“I’m well, thank you,” she said. Her smile, like everything else about her, was radiant. One of the advantages of having a god for the father of her child, it seemed, was immunity to morning sickness.
“Good,” Gerin said. “That’s good.” No, he hadn’t figured out how to react to Fulda. She was a good-looking young woman, certainly, but not very bright. And yet Mavrix had chosen to sire a child on her. The Fox shrugged. A fertility god no doubt cared for beauty more than wit. After all, that had been the point in having her there in the first place.
Rihwin the Fox, mounted on a horse, came up to Fulda. Gerin suspected Rihwin would sooner have mounted her. She smiled up at him in a way that suggested she might have been interested in the same thing.
“Rihwin, are you trying to make Mavrix angry at you again?” Gerin asked.
“Who, me?” his fellow Fox asked, looking innocent so convincingly as to be altogether unconvincing. “Why should Mavrix be angry at me for conversing with this charming lady when I, in a manner of speaking, introduced the two of them? And why, furthermore, should he be angry with me if I do rather more than converse with her? He could never doubt the paternity of the child to be born, and I would raise it as one of my own. He might even be grateful to me.”
Rihwin, as far as Gerin could see, was thinking with his lance, not his head. Gerin sighed. Rihwin would do whatever he would do, and would probably end up paying the penalty for it. He did pay those penalties without complaint; Gerin gave him that much. As far as Gerin was concerned, not putting yourself in a position where you would have to pay them would have been wiser yet, but he’d learned Rihwin, like a lot of people, didn’t think that way.
“Be careful.” he said to Rihwin. Rihwin nodded, almost as if he would heed. Gerin sighed again.
“Lord prince?” Carlun Vepin’s son still spoke hesitantly whenever he needed to address Gerin. The Fox might have made him steward, but he had the ingrained habits of a serf—and knowing he thrived by Gerin’s sufferance couldn’t have made matters any easier. But, hesitantly or not, he went on, “Lord prince, I do need to speak to you for a moment.”
“Here I am,” Gerin said, agreeably enough. ‘What’s troubling you?”
Carlun looked around the great hall. Several warriors sat here and there along the benches, some drinking ale, one gnawing the roasted leg of a fowl, three or four more rolling dice. Lowering his voice, Carlun said, “Lord prince, may I speak with you in private?”
“I suppose so,” Gerin said. “Shall we walk down toward the village, then? That should do the job.”
Carlun agreed at once. Whenever he got out of Fox Keep these days, he seemed a flower spreading itself in the bright sunshine. And the sunshine remained bright and hot. The drubbing Mavrix had given Stribog did keep the Gradi god from meddling with the weather.
“Here we are,” Gerin said. “I asked you once, so I’ll ask you twice: what’s troubling you?”
“Lord prince, how long will Fox Keep be full of warriors?” Carlun asked. “How much longer will they stay here?”
“How long?” The Fox frowned. “Till we’ve beaten the Gradi, or till they’ve beaten us, whichever happens first. Why?”
“Because, lord prince, they are eating us—eating you—out of house and home,” Carlun answered. “If you hadn’t been so prudent about storing up food, your larder would long since have been bare. As things are, this will be a hungry, thirsty winter even without your vassals here.”
“What do you suggest I do, then?” Gerin asked. “Shall I send everyone home, with the Gradi still on the Niffet east of here? Shall I surrender to the Gradi? Is that better than letting them make me poor instead of prosperous?”
Carlun licked his lips. “That’s not, uh, what I had in mind, lord prince. But you do need to know that even the supplies you have stored up won’t last forever.”
“Oh, I know that all too well,” Gerin said. “Every time I go down into the cellars and see another storage jar opened or another jar gone, it gives me something new to worry about, and I have plenty of things already, thanks.”
“Every time you go down into the cellars—” Carlun repeated. He stared at the Fox. “Lord prince, I didn’t know you did that. As far as I could see, lords know only about talking, not about saving and watching.”
“That’s because you’ve looked at things with the eyes of a serf,” Gerin answered. It’s also because I look further ahead than most lords, he thought, but he didn’t say that out loud. What he did say was, “I have to manage this entire holding the way you ran first your house and then the village. Here, I’ll tell you what I have left down there—” He started reeling off jars of ale, of wheat, of barley, of rye, of beans, of peas, of salted beef and mutton, of smoked pork, so many hams, so many sausages, so many hung joints of beef, and on and on till Carlun’s eyes all but popped from his head.
“Lord prince,” the peasant-turned-steward whispered when the Fox was finally through, “I couldn’t have done that without checking the latest records, nor come close to it, but I think from what I do remember of those records, your memory is as near perfect as makes no difference.”
“I would have made a splendid scholar,” Gerin said, “since I have a jackdaw’s memory for useless bits of this and that. Every now and again, it comes in handy in the world where I find myself.”
“Lord prince, if you remember all these things, why did you put me in the place where you put me?” Carlun asked. “Not that I’m not grateful mind, when I think what you could have done, but you don’t need me. You could do the job yourself.”
“Of course I could,” Gerin said, with confidence so automatic he didn’t notice it himself. “But with you doing it, I don’t have to. And so I don’t, not really. If we do run low, you’re the one who’s going to make sure we lay in more supplies from … somewhere. And if you do a bad job at it, I’ll throw you out on your ear.”
“Oh, I’ve known that all along, lord prince,” Carlun said. Both men smiled, although they both knew Gerin hadn’t been joking: he expected no less from those around him than he did from himself. Carlun’s smile faded first. He asked, “How am I to pay for whatever I have to bring in?”
“You have my leave to spend my gold and silver,” Gerin answered. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t intend to let you do that. I do expect you to spend as little of it as you can.”
Carlun bowed his head. “I wouldn’t think of doing anything else.” He grinned wryly. “I wouldn’t dare do anything else.”
“No, eh?” Gerin hadn’t said one word about checking on Carlun. He didn’t intend to say one word about checking on Carlun. He did, however, intend to check on him. If Carlun couldn’t figure that out for himself, the Fox had made a mistake in promoting him rather than sending him off to some other village. And if Carlun tried cheating, he’d find he’d made a mistake himself.
They were almost out to the village where he had been headman not long before. Abruptly, he spun on his heel and started walking back toward Fox Keep again, much faster than he’d left it. “I don’t want to go back to the hut that used to be mine,” he said. “I don’t even want to see it, not up close. Do you understand that, lord prince?”
“Maybe I do,” the Fox said. “Is it that you don’t want to be reminded of how you started out—and of how you could end up?”
Carlun jerked as if Gerin had stuck him with the pin from a fibula. “Did you work magic to see that, lord prince?”
“No,” Gerin answered, and immediately wished he’d said yes—if Carlun thought his magic better than it was, he might be more tempted to walk the straight and narrow. But, having answered honestly, he went on, “Seeing that one wasn’t hard. When you were headman, you had to know what the rest of the people in the village were thinking, didn’t you?” When Carlun nodded, the Fox finished, “I’ve had to do that for my holding, and for much longer than you needed to do it. I’ve seen a lot, I’ve remembered a lot, and I can put all that together. Do yo
u follow me?”
A lot of men—some of them his vassal barons—wouldn’t have. They remembered little and learned less, going through life, or so it seemed to Gerin, more than half-blind. But Carlun, whether honest and reliable or not, was anything but stupid. “You may not be casting a spell,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t magic.”
Since Gerin had had the same thought about the craft of ruling men as recently as Aripert’s arrival at Fox Keep, he glanced toward Carlun with considerable respect. As they came back to the keep, he said, “I have your gracious permission to keep the garrison here a while longer, eh?”
“Of course, lord prince,” Carlun said, sounding on the lordly side himself. When Gerin gave him a sharp look, his burst of bravado collapsed and he added, “Not that you need it, mind you.”
“There is that,” Gerin agreed, happy Carlun knew his place after all.
Dagref, Clotild, and Blestar were playing with Maeva and Kor. Gerin watched the game with faint bemusement Dagref was not only oldest but sharpest witted. A lot of the time, he couldn’t be bothered playing with his sibs; his mind, though not his body or spirit, was nearly that of an adult. When he did join them and Van’s children, the role he saw for himself was halfway between overseer and god: he invented not just rules but a whole imaginary world, and put himself and them through their paces in it.
“No, Maeva!” he shouted. “I told you. Don’t you remember? The bark of that tree”—a stick—“is poisonous.”
“No, it’s not,” Maeva said. To prove her point, she picked up the stick and whacked Dagref with it. “There. You see?” But for the high pitch of her voice, that self-satisfied directness might have come straight from Van. “Didn’t hurt me a bit.”
“You’re not playing right,” Dagref said angrily: by his tone, he could imagine no felony more heinous.
“Be careful, son,” Gerin muttered under his breath. Dagref was older, but Maeva, girl or no girl, was both stronger and more agile. If Dagref forced a confrontation, he’d lose. If he wanted to get his way here, he’d have to figure out how to do it without getting into a fight.
Just then, Geroge and Tharma came out of the great hall. All the children greeted them with glad cries. The brewing quarrel between Dagref and Maeva was forgotten. The two monsters, though now approaching adulthood, had always been part of the children’s games at Fox Keep. They were bigger and stronger than any of the others, which more than balanced their also being duller. Had they been bad-tempered, their strength would have made them terrors. Since they weren’t, they became companions all the more desirable.
“What game are you playing?” Tharma asked Dagref.
“Well,” he said importantly, “Clotild here is a wizard, and she’s turned Kor into a longtooth”—a role well suited for one of Kor’s fierce, blustery temper—“and we’re all seeking ways to get him back his own shape. Maeva seems to be immune to poisons, and so—” He went on laying out the framework of the world that existed only inside his own head. Gerin noted he’d incorporated Maeva’s recalcitrance into the structure of the game.
Geroge laughed, loud and boisterously—so loud and boisterously, Gerin’s ears quivered in suspicion. Geroge sounded as if he’d been dipping deep into the ale jar again, in spite of earlier promises. He said, “That’s a good game!” His voice quivered with enthusiasm. “Let’s make the longtooth fly and see what happens then.”
He picked up Kor and threw him high in the air—so high, he had time to circle under the little boy before he came down. The circling was wobbly—yes, he’d been drinking more than he should have.
Gerin started toward him on the dead run, but Geroge plucked Kor out of the air neat as you please. Tharma grabbed Blestar and threw him even higher. Even more than it had when Kor soared, Gerin’s heart leaped into his mouth. He breathed out a harsh sigh of relief as his little son came down safe.
He and Kor both squealed with glee at their flights. The Fox was less amused. “This game is over,” he said in a voice filled with as much doom as he could manage.
That evidently wasn’t enough. Barons and Trokmê chieftains quailed before him. His own children, along with Van’s and with Geroge and Tharma, protested loudly and bitterly. He held his ground. “We were fine,” Clotild said, stamping her foot. “I wanted to go next. No one got hurt.”
“No, not this time. But you were lucky, because someone might have,” Gerin answered. He’d long since found out that arguments based on might have were for all practical purposes useless with children. So it proved here. But when he got a whiff of Geroge’s breath, he had another, better argument. “Baivers and barley!” he exclaimed, wrinkling his nose. “You didn’t just dive into the ale jar, you went swimming around in there.”
Geroge looked as shamefaced as a tiddly monster could. The result would have made anyone who didn’t know him flee in terror, but Gerin recognized the display of fangs as placatory, not hostile. “I’m sorry,” Geroge said with a growl that also sounded more fearsome than it was. “I don’t know what came over me. But I feel so good with the ale inside.” He punctuated that with an enormous belch. Gerin’s children and Van’s dissolved in gales of laughter.
The Fox felt like laughing, too, but didn’t let his face show it. He rounded on Tharma. “I thought you had better sense than he did,” he said accusingly.
“I’m sorry,” she answered, hanging her homely head. “But he started drinking the ale, and I—”
“If he decided to jump off the palisade and break his fool neck, would you do it, too, just because he did it?” Gerin had trotted that one out so many times for his own children, it sprang forth of its own accord now.
He’d used it on Geroge and Tharma a few times, too, generally to good effect. Today, though, Tharma looked back at him. “It wasn’t like that,” she protested. “It was like, like … something was pushing at us to drink the ale.”
“Probably the same sort of thing that pushes at me when I feel like getting into the candied fruit or the honey cakes,” Dagref said, sounding far more dubious than someone his age had any business doing. What will he be like when he grows up? Gerin thought uneasily. His eldest by Selatre would be a man to reckon with … if nobody murdered him young.
“It wasn’t like that,” Tharma said. “It really was … I could almost feel something pushing me toward the jar.” Geroge’s big head jerked up and down, up and down as he nodded agreement.
Gerin started to shout at both of them for being not just liars but stubborn liars to boot. He stopped, though, before the words passed his lips. Mavrix had used Rihwin as an instrument in a way much like this, prodding him to get drunk on wine and afford the Sithonian god an easy conduit into the northlands. But this wasn’t Mavrix, who had nothing to do with ale. It was …
“Baivers.” Gerin’s mouth shaped the name of the god in silent astonishment. Baivers was as Elabonian a deity as any. And, up till now, the Elabonian gods had been uniformly quiet, even when Voldar and her Gradi cohorts added their weight to the invaders’ power.
Up till now … Gerin wondered if he was a drowning man grabbing at straws as he tried to stay afloat. The affection Geroge and Tharma suddenly felt for ale might have nothing whatever to do with Baivers, might, in fact, have nothing to do with anything save an increasingly well-developed thirst, of the sort that turned ordinary men into drunks with no divine intervention whatever.
“Well,” the Fox said, more to himself than to the monsters, much more to himself than to the still-disappointed children, “if you’re going to grab at straws, by Dyaus—and by Baivers—grab at them. Don’t let them slip through your hands.”
“What are you talking about, Father?” Dagref, as usual, sounded highly insulted when Gerin said something he didn’t follow.
“Never mind,” Gerin said absently, which insulted his son all the more. To compound his crime, he took no notice of Dagref’s annoyance. Instead, he seized Geroge’s arm in one hand and Tharma’s in the other. “Come back to the grea
t hall with me, you two. You’re going to drink some more ale.”
Geroge greeted that pronouncement with a roar of delight. Tharma said, “You’re not going to make us drink till we hurt the next day, are you?” That made Geroge thoughtful; the memory of his first hangover was after all still painfully vivid in him, too.
Had Germ been able to get away with not answering that, he would have done it. He didn’t think he could, and the prospect of enraging two monsters, each bigger and stronger than he, was disquieting at best. He said, “I don’t know. I want to find out why you like ale so much lately. I want to see if a god is meddling with your fate.”
He wished Baivers’ meddling weren’t so subtle he had trouble telling if it was even there. Till the Gradi came, he had enjoyed being free from interference at the hands of the Elabonian gods. Now, just when he really would have relished interference, he wasn’t sure whether he had any or not.
In the great hall, Carlun Vepin’s son sat at a corner table, well away from the four or five warriors in the chamber. The steward was quietly nursing a mug of ale. When Gerin called for another jar to be brought up from the cellar, Carlun’s face expressed ostentatious disapproval. Gerin was just as ostentatious about ignoring him.
Geroge smacked his lips as he guzzled ale. The Fox studied him in the same way he might have studied some curious new beast that had wandered in from the forest. “How do I find out why you’ve got so fond of ale?” he murmured.
“Because it tastes good? Because it makes me feel good?” Geroge suggested.
“But you’ve been drinking it since you were tiny,” the Fox said. Imagining Geroge as tiny wasn’t easy now. Gerin persisted nonetheless: “It made you feel good then, too, didn’t it?”
“Not as good as I feel now,” the monster said enthusiastically. Beside him, Tharma nodded, also with great vigor. She drained her jack of ale, then filled it again. Carlun tried to catch Gerin’s eye. Gerin didn’t let him.
“Does it feel better because you’re drinking more now,” Gerin asked, “or is there something over and above that, too?”
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