The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER FIVE

King Grus looked from Hirundo to Pterocles to Vsevolod, then back again. They nodded, one after another. Grus’ eyes went to the walls of Nishevatz. They frowned down at him, as they had ever since the Avornan army came before them. “We are agreed?” Grus said. “This is the only thing we have left to do?”

The general, the wizard, and the deposed Prince of Nishevatz all nodded again. Hirundo said, “If we didn’t come to fight, why did we come?”

“I haven’t got an answer for that,” Grus said. But oh, how I wish I did! Since he didn’t, he also nodded, brusquely. “All right, then. We’ll see what happens. Go to your places. I know you’ll all do everything you can.”

Hirundo and Pterocles hurried away. Vsevolod’s place was by Grus. “I thank you for this,” he said in his ponderous Avornan. “I will do, my folk will do, all things possible to do to help.”

“I know.” Grus turned away. He thought Vsevolod meant well, but still had other things on his mind. A trumpeter stood by, face tense and alert. Grus pointed to him. “Signal the attack.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The trumpeter raised the horn to his lips. Martial music rang out. Only for a moment did it come from one trumpet alone. Then every horn player in the Avornan army blared forth the identical call.

Cheering Avornan soldiers swarmed forward. Grus wouldn’t have cheered, not attacking a place like Nishevatz. Maybe the common soldiers didn’t realize what they were up against. Some of them came within arrow range of that formidable wall and started shooting at the defenders on top of it, trying to make them keep their heads down. Others carried scaling ladders that they leaned up against the gray stone blocks. More Avornans—and some Chernagors, too—raced up the ladders toward the top of the wall.

“Come on!” Grus muttered, watching them through the clouds of dust the assault kicked up. “Come on, you mad bastards! You can do it! You can!”

He blinked. Beside him, King Vsevolod exclaimed in his own guttural language. Vsevolod grabbed Grus’ arm, hard enough to hurt. The old man still had strength. “What is that?” he said. “I see ladders. Then I see no ladders.”

Pterocles was doing his job. “I hope Prince Vasilko’s men don’t see them, either,” Grus said. “If the men can get to the top of the wall, get down into Nishevatz…”

“Yes,” Vsevolod said. “Then to my son I have some things to say.” His big, gnarled hands opened and closed, opened and closed. Grus hadn’t cared to be caught in that grip, and didn’t think Vasilko would, either.

Even from so far away, the din was tremendous, deafening. Men shouted and screamed. Armor clattered. Dart-throwing engines bucked and snapped. Stones crashed down on soldiers storming up—the wizard’s magic wasn’t perfect. Ladders went over or broke, spilling soldiers off them.

And, much closer than the walls of Nishevatz, Pterocles suddenly howled like a wounded wolf. “Noooo!” he cried, his voice getting higher and shriller every instant. All at once, every siege ladder became fully visible again. The ladders started toppling one after another when that happened. Pterocles also toppled, still wailing.

Vsevolod said something in his own language that sounded incandescent. Grus said the foulest things he knew how to say in Avornan. None of their curses did any good. It quickly grew plain the assault on the wall wouldn’t do any good, either.

Grus hauled Pterocles to his feet. The wizard’s face was a mask of pain. Grus shook him. “Do something!” he shouted. “Don’t just sound like a wheel that needs grease. Do something!”

“I can’t.” Pterocles didn’t just sound like an ungreased wheel. He sounded like a man who might be about to die, and who knew it. “I can’t, Your Majesty. He’s too strong. What happened to me before, this is ten times worse—a hundred times. Whoever’s in there, he’s too strong for me.” Tears ran down his cheeks. Grus didn’t think he knew he shed them.

The king shook the wizard again. “You have to try. By the gods, Pterocles, the soldiers are depending on you. The kingdom is depending on you.”

“I can’t,” Pterocles whispered, but from somewhere he found strength. He straightened. Grus let go of him. He still swayed, but he stayed on his feet. “I’ll try,” he said, even more quietly than before. “I don’t know what will happen to me, but I’ll try.”

Before Grus could even praise him, he exploded into motion. He had a long, angular frame, and every separate part of him seemed to be moving in a different direction. Grus had never seen a wizard incant so furiously. It was as though Pterocles were taking pieces of his pain and flinging them back into Nishevatz. His magic didn’t seemed aimed at the Chernagor soldiers on the walls anymore. Whatever he was doing, he was doing against—doing to—the wizard who’d come so close to killing him moments before.

“Take that!” he shouted again and again. “Take that, and see how you like it!”

Vsevolod nudged Grus. “He is mad,” the old Chernagor said, and tapped the side of his head with a forefinger.

“Sometimes, with a wizard, it helps,” Grus said. But he wondered exactly whom Pterocles was fighting. Was it some Chernagor wizard who, like Vasilko, had abandoned the gods and turned to the Banished One, or was it the being the Menteshe called the Fallen Star himself, in his own person? If it was the Banished One himself, could any merely mortal wizard stand against him?

Before Grus got even a hint of an answer, Hirundo distracted him. The general was bleeding from a cut over one eye. His gilded helmet had a dent in it, and was jammed down over one ear, which also bled. He seemed unaware of the small wounds. “Your Majesty, we can’t get over the wall,” he said without preamble. “You’re just throwing more men away if you keep trying.”

“No hope?” Grus asked.

“None. Not a bit. No chance.” Hirundo sounded absolutely certain.

“All right. Pull them back,” Grus said. The general bowed and hurried away. Vsevolod made a wordless noise full of fury and pain. He turned his back on Grus. Grus started to tell him he was sorry, but checked himself. If Vsevolod couldn’t figure that out without being told, too bad.

“Take that!” Pterocles shouted again, and laughed a wild, crazy laugh. “Ha! See how you like it this time!”

He thought he was getting home against whoever or whatever his foe was. And the more confident he grew, the harder and quicker came the spells he cast. Maybe—probably—it was madness, but it was inspired madness.

And then, like a man who’d been hit square in the jaw, Pterocles toppled, right in the middle of an incantation. All his bones might have turned to water. When Grus stooped beside him, he was sure the wizard was dead. But, to his surprise, Pterocles went on breathing and still had a pulse. Grus slapped him in the face, none too gently, to try to bring him around. He stirred and muttered, but would not wake.

“Will he have any mind when he rouses?” Vsevolod asked.

Grus could only shrug. “We’ll have to see, that’s all. I just hope he does wake up. Something bigger than he was hit him there.”

“It is mark of Banished One,” the Prince of Nishevatz declared. Grus found himself nodding. He didn’t see what else it could be, either.

Hirundo, meanwhile, pulled the Avornans back from the walls of the city-state where Vsevolod had ruled for so long. Many of them limped and bled. More than a few helped wounded comrades escape the rain of stones and arrows from the battlements.

“What now?” Vsevolod asked.

The last time Grus had faced that question, he’d decided to try to storm Nishevatz. Now he’d not only tried that, he’d also seen how thoroughly it didn’t work. He gave the man who’d asked for his help the only answer he could—a shrug. “Your Highness, right now I just don’t know what to tell you.”

He waited for Vsevolod to get angry. Instead, the Chernagor nodded in dour approval. “At least you do not give me opium in honey sauce. This is something. You make no fog of pretty, sweet-smelling promises to lull me to sleep and make me not notice you say nothing.”

“No. I come right out and say nothing,” Grus replied.

“Is better.” Prince Vsevolod sounded certain. Grus had his doubts.

King Lanius read the letter aloud to Queen Sosia, Queen Estrilda, Prince Ortalis, and Arch-Hallow Anser—Grus’ daughter, wife, legitimate son, and bastard. “ ‘And so we were repulsed from the walls of Nishevatz,’ Grus writes,” he said. “‘I should never have tried to storm them, but looking back is always easier than looking forward.’ ”

“What will he do now?” The question, which should have come from Ortalis’ lips if he had the least bit of interest in ruling Avornis, instead came from Estrilda’s.

“I’m just getting to that,” Lanius answered. “He writes, ‘I do not know what I’ll do next. I think I will stay in front of the city and see what happens next inside of it. Maybe Vasilko will make himself hated enough to spark an uprising against him. I can hope, anyhow.’ ”

He would have written a much more formal, much more detailed account of the campaign than Grus had. But Grus’ letter had an interest, an appeal, of its own. If it were three hundred years old and I’d found it in the archives, I’d be delighted, Lanius thought. It makes me feel I’m there.

Anser asked, “What happened to the wizard?”

“To Pterocles? That’s farther down. Here, this is what he says. ‘Pterocles started coming back to himself the morning after he lost the magical fight with the wizard in Nishevatz—or with the wizard’s Master. He knows who he is, and where, but he is not yet strong enough to try sorcery. This gives me one more reason to wait and see what happens here.’ ”

“He’s probably doing the smart thing by not charging ahead with the war,” Sosia said.

“Yes, probably,” Lanius agreed. “But if we can’t take Nishevatz with our soldiers or with our magic, what are we doing there?”

His wife had no answer for that. Lanius had none, either. He wondered if Grus did. He also wondered whether to write to the other King of Avornis and ask him. But he didn’t need long to decide not to. Grus would be suspicious because Lanius had ordered soldiers to the south. If he also wrote a letter questioning what Grus was doing up in the Chernagor country, the other king might suspect him of ambitions he didn’t have. Even more dangerous, Grus might suspect him of ambitions he did have.

Sosia said, “You’re right—if we aren’t doing anything worthwhile up there, our men ought to come back to Avornis.”

“If Grus decides he needs to do that, I expect he will,” Lanius answered, and wondered if Grus would have the sense to cut his losses. The other king was usually a man who saw what needed doing and did it.

Less than a week later, Captain Icterus rode back into the city of Avornis and reported to Lanius. The grin on the officer’s face told the king most of what he needed to know before Icterus started talking. When he did speak, he got his message into one sentence. “You don’t need to worry about Baron Clamator anymore, Your Majesty.”

“That’s good news, Captain,” Lanius said. “And how did it happen that I don’t?”

Icterus’ grin got wider. “We happened to ride past him as he was on his way to drink with the baron who lives the next castle to the west. We scooped him up smooth as you please, and he was on his way to the Maze before his people even knew he was missing.”

“Well done, Colonel!” Lanius said, and Icterus’ smile got bigger and brighter still. Lanius hadn’t thought it could.

The good news kept the king happy the rest of the morning. But he went back to worrying about the north as he examined tax records from the provinces later in the day. Almost in spite of himself, he was learning how the kingdom was administered. The numbers were all they should have been—better than Lanius had expected, in fact. But that let him worry more about the land of the Chernagors. Had Pterocles met a powerful wizard who inclined toward the Banished One? Or had the Banished One himself reached out from the far south to smite the Avornan wizard? Maybe it didn’t matter. With the Banished One, though—with Milvago that was—how could any man say for certain?

And then Lanius got distracted again, this time much more pleasantly. A serving woman stuck her head into the chamber where he was working and said, “I beg pardon, Your Majesty, but may I speak to you for a moment?”

“Yes, of course,” Lanius answered. “What do you want—uh—?” He couldn’t come up with her name.

“I’m Cristata, Your Majesty,” she said. She was a few years younger than Lanius—say, about twenty—with light brown hair, green eyes, a pert nose, and everything else a girl of about twenty should have. But she looked so nervous and fearful, the king almost didn’t notice how pretty she was.

“Say whatever you want, Cristata,” he told her now. “Whatever it is, I promise it won’t land you in trouble.”

That visibly lifted her spirits; the smile she gave him was dazzling enough to lift his, too. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” she breathed, but then looked worried again. She asked, “Even if it’s about… someone in the royal family?”

Lanius grimaced. He had a fear of his own now—that he knew what sort of thing Cristata was going to talk about. He had to answer quickly, to make her see he had no second thoughts. “Even then.” He made his voice as firm as he could.

“Will you swear by the gods?” He hadn’t satisfied her.

“By the gods,” he declared. “By all the gods in the heavens.” That left Milvago—the Banished One—out.

“All right, then,” Cristata said. “This has to do with Prince Ortalis, Your Majesty. Remember, you swore.”

“I remember.” Lanius started to tell her he’d heard stories about Ortalis before. But the words never passed his lips. That wasn’t fair to Grus’ legitimate son. What he’d heard before could have been lies. He didn’t think so, but it could have been. And, for that matter, what Cristata was about to tell him might be a lie, too. Lying about a prince to a king was a risky business for a servant, yet who could say for certain? Ortalis might—no, Ortalis was bound to—have enemies who could use her as a tool. With a sigh, Lanius said, “Go ahead.”

Cristata did. The way she told her story made Lanius think it was likely true. Ortalis’ good looks and his status had both drawn her. That seemed plausible—and even had Ortalis been wizened and homely, a serving girl would have taken a chance if she said no when he beckoned. That wasn’t fair. It probably wasn’t right. But it was the way life worked. Lanius had taken advantage of it himself, back in the days before he was married.

Everything between Ortalis and Cristata seemed to have started well. He’d been sweet. He’d given her presents. She didn’t try to hide that she’d said yes for reasons partly mercenary, which again made Lanius more inclined to believe her.

Little by little, things had gone wrong. Cristata had trouble saying exactly when. Some of what later seemed dreadful had been exciting at the time… at first, anyhow. But when she did begin to get alarmed, she found herself in too deep to get away easily. Her voice became bitter. “By then, I was just a piece of meat for him, a piece of meat that had the right kind of holes. Before long, he even stopped caring about those.”

She paused. Lanius didn’t know what to say. Not knowing, he made a questioning noise.

It must have meant something to Cristata. Nodding as though he’d just made a clever comment, she said, “I can show you some of it. I can show you all of it if you like, but some will do.” Her linen tunic fit loosely. As she turned her back on Lanius, she slipped it down off one shoulder, baring what should have been soft, smooth skin.

“Oh,” he said, and involuntarily closed his eyes. He didn’t think anyone with a grudge against Ortalis could have persuaded her to go through with… that for money.

She quickly set her tunic to rights again. “At least it did heal,” she said matter-of-factly. “And he gave me… something for it afterwards. I thought about just taking that and keeping quiet. But is it right, Your Majesty, when somebody can just take somebody else and use her for a toy? What would he have done if he’d killed me? He could have, easy enough. Some of the girls who’ve left the court… Did they really leave, or did they disappear a different way?”

Lanius had wondered the same thing. But no one had ever found anything connecting Ortalis to those disappearances—except for the couple of maidservants who’d gone back to the provinces well rewarded for keeping their mouths shut afterwards. Cristata, evidently, didn’t want to go that way. Lanius asked her, “What do you think I should do?”

“Punish him,” she said at once. “You’re the king, aren’t you?”

The real answer to that question was, yes and no. He reigned, but he hardly ruled. Explaining his own troubles, though, would do Cristata no good. He said, “King Grus would be a better one to do that than I am.”

Cristata sent him a look he was more used to feeling on his own face than to seeing on someone else’s. The look said, My, you’re not as smart as I thought you were, are you? Cristata herself said, carefully, “Prince Ortalis is His Majesty’s son.” Sure enough, she might have been speaking to an idiot child.

“Yes, I know,” Lanius answered. “But King Grus, please believe me, doesn’t like him doing these things.” Cristata looked eloquently unconvinced. Sighing, Lanius added, “And King Grus, please believe me, is also the one who has the power to punish him when he does these things. I am not, and I do not.”

“Oh,” she said in a dull voice. “I should have realized that, shouldn’t I? I’m sorry I bothered you, Your Majesty.”

“It wasn’t a bother. I wish I could do more. You’re—” Lanius stopped. He’d been about to say something like, You’re too pretty for it to have been a bother. If he did say something like that, it would be the first step toward complicating his life with Sosia. And, all too likely, Cristata would have heard the same sort of thing from Ortalis. She’d believed it from him, and been sorry afterwards. What did she think Lanius might do to her if she were rash enough to believe again?

Even though he’d stopped, her eyes showed she understood what he’d meant. Now she was the one who sighed. Perhaps as much to herself as to him, she said, “I used to think being pretty was nice. If you’d told me it was dangerous…” She shrugged—prettily. “I’m sorry I took up your time, Your Majesty.” Before Lanius could find anything to say, she swept out of the little chamber.

The king spent the next few minutes cursing his brother-in-law, not so much for exactly what Ortalis had done as for making Lanius himself embarrassed to be a man.

No one knew the river galleys that prowled Avornan waters better than King Grus. The deep-bellied, tall-masted ships that went into and out of Nishevatz were a different breed of vessel altogether, even more different than cart horses from jumpers. Sailing on the Northern Sea was not the same business as going up and down the Nine Rivers that cut the Avornan plain.

“We need ships of our own,” Grus said to Hirundo. “Without them, we’ll never pry Vasilko out of that city.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the general answered. “We do need ships. But where will we get ’em? Build ’em ourselves? We haven’t got the woodworkers to build ’em or sailors to man ’em. We haven’t got the time, either. We might hire ’em from the Chernagors, except the next Chernagor city-state that wants to let us use any’ll be the first.”

“I know,” Grus said. “They think if we have ships, we’ll use ’em against them next.”

Hirundo didn’t reply. Many years before, the Chernagor city-states had belonged to Avornis. A strong king might want to take them back again. Grus liked to think of himself as a strong king. That the Chernagors evidently thought of him the same way was a compliment of sorts. It was, at the moment, a compliment he could have done without.

His chief wizard walked by. “How are you, Pterocles?” Grus called.

“How am I?” Pterocles echoed, his voice and expression both vague. “I’ve… been better.”

He hadn’t been the same since the sorcerer inside Nishevatz laid him low. Grus still marveled that he’d survived. So did all the other Avornan wizards who’d since helped him try to recover. Maybe the same thing would have happened to Alca—exiled from the capital, if not from Grus’ heart—had the same spell struck her. Maybe.

Did the power that had smashed Pterocles mean the magic came from the Banished One himself, and not from one of his mortal minions? Like Vsevolod, the Avornan wizards seemed to think so. They didn’t want to commit themselves—one more reason Grus wished he had straight-talking Alca at his side—but that was the impression he got.

“Can you work magic at need?” Grus asked.

“I suppose so.” But Pterocles didn’t sound as though he fully believed it.

Grus didn’t fully believe it, either. Pterocles still looked and acted like a man who’d been hit over the head with a large, pointy rock. Sometimes he seemed better, sometimes worse, but even better didn’t mean the same as good.

Under his own tunic, Grus wore an old protective amulet, one he’d had since before becoming King of Avornis. It had helped save his life once, when Queen Certhia, Lanius’ mother, tried to slay him by sorcery. Would it protect him if the Banished One tried to do the same thing? Grus had his doubts. He knew he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

Pterocles said, “Half of me makes more of a wizard than a lot of these odds and sods, Your Majesty—or half of me would, if I didn’t feel so… empty inside.” He tapped the side of his head with his fist. It didn’t sound like a jar from which all the wine was gone, but Grus— and maybe Pterocles, too—thought it should have.

“You’ll be all right.” Grus hoped he was telling the truth. When he added, “You are getting better,” he felt on safer ground. On the other hand, how much of a compliment was that? If Pterocles hadn’t gotten any better, the sorcerous stroke he’d taken would have laid him on his pyre.

A messenger came up to Grus. He stood there waiting to be noticed. When Grus nodded to him, he said, “Your Majesty, a sack of letters from Avornis is here.”

“Oh, good,” Grus said. “I do want to keep track of what’s going on back home.” He’d already stayed out of the kingdom longer than he’d intended. Back in the capital, Lanius behaved more like a real king every day. If he wanted to try ousting Grus, he might have a chance now. From what Grus had seen, though, Lanius didn’t like actually governing. Grus chuckled, not that he really felt amused. That was a small, flimsy platform on which to rest his own rule.

He turned to walk back to his tent and look at those letters. He hadn’t gone far, though, before another messenger ran up to him. This one didn’t wait to be noticed. He shouted, “Your Majesty, they’re coming!”

“Who’s coming?” Grus asked.

“Chernagors! A whole army of Chernagors, from out of the east!” the messenger answered. “They aren’t on their way to ask us to dance, either.”

“No?” Grus slid gracefully from heel to toe and back again. The messenger stared at him. He sighed. “Well, probably not. Tell me more.”

“We sent men to them to find out if they were coming to help us and Prince Vsevolod,” the messenger said. “They shot at our men.”

“Then they probably aren’t.” Grus’ eyes involuntarily went back to the walls of Nishevatz. “If they aren’t coming to help Vsevolod, Vasilko will be glad to see them. Nice to think someone is, eh?”

“Er—yes.” The messenger didn’t seem to think that was good news. Grus didn’t think it was good news, either. Unlike the messenger, he knew just how bad it was liable to be.

He ordered his own army into line of battle facing east. Things could have been worse. He supposed they could have been worse, anyhow. The army could have gone on about the business of besieging Nishevatz without sending scouts out to the east and west. That would have been worse, sure enough. The Chernagors from the east might have crashed into his force unsuspected. Instead of a mere disaster, he would have had a catastrophe on his hands then.

Avornan soldiers were still taking their places when Grus saw a cloud of dust on the coastal road that came out of the east. He’d had some practice judging the clouds of dust advancing armies kicked up. He turned to Hirundo, who’d had considerably more. “Looks like a lot of Chernagors,” he said.

“Does, doesn’t it?” Hirundo agreed. “Of course, they may be playing games with us. Send some horses along in front of an army with saplings fastened on behind them and they’ll stir up enough dust to make you think every soldier in the world is heading your way.”

“Do you think that’s likely here?” Grus inquired.

Hirundo pursed his lips. “I’d like to,” he answered. But that wasn’t what the king had asked. Reluctantly, the general shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. The scouts saw Chernagors, lots of Chernagors. I’m going to pull some men back out of the line, if that’s all right with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to have a reserve handy, in case Vasilko decides to sally from Nishevatz while we’re busy with these other bastards.” Hirundo gave an airy wave of the hand. “Nothing puts a hole in your day like getting attacked from two directions at once, if you know what I mean.

“I wish I didn’t, but I do,” Grus said heavily. “That’s a good idea. See to it.” Hirundo sketched a salute and hurried off.

Prince Vsevolod came up to Grus. He tugged on the sleeve of the king’s tunic. “Your Majesty, I am sorry I put you in this place,” he said. “I fight hard for you.” His age-spotted hand fell to the hilt of his sword.

“Thank you, your Highness. We’ll all do some fighting before long,” Grus replied. For him, that would mean donning a mailshirt and mounting a horse. He hated fighting from horseback, as anyone who’d spent more time on a river galley would have. A tilting deck was one thing, a rearing mount something else again. He clapped Vsevolod on the back. “You didn’t put me in this place. Vasilko and the Banished One did. I know who my enemies are.”

“I thank you, Your Majesty. You are all King of Avornis should be,” Vsevolod said. “I fight hard. You see.”

“Good.” Grus raised his voice and called, “Let’s move out against them,” to Hirundo. He went on, “We don’t want them thinking we’re afraid to face them.”

“Afraid to face a bunch of Chernagors? We’d better not be!” Hirundo sounded light and cheerful, for the benefit of his men, and probably for Grus’ benefit, too. But the general knew—and King Grus also knew— the traders who lived by the Northern Sea made formidable warriors when they took it into their heads to fight.

Avornan trumpets blared. Shouting Grus’ name and Prince Vsevolod’s (many of them making a mess of it), the soldiers rode and marched forward. Soon, through the dust ahead, Grus made out sun-sparkles off spearheads and swords, helmets and coats of mail. The Chernagors rode big, ponderous horses, not fast but heavy and strong enough to be formidable in the charge.

Hirundo shouted orders. Like a painter working on a fresco inside a temple, he saw how he wanted everything to go long before the scene was done. Avornan mounted archers galloped out to the wings and started peppering the Chernagors with arrows. Some of the big, stocky men from the north slid out of their saddles and crashed to the ground. Some of the big, stocky horses they rode crashed down, too. Un-wounded beasts tripped over them and also fell.

But most of the Chernagors ignored the arrows and kept coming. They had archers of their own, more of them afoot than on horseback, and started shooting at Grus’ men as soon as they got into range. Arrows thudded into shields. They clattered off helms and armor. Now and then, they smacked home against flesh. Every cry of pain made Grus flinch.

An arrow hissed past his head, sounding malevolent as a wasp. A few inches to one side and he would have been screaming, too. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Not far away, an Avornan took an arrow in the face and fell from his horse without a sound. He never knew what hit him. That was an easy way to go, easier than most men got on the battlefield or off it.

Grus had hoped Hirundo’s mounted archers would make the Chernagors think twice about closing with his army. But no. Shouting fierce-sounding incomprehensibilities in their own throaty language, the bushy-bearded warriors slammed into their Avornan foes.

“Come on, men! Let’s show them what we can do now that we’ve got them in the open!” Grus shouted. “Up until now, they’ve hidden in forts, afraid to meet us face-to-face.” Had he commanded the Chernagors, he would have done the same thing, which had nothing to do with anything when he was trying to hearten his men. “Let ’em see they knew what they were doing when they wouldn’t come out against us.”

A few heartbeats later, he was trading sword strokes with a large Chernagor who had a large wart by the side of his nose. After almost cutting off his own horse s ear, Grus managed to wound the enemy warrior. The fellow howled pain-filled curses at him. The fighting swept them apart. As so often happened, Grus never found out what happened to the foe.

Shouts from the north drew the king’s attention. As Hirundo had feared, Prince Vasilko’s men were swarming out of Nishevatz and into the fight. Grus wondered whether the general had pulled enough soldiers to hold them off before they took the main part of the Avornan army in the flank and rolled it up. One way or the other, he would find out.

His army didn’t come to pieces, which proved Hirundo had a good notion of what he was doing after all. But the Avornans didn’t win— they didn’t come close to winning—the sort of victory Grus would have wanted. All he could do was fight hard and send men now here, now there, to shore up weak spots in his line. He had the feeling the Chernagor generals were doing the same thing; it certainly seemed to be a battle with no subtlety, no surprises.

Late in the afternoon, Vasilko’s sortie collapsed. The men from Nishevatz still on their feet streamed back into the city. Had things been going better in the fight against the rest of the Chernagors, Grus’ men might have chased them harder and gotten into Nishevatz with them. But things weren’t, and the Avornans didn’t. Having only one foe to worry about struck Grus as being good enough for the time being.

At last, sullenly, the rest of the Chernagors withdrew from the field. It was a victory, of sorts. Grus thought about ordering a pursuit. He thought about it, looked at how exhausted and battered his own men were, and changed his mind. Hirundo rode up to him and dismounted. The general looked as weary as Grus felt. “Well, Your Majesty, we threw ’em back,” he said. “Threw ’em back twice, as a matter of fact.”

Grus nodded. The motion made some bones in his neck pop like cracking knuckles. “Yes, we did,” he said, and yawned enormously. “King Olor’s beard, but I’m worn.”

“Me, too,” Hirundo said. “We did everything we could do there, though.”

“Yes,” Grus said again. He wished he weren’t agreeing. They’d done everything they could, and they were no closer to ousting Vasilko from Nishevatz or restoring Vsevolod. Grus looked around for the rightful Prince of Nishevatz, but didn’t see him.

“Now the next interesting question,” Hirundo said, “is whether the Chernagors will come back at us tomorrow, or whether they’ve had enough.”

“Interesting,” Grus repeated. “Well, that’s one way to put it. What do you think?”

“Hard to say,” Hirundo answered. “I wouldn’t care to send this army forward to attack them tomorrow, and we had the better of it today. But you never can tell. Some generals are like goats—they just keep butting.”

“Would one more Chernagor attack be likelier to ruin them or us?” Grus asked.

“Another good question,” his general replied. “I think it’s likelier to ruin them, but you don’t know until the fight starts. For that matter, another fight where everybody’s torn up could ruin both sides.”

“You’re full of cheery notions, aren’t you?”

Hirundo bowed. Something in his back creaked, too. “I’m supposed to think about these things. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t.”

“I know.” Grus looked around for Vsevolod again. When he didn’t see him, he yelled for a messenger. “Find out if the prince is hale,” he told the young man. “If he is, tell him I’d like to see him when he gets the chance.”

Nodding, the youngster hurried off. A few minutes later, Prince Vsevolod joined Grus. The ousted lord of Nishevatz wasn’t perfectly hale. He had a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. Even so, he waved aside Grus’ worried questions. “You should see man who did this to me,” he said. “Somewhere now, ravens pick out his eyes.”

“Good,” Grus said. “I have a question for you.”

“Ask,” Vsevolod said.

“How likely is it that we’ll see more Chernagor armies that don’t want us in this country anymore?”

Vsevolod frowned. Even before donning the bandage, he’d had a face made for frowning. With it, he looked like a man contemplating his own doom and not liking what he saw. “It could be,” he said at last. “Yes, it could be.”

“How likely do you think it is?” Grus persisted.

Now Prince Vsevolod looked as though he hated him. “If I were prince in another city-state, I would lead forth my warriors,” he said.

“I was afraid of that,” Grus said. “We don’t have the men here to fight off every Chernagor breathing, you know.”

“What will you do, then?” Vsevolod asked in turn. “Will you say you are beaten? Will you run back to Avornis with tail between your legs?”

He’s trying to make me ashamed, Grus realized. He’s trying to embarrass me into staying up here and going on with the war. Grus understood why the Prince of Nishevatz was doing that. Had he worn Vsevolod’s boots, he wouldn’t have wanted his ally to give up the fight, either. Being who and what he was, though, he didn’t want to risk throwing away his whole army. And so, regretfully, he said, “Yes.”