it now that they’re aboveground. This one will have been pregnant before she got aboveground, come to that.”
“So she will,” Gerin said. The outlander was right, of course, but that didn’t take away the startlement. The Fox dug into the deadfall, scattering brush in all directions. After a moment, Van and Raffo pitched in to help.
They soon uncovered the monster cubs. Gerin stared at them in dismay. They looked like nothing so much as ugly, hairy babies. “What are you going to do with them?” Raffo asked, gulping a little. Oddly, that made Gerin feel a little easier: the driver didn’t have the stomach just to kill them, either.
Van did. “Get rid of them,” he said. “You know what they turn into.”
“I don’t know what to do,” the Fox answered slowly. “Aye, I know what they turn into, but I’m still not sure how smart the monsters are. If they learn I’m slaying their cubs out of hand and understand that, it’ll just make them worse foes of mine than they are already.”
“Honh!” Van said, a noise of deep discontent. “How could they be?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”
“Well, what will you do?” Van asked scornfully. “Take ’em home and make pets of ’em?”
“Why not? We have Fand back at Fox Keep.…” Gerin murmured. Actually, the idea tempted him, tweaking his curiosity. If you raised a monster among men, what would you get? A monster? A pet, as Van had said? Something not too far removed from an ugly, hairy man, or, for that matter, an ugly, hairy woman? If he’d had fewer things to worry about, if he’d had more leisure, if he hadn’t been certain all his vassals would scream even louder than Van had, he might have tried the experiment. As it was— “I know what we’ll do.”
“What’s that, lord?” Raffo asked.
“Nothing,” Gerin said. “Nothing at all. We killed the female in battle—well and good. We won’t—we can’t—take the cubs back to Castle Fox. You’re right about that, Van. But I won’t just slaughter them, either. I’ll leave them here. Maybe beasts will get them, or maybe, if the monsters do have something in the way of family feeling, they’ll take them and raise them up. I’ll leave that in the hands of the gods.”
He hadn’t asked whether Van or Raffo approved. Now he looked to see if they did. Raffo nodded. Van still seemed unhappy, but finally said, “You have a way of looking for the middle road, Fox. I suppose you found it here. Let’s go back.”
When they returned to the village, they found the other chariot crews had also had good luck. They’d killed two monsters, the only serious injury they’d taken being to Parol Chickpea, who’d just recovered from his bitten buttock. Now he was gray-faced, and had a bloody rag wrapped around his left hand—he’d lost two fingers from it.
“How did that happen?” Gerin asked. “His shield should have protected him there. He’s right-handed, so he doesn’t have that hand out in the open the way I do.”
“Just bad luck,” Drago the Bear answered. “The monster he was fighting gave a good yank at his shield, and it broke away from the handgrip and lashing. Then the thing sprang at him, and he stuck out his arm to keep from getting its teeth in his neck instead. I hope he heals; he’s lost a lot of blood.”
Gerin made unhappy clucking noises. “Aye, he’s a good fighter, and a long way from the worst of men.” He kicked at the dirt, feeling useless. “Would that the gods had never let this plague of monsters loose on us. Every warrior, every serf even we lose is one we can’t replace.”
“That’s all true, lord, but the creatures are here, and we have to fend ’em off as best we can,” Drago said. Gerin wished he could muster that same stolid acceptance for things he couldn’t help.
The warriors started back toward the main road at dawn the next day. They left Parol Chickpea behind; he’d taken a fever, and was in no condition to spend a day in the chariot. “We’ll do the best we can for him, lord prince,” the village headman promised. With that Gerin had to be content. The serfs’ herbs and potions were as likely to help Parol as any of the fancier doctoring techniques that came from south of the High Kirs. Unfortunately, they were also as likely not to help.
When the dirt track the chariots were following ran into the Elabon Way, Van pointed south and said, “More cars heading up toward us, Captain.”
The Fox hadn’t looked southward; he was intent on getting back to the keep. But his eyes followed Van’s pointing finger. His left eyebrow rose. “Quite a few cars,” he said in surprise. “I hope Bevon hasn’t rallied and driven my men off the highway again.” He let out a long sigh. “We’d better go find out.” He tapped Raffo on the shoulder. The driver swung his chariot south. The rest of the cars in the war party followed.
Before long, Gerin realized he didn’t recognize any of the approaching chariots. He also realized his band was badly outnumbered. If Bevon somehow had managed to pull off one victory, he might be on the point of another.
Then Van pointed again. “There in the second car, Fox. Isn’t that tall, skinny fellow Aragis
the Archer?”
“Father Dyaus,” Gerin said softly. He squinted. “Your eyes are sharper than mine.” Then he let out a whoop loud enough to make Raffo start. “Aye, it is Aragis—and see all the friends he’s brought with him.”
“A great whacking lot of them, that’s for certain,” Van said.
The more teams and chariots Gerin saw, the more thoughtful he grew. He started to regret that whoop of glee. Measured all together, his own forces comfortably outnumbered Aragis’ army. But his forces were scattered over several holdings and doing several different things, which left him in a decidedly uncomfortable position here. If Aragis should decide to take advantage of his superior numbers here on the spot, affairs in the northlands would suddenly look very different, although Gerin would be in no position to appreciate the difference.
A bold front had served him well many times in the past. He tapped Raffo on the shoulder again. “Let’s go down and give the grand duke proper greeting.”
“Aye, lord prince.” Raffo sounded a little doubtful, but steered the car toward the approaching host. The rest of the chariots in Gerin’s war party followed. He heard some of his men muttering among themselves at the course he took, but no one challenged him. He had a reputation for being right. The next few minutes would show how well he deserved it.
He waved toward the oncoming chariots. Someone waved back: Marlanz Raw-Meat. A moment later, Fabors Fabur’s son waved, too. Then Aragis also raised his hand to greet the Fox.
“Well met,” Gerin called when he’d drawn a little closer to Aragis’ force. “You’re in good time, and here with more cars even than I’d looked for. Well met indeed. We were just out driving the monsters back from one of my villages, and slew several.” And left two to an unsure fate, he added to himself. Aragis didn’t need to know about that. He would surely have killed the cubs without a second thought.
“Good for you, lord prince,” Aragis called back. “And not only have I brought my men and my horses and my cars, I have a present for you—two presents, as a matter of fact.”
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