The Bastard King

CHAPTER TWO

Captain Grus was drinking wine in a riverside tavern in the town of Cumanus when the news got to him. The fellow who brought it to the tavern stood in the doorway and bawled it out at the top of his lungs. The place—it was called the Nixie—had been noisy and friendly, with rivermen and merchants chattering; with a dice game in one corner; with about every other man trying to get one of the barmaids to go upstairs with him. But silence slammed down like a blow from a morningstar.

Nicator broke it. “He married her? He took a seventh wife? Go peddle it somewhere else, pal. Nobody’d do anything like that. It’s against nature, is what it is.”

All over the Nixie, heads solemnly bobbed up and down, Grus’ among them. The very idea of a seventh wife was absurd. (His own wife, Estrilda, would have found the very idea of a second wife for him absurd—but that was a different story, and a different sort of story, too, since it had nothing to do with the gods—but if Olor had only six wives…)

The news bringer held out both hands before him, palms up, as though taking an oath. “May the Banished One make me into a thrall if I lie,” he said, and the silence he got this time was of a different sort. Nobody, especially here on the border, would say such a thing lightly. Into that silence, he went on, “He did marry her, I tell you. Said he wanted to make sure his heir—Lanius, the brat’s name is—wasn’t a bastard. Hallow Perdix said the words over him and his concubine—I mean, over Queen Certhia.”

“How’d he find a priest who’d say such filthy words?” somebody asked belligerently.

“How? I’ll tell you how,” answered the man in the doorway. “The priest who married them was Hallow Perdix. Now he’s High Hallow Perdix. He was no fool, not him. He knew which side his bread was buttered on.”

“That’s terrible!” two or three people said at once. Whether it was terrible or not, Grus was convinced it was true. The man with the news had too many details at his fingertips for it to be something he was making up.

“What does the arch-hallow have to say about the whole business?” he asked.

“Good question!” the news bringer said. “Nobody knows the answer yet, I don’t think. If he says Prince Lanius is a bastard, he’s a bastard, all right, and he isn’t a prince, not anymore.”

“If he says that, I know what King Mergus says: ‘Out!’ ” Nicator jerked a thumb at the door, as though dismissing a rowdy drunk.

“Can the king sack the arch-hallow?” Grus asked.

“I don’t know,” Nicator said. “Can the arch-hallow tell the king the son he’s waited for his whole life long is nothing but a little bastard who’ll never, ever, plop his backside down on the Diamond Throne?”

That was another good question. Grus had no idea what soft of answer it had. He was sure of one thing, though—Avornis would find out. No, he was suddenly sure of two things. He wished he weren’t, and gulped his wine cup dry to try to chase the second thing from his head.

No such luck. Nicator knew that had to mean something, and asked, “What is it, Skipper?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Grus answered. “I can almost hear the Banished One laughing from here, that’s what.” He held up his cup to show the nearest barmaid it was empty, then proceeded to get very drunk.

King Mergus strode through the royal palace in the city of Avornis in the center of a bubble of silence. Whenever servants or courtiers or soldiers saw him coming, they jerked apart from one another, bowed with all the respect they were supposed to show, and stayed frozen as statues till he’d passed. Then they started up again, talking behind his back.

He’d tried catching them at it a couple of times. He could, but the sport soon palled. They didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.

The real trouble began a few days after Hallow Perdix made the king’s concubine queen. Mergus came up a corridor at the same instant that his brother, Prince Scolopax, started down it from the other end.

They both stopped for half a heartbeat when they saw each other, and then both kept walking. Mergus braced himself, as though heading into battle—and so he was.

For close to thirty years, Mergus had ruled Avornis. For close to thirty years, his younger brother had been a spare wheel—and a mistrusted spare wheel, at that. With nothing useful to do, Scolopax had thrown himself into drink and dissipation. These days, he looked ten years older than the king.

With a grim nod, Mergus started to walk past Scolopax. “You bastard,” his brother said, breathing wine fumes into his face. “You and your bastard.”

A couple of servants had been walking along the passageway, too. They froze and turned back toward the king and his brother, staring as they might have stared after the first warning rumble of an avalanche. King Mergus hardly noticed them. If his look could have killed, Scolopax would have lain dead on the floor. “Call me what you choose—” Mergus began.

Prince Scolopax glared back with loathing all the greater for being, unlike Mergus, impotent. “If I did, your bones would catch fire inside your stinking carcass.”

Mergus went on as though his brother hadn’t spoken: “—but Lanius is my legitimate son and heir, being the child of my lawfully wedded wife.”

Scolopax’s scornful snort sounded as though he were breaking wind. “Throw seven and you’ll win at dice. At marriage?”

He made that rude, rude noise again. “How much did you pay Perdix the pimp, besides promotion?”

“He won promotion on his merits, and I paid him not a copper halfpenny.” Mergus lied without hesitation.

Scolopax’s laugh was more a howl of pain. He shook a long, bony finger under the king’s nose. “All right. All right, gods curse you. Olor has six, but you think you’re entitled to more. But I tell you this, my dear brother.” A viper could have given the word no more venom. Shaking his finger again, Scolopax went on, “I tell you this: Whether you have that bastard or not, I know who’s going to rule Avornis when you’re stinking in your grave. Me, that’s who!” He jabbed his thumb at his own chest.

“Do you hear that sound?” King Mergus cupped a hand behind his ear. Scolopax frowned. But for their two angry voices, the corridor was silent. Mergus answered his own question anyhow. “That’s the Banished One, licking his chops.”

The prince went death pale. “You dare,” he whispered. “You dare, when the Banished One whispered in your ear, telling you to wed your whore in spite of all that’s right and prop—”

He ducked then, just in time. Mergus’ right fist whistled past his ear. But Mergus’ left caught him in the belly and doubled him up. Scolopax hit the king in the face. The two old men—the two brothers—stood toe to toe, hammering away at each other with every bit of strength that was in them.

Their quarrel had drawn more servants to the corridor. “Your Majesty!” cried some of those men, while others said, “Your Highness!” They all rushed toward the king and the prince and got between them so they couldn’t reach each other anymore.

“I’ll have your head for this!” Mergus shouted at Scolopax.

“It’s better than the one you’ve got now!” Scolopax shouted back.

And Mergus knew his threat was idle, empty. However much he wanted to be rid of his brother forever, he knew he couldn’t kill him, not unless Scolopax did something far worse than giving him a black eye (he’d bloodied his brother’s nose, he saw with no small satisfaction). He didn’t have many years left himself. With Scolopax gone and his son a child, who would rule Avornis after him? A regency council—and the only thing Mergus feared more was the Banished One in all his awful majesty.

If there was a better recipe for paralyzing the kingdom than a squabbling regency council, no one had found it yet.

Scolopax dabbed blood from his upper lip with a silken kerchief. “You maniac,” he panted. “If you had the Scepter of Mercy, you’d bash people’s brains in with it.”

“If I had the Scepter of Mercy—” Mergus stood there panting, trying to get enough air. He scowled at Scolopax, feeling all the bruises his brother had given him. He tried again. “If I had it—” That was no good, either; he had to stop for a second time. “Get out of my sight,” he said thickly, rage almost choking him.

He was closer to taking his brother’s head for that remark than for all the bruises he’d had from the prince. And Scolopax had to know as much, too. He shook himself free of servants and courtiers and left Mergus without another word.

“Your Majesty—” one of the servants began.

“Go away,” Mergus said. “Leave me.” One advantage of being king was that, when he said such things, people obeyed him. The corridor emptied as though by magic.

But that proved less helpful than Mergus had hoped. It left him alone with his thoughts—and with his brother’s final mocking words.

If I had the Scepter of Mercy… His shoulders slumped. He sighed. No King of Avornis had looked on, let alone held, the great talisman for four hundred years. It had been on procession in the south, to hearten the people against the Banished One and against the fierce Menteshe who did his bidding (and who, then, were newly come to the borders of Avornis), when a band of nomads, riding faster than the wind, swooped down on its guardsmen and raped it away. These days, it stayed in Yozgat, the capital of the strongest Menteshe principality.

The Banished One couldn’t do anything with the Scepter. If he could have, he surely would have by now. And if ever the Banished One found the power to wield it, he wouldn’t merely storm the city of Avornis. He would storm back into the heavens themselves. So the priests said, and King Mergus knew no reason to disbelieve them.

But even if the Banished One couldn’t hold the Scepter in his fist, he kept the kings of Avornis from using it for the good of the kingdom. Mergus thought his distant predecessors had taken its power for granted. People often did, when they’d had something marvelous for a long time.

I wouldn’t. If the Scepter of Mercy came to me, I’d do right by it. He laughed a sad and bitter laugh. Surely every king of Avornis for the past four centuries had had that same thought. And how much good had it done any of them? Exactly none, as Mergus knew all too well.

“Fire beaqon!” Turnix called. The wizard pointed to a hilltop north of the Stura atop which, sure enough, a big bonfire had flared into life.

“I see it,” Grus answered. “The Menteshe are loose, gods curse them.”

Nicator also peered toward the north. “Now—let’s see exactly whereabouts and how bad it is.”

Three more, smaller, signal fires sprang to life to the west of the first one. “That way—a medium-sized raid,” Grus said. Five would have meant a major invasion—a war. Grus pointed west. “We’ll see what the next beacon tells us.” He set a hand on Nicator’s shoulder. “Pass out weapons to the rowers. Who knows what sort of fighting we’ll be doing?”

“Right you are, Skipper,” Nicator answered, and saw to it.

Propelled by sails and oars, the Tigerfish sped down the river toward the trouble. The next flaring fire beacon still urged it toward the west. “We’re on the way to Anxa,” Grus murmured, disquieted.

“And so?” his lieutenant said. Then, perhaps a moment slower than he should have, he caught on. “Oh. That thrall we handed over to the wizards there. Don’t you think they should have figured out whether he was dangerous or not?”

“Yes, I think they should have,” Grus told him. “Trouble is, I don’t know whether they did.”

“Well, even if they didn’t, how much trouble could one thrall cause?” Nicator asked.

“I don’t know that, either. I hope nobody’s finding out.”

He watched anxiously for the smoke rising from the next beacon, which stood on a hill north of the riverside town. The smoke didn’t always predict what the fires themselves would say, but he’d gotten good at gauging it. Even before he saw the flames showing that trouble lay due north hereabouts, the way the smoke rose made him think they would tell him that. He also spied smoke rising from places that did not hold fire beacons. The Menteshe burned for the sport of it.

Just before he came in to the town of Anxa (which, thanks to its wall, remained in Avornan hands), a young officer on horseback waved to him from the northern bank of the Stura. The sun glinted off the fellow’s chain-mail shirt and conical helm. “Ahoy, the river galley!” he shouted.

Grus waved back to show he’d heard. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” he yelled back—the plumes of the officer’s crest were dyed blue.

“We’ll be driving the wild men back this way before long,” the young officer answered. “Driving ’em out of Avornis is one thing. Making sure they don’t do this again… that’s something else, something a lot better.”

“I like the way he thinks,” Nicator said in a voice too low for the lieutenant to hear.

“So do I.” Grus nodded, then cupped his hands to his mouth once more to shout over to the riverbank. “We’ll do our best, Lieutenant. What’s your name?”

“Hirundo. Who’re you?”

“I’m Grus,” Grus answered, adding, “Now we both know where to lay the blame if things go wrong.”

Hirundo laughed. “Here’s hoping we don’t have to,” he said. “Stay there, if you can. I’ll do my best to push the Menteshe your way.” Before Grus could reply, Hirundo wheeled his horse and rode away from the river, up toward the fighting.

“Think he can do it?” Nicator asked.

“You never can tell. A million things might go wrong,” Grus said. “He might get an arrow in his face half an hour from now. But if he doesn’t, I think he’s got a pretty fair chance.”

Nicator nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Hirundo, eh? He’s still wet behind the ears, but that might be a name worth remembering.”

“Let’s see how he does. That’ll tell us more,” Grus said. His lieutenant nodded again.

Before they found out what to make of the lieutenant, two more river galleys came rowing up the Stura toward the Tigerfish. Since Grus was on the scene first, they followed his lead. He spaced them out along the river to wait for the Menteshe, too. “How long are we going to wait?” one of their captains called.

“As long as we have to,” Grus answered, which probably didn’t make the other officer very happy. He had no better answer to give the fellow, though, for Hirundo had given him none.

They ended up dealing with their first Menteshe before Hirundo could have done anything at all about them. This little band of nomads had had enough looting and raping and killing in Avornis to satisfy them. They were ready to cross back over the Stura into their own country. They expected no trouble. Why should they have expected any? They’d had none coming into Avornis.

Grus saw them before they spotted the river galleys. He ordered the Tigerfish to pull back, in fact, so they’d be less likely to spot her. To his relief, the other captains did the same. The Menteshe and their horses boarded the rafts the nomads had hidden among riverside rushes and reeds and started paddling across the Stura.

“Forward!” Grus shouted when those rafts were well out into the stream. Forward the Tigerfish went, and the other galleys, too. How the Menteshe howled! They’d had it all their own way on land. They’d done just as they pleased. No more.

The Tigerfish’s ram smashed up three rafts in quick succession. Menteshe and horses splashed into the water. Avornan sailors plied the nomads with arrows. The rest of the river galleys treated the other rafts just as rudely. Grus didn’t think any Menteshe in that band made it to the far side of the river.

But the real herding of the nomads began the next afternoon. Avornan soldiers began pushing them back toward the Stura. By then, too, more than three galleys had arrived to dispute their passage. Now, with plenty of sailors on hand, Grus and his fellow captains handled things differently. The Menteshe couldn’t get past their ships, which cruised close to the shore so their archers could hit the nomads on land. The Menteshe couldn’t gallop out of range, either, for Avornan cavalry kept pushing more of them toward the riverbank.

Maybe they called on the Banished One to come to their aid. If they did, he failed to hearken to them. Caught between the hammer of the Avornan cavalry and the anvil of the river galleys, they were crushed. Not many got away.

When the fighting ebbed, Hirundo rode down to the river-bank and waved to Grus. “Good job!” he called.

“Same to you,” Grus replied. “They didn’t buy anything cheap on this raid.”

“No, indeed.” Hirundo sketched a salute. “I’d work with you again anytime, Captain.”

Grus returned that salute. “And I with you, Lieutenant—and I’m afraid the Menteshe will give us the chance, too.” He realized he hadn’t had the chance to find out whether the escaped thrall he’d brought to Anxa had had anything to do with this raid. Well, it’s not that you weren’t busy, he told himself. And even if he did, we hurt the Menteshe more than they hurt us.

This time.

Lanius’ first memory was of humiliation. He couldn’t have been more than three years old. He and his mother and father, all splendidly robed, left the palace in a gilded carriage to go to the great cathedral.

He hadn’t been out of the palace very often. Riding in the carriage was a treat. He squealed with glee as the wheels bounced over cobblestones. “Whee!” he shouted. “Fun!”

He sat between his mother and father. They smiled at each other above his head. “I wish I thought this was fun,” his father said.

“Why don’t you, Papa?” Lanius asked in surprise. He couldn’t imagine anything more delightful. Another jounce made him whoop again.

“My back,” his father said.

His mother’s smile faded. “It’s the cobbles,” she said quickly. “Shall I tell the driver to slow down?”

“No, don’t bother,” his father answered. He coughed wetly. “It’s not the road. It’s… my back. I’m not a young man anymore.”

His father had a white beard. Lanius had never thought anything about it. He didn’t now, either. His father was simply his father, as much a fixture of the world as his favorite blanket or the sunshine that came through his window in the morning.

The carriage stopped. A soldier opened the door. His mother got down. “Come on, Lanius,” she said. He slithered across the velvet. She caught him, swung him up in the air, and set him down on the bumpy stones of the street.

“Do it again, Mama!”

“Maybe later. We have to go to the cathedral first.” His mother peered into the carriage, from which his father hadn’t yet emerged. “Are you all right, dear?”

“I’m coming.” His father sounded angry. Lanius knew the tone, and shrank from it. But his mother hadn’t done anything to make King Mergus angry. Lanius didn’t think he had, either. What did that leave? Could his father be angry at himself? Grunting a little, the king finally descended.

“Are you all right?” Lanius’ mother asked again.

“I’ll do,” his father said testily. “It’s just… my back. And my gods-cursed cough. Come on. Let’s find out what Arch-Hallow Bucco does this time.”

Lanius’ mother steered him forward, her hand on his shoulder. He took a couple of steps. Then, all at once, the grandiose immensity of the cathedral ahead filled his sight, and he stopped and stared and stared and stared. Every single line leaped to the sky—pointed windows; tall, narrow arches; buttresses that seemed to fly; and spires, the highest of all crowned by a silver statue of Olor.

His mother let him gape for a moment or two, then urged him on again. That was when he noticed the man in the red silk robe standing in the gateway, backed by several others in robes of the same cut but of saffron yellow silk. The man in red carried a staff topped by a little silver statue just like the big one on the highest spire. Lanius liked that.

The man held the staff in front of him, across his body, now. “You may not pass, Your Majesty,” he said—everybody but Lanius and his mother called his father that. “You know you may not pass. We have done this before. Neither you, nor your concubine, nor your bastard.”

“Have a care, Bucco,” Lanius’ father growled. He was angry now; Lanius was sure of it. “If you insult my wife and my heir, I’ll make you sorry for it.”

“You have gone against the gods themselves,” the arch-hallow said. “Where Olor contents himself with six, you have taken a seventh. It is sin. It is wickedness. It shall not stand. I have told you this each year when you brought the boy and the woman here.” Behind him, the men in the yellow robes solemnly nodded.

“One of your priests thought different,” King Mergus said. “He knew what would happen to Avornis without a proper successor to the throne. You’d know it, too, if you’d think a little.” He coughed once more, and turned as red as Arch-Hallow Bucco’s robe.

“No.” Bucco sounded very certain. “Where you break a rule for the sake of convenience, there the Banished One shows his face.” The priests in saffron silk nodded again, all in unison.

“They’re funny, Father!” Lanius exclaimed.

“They’re fools, Son,” his father answered. “But, whether they’re fools or not, this time we are going to worship here.” He started forward, pushing Lanius and his mother along with him.

Clang! Iron gates slammed shut, pushed to by more priests, these in blue robes. Thud! A bar slammed into place to make sure they stayed shut. From behind them, Bucco called, “You may not enter. The cathedral is closed to you. Begone, in the name of the gods!”

“Begone!” the other priests chorused, which made Lanius laugh.

His mother was not laughing. “They dare,” she said.

“Fools dare all sorts of things,” his father said grimly. He wasn’t red anymore. He was white—with fury, or with pain? “It’s what makes them fools.”

Chain mail clanking, one of his guardsmen strode up to the king. “Your Majesty, we’d need about two companies’ worth of men to storm the gates,” he said. “Half an hour’s work, no more.”

King Mergus shook his head. “No. We’ll go back to the palace. Let Arch-Hallow Bucco think he’s won—for now. This time, though, he will pay.”

Lanius started to cry when his father steered him back toward the carriage. “I want to go in there!” He pointed to the cathedral. “It’s pretty in there!”

“They won’t let us go in there,” his mother told him. That made him cry harder than ever. He was used to getting what he wanted.

“Be quiet, Son,” his father said, and his tone was such that Lanius was quiet. The king went on, “Bucco has had his day. He’s truly a fool if he thinks I won’t have mine.” Lanius didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand anything except that they had to go back to the palace. It didn’t seem fair at all.

Three days later, a palace servant bowed low to King Mergus. “Someone here to see you, Your Majesty.”

“Ah?” Mergus’ shaggy eyebrows rose. “Someone I’m expecting?” The servant nodded. Mergus’ grin showed teeth yellow but still sharp. “Well, send him in, send him in.”

In came Arch-Hallow Bucco, escorted—none too politely— by several palace guards. He did not wear his red silk robes now, only an ordinary shirt and pair of breeches. He looked more like a retired schoolmaster, say, than a man who dared thunder at kings. He also looked frightened, which was nothing less than Mergus had expected.

“Will you speak to me of bastards now, Bucco?” the king demanded.

One of the guards prodded the arch-hallow. Before speaking at all, Bucco bowed very low. “What—what is the meaning of this, Your Majesty?” he quavered.

“I am going to explain something to you, something that has to do with which of us is stronger in the kingdom,” Mergus answered. “When you shut the gates in my face, you thought you were. I am here to tell you, you are wrong.”

Arch-Hallow Bucco gathered himself, looking sternly at Mergus. “I did what I did because I had to do it, Your Majesty, not from hatred of you. I have told you that before, when you tried to flaunt your sin. If I did otherwise, I would not be worthy of the rank I hold.”

“I take a different view,” King Mergus said. “I say that, because you did what you did, you are not worthy of the rank you hold. And, as I am king, what I say in these matters carries weight. As of now, this instant, Bucco, you are no longer Arch-Hallow of Avornis.”

“What will you do with me?” Bucco knew fear again, but did his best not to show it.

“For your insolence, I ought to take your head,” Mergus said, and the newly deposed arch-hallow quailed. “I ought to,” the king repeated, “but I won’t. Instead, I’ll send you to the Maze, where you can pray for wisdom. You’ll have plenty of leisure to do it in, that’s certain, and company, too, for a good—no, a bad—dozen of your followers will go with you.”

Bucco looked hardly more happy than if King Mergus had ordered his immediate beheading. Not far to the west of the city of Avornis, several of the Nine Rivers came together and split apart in a bewildering group of marshes and islands—the Maze. No one knew all the secrets of navigating there, and those secrets changed from year to year, from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. Kings of Avornis had stashed inconvenient people on insignificant islands there for hundreds of years. Few thus disposed of ever came back.

“And who do you think will make a better arch-hallow than I do?” Bucco asked.

“Almost anyone,” Mergus said brutally. “The man I am naming to the post, if that’s what you mean, is Grand Hallow Megadyptes.”

Now Bucco stared. “He would accept it? From you? He is a very holy man.”

“Yes, he is.” King Mergus smiled a nasty smile. “He actually believes in peace among us, which is more than you can say. For the sake of peace, he will become arch-hallow.”

“You may send away those who condemn your sin, Your Majesty, but you cannot send away the sin itself,” Bucco said. “It remains here in the palace. It will not be forgotten. Neither will what you do to me today.”

King Mergus yawned in his face. “That’s what you think. I told you, I take a different view. And when the king takes a different view, the king is right.” He nodded to the guardsmen who’d brought Bucco into his presence. “Be off with him. Let him lie in the bed he’s made.”

Without giving Bucco a chance for the last word, the guards hauled him away.

Captain Grus had a pleasant home in one of the better—although not one of the best—parts of the city of Avornis. His home would have been even more pleasant, in his view, if he saw it more often. His river-galley cruises sometimes kept him away for months at a time.

He happened to be at home, however, when Mergus cast down Bucco and raised Megadyptes in his place. His father brought the news back to the house from the tavern where he spent his afternoons soaking up wine, rolling dice, and telling lies with other retired soldiers. Crex was a big man, stooped and white-bearded, with enormous hands—far and away the largest Grus had ever seen on any man. Grus never knew why his father was called Crex the Unbearable; everyone but Crex who knew was dead, and his father was not the sort to encourage such questions.

“Aye, he sacked him,” Crex said in the peasant accents of the central plains from which he’d come. “Threw him out on his ear, like he was a servant who dropped a soup bowl once too often.”

“There will be trouble,” Grus predicted.

“There’s always trouble,” Estrilda said. His wife was a couple of years younger than he. She had light brown hair and green eyes. At the moment, she looked tired. Their son, Ortalis, was four, and playing with a toy cart in the garden, while their two-year-old daughter, Sosia, slept on Estrilda’s lap. With them to look after, she’d earned the right to be tired. She went on, “There’s been trouble ever since the king married Queen Certhia. That’s hard to stomach.”

“He wants a proper heir,” Crex said. “He wants a better heir than Scolopax, and how can you blame him?”

“Shhh, Father,” Grus said. Crex would speak his mind, and he wouldn’t keep quiet while he did it. Estrilda said the servants were trustworthy, but that wasn’t something you wanted to find out you were wrong about the hard way.

“I can blame him for a seventh wife,” Estrilda said now. “It’s not natural. And plenty of people will say he got rid of Bucco to keep the arch-hallow from telling him the truth about that.”

“Megadyptes is a holy man,” Crex said. “He’s a holier man than Bucco ever dreamt of being, matter of fact.”

“Well, so he is,” Estrilda admitted. She suddenly raised her voice: “Ortalis! Don’t throw rocks at the cat!”

“I didn’t, Mama,” Ortalis said, revising history more than a little.

“You’d better not,” his mother told him, rolling her eyes. She looked back to Crex. “You’re right. Megadyptes is holy. I don’t understand how he can stomach any of this.”

“It’s simple,” Crex said. “He knows Avornis needs a proper king once Mergus is gone, that’s how.”

With some amusement, Grus listened to his wife and his father going back and forth. Because he was away from the city of Avornis so much, he didn’t bother keeping track of which priests here were holy men and which weren’t. But Estrilda and Crex hashed them over endlessly.

“Ortalis!” Crex yelled. “Your mother told you not to do that. D’you want your backside heated up?”

“No, Grandpa.” When Ortalis said that, he was, no doubt, telling the truth.

“Hasn’t Bucco been dickering with the Thervings?” Grus said. “What’s King Dagipert going to do when he has to talk to somebody else?”

“If he doesn’t like it, Mergus can give him a good kick in the ribs, too,” Crex said.

“It’s not that simple,” Grus said. When it came to the Thervings, he knew what he was talking about. “The way things are nowadays, Dagipert’s about as likely to give us a kick in the ribs as the other way round. And he wants to give us one, too.”

“He spent some time here in the city of Avornis when he was a youth, didn’t he?” Estrilda asked.

Crex nodded. “That’s right. Mergus’ father thought it would make him admire us too much to want to bother us. We were stronger in those days, too, and Thervingia weaker. Ortalis!”

“He admires us, all right—just enough to want what we’ve got,” Grus said. “And you never can quite tell. Is that his greed… or is the Banished One looking out through his eyes, too?” They all made a sign against the coming of evil, but Grus wondered how much good it would do.

Something was wrong in the palace. Lanius was only five, but he knew that. People bustled back and forth, all of them with worried looks on their faces. No one had any time for him. He noticed that, most of all. He had been everyone’s darling. He’d gotten used to being everyone’s darling, too, and he’d liked it. Now nobody paid any attention to him. He might as well not have been there.

“Mama—” he said one day.

But not even his mother had any time for him. “Not now,” Certhia said, impatience and anger in her voice.

He tried again. “But, Mama—”

“Not now!” his mother said again, and swatted him on the bottom. He burst into tears. She didn’t pat him and comfort him, the way she usually did. She just went off and left him to cry till he stopped.

And he couldn’t see his father. They wouldn’t let him. All sorts of strange people got to see his father—priests and wizards and men wearing green gowns, like the fellow who took his pulse and looked at his teeth and gave him nasty potions when he didn’t feel good. But Lanius couldn’t.

“It’s not fair!” he wailed. That didn’t get him what he wanted, either. Nothing did. Nothing could.

Once, his father’s chamber lit up as bright as noon in the middle of the night. Loud voices spoke from the ceiling, or so it seemed to Lanius, whose own room was nearby. The light and the voices woke him up. They didn’t frighten him—they sounded like nice voices—but they did annoy him, because he wanted to sleep. Before long, though, the chamber went dark and the voices fell silent.

Lanius’ mother and a man walked down the corridor in front of his room. “Nothing more to do, if that failed,” the man said. Lanius’ mother began to weep, quietly and without hope. “I’m sorry, Your Highness,” the man told her, “but it’s only a matter of time now.”

Two days later, everybody in the royal palace began to weep and wail. Nobody would tell Lanius why, which made him start crying, too. No one even bothered to wipe his nose for him. Wet, slimy snot dribbled down his chin.

And then Uncle Scolopax strode into his room. Lanius didn’t like Scolopax. He never had. Scolopax didn’t like him, either, and hardly bothered hiding it. He didn’t hide it now. “Shut up, you little bastard,” he snarled. “Your old man’s dead, so I’m the king now. You’re too young, no one will support you. And if I’m the king, you’d best believe you are a bastard.”