The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER TEN

Outside the royal palace, snow swirled through the air. The wind howled. When people had to move about, they put on fur-lined boots, heavy cloaks, fur hats with earflaps, and sometimes wool mufflers to protect their mouths and noses. King Lanius didn’t think the Banished One was giving the city of Avornis a particularly hard winter, but this was a nasty blizzard.

It was chilly inside the palace, too. Braziers and fires could do only so much. The cold slipped in through windows and around doors. Lanius worried about the baby monkeys. Even the grown ones were vulnerable in the wintertime. But all the little animals seemed healthy, and the babies got bigger by the day.

Lanius didn’t worry about them as much as he might have. He had other things on his mind—not least, how to go on with his affair with Cristata without letting Sosia find out about it. Cristata, he discovered, worried about that much less than he did. “She’ll learn sooner or later, Your Majesty,” she said. “It can’t help but happen.”

Knowing she was right, Lanius shook his head anyhow. They lay side by side in that same little storeroom—this time on one of the carpets, which they’d unrolled; the floor was cold. “What would happen then?” the king said.

“You’d have to send me away, I suppose.” Cristata had few illusions. “I hope you’d pick somewhere nice, a place where I could get by easy enough. Maybe you could even help me find a husband.”

He didn’t want to think of her in some other man’s arms. He wanted her in his. Holding her, he said, “I will take care of you.”

She studied him before slowly nodding. “Yes, I think you will. That’s good.”

“If I don’t find you a husband, I’ll be your husband,” Lanius said.

Cristata’s eyes opened enormously wide. “You would do that?” she whispered.

“Why not?” he said. “First wives are for legitimate heirs, and I have one. I may get more. It’s not that Sosia and I turn our backs on each other when we go to bed. We don’t. I wouldn’t lie to you. But second wives, and later ones, can be for fun.”

“Would I be… a queen?” Cristata asked. Not long before, she’d been impressed at having almost enough to count as a taxpayer. She seemed to need a moment to realize how far above even that previously unimaginable status she might rise.

“Yes, you would.” Lanius nodded. “But you wouldn’t have the rank Sosia does.” Any more than I have the rank Grus does, he thought unhappily.

Up until this moment, he’d never imagined taking a second wife. The King of Avornis was allowed six, as King Olor in the heavens had six wives. But, just as Queen Quelea was Olor’s principal spouse, so most Kings of Avornis contented themselves with a single wife. King Mergus, Lanius’ father, hadn’t, but King Mergus had been desperate to find a woman who would give him a son and heir. He’d been so desperate, he’d made Lanius’ mother, a concubine, his seventh wife to make the boy she bore legitimate. He’d also made himself a heretic and Lanius a bastard in the eyes of a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Mergus’ troubles had gone a long way toward souring his son on the idea of having more than one wife… until now. It wouldn’t be adultery then, he thought. But if it’s not, would it still be as much fun?

Grus could have wed Alca. He’d sent her away, instead. That, without a doubt, was Queen Estrilda’s doing. Would Queen Sosia’s views be any more accommodating than her mother’s? Lanius dared hope. They could hardly be less.

Cristata asked, “What will Her Majesty say if you do that?” She’d thought along with him, then.

“She has a right to complain if I take a mistress,” Lanius answered. “If I take another wife, though, how can she be upset?” He could, in fact, think of several ways. But he wanted to keep things as simple as possible for Cristata.

She, however, seemed able to see complications without him pointing them out. “She’s King Grus’ daughter,” she said. “What will the other king do?”

“He may grumble, but how could he do more?” Lanius said. “How can he fuss much about what I do after the way he carried on winter before this?”

“People always manage to forget what they did and to fuss about what other people do,” Cristata said, words that held an unpleasant ring of truth.

To stop thinking about that, Lanius kissed her. The medicine worked so well, he gave himself a second dose, and then a third. One thing led to another, and he and Cristata didn’t leave the storeroom for quite a while.

“Tell me I’m not hearing this.” Grus’ head ached as though he’d had too much wine, but he hadn’t had any. “A second wife? A serving girl my own son abused? Why, in the name of the gods?”

“I said, if I can’t find her a husband that suits her,” Lanius answered.

“You told her that?” Grus asked. Lanius nodded. Grus groaned. “What makes you think she’ll find anyone else ‘suitable’ if she has the chance to be a queen?”

Lanius frowned. Grus recognized the frown—it was thoughtful. Hadn’t that occurred to him? Maybe it hadn’t. At last, he said, “Have you paid any attention to Cristata? Say what you will about her, she’s honest.”

“She’s certainly made you think she is, anyhow,” Grus said. “Whether that’s the same thing is a different question. And here’s one more for you—why are you doing this to my daughter?”

“Who knows just why a man and a woman do what they do?” Lanius answered. “Why did you do this to your wife, for instance?”

Grus gritted his teeth. He might have known Lanius would find that particular question. As a matter of fact, he had known it, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. Now he had to find an answer for it. His first try was an evasion. “That’s different,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” Lanius agreed. “You exiled your other woman. I want to marry mine. Which of us has the advantage there?”

“You’re not being fair,” Grus said, flicked on a sore spot. He wasn’t happy about what he’d done about—with—to—Alca, and wasn’t proud of it, either. It had been the only way he saw to keep peace with Estrilda. That might have made it necessary, but he had the bad feeling it didn’t make it right.

The other king shrugged. “I never said anything—not a word— about what you did with your women up until now. You might have the courtesy to stay out of my business, too.”

“It’s also my business, you know,” Grus said. “You’re married to my daughter. I know Sosia’s not happy about this. She’s told me so.”

“She’s told me so, too,” Lanius admitted. “But I’d be happier with Cristata than without her. I’m King of Avornis… I think. Don’t I get to decide anything at all about how I live—Your Majesty?”

When Grus used the royal title with Lanius, he was usually being polite. When Lanius used it with Grus—which he seldom did—he was usually being reproachful. Grus felt his face heat. He held his hands a few inches apart. “Only about this much of you is ‘happier’ with this girl. You’re thinking with your crotch, not with your head. That isn’t like you.”

Lanius turned red, but he didn’t change his mind. “Well, what if I am?” he said. “I’m not the only one who ever has.” He looked straight at Grus.

He’s going to do this, Grus realized. He’s not going to pay attention to me telling him no. What can I do about it? He saw one thing he might try, and said, “Go talk to Anser about this. He’s closer to your age, but I think he’d also tell you it’s not a good idea.”

“I like Anser. Don’t get me wrong—I do,” Lanius said. “I like him, but I know he’d tell me whatever you tell him to tell me. And we both know he’s arch-hallow on account of that, not because he’s holy.”

“Yes.” Grus admitted in private what he never would in public. “Even so, I swear to you, Lanius, I have not spoken with him about this. Whatever he says, he will say, and that’s all there is to it. Talk to him. He has good sense—and you, right now, don’t.”

“When you say I don’t have good sense, you mean I’m not doing what you want me to,” Lanius said, but then he shrugged. “All right. I’ll talk to him. But he won’t change my mind.”

Back stiff with defiance, Lanius went off to the cathedral. Grus waited until he was sure the other king had left the palace, then pointed to three or four servants. “Fetch me the serving woman named Cristata,” he told them. His voice held the snap of command. They hurried away.

Before long, one of them led her into the little audience chamber. “Oh!” she said in surprise when she saw Grus. “When he told me the king wanted to see me, I thought he meant—”

“Lanius,” Grus said, and Cristata nodded. He went on, “Well, I do.” He could see why Lanius wanted her, too, and why Ortalis had. But that had nothing to do with anything. He went on, “Are you really bound and determined to become Queen of Avornis, or would being quietly set up for life in a provincial town be enough to satisfy you?”

If she said she was bound and determined to be Lanius’ queen, Grus knew his own life would get more difficult. She paused to consider before she answered. She’s not stupid, either, Grus thought. Is she smart enough to see when she’s well off? Or is she as head-over-heels for Lanius as he is for her?

She said, “I’ll go, Your Majesty. If I stay, I’ll have you for an enemy, won’t I? I don’t want that. Anyone in Avornis would be a fool to want you for an enemy, and I hope I’m not a fool.”

“You’re not,” Grus assured her. “ ‘Enemy,’ I think, goes too far. But I am going to protect my own family as best I can. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

“Probably,” Cristata answered. “I have to trust you, don’t I, about what ‘quietly set for life’ means? You were generous paying for what Ortalis did.”

Grus found himself liking her. She had nerve, to bargain with someone with so much more power—and to make him feel guilty for using it. He said, “By the gods, Cristata, I won’t cheat you. Believe me or not, as you please.” When she nodded, he went on, “We have a bargain, then?” She nodded again. So did he. “Gather up whatever you need to take with you. If we’re going to do this, I want you gone before Lanius can call you again.”

“Yes, I can see how you might.” Cristata sighed. “I will miss him. He’s… sweet. But you could have done a lot worse to me, couldn’t you?”

Only after she was gone did Grus realize that last wasn’t necessarily praise.

“You… You…” Lanius’ fury rose up and choked him. What he could do about it, however, knew some very sharp bounds. Grus was the one with the power, and he’d just used it.

“Think whatever you like,” he said now. “Call me whatever you like. If you’re going to take serving girls to bed now and again, I won’t fuss, though Sosia might. You’re a man. It happens. I ought to know.”

His calm words gave Lanius’ rage nowhere to light. Absurdly, Lanius realized he never had taken Cristata to bed. Coupling on the floor, even on a carpet, wasn’t the same. “I love her!” he exclaimed.

“She’s nice-looking. She’s clever. She’s got spirit,” Grus said. “And you picked her out yourself. You didn’t have her forced on you. No wonder you had a good time with her. But love? Don’t be too sure.”

“What do you know about it, you—?” Lanius called him the vilest names he knew.

“I think you’re sweet, too,” Grus answered calmly. Lanius gaped. Grus went on, “What do I know about it? Oh, a little something, maybe. Cristata reminds me more than a little of Anser’s mother.”

“Oh,” Lanius said. Try as he would to stay outraged, he had trouble. Maybe Grus did know what he was talking about after all. Lanius went on, “You still had no business—none, do you hear me?—interfering in my affairs… and you can take that last however you want.”

“Don’t be silly,” Grus answered, still calm. “Of course I did. You’re married to my daughter. You’re my grandchildren’s father. If you do something that’s liable to hurt them, of course I’ll try to stop you.”

Lanius hadn’t expected him to be quite so frank. He wondered whether that frankness made things better or worse. “You have no shame at all, do you?” he said.

“Where my family is concerned? Very little, though I’ve probably been too soft on Ortalis over the years,” Grus said. “He’s embarrassed me more times than I wish he had, but that isn’t what you meant, and I know it isn’t. I’ll do whatever I think I have to do. If you want to be angry at me, go ahead. You’re entitled to.”

And no matter how angry you are, you can’t do anything about it. That was the other thing Grus meant. He was right, too, as Lanius knew only too well. His impotence was at times more galling than at others. This… He couldn’t even protect a woman he still insisted to himself he loved. What could be more humiliating than that? Nothing he could think of. • “Where did you send her?” he asked after a long silence.

Some of the tension went out of Grus’ shoulders. He must have realized he’d won. He said, “You know I won’t tell you that. You’ll find out sooner or later, but you won’t be up in arms about it by the time you do.”

His obvious assumption that he knew exactly how Lanius worked only irked the younger man more. So did the alarming suspicion that he might be right. Lanius said, “At least tell me how much you’re giving her. Is she really taken care of?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.” Grus named a sum. Lanius blinked; he might not have been so generous himself. Grus set a hand on his shoulder. He shook it off. Grus shrugged. “I told you, I’m not going to get angry at you, and you can go right ahead and be angry at me. We’ll sort it out later.”

“Will we?” Lanius said tonelessly, but Grus had turned away. He wasn’t even listening anymore.

Lanius slept by himself that night. Sosia hadn’t wanted to sleep beside him since finding out about Cristata. He didn’t care to sleep by her now, either. He knew he would have to make peace sooner or later, but sooner or later wasn’t yet.

He thought he woke in the middle of the night. Then he realized it was a dream, but not the sort of dream he would have wanted. The Banished One’s inhumanly cold, inhumanly beautiful features stared at him.

“You see what your friends are worth?” the Banished One asked with a mocking laugh. “Who has hurt you worse—Grus, or I?”

“You hurt the whole kingdom,” Lanius answered.

“Who cares about the kingdom? Who has hurt you?”

“Go away,” Lanius said uselessly.

“You can have your revenge,” the Banished One went on, as though the king hadn’t said a word. “You can make Grus pay, you can make Grus weep, for what he has done to you. Think on it. You can make him suffer, as he has made you suffer. The chance for vengeance is given to few men. Reach out with both hands and take it.”

Lanius would have liked nothing better than revenge. He’d already had flights of fantasy filled with nothing else. But, even dreaming, he understood that anything the Banished One wanted was something to be wary of. And so, not without a certain regret, he said “No.”

“Fool! Ass! Knave! Jackanapes! Wretch who lives only for a day, and will not make himself happy for some puny part of his puny little life!” the Banished One cried. “Die weeping, then, and have what you deserve!”

The next thing Lanius knew, he was awake again, and drenched in sweat despite the winter chill. He wished the Banished One would choose to afflict someone else. He himself was getting to know the one who had been Milvago much too well.

Land-travel in winter was sometimes easier than it was in spring or fall. In winter, rain didn’t turn roads to mud. Land travel was sometimes also the only choice in winter, for the rivers near the city of Avornis could freeze. After Grus’ troubles with Lanius, he was glad to get away from the capital any way he could. If the other king tried to get out of line, he would hear about it and deal with it before anything too drastic could happen. He had no doubt of that.

Once Grus reached the unfrozen portion of the Granicus, he went faster still—by river galley downstream to the seaside port of Dodona. The man who met him at the quays was neither bureaucrat nor politician, neither general nor commodore. Plegadis was a shipwright and carpenter, the best Avornis had.

“So she’s ready for me to see, is she?” Grus said.

Plegadis nodded. He was a sun-darkened, broad-shouldered man with engagingly ugly features, a nose that had once been straighter than it was now, and a dark brown bushy beard liberally streaked with gray. “Do you really need to ask, Your Majesty?” he said, pointing. “Stands out from everything else we make, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, just a bit,” Grus answered. “Yes, just a bit.”

Plegadis laughed out loud. Grus stared at the Avornan copy of a Chernagor pirate ship. Sure enough, it towered over everything else tied up at the quays of Dodona. To someone used to the low, sleek lines of river galleys, it looked blocky, even ugly, but Grus had seen what ships like this were worth.

“Is she as sturdy as she looks?” the king asked.

“I should hope so.” The shipwright sounded offended. “I didn’t just copy her shape, Your Majesty. I matched lines and timber and canvas, too, as best I could. She’s ready to take to the open sea, and to do as well as a Chernagor ship would.”

Grus nodded. “That’s what I wanted. How soon can I have more just like her—a proper fleet?”

“Give me the timber and the carpenters and it won’t be too long— middle of summer, maybe,” Plegadis answered. “Getting sailors who know what they’re doing in a ship like this… That’ll take a little while, too.”

“I understand.” Grus eyed the tall, tall masts. “Handling all that canvas will take a lot of practice by itself.”

“We do have some Chernagor prisoners to teach us the ropes,” Plegadis said. When a shipwright used that phrase, he wasn’t joking or spitting out a cliché. He meant exactly what the words implied.

He wasn’t joking, but was he being careful enough? “Have you had a wizard check these Chernagors?” Grus asked. “We may have some of the same worries with them that we do with the Menteshe, and even with the thralls. I’m not saying we will, but we may.”

Plegadis’ grimace showed a broken front tooth. “I didn’t even think of that, Your Majesty, but I’ll see to it, I promise you. What I was going to tell you is, some of the fishermen here make better crew for this Chernagor ship than a lot of river-galley men. They know what to do with a good-sized sail, where on a galley it’s row, row, row all the time.”

“Yes, I can see how that might be so.” Grus looked east, out to the Azanian Sea. It seemed to go on and on forever. He’d felt that even more strongly when he went out on it in a river galley. He’d also felt badly out of his element. He’d gotten away with fighting on the sea, but he wasn’t eager to try it again in ships not made for it. Would I be more ready to try it in a monster like that? he wondered. Once I had a good crew, I think I might be. Out loud, he went on, “I don’t care where the men come from, as long as you get them.”

“Good. That’s the right attitude.” Plegadis nodded. “We have to lick those Chernagor bastards. I’m not fussy about how. They did us a lot of harm, and they’d better find out they can’t get away with nonsense like that. I’ll tell you something else, too. Along this coast, plenty of fishermen’ll think an ordinary sailor’s wages look pretty good, poor miserable devils.”

“I believe it,” Grus answered. The eastern coast was Avornis’ forgotten land. If a king wanted to make a man disappear, he sent him to the Maze. If a man wanted to disappear on his own, he came to the coast. Even tax collectors often overlooked this part of the kingdom. Grus knew he had until the Chernagors descended on it. He added, “If all this makes us tie the coast to the rest of Avornis, some good will have come from it.”

To his surprise, Plegadis hesitated before nodding again. “Well, I think so, too, Your Majesty, or I suppose I do. But you’ll find people up and down the coast who won’t. They like being… on their own, you might say.”

“How did they like it when the pirates burned their towns and stole their silver and raped their women?” Grus asked. “They were glad enough to see us after that.”

“Oh, yes.” The shipwright’s smile was as crooked as that tooth of his. “But they got over it pretty quick.” Grus started to smile. He started to, but he didn’t. Once again, Plegadis hadn’t been joking.

When all else failed, King Lanius took refuge in the archives. No one bothered him there, and when he concentrated on old documents he didn’t have to dwell on whatever else was bothering him. Over the years, going there had served him well. But it didn’t come close to easing the pain of losing Cristata.

And it wasn’t just the pain of losing her. He recognized that. Part of it was also the humiliation of being unable to do anything for someone he loved. If Grus had ravished her in front of his eyes, it could hardly have been worse. Grus hadn’t, of course. He’d been humane, especially compared to what he might have done. He’d even made Lanius see his point of view, but so what? Cristata was still gone, she still wouldn’t be back, and Lanius still bitterly missed her.

Next to that ache in his heart, even finding another letter as interesting and important as King Cathartes’ probably wouldn’t have meant much to him. As things turned out, most of what Lanius did find was dull. There were days when he could plow through tax receipts and stay interested, but those were days when he was in a better mood than he was now. He found himself alternately yawning and scowling.

He fought his way through a few sets of receipts, as much from duty as anything else. But then he shook his head, gave up, and buried his face in his hands. If he gave in to self-pity here, at least he could do it without anyone else seeing.

When he raised his head again, sharp curiosity—and the beginnings of alarm—replaced the self-pity. Any noise he heard in the archives was out of the ordinary. And any noise he heard here could be a warning of something dangerous. If one of the thralls had escaped…

He turned his head this way and that, trying to pinpoint the noise. It wasn’t very loud, and it didn’t seem to come from very high off the ground. “Mouse,” Lanius muttered, and tried to make himself believe it.

He’d nearly succeeded when a sharp clatter drove such thoughts from his mind. Mice didn’t carry metal objects—knives?—or knock them against wood. Today, Lanius had a knife at his own belt. But he was neither warrior nor assassin, as he knew all too well.

“Who’s there?” he called, slipping the knife from its sheath and sliding forward as quietly as he could. Only silence answered him. He peered ahead. Almost anything smaller than an elephant could have hidden in the archives. He’d never fully understood what higgledy-piggledy meant until he started coming in here. He often wondered whether anyone ever read half the parchments various officials wrote. Sometimes it seemed as though the parchments just ended up here, on shelves and in boxes and barrels and leather sacks and sometimes even wide-mouthed pottery jugs all stacked one atop another with scant regard for sanity or safety.

Elephants Lanius didn’t much worry about. An elephant would have had to go through a winepress before it could squeeze between the stacks of documents and receptacles. Assassins, unfortunately, weren’t likely to be so handicapped.

“Who’s there?” the king called again, his voice breaking nervously.

Again, no answer, not with words. But he did hear another metallic clatter, down close to the ground.

That made him wonder. There were assassins, and then there were… He made the noise he used when he was about to feed the moncats. Sure enough, out came one of the beasts, this time carrying not a wooden spoon but a long-handled silver dipper for lifting soup from a pot or wine from a barrel.

“You idiot animal!” Lanius exclaimed. Unless he was wildly mistaken, this was the same moncat that had frightened him in here before. He pointed an accusing finger at it. “How did you get out this time, Pouncer? And how did you get into the kitchens and then out of them again?”

“Rowr,” Pouncer said, which didn’t explain enough.

Lanius made the feeding noise again. Still clutching the dipper, the moncat came over to him. He grabbed it. It hung on to its prize, but didn’t seem otherwise upset. That noise meant food most of the time. If, this once, it didn’t, the animal wasn’t going to worry about it.

“What shall I do with you?” Lanius demanded.

Again, Pouncer said, “Rowr.” Again, that told the king less than he wanted to know.

He carried the moncat back to its room. After putting it inside and going out into the hallway once more, he waved down the first servant he saw. “Yes, Your Majesty?” the man said. “Is something wrong?”

“Something or someone,” Lanius answered grimly. “Tell Bubulcus to get himself over here right away. Tell everybody you see to tell Bubulcus to get over here right away. Tell him he’d better hurry if he knows what’s good for him.”

He hardly ever sounded so fierce, so determined. The servant’s eyes widened. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, and hurried away. Lanius composed himself to wait, not in patience but in impatience.

Bubulcus came trotting up about a quarter of an hour later, a worried expression on his long, thin, pointy-nosed face. “What’s the trouble now, Your Majesty?” he asked, as though he and trouble had never met before.

Knowing better, the king pointed to the barred door that kept the moncats from escaping. “Have you gone looking for me in there again?”

“Which I haven’t.” Bubulcus shook his head so vigorously, a lock of greasy black hair flopped down in front of one eye. He brushed it back with the palm of his hand. “Which I haven’t,” he repeated, his voice oozing righteousness. “No, sir. I’ve learned my lesson, I have. Once was plenty, thank you very much.”

Once hadn’t been plenty, of course. He’d let moncats get loose twice—at least twice. He might forget. Lanius never would. “Are you sure, Bubulcus? Are you very sure?” he asked. “If you’re lying to me, I will send you to the Maze, and I won’t blink before I do it. I promise you that.”

“Me? Lie? Would I do such a thing?” Bubulcus acted astonished, insulted, at the mere possibility. He went on, “Put me on the rack, if you care to. I’ll tell you the same. Give me to a Menteshe torturer. Give me to the Banished One, if you care to.”

The king’s fingers twisted in a gesture that might—or might not— ward off evil omens. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Thank the true gods for your ignorance, too.”

“Which I do for everything, Your Majesty,” Bubulcus said. “But I’m not ignorant about this. I know I didn’t go in there. Do what you want with me, but I can’t tell you any different.”

Sending him to the rack had more than a little appeal. With a certain amount of regret, Lanius said, “Go find a mage, Bubulcus. Tell him to question you about this. Bring him back here with you. Hurry. I’ll be waiting. If you don’t come back soon, you’ll wish some of the foolish things you just said did come true.”

Bubulcus disappeared faster than if a mage had conjured him into nothingness. Lanius leaned against the wall. Would the servant come back so fast?

He did, or nearly. And he had with him no less a wizard than Pterocles himself. After bowing to Lanius, the wizard said, “As best I can tell, Your Majesty, this man is speaking the truth. He was not in those rooms, and he did not let your pet get out.”

“How did the moncat get loose, then?” Lanius asked.

Pterocles shrugged. “I can’t tell you that. Maybe another servant let it out. Maybe there’s a hole in the wall no one has noticed.”

Bubulcus looked not only relieved but triumphant. “Which I told you, Your Majesty. Which I didn’t have anything to do with.”

“This time, no,” Lanius admitted. “But your record up until now somehow didn’t fill me with confidence.” Bubulcus looked indignant. Pterocles let out a small snort of laughter. Lanius gestured. “Go on, Bubulcus. Count yourself lucky and try to stay out of trouble.”

“Which I’ve already done, except for some people who keep trying to put me into it,” Bubulcus said. But then he seemed to remember he was talking to a King of Avornis, not to another servant. He bobbed his head in an awkward bow and scurried away.

“Thank you,” Lanius told Pterocles.

“You’re welcome, Your Majesty.” The wizard tried a smile on for size. “Dealing with something easy every once in a while is a pleasure.” He too nodded to Lanius and ambled down the corridor.

Something easy? Lanius wondered. Then he decided Pterocles had a point. Finding out if a servant lied was bound to be easier—and safer— than, say, facing a Chernagor sorcerer. But how had Pouncer escaped? That didn’t look as though it would be so easy for Lanius to figure out.

Grus listened to Pterocles with more than a little amusement. “A moncat, you say?” he inquired, and the wizard nodded. Grus went on, “Well, that’s got to be simpler than working out how to cure thralls.”

Pterocles nodded. “It was this time, anyhow.”

“Good. Not everything should be hard all the time,” Grus said, and Pterocles nodded again. Grus asked, “And how are you coming on curing thralls?”

Pterocles’ face fell. He’d plainly hoped Grus wouldn’t ask him that.

But, once asked, he had to answer. “Not as well as I would like, Your Majesty,” he said reluctantly, adding, “No one else in Avornis has figured out how to do it, either, you know, not reliably, not since the Menteshe wizards first started making our men into thralls however many hundred years ago that was.”

“Well, yes,” Grus admitted with a certain reluctance of his own. He didn’t want to think about that; he would sooner have forgotten all those other failures. That way, he could have believed Pterocles was starting with a clean slate. As things were, he could only ask, “Do you think you’ve found any promising approaches?”

“Promising? No. Hopeful? Maybe,” Pterocles replied. “After all, as I’ve said, I’ve been… emptied myself. So have thralls. I know more about that than any other Avornan wizard ever born.” His laugh had a distinctly hollow note. “I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

“What about the suggestions Alca the witch sent me?” Grus asked once more.

With a sigh, the wizard answered, “We’ve been over this ground before, Your Majesty. I don’t deny the witch is clever, but what she says is not to the point. She doesn’t understand what being a thrall means.”

“And you do?” Grus asked with heavy sarcasm.

“As well as any man who isn’t a thrall can, yes,” Pterocles replied. “I’ve told you that before. Will you please listen?”

“No matter how well you say you understand, you haven’t come up with anything that looks like a cure,” Grus said. “If you do, I’ll believe you. If you don’t, if you don’t show me you have ideas of your own, I am going to order you to use Alca’s for the sake of doing something.”

“Even if it’s wrong,” Pterocles jeered.

“Even if it is,” Grus said stubbornly. “From all I’ve seen, doing something is better than doing nothing. Something may work. Nothing never will.”

“If you think I’m doing nothing, Your Majesty, you had better find yourself another wizard,” Pterocles said. “Then I will go off and do nothing with a clear conscience, and you can see what happens after that.”

If he’d spoken threateningly, Grus might have sacked him on the spot. Instead, he sounded more like a man delivering a prophecy. That gave the king pause. Too many strange things had happened for him to ignore that tone of voice. And Pterocles, like Alca, had dreamed of the Banished One—the only sign Grus had that the Banished One took a mortal opponent seriously. Where would he find another wizard who had seen that coldly magnificent countenance?

“If you think you’re smarter than Alca, you’d better be right,” he said heavily.

“I don’t think anything of the sort,” Pterocles said. “I told you she was clever. I meant it. But I’ve been through things she hasn’t. A fool who’s dropped a brick on his toe knows better why he’d better not do that again than a clever fellow who hasn’t.”

That made sense. It would have made more sense if the wizard had done anything much with what he knew. “All right, then. I know you’re pregnant,” Grus said. “I still want to see the baby one of these days before too long.”

“If the baby lives, you’ll see it,” Pterocles said. “You don’t want it to come too soon, though, do you? They’re never healthy if they do.”

Grus began to wish he hadn’t used that particular figure of speech. Even so, he said, “If you miscarry with your notions in spite of what you think now, I want you to try Alca’s.”

He waited. Pterocles frowned. Obviously, he was looking for one more comment along the lines he’d been using. When the wizard’s eyes lit up, Grus knew he’d found one. Pterocles said, “Very well, Your Majesty, though that would be the first time a woman ever got a man pregnant.”

After a—pregnant—pause, Grus groaned and said, “Are you wizard enough to make yourself disappear?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said, and did.

His mulishness still annoyed Grus. But he had a twinkle in his eye again, and he was getting back the ability to joke. Grus thought—Grus hoped—that meant he was recovering from the sorcerous pounding he’d taken outside of Nishevatz. Maybe the baby—if it ever came— would be worth seeing after all.