“I’m sorry,” Gerin said, and meant it—he’d seen lockjaw. “That’s a hard way to go.”
“Aye, lord prince, it is, but you have to go on,” she said.
He nodded solemnly; he’d had quite a bit of ale by then. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Ethelinda, lord prince.”
“Well, Ethelinda,” he said, and let it hang there. Now she nodded, as if he’d spoken a complete sentence.
After supper, Tervagant waved Gerin and Van into a couple of huts whose inhabitants had hastily vacated them. “The gods grant you good night, lord prince, master Van,” he said.
“Me, I intend to give the gods some help,” Van said. While he’d been sitting by the fire and eating, a couple of young women had almost come to blows over him. Now he led both of them into the hut Tervagant had given him. Watching that, Gerin shook his head. Too bad no one could find a way to put into a jar whatever the outlander had.
And yet the Fox was not altogether surprised to find Ethelinda at his elbow when he went into the hut the headman had set aside for him. “You’ve no new sweetheart?” he asked her. Some lords took peasant women without thinking past their own pleasure. Along with hunger, though, that was the sort of thing liable to touch off an uprising. As usual, Gerin was careful.
But Ethelinda shook her head. “No, lord prince.”
“Good.” Gerin had to duck his head to get into the hut. It was dark inside, and smelled strongly of smoke. He shuffled in, found a straw-filled pallet with his foot. “Here we are.”
The straw rustled as he sank down onto it, then again when Ethelinda joined him there. She pulled her long tunic off over her head; that was all she wore. Gerin took a little longer getting out of his clothes, but not much. By the way she clung to him, he guessed she’d been telling the truth about having no sweetheart; he didn’t think anyone had touched her so for a long time.
That made him take care to give her as much pleasure as he could. And, at the last moment, he pulled out and spurted his seed onto her belly rather than deep inside her. He thought he would make her grateful, but she said, “What did you go and do that for?” in anything but a happy voice.
“To keep you from making a baby,” he answered, wondering if she’d made the connection between what they’d just done and what might happen most of a year later. Every time he thought he had the measure of serfs’ ignorance, he ended up being startled anew.
Ethelinda knew that connection, though. “I wanted to start a baby,” she said. “I hoped I would.”
“You did?” Gerin rolled off her and almost fell off the narrow pallet. “Why?”
“If I was carrying your baby, I could go up to Fox Keep and you’d take care of me,” she answered. “I wouldn’t have to work hard, at least for a while.”
“Oh.” Gerin stared through the darkness at her. She was honest, anyhow. And, he admitted to himself, she was probably right. No woman had ever claimed he’d put a bastard in her; he was moderate in his venery and, to keep such things from happening, often withdrew at the instant he spent. But he would not have turned away anyone with whom he’d slept.
Maybe you shouldn’t have pulled out, the darker side of him murmured. With Duren gone, you’re liable to need an heir, even if he is a bastard.
He shook his head. Sometimes he got trapped in his own gloom and lost track of what needed doing. He couldn’t let that happen, not now. His son depended on him.
Ethelinda sat up and reached for her tunic. “Do you want me to go away, lord prince?” she asked.
“We’ll be crowded on this bed, but stay if you care to,” Gerin answered. “The night’s not so warm that we’d be sticking to each other wherever we touched.”
“That’s so,” she agreed. “I always did like having somebody in a bed with me. That’s how I grew up, with all my brothers and sisters and my father and my mother while she was alive, all packed tight together. Sleeping just by yourself is lonely.” She tossed the tunic to the dirt floor. “And besides, who knows what might happen later on?”
What happened was that Gerin slept the night through and didn’t wake up till after sunrise, when Ethelinda rose from the pallet and finally did put her tunic back on. When she saw his eyes open, she gave him a scornful glance, as if to say, Some stallion you turned out to be.
He bore up under that without getting upset; unlike Van, he didn’t wear some of his vanity in his trousers. He looked around the peasant hut for a chamber pot. When he didn’t see one, he got up, dressed quickly, and went off into the bushes by the village to relieve himself. The reek that rose from those bushes said he was but following the peasants’ practice.
When he came back, Van was standing outside the hut he’d been given, tweedling away on his flute. The two women who’d gone in there with him both clung to him adoringly. His grin was smug. The Fox felt like throwing something at him, but contented himself with saying, “Time we got moving. We can eat as we travel.”
“As you will.” Van walked over to the horses, which were tethered to the low branches of a maple. “You harness the leader, then, and I’ll see to the off beast. You’re so hot to be on the road, the two of us together’ll get us on our way in a hurry.”
That afternoon, the wagon rolled into the holding of Palin the Eagle. Palin, who had Trokmoi on his western flank, acknowledged Gerin as his suzerain and, because he’d needed the Fox’s help more than once against the woodsrunners, was more sincere about his submission than Schild Stoutstaff.
Not far into Palin’s land, Gerin and Van came upon a belt of devastation: for several miles, the Elabon Way and the land to either side of it had been cratered by Balamung’s destructive sorcery. Now that weeds and shrubs had had five years to spread over the craters, they looked less raw and hideous than they had when they were new, but the ground remained too broken for farmers to work.
The Elabon Way itself was in fair repair. That was at Gerin’s order; he did not want the main road south from Fox Keep to remain a ruin. The repairs, he knew, did not come up to the standard the Elabonian Empire had set when it pushed the highway north to the Niffet. With the resources of a realm behind them, the imperial artisans had built to last, with a deep bed of gravel and stone, stone flags cemented together, and good drainage to either side of the roadway.
With peasant levies working in time snatched from their fields, the Fox hadn’t had a prayer of matching such construction. Cobblestones and gravel did give the rebuilt stretch of the Elabon Way a surface that, while it was hard on hooves, did not turn into gluey mud whenever rain fell.
“Strange,” Gerin said as the wagon jounced along over the uneven surface: “Whenever I travel this stretch of road, I remember trying to fight my way north over it just before the werenight.”
“You’re not likely to forget that,” Van agreed. “Me, I find it strange to travel the same stretch of road more than once. I’m too used to seeing something new every day to be easy with the idea of going back and forth, back and forth. Boring to see the same hills on the skyline every day. I want to find out what’s on the other side of them.”
“Those hills?” Gerin pointed west. “They shelter Trokmoi and bandits.”
“Not what I meant,” Van said. “Captain, you’ve no poetry in you, and that’s a fact.”
“I suppose not. I do the best I can without it, that’s all.”
Toward evening, they passed the keep of Raff the Ready, where they’d guested on their last trip south to Ikos. No guesting at Raff’s tonight; the keep had fallen to the Trokmoi, and nothing but tumbled ruins remained. Gerin shook his head, remembering the fine meal Raff had fed him. Tonight it would be hard bread and sausage and sour beer and whatever they managed to hunt up to keep the ghosts happy.
A red fox scurried across the road in front of the wagon. It paused by a clump of hound’s-tongue, sitting up on its haunches with its own tongue lolling out as it watched the horses and men. Van tapped Gerin on the shoulder. “Rein in. Let me grab the bow and
we’ll have our evening’s offering.”
“What? Where?” Gerin said.
Van pointed to the fox. “Right there. Are you blind, not to see it?”
Gerin stared, first at the fox, then at his friend. “You’re enough like a brother to me that I often forget you’re not Elabonian born. It’s not our custom to kill the animals that give us our ekenames. All my luck, such as it is, would run away if I tried to slay a fox.”
“You wouldn’t,” Van said. “I would.”
“I’d be abetting you.” Gerin shook his head. “In the spirit world, it would count for the other.”
“The spirit world will do more than count if we don’t find something with blood in it pretty soon,” Van grumbled. “Looks like all the peasants hereabout have fled, and a night in the open with only a fire to hold the ghosts at bay is nothing to look forward to.”
“Something will turn up.” Gerin sounded more confident than he felt. But hardly more than a minute after he’d spoken, he spotted a big, fat gray squirrel sitting on the topmost branch of an oak sapling that really should have been cleared away from the side of the road. Now he did rein in. Van had seen the squirrel, too; he was already reaching into the back of the wagon for the bow.
The bowstring thrummed as he let fly. The squirrel toppled out of the little tree and lay feebly kicking on the mossy ground below. It had stopped moving by the time Van walked over and picked it up. He hefted it in his hand. “It should serve,” he said.
“Not a whole lot of meat, but what there is will be tasty baked in clay,” Gerin said. “If you’d shot at the fox, the gods might not have put the squirrel in our path.”
“If they’re so grateful for me being good, why didn’t they put a nice fat buck in that tree instead of a rat with a fuzzy tail that won’t give us two good bites apiece?”
“Abandoned scoffer,” Gerin said, though he had to fight to get words past the laughter that welled up when he pictured an antlered stag perched atop a sapling. “Show some respect for the gods of Elabon.”
“I give them as much as they deserve and not a bit more,” Van said. “I’ve done enough traveling, seen enough gods to know they’re stronger than I am, but I’ll be switched if I can see that some of ’em are a whole lot smarter than I am.”
Gerin grunted, remembering Mavrix’s long, pink tongue flicking out like a frog as the deity had mocked him and taken away Rihwin’s sorcerous ability. “You may have something there, though you’ll not be happier for it if some god hears what you’ve said.”
“Ifsobe that happens, I’ll just go on to someplace else where the writ of Elabonian gods doesn’t run,” Van said. “The thing about gods is, they’re tied to the lands of those that worship them, and me”—he thumped his chest—“I’m not.”
“Just like you to be so sure you’d get away,” Gerin said, but then something else occurred to him. “Gods can travel, though, as their worshipers do—look at the way the Sithonian deities have taken hold in Elabon. And, I fear, we’ll have Trokmê gods rooting themselves here in the northlands now that the woodsrunners have made homes south of the Niffet.”
“You’re likely right; I hadn’t thought of that,” Van said. “Not a crew I’d be happy with as neighbors: their yen for blood is as bad as the one the Trokmoi have themselves. I should know; the woodsrunners were all set to offer me up till I got free of them.”
“Yes, you’ve told that tale,” Gerin said. He shook his head. “One more thing to worry about.” Trouble was, he seemed to add to that list almost every day. He halted the wagon. As long as he and Van had an offering for the ghosts for tonight, he wouldn’t worry about any of the things on that list till tomorrow.
Splitting the night into two watches rather than three left the Fox and Van yawning as they started traveling a little past sunrise. “I’m slower than I should be, and that’s not good,” Gerin said. “When we cross Bevon Broken-Nose’s holding, we’ll need all our wits about us.”
“Bevon Broken-Land would be a better name for him, that’s certain,” Van said.
“Can’t argue with you there,” Gerin replied. Bevon’s sons had been squabbling over their father’s holding five years before. Bevon himself was still alive, but universally ignored beyond a bowshot from his keep.
Gerin pointed ahead. “There we are. That’s progress, if you like.”
“Your fort, you mean? Aye, I expect so. It’s about the only thing that keeps the Elabon Way open through Bevon’s lands, anyhow.”
Despite a wooden palisade, the building wasn’t a keep in the proper sense of the word: no stone castle sat inside the wall, only a blockhouse also of wood. Gerin had run up the fort and put a garrison in it less than a year after the werenight, to make sure the road stayed clear. Bevon and all four of his sons had protested furiously, but couldn’t unite even to get rid of the Fox’s men.
“One day soon, Captain, you’ll just quietly claim the land along the road as part of your own holding, won’t you?” Van said. “Without your patrols, it’d be the howling wilderness it was before you put your men here—and it’s like you to let the facts talk before you open your mouth yourself.”
“That has been in my mind lately, as a matter of fact.” Gerin gave his friend a look half respectful, half annoyed. “I like it better when no one else can pick out what’s in my mind.”
“Live in a keep for a while with a man and he will rub off on you.” Van added, “However much he doesn’t care to,” in the hope—which was realized—of making Gerin scowl.
A three-chariot patrol team came north up the Elabon Way toward the fort. Seeing the wagon, they made for it instead, to see who was on the road. Gerin waved to one of the men in the lead car. “Hail!” he called loudly. “How fares the road, Onsumer?”
“Lord Gerin!” the bulky, black-bearded man called back. “I thought that was your wagon, though I’m just now close enough to be sure. We had a quiet run down to Ricolf’s border and back, so the road is well enough.” His face clouded. “But what of you? Is this the business Widin Simrin’s son spoke of?”
“My son being stolen, you mean? Yes,” Gerin said. “All my searches went awry, those after the men who might have taken him and the one round Fox Keep as well. I’m off to Ikos, to learn if the Sibyl can see farther than I did.”
“Dyaus and Biton grant it be so,” Onsumer said. The driver and warrior who shared the car with him nodded vigorously.
“I can but hope,” Gerin said. “Widin told me he learned nothing new on his run down here. Have you had word of anything unusual from Bevon’s sons? One of them, I suppose, could have arranged to kidnap Duren, though I’d not have thought any of them had the wit to plan such a thing.”
Onsumer shook his head. “No, lord Gerin, nothing of the sort. I think the lot of them are too busy trying to slaughter one another to worry about outsiders, even ones they hate. We haven’t had an attack on the fort in close to a year, but the strife among the brothers never ends.”
“You’re probably right,” Gerin said. “All the barons in the northlands squabbled among themselves and didn’t pay heed to the Trokmoi till it was too late. I wonder if we Elabonians learned the joys of faction fighting from Sithonia.”
“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea about that,” Onsumer said. He was a good enough soldier, and far from stupid, but all he knew of the wider world he’d heard in minstrels’ songs.
He got the horses moving again. “Good luck to you,” Onsumer called as the wagon rolled by. His comrades waved to Gerin. Then they turned around and headed back toward the fort.
An hour or so later, Van pointed to a column of black smoke rising in the distance. “Somebody’s burning his neighbor out there, or I miss my guess.”
“Better they battle each other than my men,” Gerin said, “but better still if they didn’t battle at all.”
“Honh! What are the odds of that?”
“On the face of it, not good,” Gerin admitted. “Still, it used to happen. Elabon, not so long
ago, was a single empire stretching from the Niffet east past the Lesser Inner Sea into the seething river plains of Kizzuwatna. Now it’s falling apart. When the Emperor and his court think more of putting gold in their own belt pouches now than worrying about where the Empire will be a generation hence, that happens.”
“It’s not just the ones at the top,” Van said. “It’s everyone who’s strong, out to get rich off the ones who aren’t and to put a fist in his strong neighbor’s eye.”
“Aye, that’s the way of it,” Gerin said. “In the early days, they say, Elabonian warlords would go back to the plow once they’d won a war.” He grinned wryly. “Of course, who knows what tales of those early days are worth?”
Near the southern edge of Bevon’s unhappy holding lay another belt of devastation from Balamung’s sorcery. As before, the wagon bounced roughly over the equally rough repairs Gerin had had the local peasants make. Van said, “Remember how Bevon’s sons tried to stop you from fixing the road, each of them screaming he’d do it himself?”
“Oh, yes.” The Fox’s laugh was less than mirthful. “And if I’d waited for that, I’d be waiting still, and so would Duren’s grandson.”
When Gerin had come into Ricolf the Red’s holding five years before, only a couple of guards kept watch at the border. Now a fort like the one he’d built on Bevon’s land stood strong to keep out bandits—and perhaps to keep out his own men as well. The thought saddened him.
A guardsman strode out from the open gateway of the fort to ask his business. The fellow started slightly when he recognized Gerin and Van. Gerin started slightly, too; he had no idea what this warrior’s name was, but he’d been at the border on that other journey, too. The Fox remembered those first days when he’d known Elise and snuck her out of her father’s keep as vividly as if they were just past. Now that only ashes lay between him and her, he often wished he could forget. Somehow that only made him remember more intensely.
“Lord prince,” Ricolf’s man said, his voice polite but wary. “What brings you to the holding of Ricolf the Red? Is it the matter your vassal—what was his name?—spoke of some days past?”
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