Fox and Empire

**

"Aye, lord king, that's how it is," Fandil Fandor's son said as he rubbed down his horse. "I got around the imperials with no great trouble, but it didn't do me as much good as I would have liked. It didn't do you as much good as you'd like, either." He patted the horse's neck. "I will tell you this, though-I had no trouble getting through the bastards and back again."

"Wonderful," Gerin said sourly. "But, once you did get through, you found that Aragis had gone to earth?"

"That's what I said, lord king." Fandil returned to rubbing the horse's back. Gerin sympathized with the animal. Fandil's father had been called Fandor the Fat. Fandil was more along the lines of the Chubby, but Gerin wouldn't have wanted to try carrying him on his back.

"He doesn't plan on doing any more fighting out in the open, then?" Gerin persisted.

"Not if he can help it," Fandil answered. "He and his army are holed up in the strongest keeps they can find, and he doesn't think the imperials can pry him out of them before winter comes and they get too hungry to stay in the field. If they tear up the countryside but then go home, what does he care? He's ahead of the game."

"His peasants aren't," Gerin said, but that only made him laugh at himself. As long as the imperials went away, Aragis didn't care what happened to the peasantry. Gerin supposed he had to sympathize with that, but Aragis didn't care what happened to the peasantry any other time, either.

Fandil said, "Looks like the imperials are settling down to the sieges, too. Don't know whether they'll try knocking down walls or just sit there and starve the places out one at a time-if they can."

"If they can," Gerin agreed. "The one thing I'm sure of is that Aragis wouldn't put his men into castles that are easy to take, and he wouldn't put them into castles that don't have plenty in their cellars, either."

"You know best about that, lord king," Fandil said. "But what it looks like to me is, we're on our own over here."

Gerin sighed. "It looks that way to me, too, Fandil. We've been on our own over here all along, and we haven't done any too well so far."

"You'll come up with something." Gerin might not have confidence, but Fandil, like a lot of his men, did.

"I hope so," Gerin said. "To the crows with me if I have the faintest notion what it is, though." Fandil didn't seem to hear that, any more than Aragis had heard Gerin when he said he wasn't a sorcerer. Not for the first time, nor for the five hundredth, either, he wondered why people didn't pay more attention to what other people said. They already had their own ideas, and that seemed to be enough for them.

The next morning, he and Van and Dagref rode out along the picket line of horsemen he kept west of his force to warn him if the imperials decided to come at him again. For the moment, the men of the Elabonian Empire were holding back. They had pickets out, too, in chariots, to warn of any sudden move Gerin might make against them.

"They're not bad fellows," one of Rihwin's riders said, pointing toward an imperial chariot perhaps a quarter of a mile away. "For business like this, they don't bother us and we don't bother them. When the time comes to really fight again, they'll really go after us, I suppose, and we'll do our best to fill 'em full of arrow holes, but what's the use till then?"

"None I can see," Gerin allowed. "It's a pretty sensible way of going about things, when you get down to it."

He glanced over at Van. In the outlander's younger days, odds were he would have thundered out something about killing the foe whenever you found any chance to do it. Had Gerin had Adiatunnus with him, the Trokm? chieftain probably would have said the same thing now. But Van only shrugged and nodded, as if to say the horseman's words made good sense to him, too. Little by little, he was mellowing.

A couple of riders farther along the line, Maeva patrolled a stretch of meadow. "No, lord king," she said when Gerin asked her, "I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary." As the earlier rider had, she pointed toward an imperial chariot out of arrow range to the west. "They're keeping an eye on us, same as we're keeping an eye on them."

"All right," Gerin said. "Right at the moment, I'm not sorry things are quiet. We need the time to pull ourselves back together."

"They're probably thinking the same thing about us, lord king," Maeva answered seriously. "We had to pull back, aye, but we bloodied them."

"They have more room to make mistakes than we do, though," Van said. "By the gods, we didn't make any mistakes I could see in that last fight, and we lost it anyhow."

Dagref said nothing at all. That was unusual enough to make Gerin keep an eye on his son, as Maeva kept an eye on the force from the Elabonian Empire and as the imperials kept an eye on Gerin's army. For his part, Dagref was keeping an eye on Maeva. As best Gerin could tell from watching the back of his son's head, Dagref's eyes did not leave her.

She kept looking at him, too. Well, well, the Fox thought. Isn't that interesting? Gerin looked over at Van again, too. The outlander was also eyeing his daughter, but not, Gerin judged, with that kind of suspicion. Van was still trying to figure out why in blazes she wanted to take the field, and not worrying about anything else.

Life would get even more interesting if Maeva's belly started to bulge. Gerin had had that thought before. He wondered whether Dagref worried about such things. He might well not have himself at that age. A man and a woman-or a boy and a girl-could enjoy each other a good many ways without running the risk. Did Dagref know about them? He had little in the way of real experience, but who could guess what all he' d heard, what all he'd read? Who could guess what all Maeva knew, either?

Still shaking his head, Gerin tapped Dagref on the shoulder. "Let' s get moving," he said. With obvious reluctance-obvious to the Fox, at any rate, and probably to Maeva, too-Dagref flicked the reins. The horses began to walk, and then to trot.

Dagref was not so unsubtle as to look back over his shoulder at Maeva. Gerin, however, could look back with no fear of rousing Van's suspicions, and he did. Sure enough, Maeva was staring after the chariot. Maybe that was because it held her father. Gerin wouldn't have bet on it, though, not anything he couldn't afford to lose.

After he'd finished the tour of his pickets and convinced himself the imperials weren't going to take him by surprise, he had Dagref drive back to camp. When he returned, Rihwin and Ferdulf were in the middle of a screaming row, each plastering the other with names that stuck like glue. Van descended from the chariot and tried to break up the fight, with the result that both Rihwin and Ferdulf turned on him.

Gerin hadn't tried to interfere between his friend and the little demigod, knowing that was what would happen if he did. He'd had a sufficiency-indeed, an oversupply-of people shouting at him lately, and saw no need to encourage more. If Van was of the opinion he hadn't been getting his own fair share of abuse, he was, in Gerin's view, welcome to it.

Van's furious bass roar blended with Ferdulf's baritone and Rihwin's higher, lighter voice to produce discord in three-part disharmony. Dagref rolled his eyes. "You'd think Uncle Van would have better sense than to get mixed up in that," he said.

"Aye, good sense is hard to come by among these parts, isn't it?" Gerin said.

He didn't think he was being much more than his usual sardonic self. His son's mind, though, worked in the same channel as his own. Dagref whirled around and gave him a look half stricken, half relieved. "You know, don't you?" he said.

"I know now," Gerin said. "I'd wondered for a while, aye."

"You don't think Van knows, do you?" Dagref asked in some alarmnot enough, as far as Gerin was concerned, but some.

"If he did know," the Fox answered, "do you think he'd waste his time yelling at Rihwin and Ferdulf?"

"A point," Dagref said, still not happily.

"You had better be careful," Gerin said-useless advice to most youths, but Dagref was not-in some ways was not-cut from the usual cloth. "If you get her with child, you'll think the five hells had come crashing down on you, no matter how much fun you're having now."

"Another point," Dagref admitted. "There are-" He paused and coughed and might have blushed a little as he searched for words. " There are… ways of doing things where we don't have to worry about that."

"Yes, I know about those ways," Gerin said, nodding. "I wasn't sure whether you did."

"Er-I do," Dagref said, and stopped there.

Gerin was content to stop there, too. He couldn't very well keep an eye on his son, not in this matter he couldn't. He could-and didhope Dagref and Maeva would stay content to stop with substitutes when they found themselves alone together. Whatever Maeva did, she threw herself into it wholeheartedly. In that, she very much resembled both her parents. That meant Gerin would have to rely on Dagref's good sense, and on Dagref's having good sense at a time when good sense was supposed to go flying out the door.

With any other lad of Dagref's age, it would have been the most forlorn of forlorn hopes. Gerin studied his son. He still didn't think the odds were any too good, but he didn't think they were hopeless, either. He sighed. Whatever the odds were, he had no choice but to accept them.

He rubbed his chin. That wasn't strictly true. "Maybe I ought to send Maeva home, to keep this from getting any further out of hand than it is already."

Dagref looked stricken. "Don't do that, Father. You didn't send her home for anything she did, so it wouldn't be fair to send her home for anything I'm doing."

"Unless you're violating her by force, which I doubt you would do and doubt you could do, you're not doing it altogether by yourself," the Fox pointed out, at which Dagref blushed again. In musing tones, Gerin went on, "Maybe I should send you home instead."

"I hope you don't send either of us," Dagref said. "If you have to send one of us, though, send me."

Gerin slapped him on the back. "That's well spoken, for I know you aren't trying to get away from the fighting. But I do think I'll leave you both here." He found one other question to ask: "What will you do if Van finds out?"

He didn't think Dagref would be able to come up with any answer for that. But Dagref did, and promptly, too: "Run."

"Well, all right," Gerin said with a startled laugh. "That's probably the best thing you could do, though I don't know if you'll be able to run far enough or fast enough."

"Have to try." Dagref risked a wry smile that reminded Gerin achingly of himself. "Maybe he won't be able to decide whether to set out after me first or Maeva, and we'll both be able to get away."

"Maybe." Gerin laughed again. Van, though, was too automatically competent a warrior to dither at a time like that. He would settle on one of Dagref or Maeva-probably Dagref-first and then the other. The Fox hoped his son wouldn't have to learn that from experience.