Selatre enjoyed the unwinding countryside as much as did Geroge and Tharma, and for the same reason. She’d not traveled far from Fox Keep since Gerin and Van saved her from the monsters and Drought her there more than a decade earlier. Before then, her only journey had been from the village where she grew up to Ikos to become Biton’s voice on earth. Everything she saw seemed fresh and new to her.
“You have no idea how lucky you are, being a man,” she told Gerin. “If you want to go somewhere, you up and go, and you don’t have to worry about it. How long has it been since I’ve been farther from the keep than the village close by?”
“I don’t know,” the Fox answered, “but the reason I leave the keep most often is that unfriendly strangers—or unfriendly neighbors—are trying to take what’s mine, and so I have the great privilege of giving them the chance to ventilate my carcass in ways the gods didn’t intend. That may be luck, but I’m not nearly sure it’s good luck.”
Had he said that to Elise, she would have got angry at him. Had Van said it to Fand, she not only would have got angry, she might have tried ventilating the outlander’s carcass in ways the gods didn’t intend. Selatre said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” A little later, she added, “The balance may be more nearly fair than it seemed when I’ve stayed behind. Not that it is, mind you—but more nearly.”
“I love you,” Gerin said, which left her looking puzzled but pleased.
When they camped that night, the ghosts were quieter than the Fox was used to, although the offering he and his men had given them—the blood of a couple of chickens bought from a roadside village—wasn’t much for as many men as they had.
“It was like this when we were bringing your lady from Ikos up to Castle Fox, too,” Van said to Gerin. “I remember. She calms the night spirits, that she does.”
“That’s true,” Gerin said. “It was like this then.” He scratched his head. On the earlier journey, Selatre was still a maiden, and barely removed from serving as Biton’s voice on earth, her only debarment being that the Fox had had to touch her to save her from the monsters unleashed in the earthquake. That was a long time ago now, and four children ago, too, though only three still lived. If Selatre still had the effect on the ghosts that she’d had then, it meant … what? That Biton still spoke through her? If he did, he’d given no sign of it, not in all those years. That he still paid attention to her?
When Gerin wondered about that out loud, Selatre shook her head. “If the farseeing one still watched over me, I would know,” she said. But then her face clouded—or perhaps it was just a trick of the light, the fires blending with golden Math’s nearly round disk, a couple of days from full, pale Nothos’ smaller gibbous fragment of a circle east of it, and Elleb’s slim young crescent. “I think I would know it.”
“When you were Sibyl, could you feel the god’s presence?” Gerin asked.
“I took it so much for granted, I never needed to feel it,” she answered, and then looked thoughtful. “Am I taking his absence so much for granted now, I’m not feeling it, either?” She laughed. “You’ve started me wondering.”
“We’ll find out,” the Fox said, and Selatre nodded. She had come along because of how useful she might be at Ikos, and she could be more useful than she’d dreamt if Biton did still pay attention to her and to what she did. Gerin hoped the god was paying attention. As he’d said, he’d find out before long.
The guards at the border between Bevander’s holding and the one that had been Ricolf’s looked to their weapons when Gerin and his companions bore down on them. Not so long before, they would have had those weapons ready to hand, for years of civil war among Bevander, his three brothers, and his father had wracked the holding north of them. Bevander had won with the Fox’s help, and brought quiet to a stretch of land that had known only turmoil for too long.
“Who seeks to enter this holding?” the chief guard called, which kept him from having to worry about whether to name it the former holding of Ricolf the Red or the holding of Duren Gerin’s son or to give it some other name altogether. Gerin approved of playing safe when you had the chance.
He named himself and Duren. That made the guards stir. Before they could say anything, he went on, “We make no claims on this holding now. All we are doing here today is passing through on the way to Ikos.”
“But, lord prince,” the leader of the guards said, “no one at the castle of—once of—Ricolf the Red will be ready to receive you. We had no word you were planning to come south.”
That had not been accidental. “It’s all right,” the Fox answered easily. “As I said, we’re only passing through. No need for anyone to go to any special pains over us.” He knew that would fluster the guards more than anything else he could say, but no help for it.
One of the troopers spotted Geroge and Tharma. “Those things!” he exclaimed. “I thought we were rid of those things for good.”
The monsters had drawn horrified looks ever since they left the vicinity of Fox Keep, where people were used to them. Gerin had warned them that would happen, in case the reactions of strangers coming to the keep hadn’t been warning enough. Now Geroge said, “I am not a thing. Are you a thing?” The guard stared at him. The last thing he’d expect was for Geroge to talk.
Gerin didn’t feel like discussing the monsters—or anything else—with the guards. Looking down his nose at their leader, he said, “Do we have your generous permission to pass through?”
They would pass through with or without the border guard’s generous permission, and his face said he knew it. Ignoring Gerin’s sardonic tone, he replied, “Aye, pass through in peace, and may you learn what you need at Ikos.”
Duren spoke up: “Thank you. Give me your name, for I value good vassalage.”
That pulled the guard up straighter. “Young lord, I’m Orbrin Darvan’s son, and pleased to make your acquaintance.” Now he waved the chariots and wagon through with a flourish.
At Van’s order, Raffo steered his chariot up near Gerin’s wagon. Van said, “I like that. The vassal barons will have a hard time raising any strife against your son if their men feel the way those guards do.”
“You’re right,” the Fox replied, “and Duren handled him just right, too. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble on the way south, as a matter of fact—not least because Authari and the other leading vassals won’t find out we’ve been here till we’re already gone. What worries me is the trip back from Ikos. They’ll have had time by then to ready whatever they aim to try.”
“Aye, likely so,” the outlander said. “Well, we deal with that when we come to it. Can’t do anything else.” Gerin could only nod; he’d been thinking the same thing himself.
Seeing the keep of Ricolf the Red, as he did late that afternoon, always made him feel strange, what with all the memories it brought to the surface. Seeing that keep with Selatre by his side felt stranger still. When he’d brought her up from Ikos, Ricolf had seen more between them than he had; he’d put the older man’s remarks down to the short temper of a former father-in-law. But now Selatre was his wife of many years, and Ricolf gone from men. Things changed.
He found out how much they had changed when a lookout called, the challenge: “Who comes to the castle to be Duren Gerin’s son’s?”
Gerin had been going to answer that challenge. When he heard how it was framed, he waved to his son instead. Duren said, “Duren Germ’s son comes to his own castle, not yet to live in it, but for a night’s shelter.”
That brought the drawbridge down in a hurry. The warriors who’d lowered it looked much less happy when they saw Geroge and Tharma in the chariot with Duren, but by then it was too late. Between them, Duren and Gerin managed to convince the soldiers the monsters were, if not harmless, at least unlikely to run wild unless provoked. A good look at their teeth gave an incentive against provoking them.
A lame old fellow name Ricrod Gondal’s son was serving as steward for the castle in the absence of a lord in res
idence. He settled Gerin and his comrades in the great hall and fed them barley porridge, roast duck, and ale. When Gerin poured a libation, he wondered if Baivers would manifest himself in the hall. The god did nothing, though, as Elabonian gods were all too wont to do.
Ghosts crowded the hall for Gerin—not the night spirits, pacified by blood and held at a distance by fire, but ghosts from his own past Rihwin, drunk and dancing obscenely; Wolfar of the Axe, an Elabonian as savage as any Gradi; Ricolf the Red himself, solid, steaay, reliable; and Elise, of whom he still could not think without pangs of regret.
He glanced over to Selatre. She had no ghosts here, and could not sense his. She was the present, the reality, and better than he’d known in days gone by. He understood that. Understanding it, though, did not make his ghosts vanish. They would be with him till he died.
“Lord,” Ricrod said, “what brings you back to this keep, your business in the north being unfinished?”
Gerin started to answer, but realized Ricrod had not directed the question at him. The steward had not said lord prince, and the Fox was not lord here. Duren was. He replied, “I’m bound for Ikos, with my father and my companions. If the gods are kind, it will help end the business in the north.”
The gods Gerin sought under the Sibyl’s shrine were unlikely to be kind. The less kind they were, in fact, the more likely they were to be useful to his cause. Ricrod, though, nodded and said, “I hope farseeing Biton gives you an answer you can unriddle fast enough for it to do you some good.”
“I hope we can use what we learn, too,” Duren said. He had not said a word about Biton. He’d let Ricrod draw his own conclusions, then encouraged him to believe they were right, all without telling a lie as he did it. Gerin was impressed. He couldn’t have handled it any more neatly himself.
Selatre had seen the same thing. That night, in the chamber the steward had given them, she said to Gerin, “He’ll do well here. He handles himself like a man: more so here, away from Fox Keep, where he’s your son first. He’s ready to rule.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Gerin answered, “and so do … some of the vassal barons here. If we win, if Duren comes down here to take up his grandfather’s barony, it will feel very strange at Fox Keep, not having him around. I’ll have to start training up Dagref, see how he shapes.”
Selatre laughed quietly. “It won’t be a matter of his not knowing enough to lead men. The question will be whether they want to follow him or to wring his neck.”
“That is one of the questions,” the Fox agreed, laughing. Then he fell into a thoughtful silence. If Dagref did shape as a leader of men, was Gerin to leave his title to his son by Selatre and have Duren, as baron of one small holding, overshadowed by his younger half brother? Or was he to name Duren his heir in all matters and leave Dagref frustrated and resentful? Either path could lead to war between them.
Best way to solve the problem, Gerin thought, is not to die. The gray spreading in his beard warned him that solution, however desirable, wasn’t practical—and that didn’t consider unfriendly weapons at all. Plenty of trouble around already, the Fox reminded himself. No need to borrow more. No telling how Dagref would shape. If he couldn’t lead and Duren could, nothing Gerin did for him would matter after the Fox was gone.
Selatre stirred on the rather lumpy bed. She’d always cared for Duren as if he were one of her own, and she’d never yet pushed for her children at his expense. But she couldn’t be blind to the ties of blood, either. One of these days, she and Gerin would have to hash it out. This was not going to be the day, though. Like Gerin, she recognized that waiting sometimes solved problems better than arguing about them.
“We’ll see,” Selatre said at last, and then, as if fearing even that might have been too much, she added, “It’s not that we don’t have plenty of other things to see about first.”
“Oh, is that why we’re here and on our way to Ikos?” Gerin said. “And all the time I thought we were traveling for the fun of it.” Selatre snorted and poked him in the ribs. Before long, lumpy mattress or no, they both fell asleep.
Gerin almost missed the standing stone carved with the winged eye that marked the track leading from the Elabon Way east to the town of Ikos and the shrine of Biton it served. He cursed under his breath; every time he wanted to go to the shrine, he had to worry about getting lost along the way.
As before, the country between the highway and the forest surrounding the valley of Ikos left him dismayed. People would be a long time making up for the devastation first from the earthquake and then the monsters. The survivors who still struggled to make a go of farming were sadly overworked; he would have had more sympathy yet for them had they not been in the habit of sometimes robbing travelers before misfortune had smote. When they saw Geroge and Tharma, they fled for the shelter of the woods by their fields. They knew all they cared to of monsters.
One of the things Gerin had not thought about was how the enchanted forest around Ikos would react to the presence of the monsters. The Fox rarely missed important details, which made his discomfiture when he did all the more acute. Geroge and Tharma stared about with interest when, along with Gerin and Selatre and their companions, they plunged into the cool greenness of the track through that forest and under the leafy canopies of its trees.
The forest seemed to stare, too, and then to exclaim in outrage. Ten years before, the monsters must have worked outrages untold under those trees. And the trees seemed to remember, as did all the other strange creatures living in the forest, creatures a traveler who stayed on the path never saw but whose presence he often sensed, like a prickling at the back of his neck. Gerin felt more than a prickling now. He felt as if the whole forest full of all of those mysterious creatures, whatever they were, were about to fall on him and his companions—and that, when they were done, nothing whatever would be left to show he’d been rash enough to come this way.
Beside him, Selatre quivered. He wondered what she was feeling. Before he could ask—saying anything, here and now, took a distinct effort of will—she spoke, and loudly: “By farseeing Biton, I swear we all”—she stressed the last word—“come in peace, meaning no harm to this wood or to any in it.”
Her words were not swallowed among the thick gray-brown boles of the trees, as others had been before them. Instead, they seemed to echo and reecho, somehow spreading farther from the path than they had any natural business doing, After that, the feeling of menace vanished, far more suddenly than it had grown.
“Thank you for winning the argument about whether you should come,” Gerin said.
Selatre seemed as pleased and surprised as he was. “That worked—very well, didn’t it?” she said in a small voice. Unlike the words of her oath, the reply did not ripple outward from the wagon.
When the Fox and his companions emerged from the strange and ancient wood, Geroge and Tharma both sighed with relief. “I didn’t like that place,” Geroge said, “not after the first little bit. It made me feel all funny inside.”
“That place makes everyone feel funny inside,” Gerin said. Then he glanced over to Selatre. “Almost everyone.”
“And you wonder why Dagref has a way of pitching a fit if everything isn’t exactly right,” she said. The Fox maintained a dignified silence, knowing any other response would only leave him vulnerable to more truths from his wife. But Selatre was looking down into the valley of Ikos from the high ground on which they had paused. ‘The shrine, I see, looks as it always did—the god promised it would, so of course it must—but how sad and shrunken the town seems.”
“I thought that when I came here to ask you what had become of Duren, all these years ago,” Gerin answered. “Ikos started to wither when it couldn’t draw questioners from south of the High Kirs. The earthquake and the fires it started made things worse, though; I wouldn’t argue with that.”
As they had earlier in the year, the innkeepers of Ikos greeted Gerin and his comrades with joy pure and unalloyed, save perhaps by greed. Whe
n it seemed as if that greed were about to keep their rates altogether extortionate, Van scowled at them and said, “We could just camp out in the open. We’ve got hard bread and smoked sausage, and in the god’s valley fires should be enough to hold the ghosts at bay.” Reason suddenly reentered the conversation, and Gerin got his men settled and horses stabled for about what he’d expected to pay, or perhaps even a bit less.
“So strange,” Selatre said, over and over. “When you come back to a place you knew well, you expect it to be as it was when you left it. Seeing Ikos like this …” She shook her head.
A temple guardsman, a grizzled veteran, sat drinking ale in the taproom of the inn Gerin had chosen for himself and Selatre, and for Duren and Van, Geroge and Tharma. When the fellow saw the monsters, he coughed and choked and grabbed for his sword. Gerin had just managed to calm him down when he took a longer look at Selatre. Instead of choking again, he went white. “Lady,” he blurted, “you’re dead! Farseeing Biton has a new voice now.”
“Farseeing Biton has a new voice,” Selatre agreed. “As for the other, Clell, I thought you were dead, too, and glad I am to be wrong.”
“Some few of us did live,” Clell answered. “When we saw how many monsters came boiling up out from under the shrine, we went up into the woods, and skulked there like bandits, you might say, till the day all the monsters disappeared. Almost all the monsters,” he amended, casting a dubious eye toward Geroge and Tharma.
“You went up into those woods?” Gerin pointed back at the haunted forest through which he’d just passed. He leaned forward, intense curiosity on his face. “You couldn’t have stayed on—you couldn’t have stayed near—the road that runs through them. What is it like, in there away from the road?”
“It’s not like anything.” The temple guard shivered. His eyes went wide and faraway. “I never would have done it—none of us would have done it—if it hadn’t been a choice between that and the monsters. We lived, most of us, so I guess we did right, but …” His voice trailed off.
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