“If any man styles himself king who hasn’t earned it, you mean,” Bevander said. “If Aragis beats you and the woodsrunners both, who could say he has no right to the title? You should use some of your magic powers, lord prince, and see what Aragis intends when you move against the Trokmoi.”
Like so many other people in the northlands, Bevander was convinced Gerin had strong magical powers because he’d cleared the land of the monsters from under Biton’s shrine at Ikos. The Fox knew only too well that had been two parts desperation to one part sorcery. He hadn’t advertised the fact, wanting his foes to think him more fearsome than he was. That created another problem, as solutions have a way of doing: his friends also thought him more fearsome than he was.
Now, though, he paused thoughtfully “I may do that,” he said at last. Scrying was not likely to be a form of magic particularly dangerous to his health. He didn’t know how accurate the spells would prove; in peering into the future, you tried to navigate through a web of possibilities expanding so rapidly that even a god had trouble following the links.
Bevander beamed. “May you have good fortune with it,” he said. He swelled with the self-importance of a man who’s had a suggestion taken.
Gerin eyed him as he walked away, strutting just a little. He had wit enough to be dangerous had his ambition matched it. Having obtained the lion’s share of Bevon’s barony for backing the Fox in the last fight against Adiatunnus, though, he’d been satisfied with that—and with finally getting the upper hand on his brothers—ever since.
For his part, Gerin was satisfied to remain prince rather than king. The only trouble was, no one believed him when he said as much.
Selatre came into the library “Hello,” she said to the Fox. “I didn’t expect to find you here.” Ever since he’d taught her to read, she’d taken the chamber where he stored his scrolls and codices as her private preserve.
“I’m getting away from the racket of my barons,” he said, and then, because he didn’t like telling her half-truths, “and I’m looking in the grimoires to see what sort of scrying spell I can cast that’s least likely to turn me into a salamander.”
“I wouldn’t want that,” Selatre said seriously. “Salamanders aren’t good at raising children, let alone running a principality.” She walked over and ran a hand down his arm. “I suspect they’re also, mm, less than desirable in certain other areas.”
“I daresay you’re right,” Gerin answered. “The gods only know how we’d manage to put a pond in the bedchamber.” As Selatre snorted, he went on, warming to the theme, “Or we could, go up to the Niffet and make sport there, always hoping no big pike came along at the worst possible moment.”
“I’m leaving,” Selatre said with more dignity than the words really needed. “It’s plain enough you won’t keep your mind on what you’re doing if I’m here to distract you.”
The Fox grinned over his shoulder, then returned to the grimoires. If half what they said was true, seeing into the future was so easy, no one should ever have needed to consult Biton’s Sibyl down at Ikos. Of course, if half what the grimoires said was true, anyone who read them would have more gold than he knew what to do with and live to be three hundred years old. Knowing which grimoire to trust was as important as anything else when it came to sorcery.
“Here, this ought to do it,” the Fox said at last, picking a spell from a codex he’d brought back from the City of Elabon. He closed the book, tucked it under his arm, and carried it out of Castle Fox and over to the small hut near the stables where he worked his magic.
Every time he went in there, even if it was for nothing more elaborate than trying to divine where a sheep had strayed, he wondered if he would come out again. He knew how much he knew—just enough to be dangerous—and also how much he didn’t know, which gave him pause about using the knowledge he had.
He opened the grimoire. The divining spell he’d chosen, unlike a lot of them, required no wine. Wine grapes would not grow in the northlands. Even if they had, he would have been leery of using what they yielded. His previous encounters with Mavrix, the Sithonian god of wine, made him anxious never to have another.
“Oh, a pestilence,” he muttered. “I should have brought fire with me.” After filling a lamp with perfumed linseed oil, he went back to the castle, got the lamp going at a torch, and carried it over to the hut. He felt stares at his back; if his vassals hadn’t noticed before what he was doing, they did now. Whatever enthusiasm they had, they hid very well.
He set the lamp on a wooden stand above his worktable. That done, he rummaged in a drawer under the table till he found and pulled out a large quartz crystal. The grimoire said the crystal was supposed to be flawlessly pure. He looked at it, shrugged, and started to chant. It was what he had. If he didn’t use it, he couldn’t work the spell.
As with a lot of spells, this one had the more difficult passes for the left hand. The Fox suspected that was intentional, to make the spells more likely to fail. It bothered him not at all, since he was left-handed. His magic did not go wrong on account of clumsiness. Lack of training and lack of talent, however, were something else again.
“Reveal, reveal, reveal!” Gerin shouted in tones of command, holding the crystal between the elevated lamp and the table.
A rainbow sprang into being on the grimy tabletop—getting it spotlessly white, as the grimoire suggested, had struck the Fox as more trouble than it was worth. As the magic began to unfold, he reckoned himself vindicated. He had seen, over the years, that the men who wrote tomes on magic had a way of worrying more about form than about function.
The rainbow vanished. A white light filled the crystal. Gerin almost dropped it in alarm, but held on when he realized it wasn’t hot. Surely the little smudges and chips that white light revealed would not matter to the spell.
He concentrated his own formidable wits on Aragis the Archer, visualizing the grand duke’s craggy, arrogant features: by his face, Aragis might have been half hawk on his father’s side. The brain behind that harsh mask was alarmingly keen—nearly as good as Gerin’s, if focused more on the short term and the immediate vicinity.
So what was Aragis plotting now? If the Fox locked himself in battle with Adiatunnus, what would the grand duke do?
As soon as Gerin fully formed the question, a beam of light stabbed out from the glowing crystal down onto the tabletop. The Fox sucked in a quick, startled breath. There sat Aragis, with what looked like a mixture of distaste and intense concentration on his face. Gerin looked closely, trying to be sure he was reading the expression correctly. His rival seemed shrouded in shadow.
Aragis suddenly rose. The perspective shifted. The strings of oaths Gerin let out had nothing to do with the spell. Maybe purity of materials and cleanliness of scrying surface mattered more than he’d thought. A view of Aragis grunting in the smelly castle latrine was less edifying than the Fox had hoped No wonder the grand duke’s expression had been as it was. Had he obtained relief for the problem troubling him? Gerin would never know.
The light from the crystal faded. Evidently that was the only glimpse of Aragis Gerin would get. He swore again, half in anger, half in resignation. Sometimes his magics worked, sometimes he made an idiot of himself and wondered why he ever bothered trying. At least he hadn’t come close to burning down the hut, as had happened before.
Unlike most of Gerin’s vassals, Bevander could guess why Gerin had gone into the hut in the first place. Looking very full of himself, he walked up to the Fox and asked, “What news of Aragis, lord prince? Will he bedevil us if we war with Adiatunnus?”
“I don’t really know, worse luck,” the Fox answered. “The spell I tried turned out to be full of shit.” He wasn’t often able to tell literal and symbolic truth at the same time, and savored this chance the way a litterateur savored a well-turned verse. All the same, he would have traded the witticism for a real look into the future.
Every time his vassals rode away from Fox Keep at the end of a campa
ign, Gerin forgot how much chaos they brought while they were there. Part of that came from packing a lot of fighting men into a compact space and then having to wait for the latecomers before everyone could go out and fight. If they couldn’t battle their foes, a lot of the Fox’s troopers were willing, even eager, to battle one another.
Some of those fights were good-natured affrays that sprang from nothing more than high spirits and a couple of mugs of ale too many. Some had the potential for being more serious. Not all of Gerin’s vassals loved one another. Not all of them loved him, either. Schild Stoutstaff was not the only man who would have liked nothing better than to renounce his allegiance to the Fox—had he not had Adiatunnus hanging over his southern border.
Gerin did his best to keep known enemies among his vassals as far from each other as he could. For years, he’d been doing his best to keep those vassals from going on with their own private wars. “And you’ve done well at it, too,” Van said when he complained aloud one day: “better nor I ever thought you could. A lot of the feuds that were hot as a smith’s fire when first I came here have cooled down in the years since.”
“And a lot of them haven’t, too,” Gerin said. “Drungo Drago’s son remembers that Schild’s great-great-grandfather killed his own great-great-great-grandfather in a brawl a hundred years ago, and he wants to pay Schild back. And Schild remembers, too, and he’s proud of what his flea-bitten brigand of an ancestor managed to do.”
“Isn’t that—what do you call it?—history, that’s the word I want?” Van said. “You always say we have to know history if we’re going to be civilized, whatever that means. Do you want Drungo and Schild to forget their blood feud?”
“I want them to forget their blood vengeance,” Gerin answered. “The old quarrels get in the way, because the new one we have is more important—or it ought to be more important. The way some of my vassals eye some of the others, you’d think they came here for their own private wars. As far as they’re concerned, fighting mine is a nuisance.”
“Only one way to deal with that,” Van said. “So long as they’re more afraid of you than they are of each other, they’ll do as you like.”
“Oh, they know I can thump them like a drum if I have to, and they’re too fractious to join together and cast me down, for which the gods be praised,” the Fox replied. “But that isn’t what brings them together here. The one they’re really afraid of is the cursed Trokmê.”
Van scratched a scar that wandered down into his beard Himself afraid of nothing this side of angry gods, he found fear of a foe hard to fathom. At last, he said, “There’s that, too, I suppose. Anyone who thinks the woodsrunners make good neighbors has been chewing the wrong leaves and berries: I give you so much.”
Vassals hastily moved aside from the doorway to the great hall. Gerin understood that a moment later, when Geroge walked outside. Even without armor, the monster was a match for men who wore bronze-scaled corselets and helms and carried spears and shields. A couple of minor barons had already urged the Fox to get rid of Geroge and Tharma both. He’d invited them to try it, with no more additions to nature than the monsters enjoyed. They hadn’t urged twice.
Geroge came up to Gerin at a sort of lumbering trot. “Something wrong?” the Fox asked. As best he could tell, Geroge looked troubled. The monster’s features were hard to read. The forward stretch of the lower half of his face made his nose low and flat, and heavy brow ridges shadowed his eyes. Had a creature half-wolf, half-bear walked like a man, it would have looked a lot like him.
He was also right on the edge of the transition from child to adult, and no more easy with that than anyone else. “They laugh at me,” he said in his rough, growly voice, pointing with a clawed forefinger back toward the great hall. “They should be used to me by now, but they call me names.”
“Why don’t you grab one of them and eat him?” Van said “He won’t call you names after that, by the gods.”
“Oh, no!” Geroge sounded horrified. As best the Fox could tell, he looked horrified, too. “Gerin taught Tharma and me never to eat people. And we couldn’t eat enough of them to keep the rest from hurting us.”
“That’s right,” Gerin said firmly, giving Van a dirty look. He’d worked hard trying to humanize the monsters, and didn’t appreciate having his work undermined. “That’s just right, Geroge,” he repeated, “and you reasoned it out very well, too.” For their land, Geroge and Tharma were both clever. He never failed to let them know it.
Geroge said, “What do we do, then? I don’t like it when they call us names. It makes me mad.” He opened his mouth very wide. Examining the sharp ivory within, Gerin knew he would not have wanted the monster annoyed at him.
He said, “If they bother you again, I will eat them.”
“Really?” Geroge’s narrow eyes widened.
“Er—no,” the Fox admitted. He had to keep reminding himself that, even though Geroge was bigger and much more formidably equipped than he, the monster was also as literal-minded as a child half his age. “But I will make them very sorry they insulted you. They have no business doing it, and I won’t stand for it.”
“All right,” Geroge said like a child with its father, he was convinced Gerin always could and would do exactly as he promised. Gerin had to bear that in mind when he spoke with the monster. If he didn’t deliver on a promise … he didn’t know what would happen then, or want to find out.
“Anyone who bothers you will answer to me, too,” Van rumbled. That made the monster happy; unlike most mere mortals, Van was still stronger than Geroge, and also unintimidated by his fearsome looks. That made him a hero in the monster’s eyes.
“Let’s go hunting,” Geroge said. “We need more meat with all these people crowding the keep. We always need more meat.” His tongue, long and red and rough like a cat’s, flicked out to moisten his lips. He didn’t just need meat—he needed to hunt more meat.
“You won’t hear me say no,” Van answered. He went back into the great hall, emerging a moment later with a stout bow and a quiver slung over his back. He affected to despise archery when fighting men—he preferred a long, heavy spear that he handled as if it were a twig used for picking teeth—but proved his skill as a bowman whenever he went after game.
Geroge hurried away, too, returning momentarily with Tharma. Both monsters were chattering excitedly; they were about to go off and do something they loved. With so many warriors in the keep, the drawbridge was down. Flanked on either side by a monster, Van tromped out of the keep and headed for the woods.
No one would call Geroge and Tharma names while they were out hunting. Even if a warrior came upon them in the woods, he would think several times before drawing their notice, much less their anger. Gerin had hunted with them, many times. Out among the trees, they sloughed off a lot of the cloak of humanity they wore inside Fox Keep. They were more purely predators in the woods, and less inclined to put up with nonsense from people.
Gerin, much to his own regret, had to put up with a lot of nonsense. He sometimes thought that the hardest part of the ruler’s art. He’d never been one to suffer Fools gladly. In his younger days, he’d never been one to suffer fools at all. He would either ignore them or insult them till they went away. First as baron, though, and then as self-styled prince, he’d gradually become convinced the number of fools was so high, he made too many enemies by treating them all as they deserved. Little by little, he’d learned patience, though he’d never learned to like it.
Rihwin the Fox and Carlun Vepin’s son came out of the great hall together. Seeing them so sent alarm through Gerin. Carlun had already figured out on his own how to get into trouble, and if by some chance he hadn’t, Rihwin would have taken care of that small detail for him. Rihwin could get anyone, from himself up to and including gods, into trouble.
To Gerin’s relief, his fellow Fox said something to Carlun that seemed to rub the ex-headman the wrong way. Rihwin laughed out loud at that. Carlun looked angry, but didn’t do anyt
hing about it In his place, Gerin wouldn’t have done anything, either. Carlun had spent a lifetime with hoe and shovel and plow, Rihwin just as long with sword and bow and spear. If you weren’t trained from childhood as a warrior, you were a fool to take on a man who was.
Laughing still, Rihwin gave Carlun a mocking bow and went on his way. Carlun saw Gerin and hurried over to him. “Lord prince!” he cried, his face red with frustrated, impotent fury. ‘They scorn me, lord prince!”
He might have been Geroge, though he expressed himself better. On the other hand, the warriors could twit him with impunity; he wasn’t liable to tear them limb from limb if they pushed him too far. “What are they calling you?” Gerin asked.
“They’ve given me an ekename,” Carlun said indignantly. “One of them called me Carlun Inkfingers, and now they’re all doing it.” He held out his hands to the Fox. Sure enough, the right one was stained with ink.
Gerin held out his hands in return. “I have those stains, too, you’ll note,” he said, “and rather worse than you: being left-handed, I drag the side of my hand through what I’ve written while that’s still wet.”
“But they don’t call you Gerin Inkfingers,” Carlun said.
“That’s true. I’ve given them reason to hang a different sobriquet on me,” Gerin said. “You could do that. Or you could take pride in the one they’ve given you, instead of letting them make you angry with it. Most of them, you know, couldn’t find their own name on a piece of parchment if it stood up and waved to them.”
“I don’t like trying to deal with so many of your warriors,” Carlun said, sticking out his lower lip like a sulky child.
“Then it’s back to a village for you—a village far away,” Gerin told him. “You won’t be headman there, either—you know that. You’d just be a serf among serfs for the rest of your life. If that’s truly what you want, I’ll put you and your family on the road tomorrow.”
King of the North Page 6
