"Take everything you can from the horses," he told Raffo, his voice harsh. "Now we have to catch them before they win back to Adiatunnus' lands."
"Aye, lord Gerin." But Raffo sounded doubtful. "They have a long lead, though. Gaining enough ground won't be easy, the more so as we may have to keep casting about for the road they took."
"I know that," Gerin growled. "But I'll have answers from them if I have to wring out each word with hot pincers."
Van thumped him on the shoulder. "Easy, Captain, easy. We don't even know they ever had the lad, mind you."
"But they must have—" Gerin stopped, shook his head. Assuming something was so because you thought it had to be was one of the flaws in logic that made the savants in the City of Elabon laugh. He took a deep breath and said, "You're right. We don't know they had him."
He wondered if he ever would, or could, know. Had Diviciacus and his crew killed Duren and tossed his body into the woods, scavengers would make short work of it (he knew too well that his son had only a little meat on his bones). When he'd charged out after the Trokmoi, he'd figured he or Drago or Rihwin or Widin would catch up with Duren's kidnappers, rescue the boy, and return in triumph to Castle Fox. Now he realized he'd been making assumptions there, too. Uncertainty, in a way, felt even worse than being sure of Duren's death would have. How long could he go on wondering without going mad?
Then he thought that, after a while, he wouldn't be uncertain any more. He'd have to reckon Duren dead if he wanted to keep on living himself.
"Push them," he said to Raffo. This time, the driver did not answer back. He flicked the whip over the horses' backs. They leaned into the harness, pushed their pace up to a fast trot.
The chariot rolled through another peasant village and then drove by the small keep of Notker the Bald, one of Gerin's vassal barons. "Aye, lord Gerin," Notker called from the palisade, "they came by here yesterday, sometime past noon, but they showed shield of truce, just as they had on the way to your castle, so I thought no more about it."
"Did they have Duren with them?" Gerin asked. Two sets of serfs had already answered no to that, but the Fox put the question again anyhow. Maybe, he thought with what he knew to be irrationality, a noble would have noticed something the serfs had not.
But Notker shook his head. "Your son, lord?" he said. "No, I saw him not. What then? Is it war between the woodsrunners and us despite the truce sign?"
"By the gods, I wish I knew." Gerin tapped Raffo on the shoulder to drive on before Notker asked any more questions he couldn't answer.
Toward the middle of the afternoon they passed the boundary stone that had marked the border between Gerin's holdings and those of his southwestern neighbor, Capuel the Flying Frog. No one had seen Capuel since the werenight; Gerin sometimes wondered if his ekename had been a clue to a were strain in his family and he'd turned toad when all the moons rose full together. More likely, though, the Trokmoi had slain him.
The boundary stone lay on its side these days, ruining the charms for peace and prosperity that had been carved into it. Whether that was cause or effect Gerin did not know, but Capuel's former holding knew no peace these days. None of his vassals had been able to take any kind of grip on the land. The Fox held some of it himself, Trokmoi had overrun a couple of keeps, and the rest was given over to banditry.
The first peasant village the chariot passed was only a ruin, some of the houses burned, the rest falling to pieces from lack of care. Some grain grew untended in weed-choked fields, but before another generation passed no sign would be left that man had ever lived here.
"Captain, we may need to stop to hunt toward sunset, and I don't mean for the Trokmoi," Van said. "Who's going to sell us a chicken in country like this?"
Gerin didn't answer. He knew Van was right but didn't want to admit it, even to himself. Stopping to slay an animal with whose blood to propitiate the ghosts would make him lose time on Diviciacus, not gain it.
The next village was still inhabited, but that did the travelers no good. Only a handful of people remained in what had been a fair-sized hamlet. When one of them spotted an approaching chariot, he let out a yell full of fear and desperation. Everyone—men, women, children—fled from fields and houses into the nearby woods.
"Wait!" Gerin shouted. "I just want to ask you a couple of questions." No one paid him any attention.
He looked helplessly to Van. The outlander said, "You ask me, Captain, these poor buggers have got themselves trampled too often lately to take chances when somebody who looks like a warrior comes by."
"No doubt you're right," the Fox answered, sighing. "Doesn't say much for the state the northlands are in, does it?"
"Your serfs don't run from you, lord Gerin," Raffo said.
"That's so," Gerin said, "but there's more to the northlands than my holdings—and if I took in these lands, I'd do it by war, so the peasants here wouldn't get the chance to learn I treat them decently. They'd just go on running when they saw me coming."
Raffo didn't answer. Unless he should be involved in fighting to gain control of land beyond Gerin's holding, it was too remote to matter to him. That made him typical, not otherwise, which saddened Gerin: he tried to think in larger terms.
Van said, "You're not the only baron—excuse me, Captain: prince—the serfs don't flee. What Aragis does to the ones who run that he catches makes all the others think three times before they try it."
"He's a hard man," Gerin agreed. "Harder than need be, I think. But it may be that hard times require a hard man. Who can tell for certain?"
"Do you know what your trouble is, Captain?" Van said.
"No, but I daresay you're going to tell me," the Fox answered, raising that eyebrow of his. Every so often, Van found a flaw in him, rarely the same one twice. The infuriating thing was that more often than not he had a point.
"Your trouble, Captain, is that you're so busy trying to understand the other fellow's point of view that you don't give enough heed to your own."
Gerin clutched his chest and lurched in the chariot, as if pierced by an arrow. Van's chuckle rumbled deep in his chest. That was a hit, though, and the Fox knew it. He said, "Understanding the other fellow has its uses, too. Sometimes he may even be right."
"And what does that have to do with the price of tin?" Van said. "All you really need worry about is that he does what you have in mind."
"Are you sure you're not really a Trokmê after all?" Gerin asked mildly. That earned him the glare he'd expected.
The chariot rattled past a burned-out keep. Perched atop one of the charred logs sat a fat bustard. Van tapped Raffo on the shoulder, pointed. The driver pulled back on the reins; the horses stopped and began to graze. Van reached for Gerin's bow. "I saw the bird—will you let me do the hunting?" he asked.
"Go ahead," the Fox answered. Van might think slaying men with the bow an effete way to fight, but he was a fine archer nonetheless.
The outlander strung the bow. Gerin handed him an arrow. He dropped down from the chariot and slid toward the bustard, light on his feet as a stalking longtooth. The bustard grubbed under its wing for mites. Van got to within twenty paces before he stood still, nocked the shaft, drew the bow, and let fly.
The arrow hit the bustard just below where it had been scratching. It let out a startled squawk and tried to fly, but tumbled off its log into the ditch that had not served to protect the palisade. Van scrambled in after it. When he came out again, he carried the bird by the feet and wore an enormous grin.
"Well shot," Gerin said, pleased the hunt had been so successful—and so brief. "Blood for the ghosts and supper for us."
"The very thing I was thinking," Van said.
Before long, sunset forced the travelers to a halt. Gerin and Van got out of the chariot and, one with sword, the other with spear, moved cautiously through the woods on either side of the road until Gerin came upon a small clearing screened off by trees. He hurried back to the dirt track, whistled to let Van know he'd found
what he was after.
"You've got a place to keep us away from prying eyes, do you?" the outlander said, slipping out from between a couple of oaks. Despite his bulk, he moved so quietly that Gerin had not heard him till he spoke.
"Indeed I do. In my own lands, I wasn't much worried about making a fire out where anyone could see it. Here, though, it might draw serfs on the run, bandits—who knows what? Why take the chance?" The Fox turned to Raffo. "Unharness the horses. We can lead them back to the clearing, too; the way's not badly overgrown."
"Aye, lord Gerin." Raffo freed the animals from the central shaft; he and the Fox led them away to tether them in the clearing.
Van joined them a few minutes later. "I dragged the chariot off the road and into the bushes," he said. "It won't be so easy to see now."
"Good." Gerin nodded. "And if one of the horses goes lame, now we know we can hitch you to the shaft in its stead. Maybe we'll let the horse ride in your place in the car."
"I thank you, Captain," Van said gravely. "Always good to see how you look out for the welfare of them that serve you, so it is."
Suspecting he'd come off worse in that exchange, Gerin dug a trench to hold the blood from the bustard Van had killed earlier in the afternoon. When the bird had bled out, he frowned. "I hope that will be enough," he said. "We'd better build the fire bigger than we would have otherwise, or we'll have dreadful dreams all through the night."
After the sun went down, the ghosts did buzz gratefully around the offering the travelers had given them, but they rose from it faster than the Fox would have liked to see, as if they were men getting up from the table still hungry. They also braved the light and heat of the fire to gain more vital essence from the cut-up chunks of bird Gerin, Van, and Raffo were roasting.
The Fox drew first watch. After he woke Raffo for the middle stint, he fell asleep almost at once. His dreams were dreadful: monsters rampaging over the northlands, with men in desperate and what looked like losing struggle to drive them back. At first, in one of those almost-conscious moments dreams sometimes have, he thought he was harking back to the werenight. But he soon realized that was not so; these monsters seemed more appalling than mere wild beasts armed with the remnants of human wit that still clung to them.
When Van shook him awake at sunrise, he rose with such alacrity that the outlander gave him a curious look and said, "You're not apt to be so cheerful of a morning."
"Bad dreams," Gerin muttered, sliding a foot into a sandal.
"Aye, I had 'em, too." Van shook his head. "All manner of horrid creatures running loose—the gods grant I had a sour stomach or some such, to make me see such phantoms in my sleep."
The Fox paused with the sandal strap still unfastened. "That sounds like the same dream I had," he said slowly.
"And I," Raffo agreed. "I wouldn't have minded spending more time on watch and less in my blanket, and how often do you hear me say something like that?"
They hashed it out over breakfast, each recounting what he remembered of his dreams. As best Gerin could tell, they were all the same. "I don't like that," he said. "The omen is anything but good." His fingers shaped a sign to turn aside ill luck. The sign worked well enough for small misfortunes. Whatever misfortune lay ahead, he feared it would not be small—with Duren missing, it was already large. He offered the sign as a man without food in his house will offer a neighbor a stoup of water: not much, but the best he can do.
Van said, "If it is an omen, we won't be able to escape it, whatever it may prove to mean. One way or another, we'll get through." He seized his spear, made a sudden, savage thrust, as if to dispose of any troublesome foretellings.
The Fox wished he could match his friend's confidence. Van had never found anything, even the werenight, he couldn't overcome with brawn and bravery. Gerin trusted his own power less far. He said, "Let's get on the road."
They passed another couple of mostly deserted villages that day, and a wrecked keep. And, about noon, the Fox saw on a distant hill a building that wasn't quite a keep but was far stronger and more elaborate than anything a serf would need. Raffo saw it, too, and scowled blackly. "If that's not a bandits' nest, you can call me a Shanda nomad."
"That's what it is, all right, and right out in the open, too." Gerin spat into the dirt of the road to show what he thought of it. "Everything's going to the five hells when bandits set themselves up like barons."
"Who do you think the first barons were?" Van said. "Bandits who got rich, most likely. That's how it was a lot of places, anyhow."
"Insulting my ancestors, are you?" Gerin said. "I'd be angrier if I didn't know you were probably right. Even so, one fine day we're going to come down here and burn these bandits out before they get the chance to turn into barons."
"We're getting close to the lands Adiatunnus holds," Raffo said. "He's liable not to like that."
"Aye, he might have in mind to use these buggers, whoever they are, as a buffer between him and me," Gerin agreed. "That he has it in mind, though, doesn't mean it will happen so."
The sun had slid more than halfway down toward the west when the chariot clattered up to a new border stone standing by the side of the road. The boulder was carved not with Elabonian designs or letters, but rather with the fylfots and spirals the Trokmoi favored. In the roadway itself stood a couple of red-mustached northerners, one with a spear, the other with a sword. The one with the spear called in lilting Elabonian, "Who might you be, coming to the lands of the great chief, Adiatunnus his own self?"
"I might be anyone. I am Gerin the Fox," Gerin answered. "Did Adiatunnus' liegeman Diviciacus pass this way?"
"He did that." The border guard gave Gerin a look more curious than hostile. "And I'm after thinking it's fair strange, Fox, for you to be after him so. Have you changed your mind, now, over the matter anent which Diviciacus was sent forth for to talk with you?"
"I have not," Gerin answered at once, which made both Trokmoi scowl. "But neither am I at feud with Adiatunnus, nor with any of his. Does peace hold between us, or not?" He reached for the bronze-headed axe in its rest on the side wall of the chariot. Van hefted his own spear, not in a hostile way but thoughtfully, as if to find out how heavy it was.
It certainly made the Trokmoi thoughtful. The man who had spoken before said, "Sure and you've no need to be fighting us, now. For all Diviciacus ranted and carried on about what a black-hearted spalpeen you were, Fox—these are his words, mind, and none o' my own—he said not a whisper of faring forth to fight."
"As I told him I had no quarrel with Adiatunnus," Gerin agreed. "But tell me this—when Diviciacus rode through here, did he have with him in the chariot a boy of four summers? Not to put too fine a point on it, did he have my son? Before you answer, think on this: if you lie, we shall be at feud, and to the death."
The two northerners looked at each other. This time, the one who had the sword replied: "Fox, by Esus, Taranis, and Teutates I swear he did not." That was the strongest oath the Trokmoi used, and one they did not swear lightly. The fellow went on, "If we aimed to go to war with you, we'd up and do it. Stealing a child, now?" He spat. "Bad cess to any man who's after trying such a filthy thing."
"Aye," the other warrior said. "Did one of ours do such to you, Fox, we'd hand him back nicely tied and all, for you to do with him as you thought best. You could make him last days so, and wish every moment he'd never been born. I've two lads and a girl of my own, and I'd use the same way any ogre of a man who so much as ruffled a hair on their heads without my leave."
His anger and sincerity were unmistakable. Maybe Adiatunnus had set him and his friend here just because they lied so well, but Gerin couldn't do anything about that, not without an army at his back. He said, "I shall believe you, but remember what I said if you've not spoken truth."
"Och, but we have, so we've nought to fear," the fellow with the sword said. "I hope you find the bairn safe, Fox."
His friend nodded, adding, "Since you're apt to be spending the night in the
open, would you want to buy a hen from us, now?"
"You probably stole it," Gerin said without rancor. "That's what all you Trokmoi south of the Niffet are—just a bunch of damned chicken thieves."
"Indeed and we're not," the northerner with a spear answered indignantly. "We came south because you Elabonians are after having so many things better and better than chickens to steal."
Since that was nothing but the truth, Gerin could not even argue with it. He tapped Raffo on the shoulder. His driver slewed the chariot in the narrow roadway and started east, back toward Castle Fox. "Sensible," Van said. "This set of woodsrunners seemed friendly enough, but we'll want to put some distance between them and us all the same. One of their higher-ups is liable to decide we're worth hunting through the night."
"My thought exactly," Gerin agreed. "Raffo, go by back roads while the day lasts, so long as they lead north or east. If we stay on the main track, I think we're asking for trouble."
"Aye, lord Gerin," Raffo said, and then, after a moment, "I'm sorry we didn't find your son."
Gerin sighed. "So am I. I have to pray that Rihwin or Drago or Widin had better luck than we did." He tried not to think about what might be happening to Duren. Too many of the pictures his imagination came up with were black ones.
"We were so sure the Trokmoi had run off with him, too," Van said. Another man might have put that, You were so sure— Like any proper friend, the outlander shared responsibility as well as credit.
"We'll know more when we get back to the castle," the Fox said, wondering how he'd keep from going mad till then.
* * *
Rihwin the Fox spread his hands. "Lord Gerin, Schild Stoutstaff's border guards declined to give me leave to pass into their overlord's land. For whatever it may be worth, they say Tassilo did enter that holding, but that they saw no sign of any small boy with him."
"For whatever it may be worth," Gerin repeated. "If he had Duren trussed up in the back of the wagon, it may be worth nothing at all. Or, on the other hand—" He gave up, shaking his head in frustration and dismay. He'd hoped he'd find answers at Fox Keep, not just more questions, but questions seemed in better supply. Turning to Widin Simrin's son, he asked, "Any luck with you?"
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