The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER FOUR

“Your Majesty! Your Majesty!” A servant chased Lanius down the corridors of the royal palace.

“What is it, Bubulcus?” Lanius asked apprehensively. When any servant called in that tone of voice, something had gone wrong somewhere. When Bubulcus called in that tone of voice, something dreadful had gone horribly wrong, and he’d had something to do with it.

And, sure enough, now that he had Lanius’ attention, he didn’t seem to want it anymore. Looking down at the mosaic flooring, he mumbled, “Well, Your Majesty, a couple of those moncats have gotten loose.”

He made it sound as though the animals had done it all by themselves. That probably wasn’t impossible, but it certainly wasn’t likely. If they had done it all by themselves, Bubulcus wouldn’t have seemed so nervous, either. “And how did the moncats get loose?” Lanius inquired with what he hoped was ominous calm.

Bubulcus flinched, which surprised the king not at all. The palace servant said, “Well, it was when I went into one of their rooms for a minute, and—”

“Are you supposed to do that?” Lanius asked gently. None of the servants was supposed to do that. Even when powerless over the rest of Avornis, Lanius had ruled the rooms where his animals dwelt. He’d laid down that law after the last time one of Bubulcus’ visits let a moncat escape.

Angrily defensive, Bubulcus said, “Which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t thought you were in there.” He made his lapse sound as though it were Lanius’ fault.

“You’re not supposed to go into one of those rooms whether you think I’m there or not,” Lanius snapped. Bubulcus only glared at him. Nothing would convince the servant that what he’d done was his fault. Still angry, Lanius demanded, “Which moncats got away?”

Bubulcus threw his hands in the air. “How am I supposed to know? You never let anybody but you into those miserable rooms, so who but you can tell one of those miserable creatures from the next? All I know is, there were two of ’em. They scooted out fast as an arrow from a bow. If I hadn’t slammed the door, more would’ve gotten loose.” Instead of being embarrassed at letting any of the animals escape, he seemed proud it hadn’t been worse.

“If you hadn’t slammed the door, Bubulcus, you’d be on your way to the Maze right now,” Lanius said.

Where nothing else had, that got through to Bubulcus. Kings of Avornis had exiled people who dissatisfied them to the swamps and marshes east of the capital for years uncounted. The servant’s smile tried to seem ingratiating, but came out frightened. “Your Majesty is joking,” he said, sounding as though he hoped to convince himself.

“My Majesty is doing no such thing,” Lanius replied. “Do you want to see if I’m joking?” Bubulcus shook his head, looking more frightened than ever. This is the power Grus knows all the time, Lanius thought. Am I jealous? He didn’t need to wonder long. Yes, I’m jealous. But that too would have to wait. “Where did the moncats go?”

“Out of that room—that’s all I can tell you,” Bubulcus answered, as self-righteous as ever. “Nobody could keep track of those… things once they get moving. They aren’t natural, you ask me.”

Lanius wished he knew which moncats had gotten out. Maybe his special calls would have helped lure them back. Or maybe not; moncats could be as willful and perverse as ordinary felines. As things were, elegant solutions would have to fly straight out the window. “Go to the kitchens,” he told Bubulcus.

“To the kitchens?” the servant echoed. “Why should I do that?”

“To get some raw flesh for me to use to catch the moncats.” Lanius suddenly looked as fierce as he knew how. “Or would you rather have me carve some raw flesh from your carcass?”

Bubulcus fled.

When he got back, he had some lovely beef that would probably have gone on the royal table tonight. And he proved to be capable of thought on his own, for he also carried a couple of dead mice by the tail. “Good,” Lanius murmured. “Maybe I won’t have to carve you after all.”

He walked through palace hallways near the moncats’ room, clucking as though it were general feeding time and holding up the meat and the mice. Only when servants’ eyes went big did he stop to reflect that this was a curious thing for a King of Avornis to do. Having reflected, he then quit letting it bother him. He’d done all sorts of curious things. What was one more?

As he walked, he eyed wall niches and candelabra hanging from the ceiling. Unlike ordinary cats, moncats climbed at any excuse or none; they lived their lives in the trees. That made them especially delightful to catch when they got loose. It was also the reason Lanius had told his servants not to come into the animals’ rooms—not that Bubulcus bothered remembering anything so trivial as a royal order.

A woman saw the meat in Lanius’ hand and waved to him. “Your Majesty, one of those funny animals of yours is around that corner over there. It hissed at me, the nasty thing.”

“Thank you, Parula. You’ll have a reward,” Lanius said. He glowered at Bubulcus. “What you’ll have…”

“I didn’t do anything, Your Majesty.” Bubulcus sounded affronted. The next time he did do something wrong would be the first, as far as he was concerned.

Lanius hurried around the corner at which Parula had pointed. Sure enough, the moncat was there. It was trying to get out a window. Since the royal palace was also a citadel, the windows were narrow and set with iron bars. The moncat couldn’t get out that way, though it might have dashed out a door.

“Rusty!” Lanius called.

“How can you tell one of the miserable creatures from another?” asked Bubulcus, who’d trailed along behind him.

“How?” Lanius shrugged. “I can, that’s all.” From then on, he ignored Bubulcus. Dangling one of the dead mice by the tail, he called the moncat’s name again.

Rusty turned large green eyes his way. Moncats were smarter than ordinary cats; they did come to learn the names Lanius called them. And the offer of a mouse would have tempted any feline small enough to care about such a morsel. Rusty dropped down from the window and hurried over to the king.

He gave the moncat the mouse. Rusty held the treat in its hind feet—whose first toes did duty as thumbs—and used the claws of its front feet and sharp teeth to butcher it. The moncat ate the mouse in chunks. It didn’t scratch or bite when Lanius picked it up and carried it off to the room from which it had escaped.

“There. That’s all taken care of,” Bubulcus said happily, as though he’d caught the moncat instead of letting it escape.

“No.” Lanius shook his head. “This is one moncat. Two got away, you said. If the other one isn’t caught soon, you will be very, very sorry. Do you understand me?” He sounded like a king who ruled as well as reigned. Bubulcus looked unhappy enough to make Lanius feel like that kind of king, too.

King Grus stared up at the frowning walls of Nishevatz. He still had no sure notion of what had happened to the Avornans and Chernagors he’d tried to sneak into the city. Prince Vasilko hadn’t gloated about them from the wall or shot their heads out of catapults or anything of the sort. He gave no sign of knowing they’d tried to enter Nishevatz. In a way, that silence was more intimidating than anything blatant he might have done. What had his men done to them? Or, worse, what were they doing to them?

Not knowing gnawed at Grus. Still, he had to go on. With one effort a failure, he tried another. An interpreter, a squad of guards, and Prince Vsevolod at his side, he approached the Chernagor fortress.

“Here is your rightful prince!” he called, and pointed to Vsevolod. The interpreter turned his words into those of the throaty Chernagor tongue.

Faces, pale dots in the distance, peered down at Grus from the top of the frowning wall. Here and there, the sun sparkled off an iron helmet, or perhaps a sword blade. No one on the wall said a word. The wind blew cold and salty off the gray sea beyond the city-state.

“Here is your rightful prince!” Grus said again. “Cast down the ungrateful, unnatural son who has stolen your throne. Do you want the servants of the Banished One loose in your land? That is what Vasilko will give you.”

Vsevolod strode forward. Despite his years, he still stood very straight, very erect. He looked every inch a prince. He shouted up at the warriors on the wall. He surely knew a lot of them as men, not merely as Chernagors.

“What does he say?” Grus asked the interpreter.

“He says he will not punish them if they yield up Vasilko to him,” the Chernagor answered. “He says he knows they were fooled. He says he will not even kill Vasilko. He says he will send him into exile in Avornis, where he can learn the error of his ways.”

“Hmm.” Grus wondered how Vsevolod had meant that. He didn’t much want Vasilko in his kingdom, not even in the Maze. But he supposed Vsevolod was doing the best he could. If the old man had promised to torture his son to death the minute he got his throne back, which of them was really likely to have fallen under the influence of the Banished One?

That thought brought on another. How do I know Vasilko really is the man the Banished One backs? Grus wondered. He sent Vsevolod a sudden hard stare. He’d always believed the old lord of Nishevatz. Why would Vsevolod have summoned him up to the Chernagor country, if not to fight the forces of the Banished One? Why? What if the answer is, to lure me into a danger I can’t hope to escape?

“He is calling on them to open the gates,” the interpreter said. Grus knew he’d missed a couple of sentences. That jolt of suspicion had driven everything else out of his mind for a moment. The older he got, the more complicated life looked. He eyed Vsevolod again. By the time he got that old, how would things seem? Would he be able to find any straight paths at all, or would every choice twist back on itself like a snake with indigestion? The interpreter added, “He says he will not harm any of them, if they return to his side now. He also says you Avornans will go home then.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Grus saw no point to putting a permanent garrison in Nishevatz. That would just embroil him in a war against all the other Chernagor city-states. Unless he aimed to conquer this whole stretch of coast, seizing a little of it would be more trouble than it was worth.

Vsevolod called to the men on the wall one more time. The interpreter said, “He asks them, what is their answer?”

They did not keep him waiting long. Almost as one man, they drew their bows and started shooting at him and Grus and their companions. The guardsmen threw up their shields.

Thock! Thock! Thock! Arrows thudded into metal-faced wood. A softer splat was an arrow striking flesh rather than a shield. A guard gasped, trying to hold in the pain. Then, failing, he howled.

Guards and the royalty they guarded got out of range as fast as they could. Avornan archers rushed forward to shoot back at the Chernagors on the walls. Grus doubted they hit many, but maybe they did make the Chernagors keep their heads down. That would at least spoil the foe’s aim.

After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, the arrows the Chernagors kept shooting thudded into the ground behind Grus, and not into shields or flesh. He wasn’t ashamed to let out a sigh of relief. He turned to Vsevolod and asked, “Are you all right?”

Panting, the deposed lord of Nishevatz nodded. “Only—winded. I am not—as swift—as I used to be.” He paused to catch his breath. “What will you do now?”

“Well, we’ve tried being sneaky, and that doesn’t work,” Grus said. “We’ve tried being reasonable, and that didn’t work, either. We can’t very well starve them out, can we, not when they can bring in food by sea?”

“What does that leave?” Vsevolod asked morosely.

“Assaulting the walls,” Grus answered. He stared toward those walls again. The Chernagors were still trading arrows with his archers. They were getting the better of it, too; they had the advantage of height: Grus sighed. “Assaulting the walls,” he repeated, and sighed again. “And I hate to think about it, let alone try.”

Whenever Bubulcus saw King Lanius coming, he did his best to disappear. With one moncat still on the loose, that was wise of him. It wasn’t wise enough, though. The longer Pouncer stayed missing, the angrier Lanius got. Had Bubulcus been truly wise, he would have fled the palace and not just ducked into another room or around the corner when the king drew near.

“One of these days,” Lanius told Sosia, “I am going to lose all of my temper, and I really will send that simpering simpleton to the Maze.”

“Go ahead,” his wife answered. “If you’re going to act like a king, act like a king.”

The only trouble here was, acting like a king meant acting like an ogre. No matter how angry at Bubulcus Lanius got, at heart he remained a mild-mannered man better suited to scholarship than to ruling. He could too easily imagine what a disaster exiling Bubulcus would be to the servant’s family. And so he muttered curses under his breath, and told himself he would condemn Bubulcus tomorrow, and then put it off for another day.

He left meat in places to which he hoped the moncat might come. A couple of times, the moncat did come to one of those places… and stole the meat and disappeared again before anybody could catch it. Bubulcus came very close to exile the first time that happened, very close indeed.

Lanius did his best to live his life as though nothing were wrong. He went into the archives, trying to find out as much as he could about Nishevatz and the Chernagors for Grus. He doubted his father-in-law would be grateful, but, grateful or not, Grus still might find the information worth having.

Of course, Lanius would have enjoyed going to the archives regardless of whether he found anything useful to Grus. He liked nothing better than poking around through old sheets of parchment. Whenever he did, he learned something. He had to keep reminding himself he was trying to find out about the Chernagors. Otherwise, he might have happily wandered down any of half a dozen sidetracks.

He also liked going into the archives for the same reason he liked caring for his animals—while he was doing it, people were unlikely to bother him. Palace servants weren’t forbidden to come into the archives after him. Old tax records and ambassadors’ reports, unlike moncats and monkeys, couldn’t escape and cause trouble. But no one in the royal palace except Lanius seemed to want to venture into the dark, dusty chambers that held the records of Avornis’ past.

When the Chernagors first descended on the north coast, Avornans had reacted with horror. Lanius already knew that. The Chernagors hadn’t been merchant adventurers in those distant days. They’d been sea-raiders and corsairs. Lanius suspected—he was, in fact, as near sure as made no difference—they were still sea-raiders and corsairs whenever and wherever they could get away with it.

He’d just come across an interesting series of letters from an Avornan envoy who’d visited Nishevatz in the days of Prince Vsevolod’s great-grandfather when a flash of motion caught from the corner of his eye made him look up. His first thought was that a servant had come into the archives after all. He saw no one, though.

“Who’s there?” he called.

Only silence answered.

He suddenly realized his seclusion in the archives had disadvantages as well as advantages. If anything happened to him here, who would know? Who would come to his rescue? If an assassin came after him, with what could he fight back? The most lethal weapon he had was a bronze letter opener.

And if the Banished One had somehow learned he spent a lot of time alone in the archives… Unease turned to fear. A thrall under the spell of the Banished One had already tried to murder him while he was caring for his animals. Flinging a treaty in an assassins face wouldn’t work nearly as well as throwing a moncat had.

“Who’s there?” This time, Lanius couldn’t keep a wobble of alarm from his voice.

That alarm got worse when, again, no answer came back.

Slowly, fighting his fear, Lanius rose from the stool where he’d perched. He clutched the letter opener in his right hand. He was no warrior. He would never be a warrior. But he intended to put up as much of a fight as he could.

Another flash of motion, this one from behind a cabinet untidily full of officers’ reports from a long-ago war against the Thervings. “Who’s there?” Lanius demanded for a third time. “Come out. I see you.” And oh, how I wish I didn’t.

More motion—and, at last, a sound to go with it. “Mrowr?”

Lanius’ joints felt all springy with relief. “Olor’s beard!” he said, and then, “Come out of there, you stupid moncat!”

The moncat, of course, didn’t. All Lanius could see of it now was the twitching tip of its tail. He hurried over to the oak cabinet. Any moment now, the moncat was only too likely to start scrambling up the wall, to somewhere too high for him to reach it.

He was, in fact, a little surprised it hadn’t fled already. With his fear gone and his wits returning, he clucked as he did when he was about to feed the moncats. “Mrowr?” this one said again, now on a questioning note. He hoped it was hungry. Though mice skittered here and there through the royal palace, hunting them would surely be harder work than coming up to a dish and getting meat and offal. Wouldn’t it?

“It’s all right,” Lanius said soothingly, stepping around the cabinet. “It’s not your fault. I’m not angry at you. I wouldn’t mind booting that bungling Bubulcus into the middle of next month—no, I wouldn’t mind that at all—but I’m not angry at you.”

There sat the moncat, staring up at him out of greenish-yellow eyes. It seemed to think it was in trouble no matter how soothingly he spoke, for it sat on its haunches clutching in its little clawed hands and feet an enormous wooden serving spoon it must have stolen from the kitchens. The spoon was at least as tall as the moncat, and that included the animal’s tail.

“Why, you little thief!” Lanius burst out laughing. “If you went sneaking through the kitchens, maybe you’re not so hungry after all.” He stooped to pick up the moncat.

It started to run away, but couldn’t make itself let go of the prize it had stolen. It was much less agile trying to run with one hand and one foot still holding the spoon. Lanius scooped it up.

Still hanging on to the spoon, the moncat twisted and snapped. He smacked it on the nose. “Don’t you bite me!” he said loudly. It subsided. Most of the moncats knew what that meant, because most of them had tried biting him at one time or another.

Feeling like a soldier who’d just finished a triumphant campaign, Lanius carried the moncat—and the spoon, which it refused to drop— back to its room. Once he’d returned it to its fellows, he sent a couple of servants after Bubulcus.

“Yes, Your Majesty?” Bubulcus asked apprehensively. Even servants rarely sounded apprehensive around Lanius. He savored Bubulcus’ fear—and, savoring it, began to understand how an ordinary man could turn into a tyrant. Bubulcus went on, “Is it… is it the Maze for me?”

“No, not that you don’t deserve it,” Lanius said. “I caught the missing moncat myself, so it isn’t missing anymore. Next time, though, by the gods… There had better not be a next time for this, that’s all. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty! Thank you, Your Majesty! Gods bless you, Your Majesty!” Blubbering, Bubulcus fell to his knees. Lanius turned away. Yes, he understood how a man could turn into a tyrant, all right.

The Chernagor stared at Grus. Words poured out of him, a great, guttural flood. They were in his own language, so Grus understood not a one of them. Turning to the interpreter, he asked, “What is he saying? Why did he sneak out of Nishevatz and come here?”

“He says he cannot stand it in there anymore.” The interpreter’s words were calm, dispassionate, while passion filled the escapee’s voice. Grus could understand that much, even if he followed not a word of what the man was saying. “He says Vasiiko is worse than Vsevolod ever dreamed of being.”

Grus glanced over toward Vsevolod, who stood only a few feet away. Vsevolod, of course, didn’t need the translation to understand what the other Chernagor was saying. His forward-thrusting features and beaky nose made him look like an angry bird of prey—not that Grus had ever seen a bird of prey with a big, bushy white beard.

More excited speech burst from the Chernagor who’d just gotten out of Nishevatz. He pointed back toward the city he’d just left. “What’s he going on about now?” Grus asked.

“He says a man does not even have to do anything to oppose Vasiiko.” Again, the interpreter’s flat, unemotional voice contrasted oddly with the tones of the man whose words he was translating. “He says, half the time a man only has to realize Vasiiko is a galloping horse turd”—the Chernagor obscenity sounded bizarre when rendered literally into Avornan—“and then he disappears. He never has a chance to do anything against Vasiiko.”

“You see?” Vsevolod said. “Is how I told you. Banished One works through my son.” Now grief washed over his face.

“I see.” Grus left it at that, for he still had doubts that worried him, even if he kept quiet about them. Some of those doubts had to do with Vsevolod. Others he could voice without offending the refugee Chernagor. He told the interpreter, “Ask this fellow how he managed to escape from Nishevatz once he decided Vasiiko was… not a good man.” He didn’t try to imitate that picturesque curse.

The interpreter spoke in throaty gutturals. The man who’d gotten out of Nishevatz gave back more of them. The interpreter asked him something else. His voice showed more life while speaking the Chernagor tongue than when he used Avornan. He turned back to Grus. “He says he did not linger. He says he ran away before Vasiiko could send anyone after him. He says—”

Before the interpreter could finish, the other Chernagor gasped. He flung his arms wide. “No!” he shouted—that was one word of the Chernagor speech Grus understood. He staggered and began to crumple, as though an arrow had hit him in the chest. “No!” he shouted again, this time blurrily. Blood ran from his mouth—and from his nose and from the corners of his eyes and from his ears, as well. After a moment, it began to drip from under his fingernails, too. He slumped to the ground, twitched two or three times, and lay still.

Grimly, Vsevolod said, “Now you see, Your Majesty. This is what my son, flesh of my life, now does to people.” He covered his face with his gnarled hands.

“Apparently, Your Majesty, this man did not escape Vasilko’s vengeance after all.” The interpreter’s dispassionate way of speaking clashed with Vsevolod’s anguish.

“Apparently. Yes.” Grus took a gingerly step away from the Chernagor’s corpse, which still leaked blood from every orifice. He took a deep breath and tried to force his stunned wits into action. “Fetch me Pterocles,” he told a young officer standing close by. He had to repeat himself. The officer was staring at the body in horrified fascination. Once Grus got his attention, he nodded jerkily and hurried away.

The wizard came quickly, but not quickly enough to suit Grus. Pterocles took one look at the dead Chernagor, then recoiled in dread and dismay. “Oh, by the gods!” he said harshly. “By the gods!”

Grus thought of Milvago, who was now the Banished One. He wished he hadn’t. It only made Pterocles righter than he knew. “Do you recognize the spell that did this?” the king asked.

“Recognize it? No, Your Majesty.” Pterocles shook his head. “But if I ever saw the man who used it, I’d wash my eyes before I looked at anything else. Can’t you feel how filthy it is?”

“I can see how filthy it is. Feel it? No. I’m blind that particular way.”

“Most of the time, I pity ordinary men because they can’t see what I take for granted.” Pterocles looked at the Chernagor’s corpse again, then recoiled. “Every once in a while, though, you’re lucky. This, I fear, is one of those times.”

Bowing nervously before King Lanius, the peasant said, “If my baron ever finds out I’ve come before you, I’m in a lot of trouble, Your Majesty.”

“If the King of Avornis can’t protect you, who can?” Lanius asked.

“You’re here. I live a long ways off from the capital. Wasn’t that I had a cousin move here more than twenty years ago, give me a place to stay, I never would’ve come. But Baron Clamator, he’s right there where m at.”

That probably—no, certainly—reflected reality. Lanius. wished it didn’t, but recognized that it did. “Well, go on…” he said.

Knowing the pause for what it was, the peasant said, “My name’s Flammeus, Your Majesty.”

“Flammeus. Yes, of course.” Lanius was annoyed with himself. A steward had whispered it to him, and he’d gone and forgotten it. He didn’t like forgetting anything. “Go on, then, Flammeus.” If he said it a few times, it would stick in his memory. “What’s Baron Clamator doing?” He had a pretty good idea. Farmers usually brought one complaint in particular against their local nobility.

Sure enough, Flammeus said, “He’s taking land he’s got no right to. He’s buying some and using his retainers to take more. We’re free men down there, and he’s doing his best to turn us into thralls like the Menteshe have.”

He didn’t know much about the thralls, or about the magic that robbed them of their essential humanity. He was just a farmer who, even after cleaning up and putting on his best clothes, still smelled of sweat and onions. He wanted to stay his own master. Lanius, who longed to be fully his own master, had trouble blaming him for that.

Grus had issued laws making it much harder for nobles to acquire land from ordinary farmers. He hadn’t done it for the farmers’ sake. He’d done it to make sure they went on paying taxes to Kings of Avornis and didn’t become men who looked first to barons and counts and dukes and not to the crown. Lanius had seen how that helped him keep unruly nobles in line.

And what helped Grus could help any King of Avornis. “Baron Clamator will hear from me, Flammeus,” Lanius promised.

“He doesn’t listen any too well,” the farmer warned.

“He’ll listen to soldiers,” Lanius said.

“Ahh,” Flammeus said. “I figured King Grus would do that. I didn’t know about you.” Courtiers stirred and murmured. Flammeus realized he had gone too far, and quickly added, “Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

“Of course,” Lanius said dryly. Some Kings of Avornis would have slit the farmer’s tongue for a slip like that. Lanius’ own father, King Mergus, probably would have. Even Grus might have. Lanius, though, had no taste for blood—Bubulcus, luckily for him, was living proof of that. “I will send soldiers,” the king told Flammeus.

The farmer bowed and made his escape from the throne room. He would have quite a tale to tell the cousin he was staying with. Lanius found new worries of his own. He’d never given orders to any soldiers except the royal bodyguards. Would the men obey him? Would they refer his orders to Grus, to make sure they were real orders after all? Or would they simply ignore him? Grus was the king with the power in Avornis, and everybody knew it.

Should I write to Grus myself? That might get rid of trouble before it starts, Lanius thought. But it would also delay things at least two weeks. Lanius wanted to punish Clamator as quickly as he could, before the baron got word he was going to be punished. I’ll write Grus, telling him what I’m doing and why. That pleased Lanius. It would work fine… unless the soldiers refused to obey him at all.

His heart pounded against his ribs when he summoned an officer from the barracks. He had to work hard to hold his voice steady as he said, “Captain Icterus, I am sending you and your troop of riders to the south to deal with Baron Clamator. He is laying hold of peasant land in a way King Grus’ laws forbid.” He hoped that would help.

Maybe it did. Or maybe he’d worried over trifles. Captain Icterus didn’t argue. He didn’t say a word about referring the question to King Grus. He just bowed low, said, “Yes, Your Majesty,” and went off to do what Lanius had told him to do. His squadron rode out of the city of Avornis that very afternoon.

Yes, this is what it’s like to be a real King, Lanius thought happily. His sphere was no longer limited to the royal chambers, the archives, and the rooms where his moncats and monkeys lived. With Grus away from the capital, his reach stretched over the whole kingdom.

It did, at least, until he wrote to the other king to justify what he’d done. Writing the letter made him want to go wash afterwards. It wasn’t merely the most abject thing he’d ever written. It was, far and away, the most abject thing he’d ever imagined. It had to be. He knew that. Grus would not take kindly to his behaving like a real king. But reading the words on parchment once he’d set them down… He couldn’t stomach it. He sealed the letter without going through it a second time.

Sosia said, “I’m proud of you. You did what needed doing.”

“I think so,” Lanius said. “I’m glad you do, too. But what will your father think?”

“He can’t stand nobles who take peasants under their own wing and away from Avornis,” his wife answered. “He won’t complain about whatever you do to stop them. You’re not about to overthrow him.”

“No, of course not,” Lanius said quickly. He would have denied it even if—especially if—it were true. But it wasn’t. He didn’t want to try to oust Grus. For one thing, his father-in-law was much too likely to win if they measured themselves against each other. And, for another, this little taste of ruling Lanius was getting convinced him that Grus was welcome to most of it. When it came to animals or to ancient manuscripts, Lanius was patience personified; the smallest details fascinated him. When it came to the day-to-day work of governing, he had to fight back yawns. He also knew he would never make a great, or even a good, general. Grus was welcome to all of that.

Sosia said, “I wish things were going better up in the Chernagor country. Then Father could come home.”

“I wish things were going better up in the Chernagor country, too,” Lanius said. “The only reason they aren’t going so well is that the Banished One must be stronger up there than we thought.”

“That’s not good,” Sosia said.

“No, it isn’t.” Lanius said no more than that.

Sosia asked, “Can we do anything here to make things easier for Father up there? Would it be worth our while to start trouble with the Menteshe, to make the Banished One have to pay attention to two places at once?”

Lanius looked at her with admiration. She thought as though she were King of Avornis. He answered, “The only trouble I can see with that is, we’d have to pay attention to two places at once, too. Would it work a bigger hardship on the Banished One or on us? I don’t know, not offhand. One more thing to go into a letter to your father.”

“One more thing?” Sosia cocked her head to one side. “What’s Ortalis gone and done now?”

“I don’t know that he’s done anything since the last time,” Lanius said. They both made sour faces. Saying he didn’t know that Ortalis had done anything new and dreadful wasn’t the same as saying Sosia’s brother hadn’t done any such thing. How much had Ortalis done that nobody but he knew about?

Lanius shook his head. Whenever Ortalis did such things, somebody else knew about it. But how many of those somebodies weren’t around anymore to tell their stories? Only Ortalis knew that.

“He should start hunting again,” Sosia said. Something must have changed on Lanius’ face. Quickly, his wife added, “Hunting bear and boar and birds and deer and rabbits—things like that.”

“I suppose so.” Lanius wished he could sound more cheerful. For a while, Ortalis had seemed… almost civilized. Hunting and killing animals had let him satiate his lust for blood and hurt in a way no one much minded. If only it hadn’t lost the power to satisfy him.

Sosia said, “I wish things were simpler.”

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Lanius said. “The older I get, the more complicated everything looks.” He was married to the daughter of the man who’d exiled his mother to the Maze. Not only that, he loved her. If that wasn’t complicated enough for any ordinary use, what could be?