Fox and Empire

**

Selatre had been working in the kingdom's library-an overstatement of what one upstairs room of Castle Fox held, but an overstatement Gerin had been making ever since he'd succeeded his father as local baron, more than twenty years before. She came down for supper.

When she did, Marlanz bowed before her. "Lady, seeing as you were Sibyl at Ikos, and seeing as the farseeing god spoke through you there," he said, getting around to his question a clause at a time, like a lawyer south of the High Kirs, "does that mean this Ferdulf you've got here pays any special heed to what you say?" He spoke of Mavrix's son as he might have of a dangerous wild beast, which struck Gerin as fitting enough.

Selatre gave the question grave consideration, almost as if she expected Biton to speak through her here and now. After scratching the side of her pointed chin for close to a minute, she delivered a short answer: "Not very often."

Marlanz stared, then started to laugh. "Well, that's straight, and no mistake," he said, his last couple of words blurring into an enormous yawn. He turned back to Gerin. "If you'll be kind enough to have somebody show me up to my bedchamber, I'll thank you for it. I've spent a good many days on the road, coming up from Aragis' keep."

"I can do that," Gerin said, and waved for a servant, who led Aragis' envoy away. The warriors who had accompanied Marlanz would sleep in the great hall; the Fox had made sure they had plenty of blankets to stay comfortable. No one at Fox Keep had to fear night ghosts, for he made a point of giving them the blood they needed to keep from molesting mortals.

Once Marlanz was gone, Selatre put on that thoughtful expression again. "Do you suppose we could find a way to use Ferdulf?" she said in a low voice.

"Against Aragis, you mean?" Gerin asked, as quietly. His wife nodded. He said, "I never thought about it before. I never imagined Ferdulf doing anything but whatever he wants." He looked around. None of the men who'd come to Fox Keep with Marlanz seemed to be listening, and a couple of them were already asleep, but Gerin had not grown as old as he had-older than I ever thought I'd be-by taking unnecessary chances. The necessary ones were quite bad enough. "Let's talk about it upstairs."

"All right." Selatre rose from the bench in one smooth motion. She and Gerin walked up the wooden stairway hand in hand.

In the chamber nearest the top of the stairs, Van and Fand were arguing. The outlander and the Trokm? woman looked on quarrels as most folk looked on meat and drink. Gerin met Selatre's eye. Wryly, he shook his head. After Elise had left him, before he'd met Selatre, he' d shared Fand's affection-and her temper-with Van for a while. No wonder he did his best to keep his even-tempered wife that way. He had standards of comparison.

He and Selatre shared the next bedchamber with their children. Since he didn't feel like explaining everything to Dagref (however much his son thought himself entitled to explanations), and since Clotild might well also still be awake, he led Selatre past that door, too. She nodded, understanding his reasons without his having to spell them out. One more reason to love her, he thought.

Rihwin had the chamber on the other side of the Fox's. Since Rihwin could no more keep secrets than Fand could keep calm, Gerin walked by his room. The next bedchamber held Marlanz. Across from it was the library, to which Gerin and Selatre were both drawn like feathers gliding toward rubbed amber.

Few in the northlands knew their letters. Selatre hadn't, not till Gerin taught them to her after bringing her to Fox Keep. He'd thought to give her a useful place here, not knowing he would fall in love with her in short order-and she with him, too, which struck him as stranger and more marvelous. She'd also fallen in love with books. That, unlike falling in love with him, he understood completely. He'd done it himself.

He opened the door, then gestured for her to go in ahead of him. She did-and started to laugh. When he followed her into the chamber, he laughed, too. There sat Dagref in front of a lamp, his nose in a scroll.

Gerin glanced over at Selatre. "Anyone would think he was our child," he said.

Dagref looked up at his parents. "Of course I'm your child," he said testily, "and I'm sure you came in here so you could talk about something you think is none of my business."

"You're right," Selatre told him.

"It isn't fair," he said. "How am I supposed to learn what I need to know if you won't let me find out about it?" He started to stalk off, then stopped under Gerin's glare. When he went back, rolled up the scroll, and replaced it in its proper pigeonhole, his father stopped glaring.

"That was good," Selatre said with a smile after her son did depart. "He figured out why you were unhappy."

"Something, anyway," Gerin agreed. "Tell him the same thing four hundred times in a row and he will start to listen-if it suits him. If it doesn't…" His scowl said what happened then. After a moment, he went on, "And yet, if it's something he wants to learn, he'll soak it up the way dry ground soaks up the first rain of the year."

Selatre gazed at him with amused fondness. "Anyone would think he had you for a father," she murmured.

The Fox tried to glare again, but ended up laughing instead. "You know me too well-and you have altogether too little respect for your king." That made Selatre laugh, too. But Gerin quickly sobered. "Can we use Ferdulf as a weapon against Aragis if we do go to war?"

"I would be happier trying it if he were the son of any other god than Mavrix," Selatre said.

"Why do you say that? Because Mavrix is about the least predictable god in anyone's pantheon, or because he's shown he isn't fond of me in particular?"

"Yes," Selatre said, as Gerin had with Marlanz. He made a face at her. Despite her joke, though, both halves of the question could legitimately be answered yes. Mavrix was the Sithonian god of wine, beauty, fertility, creativity… and of the chaos accompanying all those. He did not know, from one moment to another, what he would do next, nor did he care. And his encounters with the Fox over the years had mostly ended up alarming both the god, who was a coward at heart, and the man, who was anything but.

Gerin said, "For once, I'd like to use a weapon against my foes that isn't stronger than I am, so I won't have to spend so much time worrying whether it will turn in my hand and end up being worse than simply losing whatever fight I happen to be making."

"The question, then, it seems to me, is, if we go to war with Aragis, whether we can beat him without resorting to… extraordinary means," Selatre said.

Gerin paused a moment to admire the precise phrasing of that. He tried to answer with similar precision: "We can-if everything goes right. If Adiatunnus chooses to remember he's my vassal, and doesn't take the fight as an excuse to throw off his allegiance and set up on his own, for instance."

"He'd better not," Selatre said with no small anger, "not when he' s the one who first proclaimed you king."

"He's been a good enough vassal since, too," Gerin admitted, "but he's a Trokm?, which means he's almost as fickle as Mavrix. If he sees the two greatest Elabonian lords in the northlands going at each other, the temptation may be too much for him to stand. And there are the Gradi, too."

The seafaring invaders from the chilly lands north of the Trokm? forests had tried to establish themselves and their grim gods in the northlands a few years before. Fear of them was what had made Adiatunnus remember he was Gerin's vassal. Fighting together instead of against each other, Elabonians and Trokmoi had pinned the northerners against the Orynian Ocean. More than that they could not do, not when Gradi galleys controlled the sea.

Because Voldar, the chief Gradi goddess, and the rest of the northerners' gods contemplated making the northlands into a frigid copy of the home from which they'd come, a land too cold for even barley to grow there, Gerin had managed to persuade Baivers, the Elabonian god of barley, beer, and brewing, to join with the ferocious powers of Geroge and Tharma's kind and battle those Gradi gods. He didn't know whether that battle on the spiritual plane had been won or lost. His best guess was that it still went on, five years after its beginning: time, for the gods, was not as it was for men. What he did know was that, without help from their gods, the Gradi hadn't been able to stand against him. That was the only thing that mattered.

No, not quite the only thing. "If Voldar and the other Gradi powers ever manage to pull loose from the battle I found for them, they won't be very happy with me."

"They haven't done it yet, and it's been a long time now." Selatre spoke with her usual brisk practicality. "And, if they do, you'll come up with something."

That wasn't practicality; it was, as far as Gerin could see, madness. "Everyone else expects me to have all the answers and pull them out of my beltpouch whenever I need them," he growled. "I thought you knew better."

She looked steadily back at him. "You forget, I've been living by your side these past fifteen or sixteen years. I know what you can do. Everyone else just guesses." When that drew nothing more than a sardonic snort from the Fox, Selatre went on, "You would come up with something. I know you too well to doubt it. Maybe, with Ferdulf here, you could use him to call on Mavrix, and-"

"That would be wonderful, wouldn't it?" Gerin said. "Mavrix likes me about as well as Voldar does. Trying to use one god who can't stand me to head off another one who can't stand me, either… I think I' d be better off jumping out of the watchtower and hoping I broke my neck when I hit. Besides, Voldar's stronger than Mavrix. I found that out."

"Well, you'd do something else, then." Selatre still sounded confident. "I thought of Mavrix because we were talking about Ferdulf."

"So we were," Gerin said. "The best thing I can think of to do with him is to hope that his being here frightens Aragis, and to hope Aragis never finds out how much his being here frightens me."

"You're the king of the north." Amusement glinted in his wife's eyes. "Nothing is supposed to frighten you."

She was poking him in the ribs to make him jump. He knew as much, but answered seriously: "No, that's Aragis. As far as I've ever seen, nothing does frighten him-and that frightens me. He's very simple, like a hunting hawk. He goes straight for what he wants, knocks it down, and kills it. The only reason he's never gone after me is that I've always looked too big to knock down. Maybe I don't, not any more. I don't think Marlanz is bluffing."

"No. Aragis doesn't want you becoming Balser's overlord," Selatre agreed. She cocked her head to one side and studied him. "Wouldn't you say that means he's afraid of you?"

Gerin started to say something, then stopped. What he did say, in tones of appreciation, was, "I think I've just been outargued."

Selatre was still studying him, but now in rather a different manner. "And what do you propose to do about that?" she inquired.

He got up, walked over to the door, and barred it. He'd had a serf skilled in carpentry install the bar and the brackets that held it a couple of years before. At about the same time, he'd taken to storing a bolt of thick woolen cloth in one corner of the library. That had perplexed Dagref, who'd noted, pointedly and accurately, that nothing else but books ever got stored in that room. "It's not doing any particular harm there, so let it alone," Gerin had told him. That was also true. Dagref had grumbled about it for a while, but then, as is the way of such things, he'd got used to it. He probably didn't even notice it was there any more.

The other thing he didn't notice, however alert he was to connections between events around him, was that that bar and the roll of cloth had appeared in the library at about the same time he and Clotild grew to the point where they didn't sleep much more than Gerin and Selatre did. The Fox's bedchamber had only one large bed in it. Private moments there got harder and harder to find.

"What are you doing?" Selatre asked now, though her tone of voice suggested she knew perfectly well what he was doing-and that she might have done it herself if he hadn't.

"Who, me?" Gerin unrolled the cloth on the floor. When he'd doubled it over onto itself, it was a little longer than a woman, or even a man, might be, lying at full length.

Selatre came over and stood beside him. As if altogether of its own accord, his arm slid around her waist. She moved closer. Her voice, though, was thoughtful as she said, "It's really not quite so soft as the bed, is it? And you don't always remember to keep your weight on your elbows instead of on me." She let out a small sigh that might have proclaimed she was resigned to his iniquities.

Some pleasant little while later, Gerin murmured, "There. You can' t say I'm squashing you now." Selatre, astride him, nodded agreement altogether too solemn for the moment. Both of them started to laughquietly. Gerin slid his hands along her smooth, warm length. "Is this better, then?"

"Better?" Her shrug was delightful. Even then, though, the answer she gave was carefully considered: "I don't know. It's not the same, and you're not squashing me. That's enough." She began to move, and the answers she and Gerin found were not expressed in words.

Once he'd put on his linen tunic and wool trousers, Gerin rolled up the bolt of cloth and slung it back in its corner. In the light of the single lamp still burning in the library, it looked altogether mundane: just one more thing for which there hadn't been room anywhere else in the crowded castle.

Suddenly, Selatre started to giggle. The Fox raised an interrogative eyebrow. She said, "I wonder what Ferdulf would have thought if he'd been walking in the air outside the window just then."

There was an aspect of Ferdulf's unusual abilities Gerin hadn't contemplated till then. "Maybe he would have learned something," he said, which made Selatre laugh again. He went on, "Considering which god he's the son of, maybe he wouldn't have, too." He and Selatre both laughed at that. Were they a little nervous? If they were, they both kept quiet about it. He unbarred the door. Selatre blew out the lamp. They went off to bed.