“Go ahead and tell him,” Grus answered. “I think he knows I know what he thinks of me.” He listened to what he’d just said. “Did that come out right?”
“I think so,” Alca said. “All right, Your Majesty. I’ll attend to it.”
Lanius stared at the bright-eyed witch. “You want to work what kind of magic on me?” he said.
“One that will measure the strength of a spell to detect dislike and disloyalty toward King Grus,” Alca said again.
One that would give Grus an excuse for getting rid of me, Lanius thought. “You wouldn’t find anything,” he said. “How can I dislike King Grus when I’m married to his daughter?” He was sure his life was at stake here. If Grus can claim I’m plotting against him, he’ll dispose of me as fast as he can.
“You misunderstand, Your Majesty,” Alca told him. “King Grus told me he already has an idea of your feelings, and won’t worry about what they are. All he cares about is using them to measure the way the spell works.”
“He told you that, did he?” Lanius said suspiciously.
Alca nodded. “He did.”
“Well, regardless of whether he told you that or not, why should I believe it?” Lanius demanded.
“May I speak frankly, Your Majesty?”
“Why not?” Lanius didn’t bother trying to hide his bitterness. “It’s not as though I can do anything to you any which way.” He eyed the witch. She wasn’t far from his mother’s age, and seemed nice enough. A few years before, that would have made him want to trust her. Now it made him more suspicious than ever; he wondered whether Grus had chosen her to lull him into a false sense of safety.
But then she said, “Even so, Your Majesty. And Grus would need no special excuse to get rid of you … if he wanted to do that. He could do it, and then give out whatever reason he chose after he had. Am I right or am I wrong?”
No one, not even Grus, had ever spelled out Lanius’ helplessness quite that way before. Now, all at once, Lanius began to think he would hear truth from this woman. He said, “You tell me he will only use what you learn here to go after enemies he doesn’t already know about?”
Alca nodded once more. “That is exactly what I tell you. Ask King Grus, if you like, and he will tell you the same.”
“Never mind,” Lanius said. “The point is, I believe you. Go ahead. Make your magic.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Alca said. “I’ll be back directly, then. I need to bring a few things here.”
The spell proved much more formidable than Lanius had expected. The witch peered at him through peacock feathers, and through what looked like picture frames first of horn and then of ivory, while she chanted and made passes. She had a couple of retorts bubbling over braziers during the spell. One of them sent up yellowish smoke, the other reddish. Lanius expected to smell the sweetness of incense, but the odors that reached his nose were harsher, more acrid. He coughed once or twice.
Alca’s chant rose and fell, rose and fell. The spell took longer than Lanius had thought it would, too. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers and said, “It doesn’t have to be this showy, does it?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Your Majesty,” Alca said when she found a moment to pause in her enchanting.
“I think you do,” he said. “I think you’re making this magic fancy on purpose, to overawe the people you aim it at.”
She paused. Her eyes gleamed as she peered at him in a new and thoughtful way. He wasn’t sure he wanted anybody looking at him like that, but realized he’d invited it. After that long, thoughtful silence, she said, “You see through things, don’t you?”
“You mean, the way a wizard sees through things?” Lanius shook his head. “I have no gift along those lines. I wish I did.”
Alca shook her head. “No, that isn’t what I meant, Your Majesty,” she answered. “I can tell you will never make a wizard, yes. But what of that? A man who is learned and wise sees through things in his own way, too.”
“Do you think so?” Lanius won praise so seldom, he wanted to blossom like a flower in sunlight when he did. But praise also made him suspicious. He was King of Avornis, after all. What did someone who flattered him want?
If the witch wanted anything from him, she hid it very well. “I do, Your Majesty,” she answered, and then said, “And now, if you’ll excuse me …” When Lanius didn’t say no, she packed up her sorcerous apparatus and left without another word.
King Grus stood before his assembled captains and couriers in the square in front of the palace, Alca the witch at his side. He bowed to her as to an intimate friend. She dropped him a fine curtsy in return. He spoke with unusual formality to the men through whom he ran Avornis. “Alca is an extraordinary woman, and has served me extraordinarily well. Not only did she save my life when foul wizardry beset me, but, through her own rare magical talent, she has found a perfect way for me to test the hearts of those in my command, and to know exactly who is in the pay of the Thervings, or of Corvus and Corax the traitors … or of the Banished One.”
Alca stirred beside him when he said that. “Your Majesty, when a mortal pits his sorceries against those of the Banished One, he usually loses,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t tell them that I—”
“Hush,” he said, also quietly. “You may know I’m not telling the whole truth, but they don’t, do they?”
“Ah.” Ever so slightly, the witch’s eyes widened. Still speaking in that tiny whisper, she went on, “You’re sneakier than I thought.”
With a bland smile, Grus answered, “Me? Sneaky? I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” Alca rewarded him with a noise halfway between a snort and a snicker. She knew him well enough not to take that too seriously.
His officers and ministers, on the other hand … Looking as regal as he could, Grus stared out at them. His face might have been carved from marble, like the relief portraits of long-dead Kings of Avornis set into the palace walls as decoration—and perhaps to intimidate the kings who came after them.
The men’s faces were livelier and more interesting. Some of them, like Nicator, looked delighted that he could sniff out enemies with the witch’s help. Others, like Lepturus, showed little—but then, Lepturus never showed much. Three or four tried to look delighted and ended up looking bilious instead. A couple seemed angry. Angry that I presume to spy on their thoughts, or angry that I might discover their treason? Grus wondered. And one or two looked terrified. The king knew that didn’t necessarily prove anything, but noted who they were even so.
“Before long, Alca will call in each of you and work her magic,” he said. “And we will go on and beat our foes. For now, my friends, you’re dismissed.” He waved, as though shooing them out of the square.
In a low voice, Alca said, “You know, Your Majesty, you might be able to get the same result if I knew no magic at all. So long as those people think I know what’s in their hearts, they’ll behave as though I really do.”
“Yes, that occurred to me,” Grus answered. “We’ll go on from here, and we’ll see what happens next.”
What happened next was that two ministers and three officers slipped out of the city of Avornis. Grus wasn’t surprised to hear they’d surfaced with Corvus. He was a little surprised when one of Arch-Hallow Bucco’s aides disappeared from the capital. So, by all appearances, was Bucco. “I never thought the man anything but a hard-working, holy priest,” the arch-hallow said.
“I believe you,” Grus told him. “Just to be on the safe side, though, I’d like you to let Alca test you with her spell.”
“You cannot doubt me, Your Majesty!” Bucco exclaimed. “After all, I put the crown on your head.”
“And you would have put it on Corvus’, if he hadn’t made a hash of his chance,” Grus answered. “We both know that’s true, don’t we? So I had better find out what’s in your heart.”
He didn’t say what he would do if Bucco refused to let the witch use her wizardry. He didn’t have to say anyt
hing. Letting Bucco draw his own pictures worked much better. Several men had fled before Alca could see their secrets. The arch-hallow didn’t. He went to his sorcerous appointment with the air of a cat going into a washtub, but he went. When he and the witch emerged, Alca said, “He is tolerably loyal to Your Majesty.”
“Good,” Grus said heartily. “I expected nothing else.”
That made Bucco bristle. “If you expected nothing else, why did you put me through that humiliating ordeal?”
Grus’ smile seemed to show as many teeth as a moncat’s. “Because what you don’t expect can hurt you worse than what you do.” Bucco bowed stiffly and left the palace as fast as his old legs would carry him.
“Whom shall I examine next, Your Majesty?” Alca asked.
The smile Grus gave her was of a different sort. “For the time being, I think you can let your spell rest. If you use it too often, you’re liable to cause more disloyalty than you root out.”
She nodded. “I knew that. I wasn’t sure you did.”
“Oh, yes,” Grus said. “Oh, yes, indeed.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Lanius said to Sosia.
“Mind? Why should I mind?” she answered. “You’re my husband.”
Things weren’t quite so simple. Lanius knew as much. He was sure she did, too. Even so, he asked, “Do you know why your brother”—he didn’t want to call Ortalis Prince Ortalis, but didn’t dare leave off the title when speaking of him by name, either—“has that bandage on his right hand?”
“I don’t know, no,” Sosia said. “But I don’t think he had it before he went into the room where you keep Iron these days.”
Ice walked up Lanius’ back. “That’s what I thought, too. But Iron’s still all right. I bet it bit him or scratched him before he could hurt it. What am I going to do?”
“Talk to my father,” she said at once. “If anyone can put a stop to it for a while, he can.”
It wasn’t a long answer. Still, Lanius had seldom heard one that gave him more to chew on. That for a while was truly frightening. But so was the prospect of talking to King Grus. “Why should he do anything at all?” Lanius asked bitterly. “Ortalis … Prince Ortalis is his son. I’m just … me.”
“Oh, he knows about Ortalis,” Sosia said. “He’s known about Ortalis and animals for a long time. He can make Ortalis fear the gods … for a while. I don’t think anyone can make Ortalis do any more than that. It’s like he has a demon inside, and every so often it comes out—or maybe more like he has a hole inside himself, and every so often he falls into it. If you want to keep the moncats safe, you’d better talk to my father.”
Where nothing else would have, that did it. More than anything else, Lanius did want to make sure the moncats stayed safe. And so, nervously, he spoke to Grus. To his surprise, the man who’d stolen part of his throne and all of his power heard him out. The more Grus heard, the colder and harder his face got. When Lanius finished, Grus said, “Thanks for telling me. Don’t worry about the beasts. He won’t bother them again.”
“How will you stop him?” Lanius asked. “What will you do?”
“Whatever I have to,” Grus said grimly. For the first time, Lanius began to believe Sosia had known what she was talking about.
The next time he saw Prince Ortalis, his brother-in-law scuttled out of his way. Ortalis moved as though in some little pain, or perhaps some not so little. And he stayed away from the rooms where the moncats lived for a long time afterward. There, at least, Grus kept his promise.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Colonel Hirundo watched King Grus with more than a little amusement. Grus’ mount was a bay gelding calm as a pond on a breezeless day, but the king clutched the reins and gripped the horse with his knees as though afraid of falling at any moment—which he was. “Meaning no offense, Your Majesty, but you’ll never make a horseman,” Hirundo remarked.
“Really? Why on earth would you say such a thing? Because I’m as graceful as a sack of beans on horseback?”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes.”
“So what?” Grus said. “I give the men something to laugh at. Better they could laugh than quiver in their boots for fear of bumping into Dagipert and the Thervings.”
“When you put it that way, maybe,” Hirundo said.
“Whether I’m a horseman or not, Colonel, I have my reasons for coming along, believe you me I do,” Grus said. “I don’t want to stay in the capital the rest of my days. I want to see more of Avornis than that. How can I deal with what goes on in the kingdom if I don’t keep an eye on it?”
“Plenty of Kings of Avornis have tried,” Hirundo observed. Like Grus, he had risen in the world since their wars against the Menteshe in the south.
“I don’t intend to be one of them,” Grus said.
He was glad to escape the capital, even if escaping it meant going into battle against the Thervings. An army on the march, he was discovering, was different from a fleet of river galleys on the move. In one way, the army had the advantage—it could go anywhere, while available waterways limited the fleet. But the army carried its own stink with it, a heavy odor compounded of the smells of horses and unwashed men. It stayed in Grus’ nostrils and would not go away. Even after his conscious mind forgot about it, it lingered. He smelled it in his dreams.
He led the soldiers west, toward Thervingia, toward danger. No one could doubt the Thervings had used this route to come through Avornis and approach the capital in the recent past. The signs were all too clear—torched villages, empty farmsteads, fields that should have been full of ripening grain going to weeds, instead. Once, Grus’ army came upon what was left of a detachment of Avornan soldiers King Dagipert’s men had met and overwhelmed. Not much remained of the Avornans—only a few scattered bones still recognizable as human, and fragments of clothing enough to identify them as Grus’ countrymen. The Thervings had stolen everything they found worth taking.
“This could happen to us, too,” Grus told the men he led. “It could—if we aren’t careful. If we are, though, nothing can beat us. We just have to watch ourselves, don’t we?”
“Yes,” the soldiers chorused dutifully. He also watched them, sometimes in ways they didn’t expect. He posted extra sentries that evening on the roads leading east, for instance. Those sentries captured six or eight men trying to slip away from the danger they’d seen. Grus didn’t make examples of them, as he might have. But he didn’t let them desert, either. Back to the encampment they went.
Whenever the army passed woods on its way west, Grus sent scouts into them. He didn’t want to give Dagipert the chance to ambush him, as the King of Thervingia had ambushed other Avornan armies. Three days after the army found what was left of that Avornan detachment, the scouts Grus sent to examine a frowning pine forest burst out of it much faster than they’d gone in. They came galloping back toward the main mass of men.
“Thervings!” they shouted. “The Thervings are in the woods!”
“Good!” Grus exclaimed, though he was anything but sure how good it was. “Now we can make them pay for what they’ve done to Avornis.” He raised his voice to a shout like the one he might have used aboard a river galley. “Revenge!”
“Revenge!” the soldiers echoed.
Grus had never led a battle on land before. He didn’t try to lead this one now, either, not really. He’d brought Colonel Hirundo here for just that reason. Hirundo handled the job with unruffled competence. At his orders, horns bellowed from metal throats and signal flags waved. The Avornan soldiers shook themselves out, moving from column to line of battle as smoothly as Grus could have hoped. As they were deploying, Hirundo turned to Grus and asked, “What now, Your Majesty? Do we await the enemy on open ground here, or do we go into the woods after them?”
“Into the woods,” Grus replied at once. “They won’t surprise us now.”
Hirundo nodded. “All right. I hoped you’d say that. If you’d care to do the honors …?”
�
��What do you—? Oh.” Grus raised his voice again, this time shouting, “Forward!”
The Avornans cheered as they began to advance. Grus and Hirundo both weighed those cheers, trying to gauge the army’s spirit from them. At almost the same instant, they both nodded. Despite the attempted desertions a few nights before, the soldiers seemed ready enough to fight.
Well before the Avornans could push in among the pines, Thervings began emerging from them. They formed their own line of battle, which looked more rugged than the Avornans’, then surged toward Grus’ men, roaring like beasts.
“Come on, boys!” Colonel Hirundo called gaily. “Now we get to pay these bastards back for everything they’ve done to Avornis lately. King Grus!” When he used it, he had a pretty good battlefield roar himself.
“King Grus!” The shout rose from the Avornans. Men also yelled, “King Lanius!” Grus knew he couldn’t complain about that. Lanius was, after all, still king, and they were cheering the dynasty as much as the young man.
To show he didn’t mind, he shouted, “King Lanius!” himself, and then, “Avornis and victory!” He hoped it would be victory.
Dagipert’s men, though, had other things in mind. They cried out their king’s name, as well as guttural bits of Thervingian. Grus didn’t know any of the mountain men’s language, but doubted they were complimenting either Avornis or him.
Most of the Thervings were on foot. The Avornan army had more horsemen than foot soldiers. Hirundo led them to the wings, to try to outflank the Thervings and soften them up with arrows. The Thervings’ riders stayed in the center of their line, in a tight knot around a wolfhide standard. That’s Dagipert’s emblem, Grus realized. He spurred toward it, brandishing his sword.
“Come on, Dagipert!” he yelled. “Fight me, or show yourself a coward!”
The King of Thervingia was at least twenty years older than he was. But if he could cut Dagipert down, he would cut the heart out of the Thervings. And what if you fall yourself, instead? You’re still a long way from the best horseman the gods ever made. Once upon a time, a King of Thervingia had beaten a King of Avornis in single combat and made a drinking cup from his skull.
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