The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

King Lanius was gnawing the meat off a goose drumstick when he almost choked. “Are you all right?” Sosia asked. “I think so,” he replied once he could speak again. He tried to snap his fingers in annoyance, but they were too greasy. Muttering, he wiped his hands on a napkin—he did remember not to use the tablecloth, which would have been the style in his grandfather’s day, or his own clothes, which would have been the style in his grandfather’s grandfather’s day. He sipped from his wine cup—his voice needed more lubricating even if his 6ngers didn’t. “The only problem is, I’m an idiot.”

“Oh.” Sosia eyed him. “Well, I could have told you that.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.” Lanius gave her a seated bow. He waited. Nothing more happened. He muttered again, then broke down and said, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m an idiot?”

His wife shrugged. “I hadn’t intended to. But all right—how were you an idiot this time?” Her tone said she knew how he’d been an idiot before, and with which serving girls.

“It’s not like that.” Lanius hid his own smile. Sosia still hadn’t found out about Flammea.

“In that case, maybe I really am interested,” Sosia said.

“Thank you,” Lanius repeated. By the elegant way she inclined her head, her family might have been royal much longer than his. Now he did smile. That struck him funny. Sosia laughed at him. In a couple of heartbeats, he was laughing, too.

“Tell me,” the queen said.

“Do you remember the old parchments the envoy from Durdevatz brought me as a gift when he came down here last summer?”

Sosia shrugged again. “I didn’t, not until you reminded me. Playing around with those old things is your sport, not mine.” Quickly, she added, “But its a better sport than playing around with young things, by the gods.” Lanius made a face at her; he would have guessed she’d say that. She made one right back at him. “What about these precious parchments, then?”

“They may be precious parchments, for all I know. I was so excited to get them, and then I put them away to go through them in a little while… and here it is more than a year later, and I haven’t done it. That’s why I’m an idiot.”

“Oh.” Sosia thought that over, then shrugged. “Well, you’ve had reasons for being one that I’ve liked less, I will say.”

“Yes, I thought you would.” Lanius made another face at her. She laughed again, so she wasn’t too peeved. Sure enough, she hadn’t found out about Flammea.

Lanius almost charged away from the supper table to look at the documents from Durdevatz. He was halfway out of his seat before he realized that would be rude. Besides, the light was beginning to fail, and trying to read faded ink by lamplight was a lot less enjoyable than, say, trying to seduce a maidservant. Tomorrow morning would do.

When the morning came, he found himself busy with moncats and monkeys and a squabble between two nobles down in the south. He forgot the parchments again, at least until noon. Then he went into the archives to look at them. He was sure he remembered where they were, and he was usually good about such things. Not this time. He confidently went to where he thought he’d put the gift from Durdevatz, only to find the parchments weren’t there. Some of the things he said then would have made a guardsman blush, or more likely blanch.

Cursing didn’t help in any real way, even if it did make him feel better. Once he stopped filling the air with sparks, he had to go poking around if he wanted to find the missing parchments. They were bound to be somewhere in the archives. No one would have stolen them. He was sure of that. He was the only person in the city of Avornis who thought they were worth anything.

If they weren’t where he thought he’d put them, where were they likely to be? He looked around the hall, trying to think back more than a year. He’d come in, he’d had the parchments in his hand… and what had he done with them?

Good question. He wished he had a good answer for it.

After some more curses—these less spirited than the ones that had gone before—he started looking. If he hadn’t put them where he thought, what was the next most likely place?

He was on his way over to it when something interrupted him. Ancient parchments—even ancient parchments from up in the Chernagor country—were unlikely to say, “Mrowr?”

“Oh, by the gods!” Lanius threw his hands in the air and fought down a strong urge to scream. “I haven’t got time to deal with you right now, Pouncer!”

“Mrowr?” the moncat said again. It didn’t care where the king had put the documents from Durdevatz. It had gotten out of its room again, and had probably also paid a call on the kitchens. The cooks had stopped up the one hole in the wall, but the moncat had found another. It liked visiting the kitchens—all sorts of interesting things were there. Who was going to deal with it if the king didn’t? Nobody, and Lanius knew it only too well.

These days, though, he had a weapon he hadn’t used before. Because he’d thought he knew where the parchments were, he was wearing a robe instead of the grubby clothes he often put on to dig through the archives, but he didn’t care. He lay down on the dusty floor and started thumping his chest with his right hand.

“Mrowr!” Pouncer came running. Lanius had trained the moncat to know what that sound meant— if I get up onto him, he’ll give me something good to eat. That was what Pouncer had to be thinking. The moncat was carrying a big, heavy silver spoon. Sure enough, the archives hadn’t been its first stop on its latest jaunt through the spaces between the palace’s walls.

“You’ve stolen something expensive this time. Congratulations,” Lanius said, stroking Pouncer under the chin and by the whiskers. Pouncer closed its eyes and stretched out its neck and rewarded him with a feline smile and a deep, rumbling purr. The moncat didn’t even seem offended that he hadn’t fed it anything.

He stood up, carefully cradling the animal in his arms. Pouncer kept acting remarkably happy. Lanius carried the moncat out of the archives and down the hall to the chamber where it lived—until it felt like escaping, anyhow. Pouncer didn’t fuss until he took the silver spoon away from it. Even then, it didn’t fuss too much. By now, it was used to and probably resigned to his taking prizes away from it.

Once Pouncer was back with the other moncats, Lanius brought the spoon to the kitchens. “You didn’t steal that yourself, Your Majesty!” Quiscula exclaimed when she saw what he carried. “That miserable creature’s been here again, and nobody even knew it.”

“Pouncer doesn’t think it’s a miserable creature,” Lanius told the pudgy cook. “Talented would probably be a better word.”

“Talented, foof!” Quiscula said. “Plenty of thieves on two legs are talented, too, and what happens to them when they get caught? Not half what they deserve, a lot of the time.”

“Thieves who go on two legs know the difference between right and wrong,” Lanius said. “The moncat doesn’t.” He paused. “I don’t think it does, anyhow.”

“A likely story,” Quiscula said. “It’s a wicked beast, and you can’t tell me any different, so don’t waste your breath trying.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” Lanius held out the spoon. “Here. Take charge of this until Pouncer decides to steal it again.”

“Oh, you’re too generous to me, Your Majesty!” Quiscula played the coquette so well, she and Lanius both started laughing. She accepted the spoon from the king.

Lanius started back toward the archives, wondering if he would ever get to look for those parchments. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. And everything, today, included Princess Limosa, who was carrying her baby down the corridor. “Hello, Your Majesty,” Limosa said. “Isn’t Capella the sweetest little thing you ever saw?”

“Well…” Lanius wondered how to answer that and stay truthful and polite at the same time. Truth won. He said, “If you don’t count Crex and Pitta, yes.”

Limosa stared at him, then giggled. “All right, that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t think their children are the most wonderful ones in the world?”

“I can’t think of anybody,” Lanius said. “That’s what keeps us from feeding our children to the hunting hounds, I suppose.”

Limosa’s eyes got even wider than they had been before. She hugged Capella a little tighter and hurried away as though she feared Lanius had some dreadful, contagious disease. He wondered why. He hadn’t said he wanted to feed Capella—or any other children—to hunting hounds. He sighed. Some people just didn’t listen.

He’d just started searching through the spots likeliest to hold the missing documents when somebody began banging on the door to the archives. The king said something pungent. The servants knew they weren’t supposed to do things like that. Bubulcus, the one who’d been most likely to “forget” such warnings, was dead. Either someone was making a dreadful mistake or something dreadful, something he really needed to know about, had just happened. Adding a few more choice phrases under his breath, he went to see who was bothering him in his sanctum.

“Sosia!” he said in astonishment. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“I was going to ask you the same question,” his wife answered. “What on earth did you say to Limosa? Queen Quelea’s mercy, it’s frightened the life out of her, whatever it was.”

“Oh, by the gods!” Lanius clapped a hand to his forehead in exasperation altogether unfeigned. “She really doesn’t listen.” He spelled out exactly what he’d said to Limosa.

Even before he got halfway through, one of Sosia’s eyebrows started climbing. Lanius had seen that expression more often on Grus than on his wife. He liked it no better on her. Once he’d finished, she said, “Well, I don’t blame Limosa a bit. Poor thing! Hunting dogs, indeed! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“You weren’t listening, either,” Lanius complained. “I didn’t say that was what we did with children. I didn’t say it was what we should do. I said it was what we would do if the people who had them didn’t think they were wonderful. Don’t you see the difference?”

“What I see is that nobody’s got any business talking about feeding babies to any hounds.” Sosia spoke with impressive certainty. “And that goes double for talking about babies and hounds to somebody who’s just had one. Had a baby, I mean.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re not going to make me sound foolish. This is important.”

“I wasn’t. This is already nothing but foolishness,” Lanius said.

“It certainly is— your foolishness. Next time you see Limosa, you apologize to her, do you hear me?” Sosia didn’t wait for an answer. She stared past Lanius into the cavernous archives. “So this is where you spend all your time. I feel as though I’m looking at the other woman.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lanius said, although that comparison made much more sense to him than the other one had. “And I still don’t see why you want me to apologize to Limosa when I didn’t say anything bad to begin with.”

“Yes, you did. You’re just too—too logical to know it.” Sosia turned her back and stalked off. Over her shoulder, she added, “And if you think people run on logic all the time, you’d better think again.”

“I don’t think anything of the sort. People cured me of it a long time ago,” Lanius said plaintively. Sosia didn’t even slow down. She went around a corner and disappeared. The king almost chased after her to go on explaining. But he realized—logically—that it wouldn’t do him any good, and so he stayed where he was.

When he could no longer hear Sosia’s angry footsteps, he shut the door to the archives once more. For good measure, he barred it behind him. Then he went back to looking for the parchments from Durdevatz.

He searched on and off for four days, and finally found them by accident. If he had told Sosia about that, she would either have laughed at him or rolled her eyes in despair. He’d forgotten he’d put the parchments in a stout wooden box to keep them safe. How many times had he walked past it without paying it any mind? More than he wanted to think about—he was sure of that. If he hadn’t barked his knuckles on a corner of the box, he might never have found the documents at all.

That moment of sudden, unexpected pain made him take a long, reproachful look at the box. When he recognized it, he still felt reproachful—self-reproachful. After all that searching—and after its ludicrous end—he was almost afraid to look at the parchments. If they turned out to be worthless or dull, how could he stand it?

Of course, if he didn’t look at them, why had he gone to all the trouble of finding them? After rubbing his hand, he carried the box over to the table where he’d written most of How to Be a King. When he opened the box, he started to laugh. The Chernagors had made him happy with some of the cheapest presents ever given to a King of Avornis—a pair of moncats, a pair of monkeys, and a pile of documents dug out of a decrepit cathedral. For all he knew, merchants in the north country laughed whenever they heard his name.

He didn’t care. Happiness and having enough money weren’t the same thing. He’d been happy enough even at times when Grus squeezed him hardest. That money and happiness weren’t the same thing didn’t mean happiness had nothing to do with money. Lanius’ intuition, though, didn’t reach that far.

The first few parchments he unrolled and read had to do with the cathedral, not with anything that went on inside it. They included a letter from the yellow-robed high-hallow then presiding in the building asking a long-dead King of Avornis for funds to repair it and add to its mosaic decoration. The letter had come to the capital and gone back to what was then Argithea, not Durdevatz, with the king’s scribbled comment and signature below it. We are not made of silver, the sovereign had written. If the projects are worthy, surely your townsfolk will support them. If they are not, all the silver in the world will not make them so.

Lanius studied that with considerable admiration, “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he murmured. He studied the response until he’d memorized it. He could think of so many places to use it.…

Other documents told him more about the history of Argithea than he’d ever known before. Some of them talked about the Chernagors as sea raiders. Up until then, he’d seen only a couple of parchments like that. They proved Argithea hadn’t been the first town along the coast of the Northern Sea to fall to the Chernagors. Lanius tried to remember whether he’d known that before. Try as he would, he couldn’t be sure.

More appeals—for money and for aid—to the capital followed, from the city governor and from the high-ranking priest at the cathedral. Only one of them had any sort of reply. A relieving force is on the way, the answer said. Hold out until it arrives.

There were no more letters in Avornan after the date of that one. The messenger bringing the answer must have managed to slip through the besieging Chernagors; Lanius had read elsewhere that they hadn’t been polished at the art of taking cities. Polished or not, though, they’d surely taken Argithea before the promised relieving force arrived. They must have kept the Avornans from recapturing the town, too. From then on, the history of Argithea ended and that of Durdevatz began.

One parchment still sat at the bottom of the box. Lanius pulled it out as much from a sense of duty as for any other reason. Since he was going through the documents, he thought he ought to go through all of them. He didn’t expect anything more interesting or exciting than what he’d already found.

But the first sentence caught and held his eye. I wonder why I have written this, it said, when no one is ever likely to read it, or to understand it if he does. After that, he couldn’t have stopped reading for anything. The author was a black-robed priest named Xenops. He had been consecrated the year before the Chernagors took Argithea out of the Kingdom of Avornis, and had stayed on at the cathedral under the town’s new masters for the next fifty years and more.

“Olor’s beard!” Lanius whispered. “This shows how Durdevatz passed from one world to the other.” He’d never imagined seeing such a document. In their early years in these parts, the Chernagors hadn’t written in Avornan or their own language or any other. And he had not thought any Avomans left behind in the north had set down what they’d seen and heard and felt. No such chronicles existed in the royal archives—he was sure of that. A moment later, he shook his head. One did now.

Xenops had caught moments in the transition from the old way of life to the new. He’d mocked the crude coins the Chernagors began to mint a generation after the fall of Argithea. Next to those of Avornis, they are ugly and irregular, he’d written. But new coins of Avornis come seldom if at all, while so many old ones are hoarded against hard times. Even these ugly things may be better than none.

Later, he’d noted the demise of Avornan in the market square. Besides me, only a few old grannies use it as a birthspeech nowadays, he said. Some of the younger folk can speak it after a fashion, but they prefer the conquerors’ barbarous jargon. Soon, only those who need Avornan in trade will know it at all.

Once, earlier, some of the Avornans left in the city had plotted to rejoin it to the kingdom from which it had been torn. The Chernagors discovered the plot and bloodily put it down. But none of them so much as looked toward me, Xenops wrote. Had they done so, they might have been surprised. I have been for so long invisible to the new lords of this town, though, that they cannot see me at all. Well, I know their deeds, regardless of whether they know mine.

That was interesting, to say the least. How deep in the conspiracy had Xenops been? Had he quietly started it and managed to survive unnoticed when it fell to pieces? The only evidence Lanius had—the only evidence he would ever have—lay before him now, and the priest did not go into detail. If someone had found and read his chronicle while he still lived in Durdevatz, he had said enough to hang himself, so why not more? Lanius knew he would never find out.

A chilling passage began, He calls himself a spark from the Fallen Star. Xenops went on to record how an emissary from the Banished One had come to Durdevatz even that long ago. He’d made a mistake—he’d gotten angry when the Chernagors didn’t fall down on their knees before him right away. I advised the lords of the Chernagors that such a one was not to be trusted, as he had shown by his own speech and deeds, Xenops wrote. They were persuaded, and sent him away unsuccessful.

How much did Avornis owe to this altogether unknown priest? If the Chernagors had fallen under the sway of the Banished One centuries earlier, how would the other city-states—how would Avornis— have fared? Not well, not when Avornis might have been trapped between the Banished Ones backers to north and south.

“Thank you, Xenops,” Lanius murmured. “You’ll get your due centuries later than you should have, but you’ll have it.” He could think of several passages in How to Be a King he would need to revise.

At the end of the long roll of parchment, Xenops wrote, Now, as I say, I am old. I have heard that the old always remember the time of their youth as the sweet summer of the world. I dare say it is true. But who could blame me for having that feeling myself? Before the barbarians came, Argithea was part of a wider world. Now it is alone, and I rarely hear what passes beyond its walls. The Chernagors do not even keep its name, but use some vile appellation of their own. Their speech drives out Avornan; even I have had to acquire it, however reluctantly I cough out its gutturals. The tongue I learned in my cradle gutters toward extinction. When I am gone — which will not be long — who here will know, much less care, what I have set down in this scroll? No one, I fear me— no one at all. If the gods be kind, let it pass through time until it comes into the hands of someone who will care for it in the reading as I have in the writing. King Olor, Queen Quelea, grant this your servants final prayer.

Tears stung Lanius’ eyes. “The gods heard you,” he whispered, though Xenops, of course, could not hear him. But how many centuries had Olor and Quelea taken to deliver the priest’s manuscript into the hands of someone who could appreciate it as it deserved? If they were going to answer Xenops’ last request, couldn’t they have done it sooner? Evidently not.

Was a prayer answered centuries after it was made truly answered at all? In one sense, Lanius supposed so. But the way the gods had chosen to respond did poor Xenops no good at all.

Lanius looked again at the long-dead priest’s closing words. No, Xenops hadn’t expected anyone in his lifetime could make sense of what he’d written. He’d merely hoped someone would someday. On reflection, the gods had given him what he’d asked for. Even so, Lanius would have been surprised if Xenops had thought his chronicle would have to wait so very long to find an audience.

But then, for all Xenops knew, the scroll might have stayed unread until time had its way with it. The priest must have thought that likely, as a matter of fact, for Avornan was a dying language in the town that had become Durdevatz. And, except among traders who used it for dealing with the Avornans farther south but not among themselves, it had died there. Yes, its getting here was a miracle, even if a slow one.

“A slow miracle.” Lanius spoke the words aloud, liking the way they felt in his mouth. But the Banished One could also work what men called miracles when he intervened in the world’s affairs, and he didn’t wait centuries to do it. There were times when he waited, and wasted, not a moment.

The gods had exiled him to the material world. In a way, that made it his. Could they really do much to counter his grip on things here? If they couldn’t, who could? Ordinary people? He had far more power than they did, as Lanius knew all too well. Yet somehow the Banished One had failed to sweep everything before him. Maybe that was a portent. Maybe it just meant the Banished One hadn’t triumphed. Time was on his side.

But he still feared Lanius and Grus and Pterocles—and Alca as well, the king remembered. Lanius only wished he knew what he could do to deserve even more of the Banished One’s distrust.

For a while, nothing occurred to him. Having the exiled god notice him at all was something of a compliment, even if one that he could often do without. Then Lanius nodded to himself. If he—or rather, if Avornis’ wizards—could begin liberating thralls in large numbers, the Banished One would surely pay heed.

What would he do then? Lanius didn’t know. He couldn’t begin to guess. One thing he did know, though, was that he would dearly love to find out.

Hisardzik sat at the end of a long spit of land jutting out into the Northern Sea. Besieging Nishevatz had been anything but easy. Besieging this Chernagor city-state would have been harder still, for the defenders had to hold only a short length of wall against their foes. King Grus, a longtime naval officer, knew he could have made the Chernagors’ work more difficult with a fleet, but they had a fleet of their own. Their ships were tied up at quays beyond the reach of any catapult.

Fortunately, however, it did not look as though it would come to fighting. Prince Lazutin, the lord of Hisardzik, not only spoke to Grus from the wall of his city, he came forth from a postern gate to meet the King of Avornis. Lazutin was in his midthirties, slim by Chernagor standards, with a sharp nose and clever, foxy features. He denied speaking Avornan, and brought along an interpreter. Grus suspected he knew more than he let on, for he listened with alert attention whenever any Avornan spoke around him.

Grus did his best to sound severe, saying, “You fell into bad company, Your Highness, when you chose Vasilko’s side.”

Lazutin spoke volubly in the Chernagor tongue after that was translated for him. The interpreter, a pudgy man named Sverki, said, “He says, Your Majesty, it was one of those things. It was political. It was not personal.”

“Men who get killed die just as dead either way,” Grus said.

“You have shown you are stronger than Vasilko,” Lazutin said. Sverki did such a good job of echoing his master’s inflections, Grus soon forgot he was there. Through him, the Prince of Hisardzik went on, “You have shown the gods in the heavens are stronger than the Banished One. This also is worth knowing.”

Grus had an Avornan who understood the Chernagor speech listening to the conversation to make sure Sverki did not twist what Lazutin said or what Grus himself said to Lazutin. The king glanced over to him now. The Avornan nodded, which meant Lazutin really had spoken of the Banished One, and not of the Fallen Star. Grus took that for a good sign.

He said, “You should have known that anyhow, Your Highness.”

Prince Lazutin shrugged delicately. “Some things are more readily accepted with proof. A man may say this or that, but what he says and what is are often not the same. Or have you found otherwise?” He arched an eyebrow, as though daring Grus to tell him he had.

And Grus couldn’t, and knew it. “We are not dealing with men here,” he said. “We are dealing with those who are more than men.”

“The same also applies,” Lazutin answered. “It applies even more, I would say, for those who are more than men make claims that are more than claims, if you take my meaning. The only way to be sure who is believable is to see who prevails when one is measured against another.”

Here’s a cool customer, Grus thought. “And now you have seen?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Now I have seen.” Even speaking a language Grus didn’t understand, Prince Lazutin fairly radiated sincerity.

In light of the games Lazutin had played, that made Grus less inclined to trust him, not more. “Since you’ve seen, what do you propose to do about it?” the king said.

“Ah… do about it?” If doing anything about it had occurred to the Prince of Hisardzik, he concealed it very well.

But Grus nodded. “Yes, do about it. Ships from Hisardzik raided the coast of Avornis. Hisardzik sided with Vasilko and against me. Do you think you can get away with that and not pay a price?”

By the look on Lazutin’s face, he’d thought exactly that. He didn’t much take to the idea of discovering he might be mistaken, either. “If you think you can take my city as you took Nishevatz, Your Majesty, you had better think again.”

“Not this late in the year, certainly, Your Highness,” Grus replied in silky tones, and Lazutin looked smug. But then Grus went on, “But if I turned my men loose and did a proper job of ravaging your fields, you would have a lean time of it this winter.”

By the way Prince Lazutin bared his teeth, that had hit home. “You might tempt me to go back to the Banished One, you know,” he observed.

Yes, he was a cool customer. “I’ll take the chance,” Grus said, “for you’ve seen the true gods are stronger. You would do better to show you are sorry because you made a mistake before than you would to go back to it.”

“Would I?” Lazutin said bleakly. Grus nodded. The Prince of Hisardzik scowled at him. “How sorry would you expect me to show I am?”

“Fifty thousand pieces of silver, or the equivalent weight,” Grus answered, “and another fifty thousand a year for the next ten years.”

Lazutin turned purple. He said several things in the Chernagor language that Sverki didn’t translate. The Avornan who spoke the northern tongue stirred, but Grus declined to look his way. Finally, through Sverki, Lazutin sputtered, “This is an outrage! A robbery!”

“I’d sooner think of it as paying for the damage your pirates did, with interest to remind you those games can be expensive,” Grus said.

Lazutin promptly proved he was a prince of merchants and a merchant prince—he started haggling with Grus over how much he would have to pay and for how long. Grus let him dicker the settlement down to a first payment of forty thousand plus thirty-five thousand a year for eight years. He was willing not to take all of Lazutin’s pride. This way, the prince could go back to his people and tell them he’d gotten something from the hard-hearted King of Avornis.

Grus did say, “We’ll leave your lands as soon as we receive the first payment.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Lazutin said. After a moment, he chuckled ruefully. “You’re wasted on the Avornans, Your Majesty. Do you know that? You should have been born a Chernagor.”

“A pleasant compliment,” said Grus, who supposed Lazutin had meant it that way. “I am what I am, though.” And what I am right now is the fellow holding the whip hand.

“So you are,” Lazutin said sourly. “What you are now is a nuisance to Hisardsik.”

“What you were before was a nuisance to Avornis,” Grus replied. “Do you think the one has nothing to do with the other?”

Prince Lazutin plainly thought just that. Why shouldn’t he have been able to do as he pleased without worrying about consequences? What pirate ever needed to have such worries? After he sailed away, what could the folk whose coasts he had raided do? Here, it turned out the Avornans could do more than he had dreamed.

“The sooner we have the payment, the sooner we’ll leave your land,” Grus said pointedly, “and the sooner you can start the harvest.”

Fury filled Lazutin’s face. But it was impotent fury, for his warriors were shut up inside Hisardzik. They could stand siege, yes, but they could not break out. If Grus felt like burning the countryside instead of trying to break into the city, what could they do about it? Nothing, as their prince knew.

“You’ll have it,” Lazutin said. Then he turned his back and stalked off to Hisardzik. Sverki the interpreter stalked after him, mimicking his walk as expertly as he had conveyed his tone.

“He doesn’t love you. He’s not going to, either,” Hirundo said.

“I don’t care if he loves me or not,” Grus said. “I want him to take me seriously. By Olor’s beard, he’ll do that from now on.”

“Oh, darling!” The general sounded like a breathless young girl. “Tell me you—you take me seriously!”

Grus couldn’t take him seriously. Laughing, he made as though to throw something at him. Hirundo ducked. “Miserable troublemaker,” Grus said. By the way Hirundo bowed, it might have been highest praise.

But Grus stopped laughing when he read the letter from King Lanius that had caught up with his army on the march between Nishevatz and Hisardzik. Lanius sounded as dispassionate as any man could about what had happened between Ortalis and Bubulcus. However dispassionate he sounded, that made the servant no less dead. The penalty Lanius had imposed on Ortalis struck Grus as adequate, but only barely.

After rereading Lanius’ letter several times, Grus sighed. Yes, Ortalis had been provoked. But striking a man in a fit of fury and killing one were far different things. Ortalis had always had a temper. Every so often, it got away from him. This time, he’d done something irrevocable.

What am I going to do with him? Grus wondered. For a long time, he’d thought Ortalis would outgrow his vicious streak, and ignored it. That hadn’t worked. Then he’d tried to punish his son harshly enough to drive it out of him, and that hadn’t worked, either. What was left? The only thing he could see was accepting that Ortalis was as he was and trying to minimize the damage he did.

“A fine thing for my son,” Grus muttered.

When Grus took the Avornan throne, he had assumed Ortalis would succeed him on it, with Lanius remaining in the background to give the new rulers a whiff of respectability. What else was a legitimate son for? But he’d begun to wonder some time before. His son-in-law seemed more capable than he had expected, and Ortalis… Ortalis kept doing things where damage needed minimizing.

He read Lanius’ letter one more time. The king from the ancient dynasty really had done as much as he could. If his account was to be believed, the servants despised Ortalis now only a little more than they had before. Considering what might have been, that amounted to a triumph of sorts. Grus hadn’t imagined he could feel a certain debt toward his son-in-law, but he did.

Prince Lazutin made the payment of forty thousand pieces of silver the day after he agreed to it with Grus. The prince did not accompany the men bringing out the sacks of silver coins. The interpreter, Sverki, did. “Tell His Highness I thank him for this,” Grus said (after he’d had a few of the sacks opened to make sure they really did hold silver and not, say, scrap iron).

“You are most welcome, I am sure,” Sverki said, sounding and acting like Lazutin even when the Prince of Hisardzik wasn’t there.

“I look forward to receiving the rest of the payments, too,” Grus said.

“I am sure you do,” Sverki replied. Something in his tone made Grus look up sharply. He sounded and acted a little too much like Lazutin, perhaps. If the interpreter here was any guide to what the prince felt, Grus got the idea he would be wise not to hold his breath waiting for future payments to come down to the city of Avornis.

What could he do about that? He said, “If the payments do not come, Hisardzik will not trade with Avornis, and we may call on you up here again. Make sure your principal understands that.”

Sverki looked as mutinous as Lazutin would have, too. “I will,” he said sulkily. Grus hid a smile. He’d gotten his message across.