“So Diviciacus told me,” Gerin said. “That was when you swore vassalage to me the first time.” Adiatunnus nodded, not a bit abashed. He’d been frightened into swearing submission then, just as he had now because of the Gradi. If the danger went away, he was liable to try to reclaim his freedom of action once more, as he had a decade earlier.
What the Fox didn’t tell him was that he faced the prospect of summoning Mavrix to his aid with the same enthusiasm he would have given the notion of having an arrowhead cut out of his shoulder: both were painful necessities, with the emphasis on painful. Mavrix and he had never got on well. He hadn’t persuaded the Sithonian god to get rid of the monsters so much as he’d tricked him into doing it. Mavrix would just as soon have got rid of him instead—maybe sooner.
He’d survived Mavrix once, he’d tricked him once. Could he do it again? He’d said a man could be more clever than a god. Now he was going to have his chance to prove it … if he could.
Adiatunnus found another interesting question to ask: “Is your Sithonian god truly strong enough to beat back … that goddess?” He wouldn’t name Voldar. “She’s no mere monster, monster though she seems.”
“I don’t know that, either,” Gerin told him. “All I can do is try to find out.” He held up a hand. “And I know what your next question is going to be: what will we do if Mavrix turns out not to be strong enough?”
He didn’t answer the question. He made a production out of not answering it. Finally, Adiatunnus prodded him: “Well, what will we do then?”
“Jump off a cliff, I suppose,” the Fox said. “I haven’t got any better ideas right now. Have you?”
To his surprise, the Trokmê chieftain spoke up, asking, “Will you be taking all your southrons back to your own holding the now?”
“I hadn’t thought about doing anything else with them,” Gerin admitted. “I didn’t think you’d want them on your land—they are Elabonians, after all—and I didn’t think you’d want to keep feeding them any longer than you had to. Why? Am I wrong?”
Adiatunnus hesitated, but at last, looking shamefaced, said, “I wouldn’t mind your leaving a couple of hundred behind for the sake of watching the line of the Venien and fighting alongside us should the Gradi be after trying to force it. Indeed, I ask that, Fox, as your vassal I do.”
“You mean it,” Gerin said in slow wonder. His expression unhappier than ever, Adiatunnus nodded. The Fox scratched his head. “Why, after spending so many years trying to kill every Elabonian you could find?”
“Because if it’s us by our lonesome and the Gradi coming over the river and all, we’ll lose,” Adiatunnus answered bleakly. “Summat’ll go wrong, same as it always does when the shindy’s ’twixt us and the Gradi. You southrons, though, you can stand up to ’em. With my own eyes I saw it. And so—”
Gerin slapped him on the shoulder. “For that, I’ll leave men behind. A lord protects his vassals, or else he doesn’t stay their lord long—or deserve to. Would it suit you if I left Widin Simrin’s son to command my men?”
“We’re all your men now, Fox—however little we like it,” Adiatunnus said with a wry grin. “Aye, Widin pleases to lead the Elabonians. I know his worth—I should, the trouble he’s given me. But will he follow my lead when it’s a matter of southrons and Trokmoi together?”
“Without me here?” Gerin rubbed his chin. “That seems fair. There’ll be more of your men here than mine.” He wondered if Adiatunnus really wanted him to leave a good chunk of his army behind so the woodsrunners could fall on it. He didn’t believe that, though, not after their aborted campaign against the Gradi. Any man who feared him more than Voldar was a fool, and Adiatunnus didn’t qualify there.
The Trokmê said, “I hope your foreign god knows too little of these Gradi to be in fear of ’em.”
Mavrix was, or could be, a great coward. The Fox didn’t tell that to Adiatunnus.
“There it is.” Gerin breathed a great sigh of relief. Fox Keep still stood; the land around it hadn’t been disturbed since the last Gradi raid. He thought he would have heard of any catastrophe as he traveled through his own holding, but you could never be sure. Sometimes the only way you found news was by stumbling over it.
The lookout in the watchtower was alert. Gerin heard, thin in the distance, the horn call he blew to alert the garrison to the approach of the army. Armed men popped up on the palisade with commendable speed.
“Ride out ahead,” the Fox said, tapping Duren on the shoulder. “We’ll let them know we came through in one piece.” He’d hoped to be coming back in triumph. That hadn’t happened. He’d feared coming back in defeat, perhaps with a force of fierce Gradi in pursuit. That hadn’t happened, either. Had he won, then, or had he lost? If he didn’t know himself, how was he supposed to tell anybody else?
Someone up on the wall shouted, “It’s the Fox!” The warriors cheered. They didn’t know what he’d done, any more than he knew what had gone on here. As he had been after the earthquake that toppled Biton’s shrine, he was on the outermost ripple of spreading news.
“All well, lord prince?” Rihwin the Fox called down to him.
“All well—enough,” Gerin answered. “And you? And the keep? And the holding? How has the weather been?”
“You go off to war and you ask about the weather?” Rihwin demanded. When Gerin only nodded, the southern noble who’d chosen to come to the northlands spread his hands in confusion. At last, pierced by his overlord’s stare, he answered, “Weather’s not been bad. On the cool side, and more rain than I remember most summers, but not bad. Why? How was the weather farther west?”
“Well, let’s see—how do I put it?” Gerin mused. “If it weren’t for the sleet’s getting me prepared, I would have liked the hail even less than I did.” That drew all the incredulous comments he’d thought it would. He waved impatiently. “Let down the drawbridge and we’ll tell you what went on.”
The drawbridge lowered. Duren drove the chariot into the keep. The rest of the force followed. Questions rained down on them: “Did we beat the Gradi?” “Did the Gradi beat us?” “Is Adiatunnus ally or traitor?” “Will we go back out on campaign again this season?”
Gerin answered abstractedly, for Selatre was waiting for him in the courtyard with their children. Seeing her and them reminded Gerin he had indeed come home. Seeing her also reminded him she’d been the intimate of a god, even if Biton was in many ways Mavrix’s opposite. He wanted to talk with her before summoning—or trying to summon; you never could tell with gods—the Sithonian deity.
Before he could talk with his wife, though, he had to keep on answering questions and to deal with what seemed like everything that had happened at Fox Keep while he was away on campaign. Not for the first time, he wondered how anything important ever got done when people had to wade through so many trivia first.
At last, those who’d stayed behind stopped asking questions, at least of him. He’d settled arguments, handed down judgments, put off handing down others till he found out more, confirmed almost everything Rihwin and Selatre had done in his name while he was gone, and, somewhere along the way, acquired a couple of juicy beef ribs and a jack of ale. He ate gratefully: having your mouth full was a good excuse for not saying anything for a while.
When he finally did get the chance to speak of what he intended to do, Selatre nodded gravely. “A risky course, but one I think we have to take if the danger from the Gradi and their gods is as great as you say,” was her verdict.
“Exactly what I thought,” the Fox said, which was pleasing but not surprising; over the past eleven years, he’d come to see that his mind and Selatre’s worked in ways very much alike—and ways that, as time went on, grew more alike as they went on living and planning together.
Rihwin the Fox was all excitement. “A chance to work with gods!” he burbled. “A chance to match wits with the immortals, to manipulate forces far stronger than we even dream of being, to—”
“—Get killed in nast
y ways or have other unpleasant things happen to us,” Gerin finished for him. “Or don’t you remember why you can’t work magic any more? You were trying to manipulate Mavrix then, too, as I recall.”
Rihwin had the integrity to look embarrassed. All he’d done—a small thing, really—was ask Mavrix to turn some wine that had soured into vinegar back into something worth drinking once more. But the Sithonian god, already piqued at Gerin for reasons of his own, had not only not fixed the wine but had robbed Rihwin of his sorcerous talent to keep from being bothered by him any more in the future. If you went through rapids in a canoe and came out the other side alive and unhurt, you hadn’t manipulated them, you’d just survived. You forgot the difference at your peril.
“Why should Mavrix concern himself with Voldar and the other Gradi gods?” Selatre asked. “What are they doing that he’ll particularly loathe?”
“For one thing, they’re making the part of the northlands the Gradi have seized as cold and bleak as the Gradi homeland,” Gerin answered, glad to marshal arguments for his wife so he’d have them ready when he had to give them to the god. “For another, they’ll kill or torment those who don’t bow down to them. Sithonians and their gods are fond of freedom; one of the things they don’t like about us Elabonians is that we give our rulers too loose a rein.”
“Voldar doesn’t sound as if she likes the idea of wine,” Rihwin remarked.
“Yes, I think you’re right about that,” Gerin said. “It would be more useful, though, if we could get wine in the northlands these days. The winters are too hard to let the vines live even now. If the Gradi and their gods settle down to stay, even the summers will be too cold.” He shivered, remembering the unnatural freezing storm through which he’d tried to lead his army.
Rihwin’s mobile features assumed a comically exaggerated expression of longing. “How I miss the sweet grape!” he cried, sighing long and deep like a minstrel with a song of unrequited love.
“You miss finding a great deal of trouble because you miss the sweet grape,” Selatre pointed out.
Now Rihwin looked indignant, an expression perhaps not altogether assumed. “My lady,” he said with a low bow, “I regret to have to offer the opinion that your judgments have been clouded by overlong association with that lout there.” He pointed to his fellow Fox.
“Heh,” Gerin said. “She’s right, Rihwin, and you know it bloody well. Oh, you can drink yourself stupid with ale as easily as you can with wine, but you never got Baivers’ dander up at you. Whenever you touch wine, you seem to bump up against Mavrix, and when you bump up against the lord of the sweet grape, horrible things happen.”
“They aren’t always horrible,” Rihwin insisted. “Without Mavrix, we might never have been rid of the monsters.”
“True,” Gerin admitted, “but getting rid of them wasn’t your doing, and the odds were all too good we’d end up getting rid of ourselves instead.” He paused. “And speaking of monsters, how have Geroge and Tharma been?”
“Except for eating as much apiece as any three people I could name, they’ve been fine,” Rihwin answered, and Selatre nodded agreement. “If your vassals and your serfs gave as little trouble, your holding would be easier to run.”
“Back to Mavrix,” Selatre said firmly. Even more than Gerin, she had a knack for holding to the essential.
“Aye, back to Mavrix,” Rihwin said. “How, lord prince, do you purpose summoning him without wine?”
“Books, grain, seed, fruits—a naked peasant girl, if that’s what it takes,” Gerin replied. “I’ll aim at his aspects as patron of the arts and fertility god, not the ones that pertain to wine.” He shrugged. “Wine would probably be a stronger summons, but we do what we can with what we have.” He took that for granted; he’d been making do, improvising, ever since he became baron of Fox Keep. He knew he couldn’t keep juggling forever, but he hadn’t dropped too many important things, not yet, anyhow.
Rihwin pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. Mavrix hadn’t robbed him of his magical knowledge, merely the ability to use it. “You may well encounter success by this means,” he said. “It may even be that the aspect of Mavrix you summon thus will be less flighty by nature than that which has to do with the grape. Or, of course, it may not.” The last sentence and the shrug with which he accompanied it said he’d been associating with Gerin for a long time, too.
“When will you summon the god?” Selatre asked.
“As soon as may be,” Gerin told her. “The Gradi and their gods are pushing hard. If we don’t do something to push them back soon, I worry about what they—and Voldar—will do to us next.”
“Surely your blow against them gained something,” Rihwin said.
“A little, no doubt,” Gerin said. “A fortress and a few villages cleared of them—but we couldn’t keep those. And when we tried to press on, the storms I have to think their deities raised stopped us cold—literally. Much as I wish I could, I can’t claim a victory there.”
“And so you shall bring to bear the power of the god,” Rihwin declared.
“So I shall,” Gerin agreed. “The next intriguing question is whether I’ll bring it to bear against the Gradi … or against me.”
Had the world wagged exactly as the Fox wanted, he would have undertaken the conjuration that afternoon. But more than the minutiae of running his holding made him wait for a couple of days. Much as he liked to deal with problems by attacking them head-on, he also knew that attacking them without full understanding was liable to be worse than ignoring them altogether. And so he spent most of those next two days closeted in the library above the great hall, reading every scrap about Mavrix he had in his book-hoard.
He had less than he would have wanted. That was true of his store on every subject where he had any scrolls or codices at all. Books were too rare and precious for any man, even with an insatiable itch to know and the resources first of a barony and then of a principality behind him, to have as many as he would have liked.
In her time at Fox Keep, Selatre had made the library as much her domain as it was his. She had once enjoyed a knowledge of a different sort from that contained in books, knowledge that came to her direct from Biton. Since she’d lost that, she’d made up for it in every other way she could. She helped Gerin in his studies, finding even the most obscure mentions of Mavrix and passing them to him.
The more he read, the more he hoped: the Sithonian god’s hatred of ugliness was one of his most salient characteristics. That had been one of the hooks the Fox had used to get Mavrix to drive the monsters back into their dark caverns, but the more he read, the more he worried, too. Mavrix was among the flightiest of gods. He would do whatever he did and then go off and do something else altogether. One thing Voldar seemed to have was implacable purpose.
Gerin rolled up the last scroll. “I don’t know if this is going to work,” he told Selatre, “but then, I don’t know what choice I have, either. A man will pick a bad course when all the others look worse.”
“It will be all right,” Selatre said.
He shrugged by way of reply. She didn’t know that, and had no rational basis for believing it. Neither did he. After a moment, though, he admitted to himself that hearing it from her made him feel better.
As was his way, Gerin carefully assembled everything he thought he would need and everything he thought he might need before he tried to summon Mavrix. He sent Rihwin to the peasant village to bring back a girl who would be enticing enough naked to tempt the fertility god if that proved necessary. Rihwin’s experience with the peasant women was wider than his own. Moreover, by having his friend pick the girl, he made sure he would not have Selatre asking how he knew what she looked like without clothes.
Though the woman, whose name was Fulda, wore a long, woad-dyed linen tunic when Rihwin led her up to the keep, Gerin had to admit she did look likely to shape well in the role if required. By the half-amused, half-tart sniff Selatre let out, she thought the same.
The litt
le shack where Gerin tried magic when he got up the nerve to try magic was set well away from Castle Fox. It was also set well away from the palisade, the stables, and everything else in Fox Keep. If something went wrong—and Gerin’s conjurations, like those of any half-trained mage, had a way of going wrong—he wanted the destruction to be as limited as possible.
When he, Rihwin, Selatre, and Fulda went out to the shack, the rest of the people packing Fox Keep made a point of keeping their distance, and of not looking at the ramshackle building, either. Nothing had gone too hideously wrong over the years, but everyone got the idea that meddling with Gerin while he worked at his magic—or, for that matter, meddling with him when he worked at anything—was less than a good idea.
He began to chant from the Sithonian epic of Lekapenos. He’d had the verses literally beaten into him by his teachers, and so did not need the scroll he held to be sure he had the words right. He held it nonetheless, to remind Mavrix of another reason he was being summoned.
On a rickety table, he set out wheat (not barley; Mavrix had nothing but scorn for Baivers), ripe and candied fruit, and several eggs from the castle henhouse. “Do you want me to strip off now, lord prince?” Fulda asked, reaching up to the neck of her tunic.
“Let’s wait and see if we can bring the god here some other way first,” Gerin answered, to Rihwin’s evident disappointment. One of Selatre’s eyebrows rose for a moment. Gerin didn’t know exactly what that meant. He didn’t much want to find out, either.
He used his rusty Sithonian for as much of the invocation as he could, wanting to make Mavrix feel as much at home as he could in the northlands. Despite repeated beseechings, though, the god declined to appear. Gerin wondered if that wasn’t just as well, but went on anyhow.
“Fulda,” Selatre said, and nodded.
The peasant woman pulled the tunic off over her head. One glance told Gerin she was as lushly made as he’d guessed. Past that one glance, he didn’t look at her. If he made a mistake with his invocation, whether her body was beautiful or not wouldn’t matter. Rihwin’s eyes lit up. Gerin suspected he would try to see Fulda naked under other circumstances as soon as he could. That thought appeared in his mind, but vanished a moment later: Mavrix still showed no sign of coming forth.
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