The Bastard King

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

King Lanius was picking fleas off Topaz, one of Snitch’s kittens, when King Grus came into the chamber where the moncats dwelt. “Don’t mean to bother you, Your Majesty,” Grus said, by which Lanius was sure he meant to do exactly that, “but there’s something I’d like you to take care of for me.”

“Oh? What’s that?” Lanius caught a flea and crushed it between his thumbnails, the only sure way he’d found to be rid of them.

“King Berto has sent a couple of his yellow-robed clerics to the city of Avornis,” Grus answered. “They’re touring cathedrals—looks like Berto is a pious fellow, just the way you said. Would you be kind enough to show them around a bit?”

“Why me?” As soon as Lanius stopped paying attention to Topaz, the moncat, which didn’t like him picking through its fur, fled. The grab he made for it proved futile. Muttering, he went on, “Wouldn’t showing cathedrals to the Thervings be Arch-Hallow Anser’s job, not mine?”

As he hoped, he succeeded in embarrassing his father-in-law. Reddening, Grus said, “Well, it might be, but Anser’s still learning about what he’s doing, and you know more of the history about such places than he does right now.”

Aside from doing what Grus wanted, Anser didn’t seem very interested in learning an arch-hallow’s duties. Hunting, with or without Ortalis, excited him far more. Grus had to know that at least as well as Lanius did. Lanius just folded his arms across his chest and looked back at his fellow king.

He was hoping he could make Grus turn red. He didn’t; Grus owned more than his share of self-possession. The older man went on, “Besides, having a King of Avornis escort the Thervings would be a privilege for them. It would make Berto feel we were giving him special honors, honors other sovereigns wouldn’t expect.”

“What other sovereigns?” Lanius asked. “The chiefs of the Chernagor city-states? They wouldn’t get honors to match Thervingia’s anyhow. Savages like the Heruls? They don’t worship our gods at all. Neither do the princes of the Menteshe— they bow down to the Banished One, instead.”

King Grus let out a sigh of exaggerated patience. “Please, Your Majesty,” he said. “I’ve already told them you’d do it.”

“Oh.” Lanius drummed his fingers on his thigh. “That means I’m stuck with the job, doesn’t it? All right. But I’ll thank you not to make any more plans for me without telling me you’re doing it.”

“I expect that’s fair enough, Your Majesty.” After a few heartbeats, Grus seemed to realize something more was called for, for he went on, “I won’t do it again.” That was better, but not good enough. Lanius waited without a word. Again, Grus paused. Again, he found words, this time saying, “I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” Lanius said, but that was what he’d been waiting to hear. He sighed. “Let’s get it over with.”

The clerics’ names were Grasulf and Bench. Grasulf was tall and fuzzily bearded, while Berich was squat and fuzzily bearded. They both spoke good Avornan, and they both seemed honored that Lanius was taking them around the cathedrals of the city of Avornis. Grasulf said, “King Berto will be so jealous when we go home and tell him all that we have done in your kingdom.”

Voice dry, Lanius answered, “King Berto’s father did quite a lot in our kingdom, too.”

To his amazement, both Therving clerics looked embarrassed. Berich said, “That is too bad, Your Majesty. Many of us thought so even while the war was going on. This is where the worship of the true gods centers. To fight against Avornis is to fight against the gods.”

“King Dagipert didn’t think so,” Lanius said.

“Dagipert was a very strong king,” Grasulf said. “While he lived, we had to do what he said. But there is not a cleric in Thervingia who is not glad to have peace with Avornis at last. And the same holds for our soldiers. We fought against your kingdom year after year, and what did we get because of it? Nothing anybody can see. So says King Berto, and we think he is right.”

Of course you do, or say you do, Lanius thought. He is your new king, and you have to obey him. You had better think he is right. He couldn’t say that to Grasulf and Berich, not when what they thought—what Berto thought—was exactly what he wanted Thervingians to think. He did say, “I am glad to hear you speak so. As long as you do, the Banished One will never gain a foothold in Thervingia.”

He made the gesture that was supposed to ward off the Banished One (how much good it really did, or whether it did any good at all, he couldn’t have said). The two yellow-robed clerics used the same gesture. Berich said, “May his followers never come into our land.”

“Yes, may that be so,” Lanius agreed.

Grasulf looked over his shoulder, as though afraid Dagipert might still somehow hear what he said. When he spoke, it was in a low voice. “They do say the Banished One sent minions to him who was our king. They say it, though I do not know if it was true.”

“I have heard it,” Lanius said. “I do not know if it was true, either.”

“I believe it,” Berich said. “Gods curse me if I do not believe it. Dagipert was always one to trust in his own strength. He would dare hear the Banished One’s envoys. He would be sure he could use the Banished One for his own purposes, and not the other way around.”

“He would be sure, yes,” Grasulf said solemnly. “But would he be right?”

“Who can say?” Berich replied. “That he was confident in his own strength does not mean he was right to be confident.”

“True,” Lanius said. Such rumors had floated around Dagipert for years, though he always denied them. Lanius had hoped to learn the truth after the formidable King of Thervingia was dead. But maybe Dagipert had been the only one who knew what the truth was, and had taken it onto his pyre with him.

Lanius shook his head. The Banished One knows, he reminded himself. The Banished One knows, and he dies not. Thinking so vividly of Avornis’ great foe made him wonder if he would dream of him that night. He didn’t, and wondered why. Maybe, he thought, I worried enough about him that he doesn’t need to visit me in dreams. I’ve already done his work for him.

That worried him even more than dreaming of the Banished One might have done.

King Grus watched Avornis go through much of a quiet summer. The Thervings left his kingdom alone. So did the Menteshe. No irate baron rose up against him. The first thing he wondered—and it was an amazement that lasted through that easy season—was what had gone wrong; what the gods were planning to make him sorry for those warm, lazy, peaceful months.

Estrilda laughed at him when he said as much to her in the quiet of their bedchamber. “Don’t you think you’re entitled to take it easy for a little while?” she asked.

“No!” His own vehemence surprised even him, and plainly alarmed his wife. He went on, “When have I ever taken it easy? When have I ever had the chance to take it easy? When, in all the years since I first went aboard a river galley? Why should I start doing it now?”

“You always worked hard,” Estrilda said, nodding. “You worked hard so you could get someplace you’d never gone before. But, sweetheart”—she took his hands in hers—“you’re King of Avornis. You can’t rise any higher than this, can you? Since you can’t, you’ve earned the right to relax.”

Grus thought about that. Had he done all he’d done for the sake of getting ahead? Some of it, maybe, but all? He doubted that. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted it, too.

He’d worked hard because he liked working hard, because he was good at it. Claiming anything else would be a lie.

And he certainly could rise or fall even though he was King of Avornis. He could be a good king or a bad one, remembered with a smile, remembered with a shudder—or, perhaps worst of all, not remembered. He dreaded that. Women had children to let them know they were immortal. What did men have? Only their names, in the minds and in the mouths of others after they were gone.

If I could be the king who reclaimed the Scepter of Mercy from the Banished One… They’d remember me forever, then, and cheer my name whenever they heard it. Grus laughed at himself. When he thought about getting the Scepter of Mercy back, he wasn’t just measuring himself against every King of Avornis who’d reigned over the past four hundred years. He was also, in effect, standing back to back with the Banished One himself. If that wasn’t mad and overweening pride, what would be?

He didn’t presume to mention his ambition to Estrilda. He knew what she would say. He knew she would be right, too.

All he did say was, “I want to be as good a king as I can.”

“Well, all right,” Estrilda said reasonably. “When things are going on, you should deal with them. And you do—you landed on Pandion like a falling tree last year. But why should you run around and wave your arms and get all excited when nothing’s happening that you need to worry about?”

“Because something may be going on behind the scenes,” Grus replied. “If I deal with little troubles now, they won’t turn into big ones later.”

“If you get all upset over nothing, you may make what was a little problem get bigger in a hurry,” his wife pointed out, which was also more reasonable than Grus wished it were. “Besides, you said it yourself—there aren’t any problems right now.”

“There aren’t any I can see,” Grus said. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t any at all.”

“How do you know it doesn’t?” Estrilda asked. “Everything I know about seems fine, anyhow.” By the way she said it, that proved her point.

Sometimes—far more often than not—a man who grumbled about the way things were was stuck with them, because they wouldn’t change. And when they did, he often found himself wishing they hadn’t. Knowing when to be content with what you had was something Grus had never mastered.

Only a couple of weeks after he complained to Estrilda about how quiet everything was, a messenger came up from the south—from the Stura River, the border between Avornis and the lands of the Menteshe. “Something strange is afoot, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Something strange is always afoot along the border,” Grus answered. “I ought to know—I put in enough time down there in my younger days. What is it now?”

“Your Majesty, I’ll tell you exactly what’s afoot,” the messenger answered. “The nomads’ thralls are afoot, that’s what. They’re coming over the Stura into our lands down there by the hundreds, more of ’em every day.”

“What?” Grus scratched his head. “But that’s crazy. Thralls don’t do things like that.” Being content with their lot—or perhaps just unable to imagine anything different—was a big part of what made the thralls of the Menteshe so terrifying to ordinary men, to whole men. Grus went on, “When one thrall wakes up and gets away, that’s unusual.” It was so very unusual, it often meant the “awakened” thrall was in fact not awakened at all, but a spy for the Menteshe and the Banished One. “Hundreds?” Grus said. “That hardly seems possible.”

“It’s true, though,” the messenger said. “What are we going to do with them if they keep coming? How are we going to feed them?”

Grus had a more basic worry. “Why are they doing it?” he asked.

“No one knows, Your Majesty,” the man from the south replied. “Some of them are thralls still, even on our side of the river. The rest have no memory of who they were or why they came over the border.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Grus whistled tunelessly. He asked the messenger a few more questions, then sent him away to a barracks from which he could be summoned in a hurry at need.

The first thing he did after that was give Lanius the news. “How very peculiar,” his son-in-law said when he’d finished.

“Then you’ve never heard of anything like this?” Grus knew he sounded disappointed; he expected Lanius to know about such things.

But the younger king shook his head. “No, never,” he answered in a low, troubled voice. “We’d better try to find out about it, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I think that would be a good idea,” Grus said. “It’s sorcery from the Banished One that makes thralls, and also sorcery from him that lets some of them seem to break free and come into Avornis to spy on us.”

“This doesn’t sound like either of those things,” Lanius observed.

“It has to be sorcery of some sort, don’t you think?” Grus said. “What else could make thralls change their ways? They don’t do that by accident.”

“They never have, anyhow,” Lanius said.

“I’ll summon Alca the witch,” Grus said. “She’s seen the Banished One face-to-face in dreams, the same as we have. If anybody can get to the bottom of it, she’s the one.” Lanius raised an eyebrow. Grus looked back at him, waiting to see if he would say anything. He didn’t. Grus added, “I think I’d better go down to the south myself, to see with my own eyes what’s going on. This is far enough out of the ordinary that I don’t want to rely on secondhand reports.”

Lanius raised both eyebrows this time. He said, “It’s… unusual for the King of Avornis to leave the capital when not on campaign.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t be.” Grus eyed his son-in-law. Could Lanius organize a coup while he was out of the city? That would be reason enough to keep him from going. He shook his head. Lanius might not—surely did not—like him. But his son-in-law didn’t have nearly enough backing among the soldiers to overthrow him. Grus made it his business to know such things. He glanced over to Lanius again. He was quite sure the other king knew it, too.

By the way Lanius looked back at him, the younger man was making the same calculation and, to his own dismay, coming to the same conclusions. “Perhaps you’re right,” Lanius said at last. “Some things do indeed need to be seen at first hand. And you’ll be a grandfather again by the time you get back.”

“Yes.” Grus nodded. “I don’t want my grandchildren to have to worry about being made into thralls themselves. That’s why I’m going.” He waited for Lanius to tell him he was being foolish or was exaggerating the problem. Lanius said nothing of the sort. That made Grus wonder whether, instead of exaggerating, he was underestimating whatever was going on in the south.

Well, he thought, I’ll find out.

King Lanius watched King Grus and Alca sail south on a river galley. Grus’ retinue of guards and secretaries and servants crowded not only that galley but the one that sailed with it. A king couldn’t go anywhere without an appropriate retinue. Lanius took that for granted. It sometimes seemed to chafe Grus.

As his river galley sailed away, Grus stood at the stern by the steersman—the position of command. Anyone looking at him would have guessed he’d been a river-galley skipper before taking the throne. Alca stood at the bow, with one hand on the sternpost, looking ahead to the mystery of the south. Though the galley was crowded, no one seemed to think it wise to come near the witch. She had a little space all her own.

Beside Lanius, Sosia said, “I do wonder what’s going on down there. I hope it isn’t a trap to lure Father into danger.”

“With all the men he’s taking, he could smash just about any trap,” Lanius said.

“Yes, that’s so.” Sosia looked relieved.

Lanius knew there was something he hadn’t said. He thought Grus and the soldiers with him could defeat a Menteshe ambush. Whether Grus and Alca could defeat a sorcerous onslaught from the Banished One, though, might be a different question. The king and the witch had paid each other next to no notice as they went aboard the river galley and took their separate places. Lanius scratched his head. He knew he wasn’t understanding something. He wasn’t sure what he was missing, which only made him the more curious.

But then Sosia said, “I want to go back to the palace.” She set both hands on her swollen belly.

“All right.” Lanius was getting tired of seeing Grus off, but preferred staying home himself.

As they returned, they found Anser and Ortalis arguing in a hallway just inside the entrance. Grus’ bastard was shaking his head and saying, “No, we can’t do that. That isn’t hunting, by the gods!”

“What would you call it, then?” Ortalis seemed genuinely amazed his half brother didn’t care for what he thought of as fine sport.

“Murder is the word that springs to mind,” the young Arch-Hallow of Avornis answered.

That was enough—more than enough—to draw Lanius’ attention. Hunting interested him not at all. Something that might be murder was a different story. “What’s going on here?” he asked, as casually as he could.

“Nothing,” Ortalis said quickly. “Nothing at all.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing to me,” Lanius said.

“It didn’t sound like nothing to me, either,” Anser added.

Sosia nodded. “Come on, Ortalis—out with it,” she said.

Prince Ortalis gave his sister a harried look. “Oh, all right,” he muttered. “Regular hunting’s all very well, but after a while it gets… boring, you know what I mean? I was looking for a way to spice it up. That’s all I was doing. Olor’s beard, everyone makes such a fuss about every little thing I say.”

“What exactly did you say?” Lanius asked.

Ortalis pinched his lips together and didn’t reply. “If you don’t tell him, I will,” Anser said.

That drew another glare from King Grus’ legitimate son. “Oh, all right,” he said again. “I got tired of chasing boar and deer and rabbits, that’s all. I was wondering what it would be like to hunt some worthless man.”

“And kill him?” Lanius said in rising horror. Hunting might have sated Ortalis’ bloodlust for a while. Clearly, it hadn’t gotten rid of that taste for cruelty altogether.

“Well, if he deserved it,” Ortalis answered. “If he was a condemned criminal, say. He’d have it coming to him then.”

“I don’t think anybody deserves being hunted to death,” Lanius said.

“I don’t, either,” Sosia said. “And I’m sure Father wouldn’t. You know that, too, don’t you?”

By Ortalis’ fierce scowl, he knew it all too well. “Nobody wants me to have any fun!” he shouted.

“That isn’t the only kind of fun you were talking about,” Anser said.

“I was joking!” Ortalis said. “Can’t anybody tell when I’m joking?”

“Hunting men was one thing, you said,” Anser went on, “but hunting women—”

“I was joking!” Ortalis screamed. Servants stared at him. All through the palace, far out of sight, heads must have whipped around at that cry. Lanius was as sure of it as of his own name. He’d heard some things about Ortalis and serving girls. He didn’t know whether he believed them, but he’d heard them. He didn’t want to believe them—he did know that.

Sosia said, “If Father ever finds out about this, Ortalis—”

“He won’t, if you can keep your big fat mouth shut,” her brother whispered furiously. “And you’d better, because I was just joking.”

“We’ll make a bargain with you,” Lanius said. Beside him, Sosia stirred, but she kept silent. Anser just nodded, waiting to hear what Lanius would propose. He went on, “Here—this is it. We won’t tell Grus anything about this, as long as you promise never even to talk about hunting people again, men or women, joking or not. Is that a deal?”

Ortalis looked as though he’d bitten into something nasty. “Everybody gets so excited about every stupid little thing,” he muttered.

“Is it a deal?” Lanius asked again.

“Oh, all right.” His brother-in-law still looked and sounded disgusted at the world.

“Promise, then,” Lanius said.

“Promise in the holy names of King Olor and Queen Quelea and all the other gods in the heavens,” Anser added. To Lanius’ surprise, King Grus’ bastard son could sound like a proper, holy Arch-Hallow of Avornis after all.

Ortalis blinked. Evidently, he hadn’t thought Anser could sound like a proper, holy arch-hallow, either. He coughed a couple of times, but finally nodded. “By Olor and Quelea and the other gods, I promise,” he choked out.

“The gods hold your words,” Anser said. “If you break your promise, they will make you pay. It may not be soon, it may not be the way you expect, but they will make you pay.” He nodded to Ortalis, then to Lanius and Sosia, and walked out of the palace, his crimson robes flapping around him.

“I don’t know why he started having kittens. I was only joking,” Ortalis said. Neither his sister nor his brother-in-law answered. He said something else, something pungent, under his breath and went off in a hurry, his shoulders hunched, his face pinched with the fury he had to hold in for once and couldn’t loose on the world around him.

Quietly, Sosia said, “You did well there.”

“Did I?” Lanius shrugged. “I don’t know. He can’t hunt people. I do know that. The rest?” He shrugged again. “Maybe we should tell your father. But maybe Ortalis really was joking. Who can say?”

His wife sighed. “He wasn’t joking. You know it as well as I do. He’ll do whatever he thinks he can get away with. If he decides he can’t get away with hunting people for sport, he won’t do it. I hope to the heavens he won’t do it, anyhow.”

“He won’t do it with Anser, that’s certain,” Lanius said. “More to him than I thought there was. I’m glad to see it.” He’d been scandalized when Grus named his illegitimate son Arch-Hallow of Avornis. But if Anser could sound like a proper arch-hallow, maybe he could do everything else a proper arch-hallow needed to do, too. Lanius dared hope.

By the way Sosia sounded, so did she. “I thought I’d despise Anser—after all, I don’t like to think about Father running around on Mother, any more than I’d care to think of you running around on me. But I don’t. The more I see him, the better I like him.”

“Yes, the same with me,” Lanius answered. He didn’t say anything about running around on Sosia. He hadn’t, not yet. But he had noticed a serving woman or two casting glances his way. He could do something about that if he ever decided he wanted to. Even if the palace held a new royal bastard afterward, Grus would hardly be in a position to criticize him.

Lanius laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. If Grus wanted to criticize him—or to do worse than that to him—he would. That was what being King of Avornis—being the King of Avornis with the real power in the land—meant. Grus wouldn’t need reason or right on his side, only strength. And strength, without a doubt, he had. If anyone in the kingdom was in the position to appreciate the difference between rank and strength, Lanius knew all too well he was the man.

“I don’t much care for this country,” Alca said as the river galley drew up to a pier in Cumanus. “It’s warmer than it ought to be at this season of the year. The soil’s the wrong color. People have funny accents, too. And they go around looking nervous all the time.”

King Grus smiled at her. “I lived down here in the south for years and years. It seems like home to me, at least as much as the city of Avornis does. Red dirt’s as good as brown. If you manure it well, it yields fine crops. I can talk this way as well as the way I usually do.” For a sentence, he put on a nasal southern accent.

Alca made a face. “Maybe you can, but I don’t see why you’d bother.”

“And if you had the Menteshe right across the river from you,” Grus went on, “don’t you think you’d have an excuse for looking nervous, too?”

The witch couldn’t very well argue with that. She didn’t even try. “Something must be wrong, badly wrong, on the other side of the Stura,” she said. “If it’s stirred up the thralls”—she shuddered—“it must be truly dreadful.”

“Maybe,” Grus said.

“How could it be otherwise?” Alca asked.

“That’s what you’ve come to find out—how it could be otherwise, I mean,” Grus answered. “Or if it is otherwise.”

“What else could it be but some upheaval?” Alca said.

“I don’t know,” Grus said. “The point is, you don’t know, either.”

Thralls worked their fields, took mates—they could hardly be said to marry—and endured whatever their Menteshe overlords chose to dish out to them, year after year after year, till they died. They wore clothes. They spoke—a little. Otherwise, they weren’t much different from the beasts they tended. Most of what made men men was burned out of them. So it had been for centuries, in lands where the Menteshe ruled. So the Banished One wished it were all over Avornis.

Every so often, as the Avornans had seen, a thrall would by some accident shake off the dark spell that clouded his life. Then, if he could, he would flee north to Avornis.

But why would a still spellbound thrall suddenly flee over the Stura? Why would hundreds of such thralls come north into Avornis? Grus hoped Alca would be able to tell him. No answer he’d imagined for himself came close to satisfying him.

The witch said, “They’ll have thralls here waiting for me to examine?”

“They’d better,” Grus answered. “If they don’t, someone’s going to be very unhappy.”

He looked across the Stura into the lands the Menteshe held. They looked no different from Avornan soil on this side of the river. Back before the Menteshe swarmed out of the south, they were Avornan soil, as the thralls’ ancestors were Avornan farmers.

Local officials hurried up to the river galley. “Your Majesty,” they murmured, bowing low to Grus. “Such an honor that you’re here.”

“It’s good to be back in the south,” Grus said. “I wish it hadn’t been a problem that brought me here. Now, then—this is Alca the witch, one of the finest sorcerers in the city of Avornis.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Alca said.

“For what? For the truth? You’re welcome.” The king turned back to the dignitaries from Cumanus. “You have some of these thralls where the witch can look them over? I’ll want to see them, too. I didn’t come all this way to twiddle my thumbs.”

“Oh, yes, Your Majesty,” said the garrison commander, a colonel named Tetrax. “We’ve got ’em in the amphitheater. It holds a lot of them, and we don’t have much trouble guarding ’em there, either.”

“That’s fine.” Grus knew Cumanus’ amphitheater well. It was a large semicircular pit scooped out of the ground, with a stage at the bottom and benches along the ground sloping up to the level of the surrounding streets. Tetrax was right; a handful of guards could keep captives there from getting away. “Suppose you take us to them, then. The sooner we understand what’s going on here, or start to, the better off everyone will be.”

Tetrax nodded. “Come along then, Your Majesty. And you, too, of course, Mistress Alca.”

Soldiers from the other river galley formed a guard force around the king and the witch as they made their way through the streets of the city. Shopkeepers and housewives and drunks stared at the procession. A few people cheered. Most just gaped.

When someone shouted that Grus was coming, the guards around the amphitheater stiffened to attention. Even so, their eyes never left the thralls down at the bottom of the excavation. Grus came up to the edge and, Alca at his side, peered down into the pit. He’d never seen so many thralls on this side of the Stura. He hoped he never would again.

They ambled around down there, altogether unconcerned about the guards and the King of Avornis above them. Loaves of bread and pitchers of water (or would it be beer, to keep them from coming down with a flux of the bowels?) stood on a table in the middle of the stage. It might have been a scene from a play, most likely a farce.

The resemblance was heightened when two men seized the same loaf at the same time. They both tugged on it, shouting what might or might not have been words. They clenched their fists. They looked to be on the very point of fighting. Then the loaf tore in two. The thralls, each content with what he had, relaxed and began to eat.

Alca watched them intently. “Bring them both up to me,” she said. “Do they speak Avornan or the language of the Menteshe?”

“Avornan, ma’am, after a fashion,” Tetrax answered. He nodded to some of the guards. “Go get ’em, boys. The lady’s a witch, come to try and figure out what those nasty thralls are doing swimming the Stura.”

That got the guards moving. One of them said, “I hope she’ll figure out how to send the buggers back, too.”

When they took the thralls by the elbows, they were careful not even to seem to be trying to take the bread away from them.

The thralls’ hair and beards were long and unkempt. By the ripe stench wafting from them, Grus wondered if they’d ever bathed.

“I’ve never seen them close-up before.” By the way Alca said it, she would have been just as happy never to see them again.

“Can you tell anything about them?” Grus asked.

“They’re hungry and filthy,” Alca answered. “If you mean sorcerously, no. The spell that makes them thralls lies at the very root of their minds and spirits. If it didn’t—if it were further up, you might say, where a wizard could sense it more easily—it would be easier to fight, easier to get rid of.” She spoke to one of the thralls. “You! Why are you here in Avornis?”

He stared at her. He scratched, caught something, and popped it into his mouth. Alca gulped. The thrall looked her up and down. “Pretty,” he said. He wore a shirt and trousers as grimy as he was. The bulge at his crotch said he found Alca more than just pretty.

If the witch noticed that, she gave no sign. She turned to another thrall. “Why did you come to Avornis?”

“Afraid,” he answered, and cowered away from her as though she were about to start beating him.

“Afraid of what?” she asked. The thrall didn’t answer. “Afraid of what?” Alca repeated, this time more to Grus than to the scrawny, dirty man from across the Stura. “Is he afraid of me? Is that what he means? Or did he come to Avornis because he was afraid of what was happening on the other side of the river?”

“I don’t know,” Grus said. “How do you aim to find out?”

“Questions won’t do it—that’s plain enough. I’ll have to use wizardry.” Alca looked unhappy. “I don’t like using wizardry to investigate spells the Banished One uses. You saw why, back in the city of Avornis.”

“Well, yes,” Grus said. “But sometimes these things are important. Don’t you think this is?”

Alca sighed. “I wish I could tell you no. But you’re right, Your Majesty. This is important. I’ll do the best I can.”

“Thank you,” Grus told her.

“I’m not at all sure you’re welcome,” she answered.

At her command, the guards hauled one of the thralls a few steps farther out of the amphitheater. He stood there, looking around Cumanus with the same dull-eyed lack of curiosity an ox might have shown. How can she hope to learn anything from him? Grus wondered. And even if she does, how can she hope to cure him? Come to think of it, maybe she couldn’t. She’d said, and Grus knew, making men out of thralls was anything but easy.

The witch took a crystal from the sack of sorcerous gear she’d brought. “Is that the one that makes rainbows?” Grus asked. “The one you used on the bowls of snow back in the capital?”

She nodded. “That’s right. Now maybe we’ll see something interesting. Maybe, mind you, Your Majesty.”

Holding the crystal high so it caught a sunbeam, she drew a rainbow from it once again. Grus wondered how the crystal did that; Alca had made it plain the doing there wasn’t hers. She twisted the crystal this way and that, and the rainbow moved with it. At last, she made the rainbow fall on the thrall’s eyes.

Those eyes got very wide. The man grunted in astonishment. “Do you understand me?” Alca asked him.

“Understand!” he said. Alca nodded. So did Grus. He could hear something new in the thrall’s voice. Though the fellow still used only one word, he sounded more like a real man, a full man, and less like a beast of burden that happened to walk on two legs.

“Why did you come here?” Alca asked him, keeping the rainbow shining on his face.

“Had to,” the thrall answered.

He seemed to think that was all the reply he needed. “May I ask him something?” Grus said softly. The witch nodded once more. Grus turned to the thrall. “Why did you have to? Why couldn’t you just stay where you were?”

This time, the thrall didn’t answer right away. He frowned, his face a mask of intense concentration. How much effort did he need, even with Alca’s wizardry aiding him, to use words in something close to the way a free man might? “Had to,” he repeated. “Had to go. Had to… leave.” Sweat ran down his face, leaving little clean rills in the filth. “Had to leave. Orders.”

“Whose orders?” Grus and Alca said it together.

“Orders.” The thrall seemed to have to say things more than once, perhaps to keep them straight in his own mind, such as it was. After a moment, sweating harder than ever, he got out: “His orders.”

“Whose?” Alca asked. But then the rainbow on the thrall’s face began to redden, as had happened with the sorcery back in the capital. The man who’d fled over the Stura groaned. He clutched at his forehead. Alca dropped the crystal. The rainbow vanished. But the thrall crumpled to the ground. A guard felt his wrist, then shook his head. The thrall was dead. He’d given no answer. But Alca and Grus had gotten one even so.