“The notion does not entertain me.” Ricolf kicked at the dirt again. “Well, we’ll speak of that later. What’s your pleasure for supper? We killed a sheep this afternoon, so there’s mutton, or we can chop a couple of hens down to size if the two of you would rather.”
“Mutton,” Gerin and Van said in the same breath. The Fox added, “We’ve been traveling a good deal these past few days, and mostly supping on the fowls we’ve killed as blood-offerings for the ghosts.”
“Thought as much,” Ricolf answered, “but I figured I owed you the choice.” He was indeed meticulous in observing the rituals of guest-friendship.
Inside Ricolf’s great hall, fat-wrapped bones smoked on Dyaus’ altar. At the cookfire, servants roasted ribs and chops. A big bronze pot boiled busily above it. Van stabbed a finger toward it. “That’ll be the tongue and tripe, the lungs and lights?” he asked.
“Aye,” Ricolf said. “Which of the dainties do you care for most?”
“The tongue,” the outlander answered at once. “Have you got any rock salt to scatter on it?”
“I do that,” Ricolf answered, a Trokmê turn of phrase he probably would not have used before he got woodsrunners for neighbors. “The holding has several good licks, one of them near big enough to mine salt from.”
Had Ricolf’s holding been Gerin’s, he suspected he would have mined salt and sold it to his neighbors. The only concern Ricolf had beyond his own borders was foes who might come at him. Past that, he was content with his land as he found it. Gerin wondered if he himself would ever be content with anything.
Bread and ale and meat distracted him from such worries. He gnawed roasted mutton from ribs, then tossed them to the dogs. Tripe was slippery and gluey under his knife, chewy in his mouth. The kidneys’ strong smell cut through the smoke that filled the hall and foretold their flavor.
He stuffed himself full, but Van outdid him. Ricolf watched the outlander with awe tinged by alarm. He said, “Dyaus, I’d forgotten how you put it away. You could eat a man out of his barony.”
“There’s a deal of me to keep fed,” Van replied with dignity. “Would you pass me the pitcher of ale? Ah, thank you, you’re very kind.” He poured from the pitcher into a delicately carved rhyton, part of the great stock of southron goods Ricolf had laid on to impress the band of suitors for Elise’s hand. Elise was gone. The drinking horns, the even more elaborately carved bathtub, and other such things remained, and probably lacerated Ricolf’s spirit whenever he saw or used them.
Van poured the horn of ale down his throat, hardly seeming to swallow. He filled it again, drained it with the same ease. By the look Ricolf gave him, the older man expected him to slide under the table at any moment. Instead, he got up and spoke softly to one of the young women who’d fetched food. Gerin listened to her giggle and was not surprised when, a little later, she and the outlander went upstairs together.
The Fox wished he could have gone upstairs, too, even alone, but Ricolf’s eyes held him. The white-haired baron said, “Your harvests must have been good in spite of everything, or you’d not be able to afford to keep him around.”
“I don’t begrudge him his appetites,” Gerin answered. “Not any of them. The rest of his spirit is in proportion.”
“As may be, as may be.” But Van was not what Ricolf wanted to talk about, and Gerin knew it. Ricolf stared down at his own drinking horn for a while before he went on, “Well, Fox, what in the five hells happened?”
“With Duren, you mean? You’ve heard everything I know about that,” Gerin answered. “Someone snatched the boy, and when I find out who he was, he’ll be sorry for the day his father woke up with a stiff one in his breeches.”
“Oh, no doubt.” Ricolf drank, smacked his lips, brought his fist down onto the table. “You’ll track the whoreson down and make him pay. You’re bloody good at all that sort of thing. Prince of the North these days, are you? I’ll not deny you’ve earned the title. You hold more land—or control it, which amounts to the same think—than anyone else in the northlands save maybe Aragis and one or two of the cursed Trokmoi, and you run it better, too.”
“You’re generous.” The Fox also took a pull at his ale. He could feel it buzzing inside his head. Maybe that was what made him burst out, “I wish I were shut of the whole business, and just left to be what I’d like.”
“So do we all,” Ricolf said. “But you do it well, like it or no. Which brings me to what I’d truly learn: how was it you didn’t do as well by Elise?”
Gerin wished he were drunk enough to fall asleep—or a good enough mime to pretend he was that drunk. But he wasn’t, not either one—and he knew he owed Ricolf an answer. He drank some more, as much to give himself time to think as for any other reason. Ricolf waited, patient and stubbornly unmoving as a boulder.
“I suppose part of it was that her life at Fox Keep wasn’t as different as she’d hoped from what she had here,” Gerin said slowly. He snorted air out through his nose. Wherever Elise was now, she’d surely found a different life. Whether it was better was a different question altogether.
“Go on,” Ricolf said.
“You know what the first flush of passion is like,” Gerin said. “It masks everything bad or even boring about whomever it lights on. After a while, though, you can wake up and realize this isn’t what you had in mind. I—suppose that’s what Elise did.”
“None of it your fault, eh?” Ricolf’s rumbling baritone flung sarcasm as a catapult flung stones.
“I didn’t say that,” Gerin answered. “Looking back, I guess I took a lot for granted. I figured everything was all right because she didn’t complain out loud—and I’ve always been one who doesn’t necessarily expect things to be perfect all the time, so I didn’t worry so much when they weren’t. I think perhaps Elise did after we fell in love, and when things got rocky, they looked worse to her than maybe they really were. If I’d realized that sooner … oh, who knows what I’d have done?”
Ricolf chewed on that with the air of a man finding something on his plate other than what he’d expected. Now he drank and thought a while before he spoke: “I respect that knack you have, Fox, for looking at yourself and talking about yourself as if you were someone else. Not many can do it.”
“For this I thank you,” Gerin said.
“Don’t.” Ricolf held up a big-knuckled hand. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know how to do anything but stand back from yourself, and from everybody around you. You talked about how my daughter might have felt after passion cooled, but what about you? Did you go back into that keep inside your head, the one you mostly live in?”
“You shame me,” Gerin said quietly.
“Why? For asking a question?”
“No, because the answer is so likely to be yes, and you know it very well.” If sarcasm had stung, truth cut like a knife, the more so for being unexpected.
Ricolf yawned. “I’m getting old to sit around drinking half the night,” he said. “Come to that, I’m getting old for anything else, too. Only a handful of serfs on this holding who were born before I was. One winter not so far from now lung sickness will get me, or I’ll fall over with an apoplexy. That wouldn’t be too bad—quick, anyhow.”
“You’re strong yet,” Gerin said, alarmed for his host. Few men spoke so openly of death, lest a god be listening. “If you do go out, you’ll go fighting.”
“That could happen, too,” Ricolf said. “I’m not as fast nor as strong as I was, and there’s plenty of fighting around. And what becomes of the holding then? I’d hoped to last long enough to pass it on to Duren, but now—”
“Aye, but now,” Gerin echoed. If Ricolf died heirless, his vassal barons would brawl over the holding, just as Bevon’s sons had been doing for so long further north. And Ricolf’s neighbors would be drawn in, Aragis coming up from the south, the Trokmoi from the west perhaps biting off a chunk … and the Fox did not see how he could stand aloof. He even had a claim of sorts to the barony.
&nb
sp; As if picking that from his head, Ricolf said, “Aye, a couple of my vassals might think well of you because you were wed to Elise. More of ’em, though, are likely to think less of you because she ran off. And if she ever came back here wed to a man with a fighting tail of his own—”
Gerin upended his drinking horn, poured the last draft down his throat. That thought, or rather nightmare, had crossed is mind, too, most often of nights when he was having trouble sleeping. He said, “I have no notion how likely that is, nor what I’d do if it happened. A lot would depend on who and what the fellow was.”
“On whether you thought you could use him, you mean.” Ricolf spoke without rancor. He drained his own rhyton, then pushed to his feet. “I’m going up to bed. Do you want to come along, so I can show you the chamber I’ve set aside for you? The keep’s not packed with suitors now; I don’t have to give you one of the little rooms down here off the kitchens.”
“I’ll come,” Gerin said, and rose, too. Ricolf carried a lamp as they went up the stairs. He didn’t say anything. The Fox counted that something of a minor triumph. He’d been dreading this interview since the day Elise left him, and he seemed to have got through it.
Ricolf opened a door. As Gerin walked through it into the little bedchamber the lamplight revealed, the older man asked quietly, “Do you miss her?”
Another knife in the night. Gerin said, “Yes, now and then. Quite a lot, sometimes.” He stepped into the room and shut the door before Ricolf could stab him with any more questions.
South of Ricolf’s holding, the land grew debatable once more. Gerin and Van traveled in armor, the Fox keeping his bow ready to hand. The Elabon Way seemed all but deserted. That suited Gerin fine: the fewer people he saw, the fewer people who saw him. He knew too well how vulnerable the wagon was to a good-sized band of raiders.
The roads that ran into the Elabon Way from east and west were dirt tracks like the ones up in the Fox’s holding. Pieces of the Elabon Way were just dirt here, too; peasants had prised up the paving stones for the houses, and maybe barons for their keeps, too. That hadn’t been so the last time Gerin visited Ikos, five years before.
He said, “Taking stones from the roadway used to be a crime that would cost a man his head or put him up on a cross. A good law, if you ask me; roads are a land’s lifeblood.”
“No law left up here but what comes from the edge of a sword,” Van said. “Most lands are like that, when you get down to it.”
“South of the High Kirs, Elabon isn’t, or wasn’t,” Gerin said. “Law counted for more than might there, for a lot of years. It was even true here for a while. No more, though. You’re not wrong about that.”
They rolled slowly past another connecting road. At the crossroads stood a granite boulder carved with pictures showing where the road led: a crude keep surrounded by farms and horses. “That’s not the one we want, eh, Captain?” Van said.
“No. We’re looking for an eye with wings—that’s Biton’s mark. We’re not far enough south to come to it yet, I don’t think. I hope it will still be there; some of the crossroads stones I thought I remembered from my last trip to the Sibyl aren’t here any more.”
“You were paying attention to stones?” Van shook his head in disbelief. “Far as I could see, you were so busy panting over Elise, you didn’t have eyes for anything else.”
“Thank you, my friend. I needed that just now, I truly did,” Gerin said. The visit with Ricolf had left him glum enough. If Van was going to rub salt in the wounds, they’d sting even worse.
But Van, perhaps mercifully, kept quiet after that. Like Gerin’s, his eyes went back and forth, back and forth. Every time the wagon went by a clump of bushes or some elm saplings growing closer to the road than they should have, he shifted the reins to his left hand so he could grab his spear in a hurry if he needed it.
The Fox soon became certain some crossroads stones were missing: he and Van rolled past a hollow in the ground that showed where one had recently been removed—so recently the grass hadn’t filled in all the bare dirt. “Someone’s losing trade on account of that,” he said sadly. “I wonder if he even knows.”
About halfway between noon and sunset, Gerin spied the winged eye he sought. “I’d have guessed it’d be there,” Van said. “You steal it, you’re fooling with a god, and what man with a dram of sense does that?”
“How many men have sense?” Gerin returned, which made his comrade grunt. He added, “Not only that, how many are wise enough to realize they’re stealing from Biton and not just from some petty lordlet?”
“They don’t know beforehand, they’ll find out pretty soon,” Van said, which was likely enough to be true that Gerin had to nod. The farseeing god looked after what was his.
The wagon swung east down the road that led to the Sibyl and her fane. Gerin remembered the lands away from the Elabon Way as poorer than the baronies along the main north-south route. They didn’t seem so now. That wasn’t because they’d grown richer. Rather, the holdings along the chief highway had suffered more from the Trokmoi and from the nobles’ squabbles among themselves.
When Elabon conquered and held the northlands, the road that bore the Empire’s name had also been one of the chief routes along which colonists had settled. Farther from the Elabon Way, the folk native to the land were more in evidence. They were dark like Elabonians, but slimmer and more angular, their faces full of forehead and cheekbones.
Old customs lingered away from the highway, too. Lords’ castles grew scarce; most of the peasant villages held freeholders, men who owed no part of their crop to a baron. Gerin wondered how they’d fared when Trokmê raiders swooped down on them: they had no lords to ride to their defense, either.
The freeholders measured him and Van with their eyes when the travelers paused in a village to buy a hen before evening caught them. “You’re for the Sibyl, then?” asked the man who sold it to them. His Elabonian had a curious flavor to it, not quite an accent, but old-fashioned, as if currents of speech had swept up the Elabon Way, too, but never reached this little hamlet.
“That we are,” Gerin answered.
“You’ve rich gear,” the peasant observed. “Be you nobles?”
Van spoke first: “Me, I’m just a warrior. Anyone who tries taking this corselet off my back will find out what kind of warrior I am, and won’t be happier for knowing, either.”
“I can take care of myself, too,” Gerin said. Peasants without lords had to defend themselves, which meant they needed weapons and armor. Robbing people who already had them seemed a likely way to acquire such.
If that was in the peasant’s mind, he didn’t let on (but then, he wouldn’t, Gerin thought). He said, “Aye, the both of you have that look. Go on, then, and the gods watch over you through the night.”
As soon as they were out of earshot, Gerin spoke to Van, who was driving: “Put as much space between that village and us as you can. If you find a side road just before sunset, go up it or down it a ways. We’ll want to camp where we can hide our nightfire.”
“Right you are,” Van said. “I’d have done the same thing without your saying a word, mind, but I’m glad you have the same thoughts in mind as I do. On your watch, sleep with your bow, your sword, and your shield and helm where you can grab them in a hurry.”
“If I thought I could, I’d sleep in armor tonight,” the Fox said. Van grunted out a short burst of laughter and nodded.
They traveled until the ghosts began to wail in their ears. Then, setting his jaw, Gerin sacrificed the hen to calm the spirits. A boulder shielded the light of the fire from the little track down which they traveled to get off the main road to Ikos.
Gerin had the first watch. Nothos and Tiwaz stood close together, low in the east at sunset: both were approaching full, though swift-moving Tiwaz would reach it a couple of days sooner than Nothos. Math would not rise until almost halfway through his watch, and Van alone could commune with Elleb, for the ruddy moon would stay below the horizon till a
fter midnight.
The Fox moved as far away from the fire and the blood-filled trench near it as the ghosts would allow: he wanted to be sure he could spot trouble coming down the road from the village where he’d bought the chicken. His bow was strung, his quiver on his back and ready for him to reach over his shoulder and pull out a bronze-tipped shaft.
Sure enough, just about the time when golden Math began peeping through the leaves of the trees, he heard men coming along the road from the west. They weren’t trying very hard to keep quiet; they chattered among themselves as they ambled eastward.
They all carried torches, he saw when they came to the crossroads. Even so, the ghosts bothered them. One said, “This havering is fair to drive me mad. An we don’t find them soon, I’m for my hut and my wife.”
“Ah, but will she be for you in the middle of the night?” another asked. The lot of them laughed. They paused at the narrow track down which Gerin and Van had gone. A couple of them peered toward the Fox. He crouched lower behind the bush that concealed him, hoping the light of three moons would not betray him to the peasants. Maybe their own torchlight left them nightblind, for they did not spy him. After some muttered discussion, they kept heading east down the main road.
Perhaps half an hour later, they came straggling back. Now their torches were guttering toward extinction, and they hurried on toward their village. “Mayhap ’tis as well we found the whoresons not,” one of them said; Gerin recognized the voice of the fellow who’d sold him the hen. “They’d have slain some or ever we overcame them.”
“We need arms,” somebody answered.
“Belike, but we need men to wield them, too,” the hen-seller replied. “You were in the fields, and saw them not: a brace of proper rogues, ready for aught. We’d have given the ghosts our own blood had we broiled ourselves with them, I tell you.”
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