Fox and Empire

**

Gerin sat up on his blanket. "Something's wrong," he said, his voice blurry with sleep. He looked around. The campfires were lower than they had been, though sentries still fed them to help hold the night ghosts at bay-not that the ghosts hadn't had their glut of blood earlier that day. Snores rose from sleeping soldiers in an unmelodious chorus. Injured men groaned against their pain.

Everything seemed to be as it should. But Gerin had not been dreaming when he thought something was wrong; he was sure of that. He did not know how he was sure, only that he was. He looked around again. Again, he could find nothing amiss.

He started to lie down once more, then checked himself. He looked around yet again, this time for Rihwin the Fox. Wherever there was trouble, Rihwin usually wasn't far away. That was especially true when wine was involved. Gerin hadn't had to worry about wine for a good many years. Now he did. Worrying about wine meant worrying about Rihwin.

But no: there Rihwin lay, not twenty feet off, snoring as unmusically as anyone else. Gerin let out a small sigh of relief. If Rihwin had no part in whatever trouble brewed, odds were it wouldn't be so bad. Years of experience had led Gerin to believe as much, at any rate.

He yawned and lay flat again. Despite the yawn, despite Rihwin's snores, sleep would not come. "Something's wrong," he said again, quietly this time, and got to his feet. He would not find any rest till he made sure that prickly feeling of unease in his mind was imagination and nerves.

He breathed a little easier when he saw Dagref, too. Dagref probably would not make trouble on his own. He knew precisely what sort of trouble Dagref and Maeva would make together, though. He would not have wanted to make that sort of trouble while wounded, but, with both of them so young, who could tell what they were liable to do? But they couldn't very well do anything with Dagref sprawled asleep on a blanket.

A sentry was laying branches on a fire. He looked up when he heard Gerin's footsteps. "Is everything all right, lord king?" he asked.

"I don't know," Gerin answered. "I'm trying to find out." He prowled on.

Lengyel the wizard was liable to cause trouble, too. Lengyel had already caused trouble, as a matter of fact. Gerin stalked over to where he stayed under guard. The guards were alert. So was Gerin, when he saw that Lengyel, instead of lying there asleep, was sitting up looking at him.

"No, lord king, he hasn't done anything," one of the wizard's guards assured the Fox. "He wakes up in the night sometimes-has to piss, you know. He's often a goodish while dropping off afterwards."

"Is he?" Gerin gave Lengyel a hard stare. "Probably looking for another chance to get away."

"If I found one, I should be a fool not to take it," the sorcerer said. "I regret to admit I have not found it. Your men have been more careful than I had expected." He made a sour face. "Very little on this side of the High Kirs has been as I expected."

"We never expected to see imperials on this side of the High Kirs at all," Gerin said. "We'd have been just as happy if you people had gone on minding your own business, too, instead of poking your snouts into ours."

Even as he spoke, he wondered if he was telling the truth. If the imperial army had stayed south of the mountains, he would have been fighting Aragis instead. By what the men of the Elabonian Empire had shown thus far, the Archer would have made a more troublesome foe. On the other hand, Gerin had no guarantee that the Elabonian Emperor wouldn't send another army over the High Kirs to give this one a hand.

In musing tones, he said, "Tell me what this Crebbig I is like." He chuckled into the darkness, thinking how much he sounded like the imperials asking him about Ferdulf.

"His imperial majesty is bold and valiant and splendid and terrible, beloved of his friends, a terror to his enemies-"

"Wait." Gerin held up a hand. Lengyel sounded as if he could go on like that for days without ever saying anything that mattered. Gerin said, "Let's try it another way: is Crebbig Hildor's son? If he's not, what was he before his backside landed on the throne down there in the City of Elabon?"

"How could you not know these things?" Lengyel asked in surprise.

"No trouble at all," the Fox answered. "Very much the same way as you were ignorant about everything that has anything to do with the northlands. The difference is, I know that I don't know, where you hadn't a clue."

That drew an indignant sniff from Lengyel; wizards, knowing so much about wizardry, naturally assumed they knew a lot about everything else, too. Primly, the sorcerer said, "You exaggerate, I assure you."

"No, I don't." Gerin held up a hand. "Wait. Never mind. It doesn't matter. Just answer my questions about Crebbig."

"Very well." Lengyel did not and would not call him lord king, holding to the official imperial view that there were no kings north of the High Kirs, only rebels ruling against the authority of the City of Elabon. The wizard went on, "No, Crebbig is not the son of the Emperor Hildor III, who is now beloved among the gods."

"Dead, you mean," Gerin said, and Lengyel nodded. The Fox asked, " Did Crebbig give him some timely help in becoming beloved among the gods?" Lengyel nodded again. This time, so did Gerin. "Good. Now we're getting somewhere. What was the murderous usurper doing before he slaughtered his way to the top of the heap?"

"I resent the imputation contained within your words," Lengyel said.

"I don't care," Gerin said cheerfully. "Resent all you like. You serve him. I don't, and I won't. Now answer my question: what was Crebbig the Killer doing before he got to be Elabonian Emperor?"

Lengyel gave him another reproving look for that highly unofficial ekename. He ignored it. He was good at ignoring such looks, having had practice with his children. Seeing it fail, Lengyel said, "The Emperor was formerly commander of the Elabonian garrison occupying the citystates of Sithonia."

"Was he?" Gerin said. "Now, isn't that interesting?" Crebbig would have had a good-sized army behind him when he rebelled; Elabon kept a large garrison in Sithonia for the good and sufficient reason that Elabon needed a large garrison in Sithonia. Down through the centuries of Elabonian occupation, the Sithonians had never given up plotting and scheming and conniving and occasionally rising up against their imperial overlords-and, being Sithonians, had never given up betraying one another to their imperial overlords, either.

It was also interesting, the Fox realized a moment later, because of the Sithonian connections in his own life. He hadn't actually seen a man from one of the city-states east of the Greater Inner Sea since he'd come back from the City of Elabon more than twenty years before, but since then he'd had more dealings with Mavrix than he'd ever wanted, and Mavrix had saddled him with Ferdulf, and…

"Father Dyaus," he whispered, and left Lengyel so quickly, the wizard and the guards all stared after him. He didn't care. Something was indeed liable to be wrong, and he thought he finally knew what sort of something, too.

His nostrils twitched when he got close to where he was going. He hadn't smelled that smell in a long time, but he knew what it was. Rich, fruity… He couldn't have mistaken it for anything else.

Guards stood around the wine Rihwin the Fox had captured from the imperials, as guards had stood around Lengyel. The wizard's guards hadn't been able to keep him from escaping once, and the guards here hadn't been able to keep somebody from getting into the wine. Gerin's nose told him as much, though the guards didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. "Hello, lord king," one of them greeted him. "What brings you here?"

"Trouble." Gerin pointed. "Don't you see, someone's got past you and in among the wineskins? Can't you smell the spilled blood of the sweet grape?"

Once he showed them they had been befooled, they exclaimed angrily and snatched out their swords. Before then, they'd been oblivious. " Curse the imperial wizard to the hottest of the five hells," said the fellow who'd greeted Gerin. "His spells must have stolen our wits away."

"That's not Lengyel in there." Gerin frowned. "All things considered, I rather wish it were."

Ferdulf looked up from the wine he'd been drinking. "Bother!" he said, glaring at the Fox. "Why didn't my glamour take you, too?"

"It's always harder if someone already knows what he's looking for," Gerin said. "Do you know what you're looking for, there with the wine?"

"My father," Ferdulf said.

"I thought we'd agreed that wasn't a good idea," Gerin told him.

"Aye, we did," Ferdulf, that most unchildlike baritone still as clear as if he'd never begun to drink. "And then I stopped agreeing, and I decided to do something about not agreeing."

"What you should have done was come to me," Gerin said. "You didn' t agree by yourself. You shouldn't have broken the agreement by yourself, either."

Ferdulf shrugged. "It takes two to make an agreement, but only one to be rid of it. You'd have tried to talk me out of this, and-"

"You'd best believe I would," Gerin broke in. Mavrix was the last person-force, god-the Fox wanted to see right now. No one, not Gerin, not Ferdulf, probably not Mavrix himself, could begin to guess what he'd do.

"But I don't want to be talked out of it," Ferdulf said. "The more I thought about that, the more certain I got. And so…" He raised a drinking jack to his lips. His throat worked. "That's very fine." It was sure to be only rough army wine, barely worth drinking, but he cared nothing for objectivity. "My father certainly made something better here than boring old ale."

"Ale suits me well enough," Gerin answered sincerely, "though I would be the last to deny wine is fine, too. I've drunk a deal of wine, and drunk it with enjoyment." The last thing he wanted to do was offend Mavrix, if by some mischance the god should be listening and choose to manifest himself here.

He succeeded in offending Ferdulf instead. "Trimmer!" the little demigod sneered, drinking again. "This is good, but that isn't badbah! You haven't much time, mortal man. You should be all one thing or all another, not a bit of this and a bit of that."

Gerin shook his head. "I have something of everything in me. If I left something out, that would be the waste."

Ferdulf stared at him. The demigod's eyes caught and reflected what little light there was like a cat's. "You don't answer as you should," he complained. "You don't think as you should. As best I can tell, my father put me on earth where he did for no better reason than to have you torment me."

"I doubt that." Gerin had always thought Mavrix had sired Ferdulf on Fulda for no better reason than to torment him. If Ferdulf hadn't drawn the same conclusion, Gerin didn't intend to point it out to him. Life with the demigod had proved interesting enough as things were.

For his part, Ferdulf was not thinking about about his relationship with the Fox. "I want my father!" he shouted, loud enough that the cry should have awakened the entire camp-but only Gerin and the guards around the wine seemed to hear him. "I want my father!" He poured wine down his throat from a skin almost as large as he was.

Alarm prickled through Gerin. "Don't do that," he said urgently. " Come on, Ferdulf, give me the skin."

"I want my father!" Ferdulf shouted again.

The space around the wineskins seemed to… expand. "My son, I am here," Mavrix said

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