Wisdom of the Fox

XI

The next night, only Tiwaz was full, with Elleb and Nothos a day past and Math two. This time, Gerin sent Marlanz Raw-Meat down to the cellar and locked Widin Simrin's son in the shack where he worked on his magics. To his great relief, neither Marlanz nor Widin changed shape, so he released them both when all four moons had risen into the sky.

The bear that walked like a man did not return to the camp of Aragis' warriors, either in man's form or its own. Gerin had wondered if a taste for ale would draw it back.

"Just as well it's staying away," said Drago, a Bear himself, when Gerin remarked on that. "We don't need a thirsty bear when we have a thirsty Fox." He sent Rihwin the Fox a sly look. Rihwin ostentatiously ignored him.

Late the next afternoon, Parol Chickpea came into Fox Keep, riding in the back of a peasant's oxcart. "By the gods, I'm glad to see you," Gerin exclaimed. "When I left you behind there, I feared you'd never come out of that village again."

"I feared it myself, lord, but I went were night before last, and here, look at this." Parol thrust the hand from which he'd lost a couple of fingers under Gerin's nose.

"I see what you mean," Gerin said. The wound, instead of being festering and full of pus, looked as if he'd had it for years. The rapid healing werebeasts enjoyed hadn't been able to restore his missing digits, but had done the next best thing. Somehow, the Fox doubted it would ever become a popular part of medicine all the same.

"The bite on my arse is better, too," Parol said confidentially, " but I don't suppose you want to see that."

"As a matter of fact, you're right," Gerin said. "I wasn't interested in your hairy bum before you had a chunk bitten out of it, and I'm not interested in it now, except to see if it makes you sit at a tilt."

"It doesn't, by Dyaus!" Parol was the picture of indignation till he noticed the smirk Gerin was trying to hide. He laughed sheepishly. "Ah, you're having a joke on me."

"So I am." Gerin felt embarrassed; jokes at the expense of Parol were too easy to be much fun. To make amends, he told the warrior something about which he'd just made up his own mind: "Now that we've passed through the little werenight, we'll start the move against Adiatunnus and the monsters come sunrise tomorrow."

Parol beamed. "Ah, that's very fine, lord. I owe those horrible creatures something special for all they've done to me, and I aim to give it to them."

"Stout fellow!" Gerin said. Parol was not the best fighting man he had, lacking both Rihwin's grace and cleverness on the one hand and Drago the Bear's indomitable strength on the other. But he was not in the habit of backing away from trouble, and that covered a multitude of sins.

The tents in which Aragis' men had passed the nights since they reached Fox Keep came down. The warriors stored most of them inside the keep, bringing along only a few in which they could crowd together in case of rain. Gerin was less worried about Aragis' men coming into Fox Keep than he had been when they first arrived. Not only had the grand duke shown he didn't intend treachery, but enough of Gerin's troopers had come into the area to put up a solid fight if Aragis suddenly changed his mind. The force that rolled southwest against Adiatunnus and the monsters had more of Gerin's men in it than Aragis'.

Leaving Fox Keep stirred mixed feelings in Gerin: hope that this fight, unlike the ones that had gone before, would yield decisive results; sorrow at leaving Selatre behind; and a separate mixture over Duren: sorrow at leaving him, too, but also joy that he was there to be left.

Aragis brought his chariot up alongside the Fox's. "You have a good holding here," he said. "Plenty of timber, streams where you need them, well-tended fields-you must get a lot of work out of your peasants."

Gerin didn't care for the way Aragis said that: it brought to his mind a picture of nobles standing over serfs with whips to make them sow and weed and harvest. Maybe such things happened on Aragis' landhe had a reputation for ruthlessness. The Fox said, "They work for themselves, as much as they can. I don't take a certain proportion of what they raise, whether that's a lot or a little. I take a fixed amount, and they keep whatever they produce above that."

"All very well in good years," Aragis answered, "but what of the bad ones, when they don't bring in enough to get by after you've gathered your fixed amount?"

"Then we dicker, of course," Gerin said. "If my serfs all starve giving me this year's dues, I'm not likely to get much out of them next year."

Aragis thought that over, then saw the joke and laughed. "I don't dicker with peasants," he said. "I tell them how it's going to be, and that's how it is. As you say, starving them is wasteful, but I always remember I come first."

"I believe that, grand duke," Gerin said, so innocently that Aragis again paused for a moment before sending him a sharp look. Smiling inside, Gerin went on, "I haven't had a peasant revolt since I took over this holding, and we've been through some lean years, especially the one right after the werenight. How have you fared there?"

"Not well," Aragis admitted, but his tone made that seem unimportant. "When the peasants rise up, we knock them down. They can' t stand against us, and they know it. They've no weapons to speak of, and no experience fighting, either."

"But if they're going to fight the monsters, they'll need more weapons than they have, and if they spend a good deal of time fighting the monsters, they'll get some experience at that, too," Gerin said.

Aragis gave him a look that said he hadn't thought so far ahead, and wished the Fox hadn't, either. After a long silence, he answered, "You must be of the view that solving one problem always breeds another."

"Oh, not always," Gerin said blithely. "Sometimes it breeds two or three."

Aragis opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally shook his head without speaking. He tapped his driver on the shoulder. Gerin was not surprised when the grand duke's chariot dropped back behind his own. Van laughed a little and said, "Here you went to all the trouble of making an ally of the Archer, and now you do your best to drive him away."

"I didn't mean to," Gerin said. He sounded so much like Duren after he'd dropped a pot and broken it that he started to laugh at himself.

When the dirt road went through the woods, it narrowed so that the chariots had to string themselves out single file. It was wider in the cleared lands between the forests; the cars bunched up again there.

The peasants working the fields paused to stare as the chariots rolled by. Some of them cheered and waved. Gerin wondered what Aragis thought of that. From all he'd said, and from all the Fox had heard, he ruled his serfs by force. He was a hard and able man, so he'd got away with it thus far, but was his heir likely to match him? Only time would answer that.

Gerin noted that a fair number of peasants cultivated their wheat and barley and beans and peas and turnips and squashes with full quivers on their backs. As one of them moved down a row, he bent, picked up his bow, carried it along with him, and then set it down again. Herdsmen also carried bows, and spears in place of their staves. What they could do against the monsters, they were doing. But an unarmored man, even with a spear in his hands, was not a good bet against the speed and cleverness the creatures showed.

The Fox saw only one monster that first day of the ride southwest. The thing came out of the woods a couple of furlongs ahead of his chariot. It stared at the great host of chariotry rattling its way, then turned and swiftly vanished back between the beeches from which it had emerged.

"Shall we hunt it, Captain?" Van asked.

Gerin shook his head. "We'd be wasting our time. If we can beat Adiatunnus, we'll take their refuge away from the creatures. That'll do us far more good over the long haul than picking them off one and two at a time."

"Sometimes you think so straight, you cook all the juice out of life," Van said, but let it go at that.

As sunset neared, Gerin bought a sheep from a village through which he passed. That provoked fresh bemusement from Aragis, who, like a large majority of lords, was accustomed to taking what he needed from his serfs regardless of whether it was properly part of his feudal dues. The grand duke also seemed surprised when the Fox told some of his warriors to cut firewood rather than taking it from the serfs or putting them to work. But he did not question Gerin about it and, indeed, after a few minutes ordered his own men to help those of his ally.

With all four moons now past full, the early hours of the night were unusually dark. Although the evening was warm and sultry, Gerin ordered the fires kept burning brightly. "The last thing I want is for the monsters to take us unawares," he said, after which he got no arguments.

The dancing flames kept more men sitting around them and talking than would have happened on most nights. After a while, Drago the Bear turned to Van and said, "What about a tale for us, to make the time pass by?" To several of Aragis' men sitting close to him, he added, " You've never heard a yarnspinner to match him, I promise you."

"Aye, give us a tale, then," one of those troopers said eagerly, and in a moment many more-and many of Gerin's men as well-took up the cry.

Van got to his feet with a show of shyness Gerin knew to be assumed. The outlander said, "I hate to tell a tale now, friends, for after Drago's spoken of me so, how can I help but disappoint?"

"You never have yet," one of Gerin's men called. "Give us a tale of far places-you must've seen more of 'em than any man alive."

"A tale of far places?" Van said. "All right, I'll give you another story of Mabalal, the hot country where they teach the monkeys to gather pepper for 'em-some of you will remember my tale about that. But this is a different yarn; you might call it the tale of the mountain snake, even though it's really about the snake's head, as you'll see.

"Now, they have all manner of snakes in Mabalal. The plains snake, if you'll believe it, is so big that he even hunts elephants now and again; the only time the natives go after him is when he's fighting one of those huge beasts."

"What's an elephant?" somebody asked. Gerin knew about elephants, but had his doubts about serpents big enough to hunt them-although he' d never managed to catch his friend in a lie about his travels. After Van explained, the warrior who'd asked the question was loudly dubious about the elephant's snaky trunk, though Gerin knew that was a genuine part of its anatomy.

"Well, never mind," the outlander said. "This story's not about elephants or plains snakes, anyhow. Like I said, it's about mountain snakes. Mountain snakes, now, aren't as big as their cousins of the plain, but they're impressive beasts, too. They have a fringe of golden scales under their chins that looks like a beard, and a crest of pointed red scales down the back of their necks almost like a horse's mane. When they're burrowing in the mountains, the sound their scales make reminds you of bronze blades clashing against each other."

"Are they venomous?" Gerin asked; unlike most if not all of his companions, he was in part interested in Van's stories for their natural-or perhaps unnatural-history.

"I should say they are!" Van answered. "But that's not why the men of Mabalal hunt them-in fact, it'd be a good reason to leave 'em alone. The snakes sometimes grow these multicolored stones in their heads, the way oysters grow pearls, but these stones are supposed to make you invisible. That's what they say in Mabalal, anyhow.

"There was this wizard there, a chap named Marabananda, who wanted a snakestone and needed an axeman to help him get it. He hired me, mostly on account of I'm bigger'n any three Mabalali you could find.

"Marabananda wove gold letters into a scarlet cloth and cast a spell of sleep over them. Then he carried the cloth out to one of the mountain snakes' nests. The snake heard him coming-or smelled him, or did whatever snakes do-and stuck its head out to see what was going on. He held the cloth in front of it, and as soon as the mountain snake looked, it was caught-snakes can't blink, you know, so it couldn't get free of the spell even for a moment.

"Down came my axe! Off flew the head! The snake's body, back in its burrow, jerked and twisted so much that the ground shook, just like the earthquake that knocked down the temple at Ikos. And Marabananda, he got out his knives and cut into the head-and damn me to the five hells if he didn't pull out one of those shiny, glowing snakestones I was telling you about.

" 'I'm rich!' he yells, capering around like a madman. 'I'm rich! I can walk into the king's treasure house and carry away all the gold and silver and jewels I please, and no one will see me. I'm rich!'

" 'Uh, lord wizard, sir,' says I, 'you're holding the stone now, and I can still see you.'

"Well, Marabananda says this is on account of I'm just a dirty foreigner, and too unenlightened for wizardry to touch. But the Mabalali, he says, they're more spiritually sensitive, and so the magic will work on them. He wouldn't listen to me when I tried to tell him different. But I did talk him into not trying till dead of night, in case he was wrong.

"Around midnight, off he went. He would have had me come with him, but I'd already shown the magic didn't work on me. He got to the treasure, and-" Van paused for dramatic effect.

"What happened?" half a dozen people demanded in the same breath.

The outlander bellowed laughter. "Poor damned fool, the first guard who spied him going in where he didn't belong struck off his head, same as I did with the mountain snake. I guess it goes to show the snakestone not only didn't make old Marabananda invisible to the guard, it let the guard see something even the wizard couldn't."

"What's that?" Gerin got the question in before anyone else could.

"Why, that he was a blockhead, of course," Van replied. "When he didn't come back from his little trip after a bit, I figured it had gone sour for him and I got out of there before the royal guardsmen came around with a pile of questions I couldn't answer. I don't know what happened to the mountain snake's head after that. Just like life, stories don't always have neat, tidy endings."

By the way the warriors clapped their hands and came up to chatter with Van, they liked the story fine, neat, tidy ending or no. Aragis told him, "If ever you find life dull at Fox Keep, you can stay at my holding for as long as you like, on the strength of your tales alone." When Van laughed and shook his head, the grand duke persisted, "Or if you decide you can't stomach staying with your Trokme-tempered ladylove another moment, the same holds good."

"Ah, Archer, now you really tempt me," Van said, but he was still laughing.

"I'm for my blankets," Gerin said. "Any man with a dram of sense will do likewise. We may be fighting tomorrow, and we will be fighting the day after."

Off in the distance, a longtooth roared. Some of the horses tethered to stakes and to low-hanging branches snorted nervously; that sound was meant to instill fear. It had made Gerin afraid many times in the past. Now, though, he found it oddly reassuring. It was part of the night he'd known all his life. The monsters' higher, more savage screeches he found far more terrifying.

Morning came all too soon, as it has a way of doing. The sun shining in Gerin's face made him sit up and try to knuckle sleep from his eyes. Where all four moons had been absent at sunset, now they hung like pale lamps in the western sky. Soon they would draw apart again, and Gerin would be able to stop worrying about their phases for a while-although he promised himself he'd check their predicted motions in the book of tables from time to time.

Drivers gulped hasty breakfasts of hard-baked biscuits, smoked meat, and crumbly white cheese, then hurried to harness their horses to their chariots. The warriors who rode with them, generally older men of higher rank, finished their breakfasts while the drivers worked. The food was no better, but time could be a luxury, too.

As soon as the chariots rolled out of Gerin's land into the debatable ground south and west of his holding, the troopers saw more and more monsters. The monsters saw them, too; their hideous howls split the air. The Fox wondered if they were warning their fellows-and Adiatunnus' men.

In the debatable lands between Gerin's holding and the territory Adiatunnus had taken for himself when the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet, brush and shrubs and saplings grew close to the road. The barons who'd owned that land before had been less careful of it than the Fox had with his. Now most of them were dead or fled. Gerin claimed much of their holdings, but the woodsrunners made his possession too uncertain for him to send woodsmen onto it.

The first arrows came from the cover of the roadside scrub a little past noon. One hummed past his head, close enough to make him start. He snatched up his shield and moved up in the car so he could hope to protect himself and Raffo both. "Keep going," he told the driver, and waved the rest of the chariots on as well.

"What?" Van said indignantly. "Aren't you going to stop and hunt down those cowardly sneaks who shoot without showing their faces?"

"No," Gerin answered, his voice flat. The unadorned word made Van gape and splutter, as he'd thought it would. When the outlander fell silent, the Fox explained, "I am not going to slow down in any way, shape, form, color, or size, not for monsters, not for Trokmoi. That's what Adiatunnus wants me to do, so he'll have more time to ready himself against us. I don't aim to give it to him."

"It's not manly, ignoring an enemy who's shooting at you," Van grumbled.

"I don't care," Gerin said, which set Van spluttering again despite their years of friendship. Gerin went on, "I am not fighting this war to be manly. I'm not even fighting it for loot, though anything I take from the Trokmoi helps me and hurts them. The only reason I'm fighting it is because I'll have to do it later and on worse terms if I don't do it now. Fighting it now means moving as fast as we can. We weren't quite quick enough the last time we struck at Adiatunnus. This time, the gods willing, we will be."

Van studied him some time in silence. At last the outlander said, "Me, I've heard you call Aragis the Archer ruthless a time or three. If he wanted to hang the same name on you, I think it'd fit."

"And what does that have to do with unstoppering the jar of ale?" Gerin asked. "I do what I have to do, the best way I can see to do it. You'd better pass up the little fight if you intend to win the big one."

"Put that way, it sounds good enough," Van admitted. He still looked unhappy, like a man forced to go against his better judgment. " When somebody shoots at me, though, I just want to jump down from the car, chase him till I catch him, and leave him as pickings for the crows and the foxes-no offense to you-and the flies."

"That's what the Trokmoi want us to do," Gerin answered patiently. "When you fight a war, you're better off not doing what your foe has in mind for you."

"You'll have your way here with me or without me," Van said, but then relented enough to add, "So you know, Captain, you have it with me-I suppose."

With that Gerin had to be content. By the time his army drew out of range of the archers, they'd had two horses and one man wounded, by luck none of them badly. A small enough price to pay for avoiding delay, he thought, relieved it was not worse.

He kept the chariots rolling almost up to the moment of sunset before stopping and sacrificing some of the hens he'd brought from Fox Keep. "Adiatunnus may know we're coming," he said, "but with luck he doesn't know we'll be in his lands so soon. We should start hitting him early tomorrow; we've made fine time coming down from my keep."

When the sun set, the night was very dark, for none of the moons would rise for more than two hours. That stretch of evening blackness would just grow over the next several days, too, till swift-moving Tiwaz sped round to the other side of the sun and began to illuminate the night once more. It worried Gerin. Because of the ghosts, his men could do little in the night, but he'd already seen that that did not hold for the monsters.

He took such precautions as he could, posting sentry squadrons all around the main area where his men and Aragis' rested. The Archer's troopers were inclined to complain about having their sleep interrupted. Gerin stared them down, saying, "When my warriors come south to your lands, we'll be under the grand duke's commands, and he' ll make the arrangements he thinks best. Now the worries are mine, and I'll meet them in my own way."

He did not look to Aragis for support; this too was his worry. Had the Archer chosen to argue with him, he'd been ready to lose his temper in as spectacularly dramatic a way as he could. When he was through dealing with the grand duke's men, though, Aragis got up and said, "The prince of the north is right-he leads here. Anyone who doesn't fancy that will answer to him here and then to me after we go south." Out went the sentries without another word.

Gerin bundled himself in his bedroll and soon fell asleep. What seemed like moments later, shouts of alarm rang out from the sentries, and mixed with them the monsters' screams. The Fox had his helm on his head, his shield on his arm, and his sword in his hand and was on his feet and running toward the fighting before he fully understood where he was.

As soon as the situation did sink in, Gerin realized whoever led the monsters-whether that was Adiatunnus or some of the more clever creatures-knew how best to use them. Instead of attacking the troopers, who were armed and at least partly armored and could fight back, the monsters turned their fury on the long lines of tethered horses.

There dreadful din and chaos reigned. The horses screamed and kicked and bucked under the savage teeth and claws of their attackers. Some of them tore loose the lines by which they were tethered and ran off into the night. Every one that got away would have to be recaptured later-if Gerin and his men could manage that. At the same time, though, every horse that fled drew monsters away from the main point of the assault, which left the Fox unsure how to feel about the flight.

He had little time for feeling, anyhow-nothing to do but slash and hack and keep his shield up to hold fangs away from flesh and pray that in the darkness and confusion he didn't hurt any of his own men, or Aragis'. The fear-maddened horses were as appalled to have men close by them as monsters. Someone not far from Gerin went down with a muffled groan as a hoof caught him in the midsection.

He stabbed a monster that was scrambling up onto a horse's backand leaving long, bleeding claw tracks in the beast's flanks. The monster howled and sprang at him. He slashed it. It screamed in pain and fled. The hot, coppery smell of its blood and the horse's filled his nose.

Pale Nothos was the first moon over the eastern horizon. By the time he rose, the warriors had managed to drive the monsters back into the wood from which they'd come. "Put more wood on the fire and start another one over here," Gerin shouted. "We have a lot of work to do yet tonight."

His army was still at it when Tiwaz, Elleb, and Math rose in a tight cluster a couple of hours after Nothos appeared. The men went out by squads to bring back the horses that had bolted, but that was the smaller part of what they needed to do. Treating the animals' wounds-and their panic-was a far bigger job. The drivers, men who dealt most intimately with their teams, did the greater part of the work. The rest of the troopers lent what help they could.

"I mislike everything about this," Gerin said gloomily. "Who knows what the beasts will do when they next face the monsters, or even smell them?"

"I'd not yet thought past this night," Aragis said. "Did we bring enough spare animals to make up for the ones we lost and those hurt too badly to pull a car?"

"I think so," the Fox answered; he'd been trying to run his own mental count, but confusion didn't make it easy. He looked at the hairy corpses scattered over the grass. "We hurt the monsters badly here; I don't think they'll try anything like that again. The question is, was the once enough?"

"We'll know come morning." Aragis yawned. "I don't know if we'll have any wits left by then, though. I'm dead for sleep, and I'm for my blanket."

"And I," Gerin said with a matching yawn. "One more thing for Adiatunnus to pay for-and he shall."

When the sun rose, Gerin stumbled over to a nearby stream and splashed cold water on his face to give himself a brittle semblance of alertness. Then he examined the horses the monsters had attacked. They looked worse by daylight than they had in the night, with blood dried on their coats and matted in their manes, with gashes the drivers had missed by the light of moons and fires, with mud slapped on the wounds the men had seen. He wondered how they would fare when they had to draw the chariots, but had no choice. He waved for the drivers to harness them.

Because the animals were sore and nervous, that took longer than it might have. But once they were hitched to the chariots, they pulled them willingly enough. Van drew a clay flute from a pouch on his belt and began a mournful, wailing tune that sounded as if it had come off the plains of Shanda. He assumed an expression of injured dignity when Gerin asked him to put the flute away for fear of frightening the horses.

The border post Adiatunnus had set up in imitation of Elabonian practice was empty and deserted; he must have got wind that Gerin was moving against him.

"We move straight on," the Fox commanded. "No stopping for loot anywhere. Until we run up against Adiatunnus' main force and smash it, we haven't accomplished a thing."

But when the army came to a peasant village, Aragis ordered his chariots out of the road to trample the wheat and barley growing in the fields around it. After a moment's hesitation, Gerin waved for his warriors to join the Archer's. "I hate to hurt the serfs," he said, " but if I strike a blow at the Trokmoi thereby, how can I keep from doing it?"

"You can't, so don't fret yourself," Van answered. "You go to war to win; you said as much yourself. Otherwise you're a fool."

The peasants themselves had vanished, along with most of their livestock. The army took a few chickens and a half-grown pig, set fire to the serfs' huts, and rolled on.

Perhaps the next village they came to had planted earlier than the first; the wheat and rye growing around it had already turned golden. That meant the crops were nearing ripeness. It also meant they would burn. The warriors tossed torches into the fields near the road, watched flames lick across them. The serfs would have a hungry winter. Gerin vowed to himself to work enough destruction in Adiatunnus' holding to make their Trokme masters starve, too.

Every now and then, a red-mustached barbarian would peer out of the woods at the invaders. Gerin ignored those watchers; every man afoot was one he wouldn't have to face in a chariot. "I want to reach Adiatunnus before the sun sets," he said grimly. "Spending a night in his lands with the monsters prowling about sets my teeth on edge."

"Ah, but Captain, does he want you to reach him?" Van said. "You ask me, that's a different question altogether. If he can get the monsters to come out and soften us up again, you think he won't do it?"

"No, I don't think that," Gerin said. "But he pays a price if he hangs back, too. The deeper we penetrate into his lands, the more harm we do him, and the hungrier his warriors and serfs will be come winter. It's a nice calculation he has to make: can he afford what we will do to him for the sake of what the monsters might do to us tonight?"

"You think he'll weigh the odds so-this much on this side, that much on the other?" Van shook his head vehemently. "That's what you'd do, certain sure. But Adiatunnus, he'll be watching the sky. As soon as he sees so much smoke there that his fighters start screaming at him louder than he can stand, he'll yell for them to jump into their chariots and come at you. Whether that's today or tomorrow morning we won't know till we see the woodsrunners drawn up in a meadow athwart our path."

"Or, better yet, till we catch them trying to get across our path," the Fox said with a ferocious smile. "But you're likely right; if you try to judge what the other fellow would do by what you'd do yourself, you'll be wrong a lot of the time."

The army moved past the small keep Gerin had burned out in his earlier raid. The castle at the keep's heart had burned; the roof was fallen in, and soot covered the outer stonework. No one moved on the walls. Gerin grinned again. He'd struck Adiatunnus a blow there.

To his surprise, the Trokme chieftain did not sally forth against him while the sun remained in the sky. He'd pushed close to the keep Adiatunnus had taken for his own and to the woodsrunners' village that had grown up around it by the time failing light at last made him halt. Behind him, all the way back to the border of Adiatunnus' lands, lay as broad a swath of devastation as the Fox could cut. Gerin's eyes were red with the smoke he'd raised; his lungs stung every time he breathed.

When he encamped, he treated the horses as if they were pure gold come to life. He placed them and the chariots in the center of the camp, with the warriors in a ring around them and sentries out beyond the main force. That meant spreading his men thinner than he would have liked, but he saw no other choice. Without chariotry, what good were the warriors? The Trokmoi would ride circles around them.

Rihwin the Fox said, "The first of the moons will not rise tonight until even longer after sunset than was so yestereven."

"I know," Gerin said dolefully. "And the other three, moving more swiftly in their rounds than Nothos, will have gone farther still and will rise later still." He pronounced the words with a certain amount of gloomy relish; every now and then, he drew perverse enjoyment from imagining just how bad things could be.

Few men sought their blankets right after they ate. No one put weapons out of arm's reach. After one attack on the horses, another looked too likely to take lightly.

Twilight still lingered in the western sky when, in the black shadows of the woods, a monster screamed. Warriors who had tried to sleep snatched up swords and shields and peered about wildly, waiting for a sentry or perhaps a horse to cry out in agony.

Another monster shrieked, and another, and another. Soon what sounded like thousands of the creatures were crying out together in a chorus that sent icy fingers of dread running up Gerin's back. "Damn me to the five hells if I see any way to sleep through this," he said to Van, "not when I'm already on edge looking ahead to battle tomorrow."

"Ah, it's not so bad, Captain," the outlander said. When Gerin stared at him in some surprise, he explained, "I don't care how loud they scream at us. Last night, we taught 'em something they hadn't known before, else they'd be running out of the woods at us with slobber dripping off their fangs. Now with all the moons down'd be the best time for 'em to try. Me, I think they don't dare. They're just trying to make us afraid."

Gerin considered. All at once, the hellish cries seemed less terrifying than they had. "You may well be right," he said, and managed a laugh. "They aren't doing a bad job of it, either, are they?"

"It's nothing but a great pile of noise." Van refused to admit fear to anyone, most likely including himself.

"We won't stop staying ready for a fight, whether you turn out right or wrong," Gerin said. "That's the best way I know to make sure we don't have one."

The hideous chorus kept up all night long, and got louder as the moons rose one by one. By then, though, most of the troopers had concluded the monsters were screaming to intimidate rather than as harbinger to an attack. Those not on sentry did manage to drop off, and their snores rose to rival the creatures' shrieks.

Gerin didn't remember when he dozed off, but he woke with a start at sunrise, having expected to pass the whole night awake. Most of the men were in the same state, complaining of how little they'd slept but grateful they'd slept at all. The horses seemed surprisingly fresh; an attack like the one of the night before might have panicked them, but they'd resigned themselves to the monsters' screams faster than the warriors who guarded them.

"Will we fight today?" Aragis asked rather blurrily; his mouth was so full of smoked sausage that he looked like nothing so much as a cow chewing its cud.

"We will," Gerin said with grim certainty. "If we don't, we penetrate to the heart of Adiatunnus' holding before noon, and torch the big Trokme village that's grown up around the keep he's taken for his own. He won't let that happen; his own warriors would turn on him if he did."

"There you're right," Aragis said after a heroic swallow. "A leader who won't defend what's his doesn't deserve to keep it. My men will be ready." Gerin had the feeling the Archer primed his vassals for battle by making them more afraid of him than of any imaginable foe, but in his own savage way the grand duke got results.

Not half an hour after the chariots rolled out of camp, they passed the meadow where Gerin's forces and Adiatunnus' had dueled fewer than fifty days before. Some of the ruts the chariot wheels had cut were still visible; grass had grown tall over others.

Gerin had wondered if the Trokme chieftain would pick the same spot to defend his lands as he had in the last fight. When Adiatunnus didn't, the Fox's anxiety grew. Fearing an ambush when the road went through the next stand of woods, he dismounted several teams of fighting men and sent them in among the trees to flush out any lurking woodsrunners. That slowed the rest of the army, and the searchers found no one.

Past that patch of forest, a broad stretch of clear land opened up: meadows and fields that led to Adiatunnus' keep, the Trokme village, and the meaner huts of the Elabonian peasants who still grew most of the holding's food. Mustered in front of them was a great swarm of chariotry: Adiatunnus, awaiting the attack.

The Fox was lucky-he spotted the Trokmoi before they spied his car in the shadow of the woods. He ordered Raffo to a quick halt, then waved the chariots of his force up as tight together as they could go without fouling one another. "We'll need to be in line before the woodsrunners can sweep down on us," he said. "The gods be praised, they don't look all that ready to fight, either. My men will form to the left when we burst out into the open, Aragis' to the right. I expect we'll all be mixed together before the day is done-that's just a way of keeping us straight when we start. May fortune roll with us."

"May it be so," several troopers said together. Gerin thumped Raffo on the shoulder. The driver flicked the reins and sent the horses forward onto the meadow. A great shout rose from the Trokmoi when they caught sight of the chariot. They swarmed forward in a great irregular wave, hardly bothering to shake out into line of battle in their eagerness to close with their enemies.

"Look at 'em come," Van said, hefting his spear. "If we can get ourselves ready to receive 'em, we'll beat 'em to bits, even with the monsters running between their cars there."

"They don't care much for tactics, do they?" Gerin said. "Well, I' ve known that a great many years now. The trouble with them is, they have so much pluck that that's too often what decides things."

He nocked an arrow and waited for the Trokmoi and the monsters to come within range. Behind him, ever more chariots rumbled out of the woods to form line of battle. Each one drew fresh cries of rage from the woodsrunners. Gerin saw he had more cars than the woodsrunners did. Whether they'd all be able to deploy before the fight opened was another question.

When the Trokmoi closed to within a furlong, Gerin waved his arm and shouted "Forward!" at the top of his lungs. Chariots depended on mobility; if you tried to stand to receive a charge, you'd be ridden down.

Raffo cracked the whip above the horses' backs. The beasts bounded ahead. A chariot wheel hit a rock. The car jounced into the air, landed with a jarring thump. Gerin grabbed the rail for a moment; his knees flexed to take the shock of returning to earth.

He'd pulled all the way to the left, to be on the wing of his own force. That also meant he was far away from the track that led toward Adiatunnus' keep. The horses galloped through ripening rye, trampling down a great swath of grain under their hooves. The Fox's lips skinned back from his teeth in a predatory grin. Every stride the horses took meant more hunger for his foes.

An arrow hissed past his head. Adiatunnus' hunger was distant, something that would come with winter. Had that arrow flown a couple of palms' breadth straighter, Gerin would never have worried about it or anything else, again. Planning for the future was all very well, but you had to remember the present, too.

Gerin loosed the shaft he'd nocked, snatched another from his quiver, and set it to his bowstring. He shot once more. The Trokmoi were packed so closely, the arrow would almost surely do them some harm. He shot again and again, half emptying his quiver as fast as he could. The rest of the shafts he thriftily saved against more specific targets and urgent need.

His men had followed him on that wide sweep to the left, encircling the Trokmoi on that wing. Had Aragis taken the same course on the right, the woodsrunners would have been in dire straits. But Gerin's deployment order had left the Archer with fewer chariots there, and he commanded that wing with a blunter philosophy of battle than the Fox employed. Instead of seeking to surround the enemy, he pitched straight into them. Some of his men kept shooting at the Trokmoi, while others laid about them at close quarters with sword and axe and mace.

A monster ran at the chariot in which Gerin rode. It came at the horses rather than the men, and from the right side, where Van with his spear had less reach than the Fox with his bow. But the creature reckoned without Raffo. The driver's long lash flicked out. The monster howled and clutched at its face. Raffo steered the car right past it. Van thrust his spear into the monster's vitals, yanked it free with a killing twist. The monster crumpled to the ground and lay kicking.

A Trokme driver whipped his team straight for the Fox. His car bore two archers, both of whom let fly at almost the same time. One arrow glanced from the side of Van's helmet, the other flew between the outlander and Gerin.

Gerin shot at one of the archers. His shaft also failed to go just where he'd intended it, but it caught the Trokme driver in the throat. The reins fell from his fingers; he slumped forward over the front rail of the car. The team ran wild. Both of the archers grabbed for the reins. They were past before Gerin saw whether either one managed to seize them.

"Well aimed, Fox!" Van cried.

"It didn't do what I wanted it to do," Gerin answered. Uncomfortable with praise, he used bitter honesty to turn it aside, like a man trying to avert an omen he didn't care for.

"Honh!" Van said. "It did what it needed to do, which is what matters." That left Gerin no room for argument.

His hopes built as the battle ground on. The Trokmoi were ferocious, but not all the ferocity in the world could make up for a bad position-and, this time, he'd brought more men into the fight than Adiatunnus had. The monsters helped even the odds, but not enough.

He spied the Trokme chieftain, not far away. "Well, you robber, you asked what I'd do next," he shouted. "Now you see."

Adiatunnus shook a fist at him. "To the corbies with you, you black-hearted omadhaun. You'll pay for this." He reached for his quiver, but found he was out of arrows.

Gerin jeered at him. He pulled out a carefully husbanded shaft, set it to his bow, and let fly. Adiatunnus realized he had no time to grab for his shield, so he threw up his arms. The arrow caught him in the meaty part of his right upper arm, about halfway between elbow and shoulder. He let out a howl any monster would have envied. The wound wasn't fatal, probably wasn't even crippling, but he would fight no more today.

Van swatted Gerin on the back, almost hard enough to pitch him out of the chariot onto his head. "Well aimed!" the outlander boomed again.

And again, the Fox did what he could to downplay praise. "If that had been well aimed, it would have killed him," he grumbled.

The Trokmoi tried to slam through Aragis' men. Had they succeeded, they'd have regained their freedom of movement. But Aragis' chariots were grouped more tightly than Gerin's, and the woodsrunners could not force a breakout. When they failed, they began falling back toward the cover of their village.

"We'll roast 'em like mutton!" Aragis' fierce, exultant cry rang over the battlefield, though the Trokmoi still fought back with fierce countercharges-they were beaten, but far from broken.

Gerin waved several chariots with him, trying to get between the Trokmoi and the haven they sought. Bad luck dogged the effort. An arrow made one of the Elabonian drivers drop the reins, and the horses, freed from control, chose to run in just the wrong direction. A pair of monsters sprang into another chariot; the mad fight that ensued there kept the car from going as he'd hoped it would. He never did find out why a third car failed to follow, but it did.

That left him with… not enough. The Trokmoi did not have to slow down much to get around the handful of chariots with which he tried to block their path, and then he was the one in danger of being cut off and surrounded. Cursing, he shouted to Raffo, "We can't go back, so we'd best go on. Forward!"

Like an apple seed squeezed out from between thumb and forefinger, the Fox and his followers fought their way free from the far side of the fleeing Trokme force. Now he was on the right wing of the attack, and most of his vassals on the left. He'd foretold that things would get mixed up in the fight; being of an uncommonly orderly turn of mind, though, he hadn't expected the mixing to include himself.

He still had arrows left, and shot them at the retreating Trokmoi. Some of the woodsrunners had their cars pounding down the narrow lanes between their homes. "Uh-oh," Van said. "Are you sure we want to go after 'em in there, Fox?"

Whenever Van urged caution, he had to be taken seriously. "Looks like a good way to get chewed to bits, doesn't it?" Gerin said after he'd taken a long look at the situation.

"Doesn't it just?" Van agreed. "We'll get a good many of 'em, and do the rest real harm, if we set the place afire. But going in there after the woodsrunners, you ask me, that's putting your prong on the block for the chopper."

Had Gerin been undecided before, the wince from that figure of speech would have been plenty to make up his mind. He waved his arms and shouted for his men to hold up and ply the Trokme village with fire arrows. A good many Trokmoi, though, were thundering into the village between him and his vassals, so only a few of those vassals heard. And, while he was supposed to be in command of Aragis' men as well, they ignored him when he tried to keep them from pursuing the Trokmoi.

"Now what, lord prince?" Raffo asked as the chariots streamed past.

Gerin looked at Van. The outlander's broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. The Fox scowled. The only thing he could do that would let him keep his prestige among the Elabonian warriors was also the thing he'd just dismissed as stupid. "Go on," he shouted to Raffo. "If that's where the fight is, that's where we have to go."

"Aye, lord prince," Raffo said, and cracked the whip over the horses' backs.

It was as bad as Van had predicted, as bad as Gerin had thought it would be. Foundered chariots blocked several of the village lanes, robbing the Fox's force of mobility, the essence of chariotry. Some of the Trokmoi fought afoot, side by side with the monsters. Other men ran into the houses and shot arrows at the Elabonians from windows and doors, ducking back into cover after they'd shot.

And quite as fierce as the men were the Trokme women. It was like fighting dozens of berserk Fands. They screamed and shouted. Under their pale, freckled skins, their faces turned crimson with fury and the veins stood out like cords on their necks and foreheads. Some threw stones; others used bows and swords like their men. They weren't merely unnerving; they were deadly dangerous.

"Back, curse it! Back and out!" Gerin shouted, again and again. " We'll throw everything away if we get stuck in this kind of fighting. Out and back!"

Little by little, his men and Aragis' began to heed him. But pulling out of the battle was harder than getting into it had been. Turning a chariot around in the crowded, bloody alleyways of the village was anything but easy; too often, it was next to impossible. Gerin wondered if going forward would have cost less than the withdrawal did.

A lot of the chariots had lost the firepots with which they'd begun the day's fighting. Still, before long, fire arrows sent trails of smoke through the air as they arced toward the thatched roofs of the Trokme cottages. The weather had been dry. Before long, the straw on the roofs was blazing.

More chariots rampaged through the fields outside the village, wrecking the crops that still stood after the battle had gone through them. Through thickening smoke, Gerin saw Trokmoi fleeing into Adiatunnus' keep.

"Do you aim to lay siege to 'em?" Aragis the Archer asked. The grand duke's helmet was dented, maybe by a stone. The edge of the helm had cut him above one eye; when he healed, he'd have a scar like Gerin's.

"We can't take the keep by storm, however much I wish we could," Gerin answered. "We don't have the numbers, we don't have the ladders, and they'd be fighting for their lives. We can't starve them out, either. Adiatunnus will have more in his storerooms and cellars than we can draw from the countryside. We can send in fire arrows and hope to start a big blaze, but that's just a matter of luck."

"Aye, but we should try it," Aragis said. Nonetheless, he showed relief that Gerin did not intend to linger in Adiatunnus' country.

The Fox understood that. "You'll want to campaign against the monsters in your own lands as soon as may be, won't you?"

"As a matter of fact, that's just what's in my mind," Aragis said. "Harvest won't wait forever, and I'd like the woods cleared of those creatures before then… if that can be done. I'd not care to harm your campaign by pulling back from here too soon, but-"

But I will, if you don't pull back on your own hook soon enough to suit me. Aragis didn't say it-Gerin gave him credit for being a good ally, a better one than the Fox had expected-but he thought it very loudly.

"If it suits you, we'll spend the rest of the afternoon lobbing fire arrows into the keep in the hope of sending it all up in smoke, and then-then we'll withdraw," Gerin said. "We'll ravage more of Adiatunnus' lands as we go. By your leave, we'll stop at Fox Keep for a few days, to let me set up the defenses of my own holding while I'm in the south, and then I'll meet my end of the bargain."

"Couldn't ask for fairer than that," Aragis said, though his eyes argued that any departure later than yesterday, or perhaps the day before, was too late. But again, he held his peace; he recognized necessity, and recognized that against it any man struggled in vain.

The charioteers rode rings around Adiatunnus' keep, howling and shouting louder than the Trokmoi on the walls as they sent more fire arrows smoking through the air. Up on the walls of the keep with the woodsrunners were several monsters. Gerin hoped they and the Trokmoi would quarrel in the tight quarters, but had no way to make that happen.

Two or three times, thin columns of black smoke rose from within the keep. Whenever they did, Gerin's men, and Aragis' too, cheered themselves hoarse. But each time, the smoke thinned, paled, died. At last, as the sun sank ever lower in the west, the Fox called off the attack. He and his followers drew off toward the northeast, back in the direction from which they had come.

Wounded horses and men and monsters still thrashed and groaned and screamed on the battlefield. Now and again, an Elabonian chariot would halt so its crew could cut the throat of a horse or a monster or a Trokme, or so the troopers could haul an injured comrade into their car and do for him what they could once they stopped to camp. Some of the injured cried out louder in the jouncing chariots than they had lying on the ground. Their moans made Gerin grind his teeth, but all he could do was keep on.

"One thing," Van said as they entered the woods from which they'd emerged to fight: "we won't have to offer much in the way of sacrifice to the ghosts tonight."

"That's so," Gerin agreed. "We gave them blood aplenty today. They'll buzz round the bodies the whole night long, like so many great carrion flies round a carcass-gloating, I suppose, that all those brave men joined their cold and gloomy world."

The chariots came out of the woods bare minutes before sunset. Gerin led them out into the middle of a broad meadow. "We stop here," he declared. "Van, I leave it to you to get the first fire going." He told off parties to go back to the forest and chop down enough wood to keep the fires blazing all through the night. Nothos would rise with a third of the night already passed, and the other three moons later still.

That accomplished, the Fox turned his hand to giving the wounded what help he could. As always in the aftermath of battle, he was reminded how pitifully little that was. He splashed ale on cuts to help keep them from going bad, set and splinted broken bones, sewed up a few gaping gashes with thread of wool or sinew, bandaged men who had ignored their hurts in the heat of action. None of what he did brought much immediate relief from pain, although some of it, he made himself remember, would do good in the long run.

More horses were hurt, too. He helped the drivers doctor them when he was done with the men. The men, at least, had some idea why they'd been hurt. The horses' big brown eyes were full of uncomprehended suffering.

He didn't know who'd ordered it, but the men had made the same sort of circle of fires they'd built the night before. He chose warriors who'd slept through the previous night undisturbed for sentry duty, and made himself one of them. He was tired down to the marrow of his bones, but so was everyone else.

"Did we win?" Van asked as he replaced the Fox for midwatch. "Did we do all you wanted done?"

"Aye, we won," Gerin said, yawning. "Did we do enough?" Yawning again, he shook his head and made for his bedroll.

"Wait, Captain." Van called him back. The outlander pointed to the woods, from which monsters were coming forth.

Sentries' shouts roused the camp. Swearing, men snatched at weapons and armor. Gerin found his sword in his hand. It wasn't magic; he just didn't remember drawing the weapon.

The monsters approached to the edge of bowshot, but no closer. " There aren't that many of them," Gerin remarked as the creatures began a chorus of their dreadful shrieks. Shriek they did, but they made no move to attack. After a while, the Fox said, "I think they're trying to put us in fear, nothing else but. A plague on 'em, says I. No matter how they scream, I'm going to get some sleep." He raised his voice: "All save the sentries, rest while you can. We'll have warning enough if they truly aim to come after us."

He rolled himself up in his blanket. The monsters' hideous outcry kept him awake a little longer than he would have been otherwise, but not much. Not even Mavrix the god of wine appearing before him would have kept him awake for long, he thought as sleep swallowed him.

He woke wondering why he'd worried about Mavrix, but shook his head at the pointlessness of that: sleepy minds did strange things, and there was no more to say about it. The monsters were gone. That didn't surprise him; with sunrise, the Elabonians could have started shooting at them with good hopes of scoring hits.

Not all the warriors had been able to sleep. Some of them shambled about as if barely alive. How they'd be after another day in the chariot was something about which the Fox tried not to think.

No help for it. After breaking their fast on hard bread and sausage and ale, they rolled northeast, back toward the Fox's holding. Knowing no large force lay directly ahead of them, they spread out widely over the countryside, doing as much damage to Adiatunnus' lands and villages and crops as they could with fire and their horses' hooves and the wheels of their chariots.

A victory, but not a perfect one. Gerin had hoped to smash Adiatunnus utterly; he'd hurt the Trokme chieftain, literally and metaphorically, but not enough to seize much of his territory with any assurance of keeping it. Maybe the monsters had learned not to attack large bands of armed and armored men, but they hadn't been exterminated-and Adiatunnus' lands still gave them haven.

"Not enough," Gerin said under his breath. Van glanced over to him, but did not venture to reply.

Some of Gerin's vassals peeled off from the main force as they reentered his territory, off to their own castles and to protect their own villages. Most, though, stayed on the road to Fox Keep. Before long, they'd be riding south to help Aragis and fulfill Gerin's part of the bargain.

He'd wondered if the serfs would ask him whether he'd rid their villages of the monsters for good, and dreaded having to tell them no. Then the army passed through a village the creatures had attacked while he was deep in Adiatunnus' territory. That made him feel worse. He'd hurt the Trokmoi and the monsters, but he'd been mad to think he could root them out with a single victory.

He also wondered how much he and his men would accomplish down in the holding of Aragis the Archer. He feared it would be less than Aragis hoped, but kept that fear to himself. Whatever the grand duke's misgivings, he'd come north. The Fox saw no way to keep from reciprocating, not if he wanted to keep his good name.

The return to Castle Fox was subdued. The victory the army had won did not outweigh the men who would not come back, the complete triumph that had eluded the Elabonians.

Seeing Selatre again, squeezing her to him, was wonderful, but she quickly sensed that, past having come home alive and unhurt, Gerin had little to celebrate. That made her shrink back into herself, so that she seemed to stand aloof from the chaos in the stables although she was in the middle of it.

Van and Fand got into a screaming fight over what business the outlander had had going off to fight the Trokmoi. He clapped a hand to his forehead and bellowed, "You tell me not to tangle with them when the only reason you're here is that you stabbed the last woodsrunner daft enough to take you into his bed?"

"Aye, I did that, and I had the right of it, too, for he was of my own folk, for all that he was an evil-natured spalpeen to boot," she said. "But you, now, you're the Fox's friend, but you're after being my lover. So you see!"

Van shook his head-he didn't see. Gerin didn't see, either. If being Fand's lover turned Van into some sort of honorary Trokme, by her own argument that gave him a special right to go to war against the woodsrunners. Fand was seldom long on logic; the gods seemed to have given her extra helpings of all the passions instead.

Duren hopped around, saying, "May I go fight too next time, Father? May I, please?"

"You're raising a warrior there," Aragis said approvingly.

"So I am," Gerin answered. He wasn't altogether pleased. Aye, any holding on the frontier-any holding in the northlands-needed a warrior at its head. But he hoped he would also be able to raise a civilized man, lest barbarism seize all the land between the Niffet and the Kirs and hold it for centuries to come.

The castle cooks dished out mutton and pork and bread and ale. The warriors ate and sought their bedrolls. Gerin stayed down in the great hall, hashing over the fight, till Duren fell asleep beside him. Then, as he had a few nights before, he carried his son upstairs to his bedchamber.

When he went back out into the hall, he found Selatre waiting there. She said, "If you were so worn you'd gone to bed with your son, I'd have walked back to my room, but since you're not-"

He caught her to him. "Thank you for being here when things don't look as good as they might." Even as he spoke the words, he realized he was doing his best to put a good face on the campaign from which he'd just returned. Things looked bloody awful.

Selatre ignored all that. She said, "Don't be foolish. If you hadn't been there for me, I'd be dead. Come on." She led him back to her chamber.

He took her with something approaching desperation. He hoped she read it as passion, but she wasn't one to be easily deceived. That she stayed by him when he needed her most was a greater gift than any other she could have given him.

Afterwards, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. When he jerked awake, Nothos' light streamed through the window, but not yet golden Math's: past midnight, then, but not far past. Beside him, Selatre was also sitting bolt upright.

"Something is amiss," she said. Her voice sent chills through him. For the first time in many days, she sounded like the Sibyl at Ikos, not the woman he'd come to love.

But no matter how she sounded, she was right. "I heard it, too," Gerin said. He stopped, confused. "Heard it? Felt it? All's quiet now. But-" He got out of bed and started to dress.

So did she. "I don't know what it was. I thought for a moment Biton touched me." She shook her head. "I was wrong, but it was more than a dream. I know that. And if it woke you, too…"

"We'd better find out what it was." Gerin held his sword in his left hand. How much good the blade would do against whatever had roused him and Selatre, he had no idea, but it couldn't hurt.

All seemed quiet in Fox Keep as he and Selatre tiptoed down the hall to the stairs. Van's snores pierced the door to Fand's chamber. Gerin smiled for a moment at that, but his lips could not hold their upward curve. A few warriors had fallen asleep in the great hall, maybe too drunk to seek their proper beds. Gerin and Selatre walked by. He looked this way and that, shook his head in the same confusion Selatre had shown. Whatever was wrong, it lay outside the castle proper. He didn't know how he knew, but he did.

Outside, sentries paced their rounds up on the palisade. The courtyard seemed as still as the keep. Gerin began to wonder if worry and nerves hadn't played tricks on Selatre and him at the same time. Then he heard footfalls-slow, erratic footfalls-coming up from the stables toward the entrance to the great hall.

"Stay here," he whispered to Selatre, but when he trotted round to the side of the keep to see who-or what-approached, she followed. She was not so close to him as to cramp him if he had to fight, so he bit down his annoyance and kept quiet.

He rounded the corner and stopped dead with a strangled snort of laughter. No wonder the footfalls had been as they were: here came Rihwin, gloriously drunk. Gerin wondered how Rihwin managed to keep up his footfalls without falling himself. His face bore a look of intense concentration, as if putting one foot in front of the other took everything he had in him. It probably did.

Gerin turned to Selatre in mingled amusement and disgust. "We might as well go back to bed, if this poor sot's the worst menace we can find."

"No. We stay," she said, again sounding like the Sibyl she had been. "More is here than we yet know. Can you not feel it?"

And Gerin could: a prickling of the hairs at the nape of his neck, a tightening of his belly, his mouth suddenly dry as dust. He'd felt like this in the instant when the ground began to shake at Ikos, when his body gave alarm but his mind hadn't yet realized why.

The ground wasn't shaking now, though he wouldn't have bet Rihwin could have told whether that was so. Nevertheless, the feeling of awe and dread built inside Gerin till he wanted to run or scream or smash something just to get relief. He did none of those things. Forcing himself to stillness, he waited for Rihwin's staggering progress to bring his fellow Fox to him.

Rihwin was so intent on walking, he didn't notice Gerin till he almost ran into him. "Lord pr-prince!" he said thickly, and gave such a melodramatic start that he nearly tumbled over backwards. "Mercy, lord prince!" he gasped, and then hiccuped.

Now Gerin drew back a pace, his nose wrinkling. "Feh!" he said. " Your breath stinks like a vineyard in pressing season."

"Mercy!" Rihwin repeated. He swayed as he stared owlishly at his overlord; standing in one place seemed about as hard for him as walking. His face was slack with drink, but alarm glittered in his eyes.

Then Gerin looked through him instead of at him, really hearing for the first time what he himself had said. "You've been at the wine Schild brought us, haven't you, my fellow Fox?" he asked softly. He'd let his sword trail to the ground. Now it came up again, as if to let the wine out of Rihwin.

"Mercy!" Rihwin squeaked for the third time. "I found it buried in the hay when we brought our-hic!-horses to the stables. I broached but two jars. Mer-hic!-cy!"

"That is it." Selatre's voice was firm and certain. "That is what we felt: the power of Mavrix loosed in this holding."

Gerin wanted to scream at Rihwin. Even in his fury, though, he remembered the hour, remembered the warriors and women and cooks and servants asleep inside Castle Fox. But although he hissed instead of shrieking, his fury came through unabated: "You stupid, piggish dolt. Thanks to your greed, thanks to the wine you're going to piss away over the course of the next day, you've made Mavrix notice us and given him a channel through which he can enter this land-and he hates me. What shall I do to you for that? How could Adiatunnus serve me worse than you just did?"

Tears ran down Rihwin's cheeks; they glistened in Nothos' pale light. "Lord prince, you're right," he mumbled. "I don't know what came over me. I shaw-saw-the jars there in the straw, and it as as conshu-consuming fire blazed all through me. I had to drink, or die." Even sozzled, he spoke with elaborate southern phrasings.

"That's the fanciest way to call yourself a no-account, worthless drunkard I ever heard," Gerin said in disgust.

Selatre set a hand on his arm. She still used that gesture seldom enough to command attention when she did. "Wait," she said. "There may be more truth in what he says than you hear. Perhaps Mavrix inflamed his soul, as he put it, to open the way for the god to make his presence felt in the northlands once more."

"It could be so, lord prince," Rihwin exclaimed eagerly. "Though the lord of the sweet grape expunged all sorcerous ability from my spirit, he left intact my knowledge."

"Not that you haven't tried to drown it in ale-and now wine," Gerin snarled, still anything but appeased.

"I deserve that." Rihwin's voice was full of drunken earnestness. "But it is as your gracious lady said. Were Mavrix to seek entry to your holding, I am just the sort of insht-insh-instrument he would employ." He smiled in triumph at finally forcing out the difficult word.

"All right, it could be so," Gerin said grudgingly. "Shall I thank you for it? Great Dyaus above, I'm still trying to figure out whether we can survive it. As I said, as you know, the god loves me not, nor you either."

Rihwin hung his head. "That is true."

"The god has his purposes, and we have ours," Selatre said. "He will accomplish his come what may. We can't say the same, worse luck. What we have to seek is a way in which the god's purposes are met, and ours as well, and, having found it, coax him into accepting it."

Gerin looked at her gratefully. "Put that way, it might almost be done." But in the back of his mind, he heard, or thought he heard, the god laughing, laughing.