The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For a long time, thralls had fascinated King Lanius. They were men robbed of much of their humanity, forced down to the dusky, shadow-filled borderland between mankind and the animal world. The existence of thralls made whole men think about what being human really meant.

Then a thrall tried to kill Lanius.

It wasn’t just a fit of bestial passion, of course. It was the Banished One reaching out through the thrall, controlling him as a merely human puppeteer controlled a marionette. From that moment on, thralls hadn’t seemed the same to Lanius. They didn’t strike him as just being half man and half animal. Instead, he also saw them as the Banished One’s tools, as so many hammers and saws and knives (oh yes, knives!) to be picked up whenever the exiled god needed them.

And tools weren’t so fascinating.

Since the thralls tried to murder Lanius and Estrilda, the king had paid much less attention to them, except for making sure the ones still in the palace couldn’t get out and try anything like that again. He didn’t know what sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.

He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.

By all appearances, they didn’t care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.

The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn’t think he’d made any noise uncovering it, but that didn’t always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn’t the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.

That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall’s gaze. This thrall’s face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite-man) was as empty, as emptied, as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.

Did something glint in the thrall’s eyes? His face didn’t change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn’t feel like a beast’s stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.

Nonsense, Lanius told himself. That’s only a thrall, with no working wits in his head. He tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t.

The thrall kept staring and staring. Sometimes, during one of these episodes, a thrall would mouth something up at him, or even say something—a sure sign something more than the poor, damaged thrall was looking out through those eyes. Not this time. After a couple of minutes, the thrall turned away.

Lanius turned away, too, with nothing but relief. He covered the peephole. His knees clicked as he got to his feet. He rubbed his nose, as though that could get rid of the stink from the thralls’ room. Still, he kept coming back to look at them. He was no wizard. He couldn’t learn anything about them that would help anyone find out how to cure them—if, indeed, anyone could curs them. But he stayed intrigued. He couldn’t help wondering what went on in the thralls’ minds. Logic and observation said nothing much went on there, but he wasn’t sure how far to trust them. Where sorcery was involved, were logic and observation the right tools to use?

If they weren’t, what was? What could be? More good questions. Lanius could come up with any number of good questions. Finding good answers for them was harder. Maybe the hope of good answers was what kept him coming back to the peephole.

Not long after that thought crossed his mind, he walked past Limosa in the hallway. She nodded politely as she went by—she thought he’d tried harder than he really had to get her father out of the Maze. He nodded back, though it took an effort. He had plenty of good questions about her and Ortalis, too, but no good answers, however much he would have liked to have them.

What you need is a peephole into their bedchamber, he thought. That would tell you what you want to know.

He violently shook his head. What he wanted to know was none of his business. Knowing it was none of his business didn’t keep him from wanting to find out. Sosia would be angry at him if she learned he wanted to peep into other people’s bedrooms—except she was even more curious about this than he was.

No, he told himself firmly. Some curiosity doesn’t need to be satisfied. That went dead against everything he’d ever believed. He tried to convince himself of it anyway.

Here was the Stura. Grus had spent a lot of years traveling up and down the river in a war galley. Now he approached it on horseback. The sour smell of old smoke filled his nostrils. This was the valley the Menteshe had overrun most thoroughly. That meant it was the valley where Prince Ulash’s men had done the most damage.

Seeing that damage both infuriated and depressed the king. “How am I supposed to set this to rights?” he demanded of Hirundo.

“Driving the Menteshe back over the river would be a good start,” the general answered.

Hirundo smiled. He joked. But that was kidding on the square. Unless the Avornans could drive the Menteshe south of the Stura once more, Grus had exactly no chance of setting any of this to rights. And here, where their countrymen could slip north over the river in small boats by night, where the Menteshe could also bring river galleys— some of them rowed by brainless thralls—into the fight, driving them out of Avornis was liable to prove doubly hard.

“We can do it,” Hirundo said. “They don’t want to fight a stand-up battle. Whenever they try that, they lose, and they know it.”

“They don’t need to make a stand-up fight,” Grus said darkly. “All they need to do is keep riding around and burning things. What kind of harvest will anyone here in this valley have? None to speak of, and we both know it. The Menteshe know it, too. Wrecking things works as well for them as winning battles.” He waved toward what had been a vineyard. “No one will grow grapes here for years. No grapes, no wine, no raisins. It’s the same with olive groves. Cut the trees down and burn them and it’s years before you have olives and olive oil again. What do people do in the meantime?”

“I’ll tell you what they do,” Hirundo answered. “They do without.”

Another joke that held entirely too much truth. The trouble was that people couldn’t very well do without wine and raisins and grapes and olive oil. Here in the south, those things were almost as important as wheat and barley—not that the grainfields hadn’t been ravaged, too. A good harvest next year would go a long way toward putting that worry behind people… provided they didn’t starve in the meantime. But the other crops would take longer to recover.

“And what happens if the Menteshe swarm over the Stura again next spring?” Grus demanded.

“We try to hit them before they can cause anywhere near this much mischief,” Hirundo answered reasonably.

“But can we really do it? Wouldn’t you rather go up into the Chernagor country and finish what we’ve been trying to do there for years now? And what about the Chernagor pirates? What if they hit our east coast again next spring while the Menteshe cross the Stura?”

“You’re full of cheerful ideas,” Hirundo said.

“It could have happened this year,” Grus said. “We’re lucky it didn’t.”

Hirundo shook his head. “That isn’t just luck, Your Majesty. True, you didn’t take Nishevatz, but you came close, and you would have done it, odds are, if the war down here hadn’t drawn you away. And our ships gave the Chernagor pirates all they wanted, and more besides. It’s no wonder they didn’t move along with the cursed Menteshe. You put the fear of the gods in them.”

“The fear of the gods,” Grus murmured. He hoped some of the Chernagors still felt it, as opposed to the fear of the Banished One. But what he hoped and what was true were liable to be two different things, as he knew too well. Confusing the one with the other could only lead to disappointment.

As he was getting ready to lie down on his cot that evening, Alauda said, “Ask you something, Your Majesty?”

Grus looked at her in surprise. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. “Go ahead,” the king said after a moment. “You can always ask. I don’t know that I’ll answer.”

The peasant girl’s smile was wry. “I understand. You don’t have to, not for the likes of me. But when we were up in Pelagonia… You had another woman up there, didn’t you?”

“Not another woman I slept with,” Grus said carefully. He’d had enough rows with women (that a lot of those rows were his own fault never crossed his mind). He didn’t want another one now. If he had to send Alauda somewhere far away to keep from having another one, he was ruthlessly ready to do that.

But she only shrugged. “Another woman you care about, I mean. I don’t know if you slept with her or not.” She waited. Grus gave her a cautious nod. She went on, “And you’d cared about her for a while now,” and waited again. Again, the king nodded. Now he waited. Alauda licked her lips and then asked, “Why didn’t you just throw me over for her, then?” That was what she’d really wanted to know all along.

I intended to. But Grus didn’t say that. He got in trouble over women because he took them to bed whenever he got the chance, not because he was wantonly cruel. What he did say was, “We aren’t lovers anymore. We used to be, but we aren’t.”

Alauda surprised him again, this time by laughing. “When we got there, you thought you were going to be, though, didn’t you?”

“Well… yes,” he said in dull embarrassment. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed that. Now he asked a question of his own. “Why didn’t you bring up any of this when we were there?”

She laughed once more, on a self-deprecating note. “What good would it have done me? None I could see. Safer now, when I’m here and she’s not.”

She did have her share of shrewdness. Grus had seen that before. “Now you know,” he said, although he’d told her as little as he could. He changed the subject, asking, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” she answered. “I’m supposed to have babies. I’m made for it. It’s not always comfortable—about half the time, breakfast doesn’t want to stay down—but I’m all right. Is the war going as well as it looks?”

“Almost,” Grus said. “We’re still going forward, anyhow. I hope we’ll keep on doing it.”

“Once we chase all the Menteshe out of Avornis, how do we keep them out for good?” Alauda asked.

“I don’t know,” Grus said, which made her blink. He went on, “Avornans have been trying to find the answer to that for a long time, but we haven’t done it yet. If we had, they wouldn’t be in Avornis now, would they?” He waited for Alauda to shake her head, then added, “One thing I can do—one thing I will do—is put more river galleys on the Stura. That will make it harder for them to cross, anyhow.”

She nodded. “That makes good sense. Why weren’t there more river galleys on the Stura before?”

“They’re expensive,” he answered. “Expensive to build, even more expensive to man.” The tall-masted ships that aped the ones the Chernagor pirates made cost more to build. River galleys, with their large crews of rowers, cost more to maintain. And every man who became a sailor was one more man who couldn’t till the soil. After the disasters of this war, Avornis was liable to need farmers even more desperately than she needed soldiers or sailors. The king hoped she could find enough. If not, lean times were coming, in the most literal sense of the words.

Lanius liked coming into the kitchens. He nodded to the head cook, a rotund man named Cucullatus. “Tomorrow is Queen Sosia’s birthday, you know,” he said. “Do up something special for her.”

Cucullatus’ smile was almost as wide as he was, which said a good deal. “How about a kidney pie, Your Majesty? That’s one of her favorites.”

“Fine.” Lanius hoped his own smile was also wide and seemed sincere. Sosia did love kidney pie, or any other dish with kidneys in it. Lanius didn’t. To him, cooked kidneys smelled nasty. But he did want to make his wife happy. He worked harder to keep Sosia happy since he’d started taking lovers among the serving women than he had before. He thought himself unique in that regard, which only proved he didn’t know everything there was to know about straying husbands.

“We’ll take care of it, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus promised. “And whatever kidneys don’t go into the pie, we’ll save for the moncats.”

“Fine,” Lanius said again, this time with real enthusiasm. The moncats loved kidneys, which didn’t stink nearly as much raw.

The king started to leave the kitchens. A startled noise from one of the sweepers made him turn back. There was Pouncer, clinging to a beam with one clawed hand. The moncat’s other hand clutched a big wooden spoon. Reading moncats’ expressions was a risky game, but Lanius thought Pouncer looked almost indecently pleased with itself.

“Come back here! Come down here!” the king called in stern tones. But Pouncer was no better at doing what it was told than any other moncat—or any other cat of any sort.

Cucullatus said, “Here, don’t worry, Your Majesty. We can lure it down with a bit of meat.”

“Good idea,” Lanius said. But the sweeper who’d first spotted Pouncer wasn’t paying any attention to either Cucullatus or the king. He tried to knock the moncat from the beam with his broom. He missed. Pouncer yowled and swung up onto the beam, with only its tail hanging down. The sweeper sprang, trying to grab the tail. He jumped just high enough to pull out a few of the hairs at the very end. Pouncer yowled again, louder this time, and took off like a dart hurled from a catapult.

“You stupid, manure-brained idiot!” Cucullatus bawled at the poor sweeper. Then he turned on the rest of the men and women in the kitchens. “Well? Don’t just stand there, you fools! Catch the miserable little beast!”

If that wasn’t a recipe for chaos, Lanius couldn’t have come up with one. People bumped into one another, tripped one another, and cursed one another with more passion than Lanius had ever heard from them. Several of them carried knives, and more knives, long-tined forks, and other instruments of mayhem lay right at hand. Why they didn’t start stabbing one another was beyond the king.

After a couple of minutes of screaming anarchy, somebody asked, “Where did the stinking creature go?”

Lanius looked around. So did the kitchen staff, pausing in their efforts to tear the place down. “Where did the stinking creature go?” somebody else said.

Pouncer had disappeared. A wizard couldn’t have done a neater job of making the moncat disappear.

However he got in here, that’s the way he must have gone, Lanius thought. Unlike the kitchen staff, he had, or believed he had, a pretty good idea of where the moncat would go next. He pointed to Cucullatus. “Give me two or three strips of raw meat.”

“But the moncat is gone, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus said reasonably.

“I know that. I’ll eat them myself,” Lanius said. Cucullatus stared. “Never mind what I want with them,” the king told him. “Just give them to me.”

He got them. Servants gaped to see him hurrying through the palace corridors with strips of raw, dripping beef in his hand. A couple of them even worked up the nerve to ask him what he was doing. He didn’t answer. He just kept on, not quite trotting, until he got to the archives.

When he closed the heavy doors behind him, he let out a sigh of relief. No more bellowing cooks, no more nosy servants. Only peace, quiet, dust motes dancing in sunbeams, and the soothing smell of old parchment. This was where he belonged, where no one would come and bother him.

Even as he pulled some documents—tax registers, he saw they were—from the shelf of a cabinet that had known better centuries, he was shaking his head. Today, he hoped he would be bothered. If he wasn’t… If he wasn’t, Pouncer had decided to go back to the moncats’ chamber instead. Or maybe the perverse beast would simply wander through whatever secret ways it had found until it decided to come out in the kitchens again.

Lanius looked at the registers with one eye while looking all around the archives chamber with the other. He didn’t know where Pouncer would appear. Actually, he didn’t know whether Pouncer would appear at all, but he did his best to forget about that. He did know this was the best bet he could make.

And it paid off. Just when he’d gotten engrossed in one of the registers in spite of himself, a faint, rusty, “Mrowr?” came from behind a crate that probably hadn’t been opened in at least two hundred years.

“Come here, Pouncer!” Lanius called, and then he made the special little chirping noise that meant he had a treat for the moncat.

Out Pouncer came. The moncat still clutched the spoon it had stolen. Even the spoon paled in importance, though, before the lure of raw meat. “Mrowr,” Pouncer said again, this time on a more insistent note.

“Come on,” Lanius coaxed, holding a strip of beef where the moncat could see—and smell—it. “Come on, you fuzzy moron. You know you want this.”

Want it Pouncer did. Sidling forward, the moncat reached out with a clawed hand. Lanius gave it the first piece of meat. The moncat ate quickly, fearful of being robbed even though none of its fellows were near. In some ways it was very much like a man. Once the meat had disappeared, Pouncer held out that little hand and said, “Mrowr,” yet again.

Give me some more, or you’ll be sorry. Lanius had no trouble translating that particular meow into Avornan. The king gave the moncat another piece of meat. This one vanished more slowly. As it did, Pouncer began to purr. Lanius had been waiting for that. It was a sign he could pick up the moncat without getting his hand shredded. He did. Pouncer kept on purring.

Feeling more than a little triumphant, Lanius carried the moncat— and the serving spoon it had stolen—out of the royal archives. The tax registers he left where they were. They dated from the early years of his fathers reign. No one had looked at them since; Lanius was sure of that. They weren’t going anywhere for the time being. And one of these days he would have to have a peek inside that crate Pouncer had been hiding behind.

Pouncer started twisting in the king’s arms and trying to get free before Lanius reached the moncats’ chamber. Lanius still had one strip of meat left. He offered it to the moncat, and bought just enough contentment to keep from getting clawed the rest of the way there. Pouncer even let him take away the wooden spoon.

Cucullatus clapped his hands when Lanius brought the spoon back to the kitchens. “Well done, Your Majesty!” he said, as though Lanius had just captured Yozgat and reclaimed the Scepter of Mercy.

“Thank you so much,” Lanius said.

“Kidney pie,” Cucullatus went on, ignoring or more likely not noticing the king’s irony. Lanius frowned; the commotion with the moncat had almost made him forget why he’d come to the kitchens in the first place. The chief cook went on, “Her Majesty will enjoy it. You wait and see.”

“Ah.” Lanius nodded. “Yes, I hope she does.”

Sosia did. When she sat down to supper on her birthday, she smiled and wagged a finger at Lanius. “Somebody’s been talking to the kitchens,” she said as a servant gave her a big helping of the pungent dish.

“Why would anyone talk to a kitchen?” Lanius asked. “Ovens and pots and skewers don’t listen very well.”

His wife gave him a severe look. “You know what I mean,” she said. “You’ve been talking to the people who work in the kitchens. There. Are you happier?”

“I couldn’t be happier, not while I’ve got you,” Lanius answered.

Sosia smiled. “That’s sweet,” she said. But then the smile slipped. “In that case, why—?” She stopped and shook her head. “No, never mind. Not tonight.”

Lanius had no trouble figuring out what she’d started to say. In that case, why did you take Cristata to bed? Why did you want to make her your second wife? To Lanius, it made good enough sense. He hadn’t been unhappy with Sosia. He’d just wanted to be happy with Cristata, too. He still didn’t see anything wrong with that. Grus’ daughter, however, had a decidedly different opinion.

And what about Zenaida? Lanius asked himself. He knew what Sosia’s opinion of her would be. He didn’t think he was in love with her, the way he had with Cristata. Maybe seeing that he didn’t would keep Sosia from getting so furious this time. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t do him any good at all. She’d better not find out about Zenaida, the king thought.

He smiled at Sosia. “Happy birthday,” he told her.

“You’re even eating the kidney pie yourself,” she said in some surprise.

And so Lanius was. His thoughts full of maidservants, he’d hardly noticed he was doing it. Now that he did notice, he was reminded again that this was not his favorite dish—too strong for his taste. Still, he shrugged and answered, “I don’t hate it,” which was true. As though to prove it, he took another bite. What he did prove, to himself, was that he didn’t love it, either.

“I’m glad,” Sosia said.

Later that evening, Lanius made love with his wife. He didn’t hate that, either. If Zenaida was a little more exciting… well, maybe that was because she wasn’t as familiar as Sosia—and maybe, also, because the thrill of the illicit added spice to what they did. Nothing illicit about Sosia, but nothing wrong with her, nothing that made him want to sleep apart. He did his best to please her when they joined.

By the way she responded, his best proved good enough. “You are sweet,” she said, as though reminding herself.

“I think the same thing—about you,” he added hastily, before she could tease him about thinking himself sweet. That was what he got for being precise most of the time.

He waited there in the darkness, wondering if Sosia would ask why he’d gone after Cristata if he thought she was sweet. But she didn’t. She just murmured, “Well, good,” rolled over on her side, and fell asleep. Lanius rolled over, too, in the opposite direction. His backside bumped hers. She stirred a little, but kept on breathing slowly and deeply. A few minutes later, Lanius also drifted off, a smile on his face.

A lieutenant from one of the river galleys on the Stura stood before King Grus. “Your Majesty, an awful lot of the Menteshe are sneaking south across the river. More and more every day, and especially every night. We’ve sunk half a dozen boats full of the stinking buggers, and more have gotten by us.”

This wasn’t the first such report Grus had heard. He scratched his head. Up until a few days before, Prince Ulash’s men hadn’t been doing anything of the sort. Sudden changes in what the Menteshe were up to made the King of Avornis deeply suspicious. “What have they got in mind?” he asked, though the lieutenant wasn’t going to know.

As he’d expected, the young officer shrugged and answered, “No idea, sir. We don’t get the chance to ask them a whole lot of questions. When we ram ’em, we sink ’em.” By the pride in his voice, he wanted to do nothing but sink them.

That suited Grus fine. He wanted his river-galley officers aggressive. He said, “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll see what I can do to get to the bottom of this.”

The officer bowed and left. Grus scratched his head again. He didn’t shake any answers loose. He hadn’t really thought he would. Being without answers, he summoned Pterocles. The wizard heard him out, then said, “That is interesting, Your Majesty. Why would they start going over the river now when they had seemed to want to stay on this side and fight?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Grus said. “Has there been a magical summons? Has the Banished One taken a hand in things?”

“I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.” Pterocles spoke cautiously. Grus approved of that caution. Pterocles recognized the possibility that something might have slipped past him. He said, “I have spells that would tell me if something has gone on under my nose. A summons like that lingers on the ether. If it was there, I’ll find out about it.”

“Good,” Grus said. “Let me know.”

When Pterocles came back that afternoon, he looked puzzled and troubled. “Your Majesty, if any sort of sorcerous summons came north, I can’t find it,” he said. “I don’t quite know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” Grus said. Had the Banished One deceived his wizard? Or was Pterocles searching for something that wasn’t there to find? “If you know any other spells, you ought to use them,” Grus told him.

Pterocles nodded. “I will, though I’ve already tried the ones I think likeliest to work. You ought to try to take some Menteshe prisoners, too. They may know something I don’t.”

“I’ll do that,” Grus said at once. “I should have sent men out to do it when I first called you. A lot of the time, the Menteshe like to sing.”

He gave the orders. His men rode out. But Menteshe were starting to get scarce on the ground. Even a week earlier, discovering so few of them on the Avornan side of the Stura would have made Grus rejoice. He would have rejoiced now, if his men were the ones responsible for making the nomads want to get back to the lands they usually roamed. But his men hadn’t driven the Menteshe over the Stura, and he knew it. That left him suspicious. Why were the Menteshe leaving—fleeing— Avornis when they didn’t have to?

“I know what it is,” Hirundo said when a day’s search resulted in no prisoners.

“Tell me,” Grus urged. “I haven’t got any idea why they’re going.”

“It’s simple,” the general answered. “They must have heard you were going to put a tax on nomads in Avornis, so of course they ran away from it.” He grinned at his own cleverness. “By Olor’s beard, I would, too.”

“Funny.” Grus tried to sound severe, but a smile couldn’t help creeping out from behind the edges of his beard—it was funny, even if he wished it weren’t. He wagged a finger at Hirundo, who kept right on grinning, completely unabashed. Grus said, “Do you have any real idea why they’re doing it?”

“No,” Hirundo admitted. “All I can say is, good riddance.”

“Certainly, good riddance.” But Grus remained dissatisfied, like a man who’d just enjoyed a feast but had an annoying piece of gristle stuck between two back teeth. “They shouldn’t be running away, though, not when we haven’t finished beating them. They’ve never done that before.

“Maybe they know we’re going to win this time, and so they want to save themselves for fights next year or the year after,” Hirundo suggested.

“Maybe.” Grus still didn’t sound happy—still wasn’t happy. He explained why, repeating, “They’ve never done that before.” The Menteshe usually did the same sort of things over and over again. If they changed their ways, they had to have a reason… didn’t they?

“Maybe the Banished One is telling them what to do,” Hirundo said.

“Of course the Banished One is telling them what to do,” Grus answered. He hated the idea, which didn’t mean he disbelieved it. “They’re his creatures. They’re proud to be his creatures. But why is he telling them to do that? And how is he telling them? Pterocles can’t find any of his magic.”

Hirundo considered, then brightened. “Maybe he’s trying to drive you mad, to make you find reasons for things that haven’t got any.”

“Thank you so much,” Grus said. Hirundo bowed back, as he might have after any extraordinarily meritorious service. The worst of it was, Grus couldn’t be sure the general was wrong. The king knew he would go right on wasting time and losing sleep until he found an answer he could believe. He sighed. “The more we go on like this, the plainer it gets that we need prisoners. Until we know more, we’ll just keep coming out with one stupid guess after another.”

“I don’t think my guesses were stupid.” Mock anger filled Hirundo’s voice. “I think they were clever, perceptive, even brilliant.”

“You would,” the king muttered. “When your men finally do bring back a captive or two, we’ll see how brilliant and perceptive you were.”

“They’re doing their best, the same as I am,” Hirundo said.

“I hope theirs is better than yours.” Grus made sure he smiled so Hirundo knew he was joking. The horrible face the general made said he got the message but didn’t much care for it.

Along with the cavalry, the men aboard the river galleys got orders to capture Menteshe if they could. If they could… Suddenly, the lands on this side of the Stura began to seem like a country where the birds had just flown south for the winter. They had been here. The memory of them lingered. They would come back. But for now, when you wanted them most, they were gone.

Grus had never imagined that winning a war could leave him so unhappy. He had questions he wanted to ask, questions he needed to ask, and nobody to whom to ask them. He’d snarled at Hirundo in play. He started snarling at people in earnest.

“They’re gone,” Alauda said. “Thank the gods for it. Praise the gods for it. But, by Queen Quelea’s mercy, don’t complain about it.”

“I want to know why,” Grus said stubbornly. “They aren’t acting the way they’re supposed to, and that bothers me.” He’d been down this same road with Hirundo.

His new mistress had less patience for it. “Who cares?” she said with a toss of the head. “As long as they’re out of the kingdom, nothing else matters.” That held enough truth to be annoying, but not enough to make Grus quit trying to lay his hands on some of the nomads.

When at last he did, it was much easier than he’d thought it would be. Like a flock of birds that had fallen behind the rest because of a storm, a band of about twenty Menteshe rode down to the Stura and then along it, looking for boats to steal so they could cross. Three river galleys and a regiment of Hirundo’s horsemen converged on them. When Grus heard the news, he feared the nomads would fight to the death just to thwart him. But they didn’t. Overmatched, they threw up their hands and surrendered.

Their chieftain, a bushy-eyebrowed, big-nosed fellow named Yavlak, proved to speak good Avornan. “Here he is, Your Majesty,” Hirundo said, as though he were making Grus a present of the man.

And Grus felt as though Yavlak were a present, too. “Why are you Menteshe leaving Avornis?” he demanded.

Yavlak looked at him as he would have looked at any idiot. “Because we have to,” he answered.

“You have to? Who told you you have to? Was it the Banished One?” The king knew he sounded nervous, but couldn’t help it.

“The Fallen Star?” Now Yavlak looked puzzled. With those eyebrows, he did it very well. “No, the Fallen Star has nothing to do with it. Can it be you have not heard?” He didn’t seem to want to believe that; he acted like a man who had no choice. “By some mischance, we found out late. I thought even you miserable Avornans would surely know by now.”

“Found out what? Know what?” Grus wanted to strangle him. The only thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that he would have to go through this again with another nomad, one who might not be so fluent in Avornan, if he did.

Yavlak finally—and rudely—obliged him. “You stupid fool,” he said. “Found out that Prince Ulash is dead, of course.”