The Scepter's return

CHAPTER ONE

Down in the southern part of the Kingdom of Avornis, spring had come some little while before. It was just now reaching the capital. The city of Avornis had had a long, hard winter. It wasn't as bad as it could have been — the Banished One hadn't tried to bury the city in snow and ice, as he had a few years earlier — but no one who'd been through it would have called it mild.

Today, King Lanius was glad to be able to leave the royal palace without a hooded fur cloak that reached down to the ground and sturdy felt boots with wool socks inside them to keep his toes from freezing. His breath still smoked when he did go out, but the icicles had melted from under the eaves of steep-pitched slate roofs and all the snow was gone from the streets, leaving those that weren't cobblestoned (which was most of them) calf-deep in stinking mud.

A few of the oaks and maples around the palace showed the buds that foretold new leaves. Some of the season's earliest birds perched in the mostly bare branches. The songs they sang sounded relieved and perhaps a little surprised; as though they too had trouble believing winter might be over.

Prince Crex and Princess Pitta, Lanius' son and daughter, stood beside him. They were happier to get out of the palace than he was. Snowball fights and snowmen were all very well, but they'd had to spend most of the winter indoors, and that had chafed at them. If the smell from those nearby muddy streets bothered them, they didn't show it.

Pitta pointed to one of the birds in the closest oak. "What kind is that, Father?" she asked, confident Lanius would know. People were always confident Lanius knew any number of small, mostly useless things. They were usually right, too.

"The one on that second branch there?" he asked, squinting toward it — he was a bit shortsighted. His daughter nodded. He said, "That's a goldfinch."

"How come it isn't gold, then?" Crex asked.

And Lanius knew that, too. "They're only gold in the later spring and the summer and the first part of fall," he answered. "The rest of the time, they're this sort of greenish yellow color. But you can tell what they are by the song they sing." He whistled a few notes of it, not very well.

He wondered if Crex would ask why the birds were gold only half the time. He would have, when he was a boy. But he'd always been wildly inquisitive about everything. He still was. Crex — and Pitta, too — had only ordinary children's curiosity.

He smiled down at them with a strange blend of affection and exasperation. Most ways, they took after their mother's side of the family, not his. Queen Sosia was King Grus' daughter, and Grus was as practical and hardheaded a man as had ever been born. Lanius did not like his father-in-law very much. How could he, when Grus had grafted his family onto Avornis' ancient royal dynasty and held in his own hands most of the royal power? That Grus' hands were extremely capable made matters no better. If anything, it made them worse.

Crex and Pitta even took after that side of the family in their looks. They were solidly made, where Lanius was tall and on the scrawny side. His beard had always been scraggly. Crex didn't have one yet, of course, but Lanius was ready to bet it would come in thick and luxuriant, like Grus'.

The children looked more like their mother than they did like him, too. Lanius laughed at himself. That wasn't so bad. He was ordinary at best, while Sosia was a nice-looking woman. Her brother, Prince Ortalis, was darkly handsome. Ortalis' problems lay elsewhere. In looks, he and Sosia both resembled Grus' wife, Queen Estrilda. The one who looked like Grus, all nose and chin, was his bastard boy, the Arch-Hallow Anser. Yet Anser was as good-natured as Grus was tough. You never could tell.

"I'll bet the moncats would like climbing the trees," Crex said.

Lanius laughed again, this time out loud. "I'll bet they would, too," he said. "And I'll bet they'd get away if we ever gave them the chance. That's why they stay inside the palace, and mostly inside their rooms."

Mostly. They were supposed to stay in their rooms all the time. The Chernagors had brought him his first pair of moncats from an island somewhere in the Northern Sea. The beasts were much like house cats, except that they had clawed, gripping hands and feet like a monkey's — hence the name they'd gotten here. They also added a monkey's sharp cleverness to a cat's unreliability. Lanius sometimes thought it was a good thing they'd never figured out the bow and arrow, or they might be the ones keeping people caged up.

Pitta echoed that thought, asking, "How does Pouncer keep getting away all the time, Father?"

"If I knew, sweetheart, he wouldn't do it anymore." Lanius was a thoughtful as well as an honest man. After a moment, he shook his head. "I take it back. He wouldn't do it that way anymore. He'd probably figure out some other way pretty soon, though."

Even by moncat standards, Pouncer was a pest. Somewhere in the room where he was kept, he'd found a secret way out. There were ways through the palace, too, ways too small for a man to use but perfect for a moncat. Pouncer would hunt mice in the royal archives and sometimes give them to Lanius as prizes. He would show up in the kitchens, too. Sometimes he stole food. More often, though, he ran off with silverware. Lanius had never figured out why — probably because the moncat was inherently a nuisance. He was particularly fond of big, heavy silver serving spoons. Maybe he planned to pawn them to pay for his getaway. That made as much sense as anything else Lanius had come up with.

"I can climb a tree like a moncat," Crex said, and started for the nearest one. It was an old oak; its branches didn't begin until well above the level of Lanius' head. Crex might have been able to get up into them anyway. He was much more agile than his father had been at the same age. Whether he could come down after going up was a different question.

Lanius didn't try to tell him that. It would have made no sense to him. What the king did say was, "Oh, no, you don't, not in your robes. Your mother and the washerwomen will scream at you if you tear them up and get them all filthy."

"Oh, Father!" Crex sounded as disgusted as only a small boy could.

"No," Lanius said. Crex didn't care if Sosia and the washerwomen yelled at him. But they wouldn't yell just at him. They'd yell at Lanius, too, for letting Crex get his clothes filthy. That was the last thing Lanius wanted. There were times when a king was a lot less powerful than his subjects imagined him to be.

King Grus knew he would never make a wizard. That didn't keep him from watching as Pterocles shaped a spell. Nor did it keep Pterocles from explaining as he worked. The wizard, a man who wore his breeches and tunic as though he'd fallen into them, liked to hear himself talk.

"Spells of foretelling have their risks," Pterocles said.

"The biggest one is, they're liable to be wrong," Grus put in.

Pterocles laughed. "Yes, there is that," he agreed. "But that mostly depends on how the magic is interpreted. The principle underlying the spell is sound. It is based on the law of similarity. The future is commonly similar to the present, for the present is what it springs from."

"Fair enough," Grus said. "If you can, then, tell me whether the Menteshe will go on with their civil war this summer."

"I'll do my best," the wizard answered. When he laughed again, much of the mirth had leaked from his voice. "The Banished One is probably trying to see the same thing."

Grus granted. That was too true for comfort. Civilized folk, led by the King of Avornis, worshiped King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens. Centuries before, the gods had cast the Banished One out of the heavens and down to the material world below. He still burned to resume his place and take his revenge, and the Menteshe nomads in the south gave him reverence instead of Olor and Quelea and the other gods. Here in the material world, the Banished One was something less than a god. But he was much, much more than a man.

"If you find your magic vying with his, break yours off and get away," Grus said.

"You don't need to worry about that, Your Majesty," Pterocles said feelingly. "I will. I'd be lucky to come off second best in a meeting like that. I'd be lucky to come off at all."

He set three silver coins on the table in front of him. One was minted by Prince Ulash, who for many years had been the strongest Menteshe chieftain. Ulash, a man of courage and intelligence, would have been dangerous even without the Banished One's backing. With it, he'd been doubly so, or more than that.

The other two coins were shinier and more recent. They'd been struck by Sanjar and Korkut, Ulash's sons. Neither prince was willing to see the other succeed their father. They'd been fighting each other for years now, and the Menteshe to either side had joined in the war — at least as much to plunder what had been Ulash's realm as for any other reason.

Both Sanjar and Korkut had even appealed to Avornis for aid. That was a pleasant novelty for Grus; the Menteshe were more in the habit of raiding Avornis than appealing to her. The spectacle must have infuriated the Banished One, but not even he seemed able to stop the nomads from squabbling among themselves.

Pterocles put Sanjar's and Korkut's coins on top of Ulash's so that their edges touched. He sprinkled a little dirt over them. "Dirt from the south bank of the Stura," he told Grus. The Stura was the last of the Nine Rivers that cut across the rolling plains of southern Avornis from east to west. Its southern bank was not Avornan territory at all, but belonged to the Menteshe.

To Grus, the dirt looked like… dirt. He didn't say anything. He trusted Pterocles to know what he was doing. So far, the wizard had earned that trust. Pterocles began to chant. The spell started out in modern Avornan, but quickly changed to the old fashioned language only priests, wizards, and scholars like Lanius used these days.

As he chanted, the dirt began to swirl and writhe above the coins, as if caught up in one of the dust storms so common in the lands the Menteshe ruled. The coins struck by Sanjar and Korkut sprang up on their edges and started spinning. Round and round they went, faster and faster.

"Does that mean they're going to keep fighting?" Grus asked. Without missing a word or a pass, Pterocles nodded.

Suddenly, it seemed to Grus that three coins were spinning on the tabletop. He thought Ulash's silverpiece had gotten up from where it lay to join the dance, but it was still there. He wondered if his eyes had started playing tricks on him.

Pterocles' incantation slowed. So did the spinning coins — and there were three of them. The dirt and dust that had floated above the table settled back to its surface. Sanjar's coin and Korkut's settled down on top of Ulash's so that their edges touched once more.

The last coin, the one that appeared to have come out of nowhere, wobbled over and lay down covering parts of Sanjar's, Korkut's, and Ulash's. Pterocles raised his hands above his head. He fell silent. The spell was over.

Grus picked up that last coin. No Menteshe had minted it. His own craggy features, stamped in silver, stared back at him from the palm of his hand. He held the Avornan silverpiece out to Pterocles. The wizard stared at it. "Olor's beard!" he muttered. "I never thought — "

"Does this mean we're going to get mixed up in the fighting south of the Stura this year?" Grus asked.

More unhappily than otherwise, Pterocles nodded. "I can't see how it could mean anything else, Your Majesty. It wasn't part of the sorcery I planned. Where it came from…" He gathered himself. "Sometimes the magic does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do."

"Does it?" Grus said tonelessly. He looked at the image of himself, there on his palm. "Is the magic telling us that we ought to get mixed up in the nomads' civil war, or just that we will get mixed up in it?"

"That we will, Your Majesty," the wizard answered. "You may take that as certain — or as certain as anything magic can point out. Whether we will become involved in a big way or a small one, whether good or bad will come from whatever we do — whatever you do — I can't begin to say."

"If I order my men to move against the Chernagor city-states in the north instead — " Grus began.

"Something will happen to make us fight in the south anyway," Pterocles broke in. "You're bound to leave garrisons down by the Stura, to beat back whatever Menteshe raiders come over the border. Maybe some of your men will chase after the nomads. Maybe it will turn out to be something else. But we will meet Korkut's men, and Sanjar's, on land that once belonged to Ulash. So much, I would say, is clear."

"And will we win?" Grus kept looking at the coin he held. "My silverpiece came out on top, after all."

"I'd like to say yes, Your Majesty," Pterocles answered. "I'd like to, but I won't. I simply don't know."

"All right. I'd rather have an honest answer than a lie trotted out to make me feel good… I suppose." Grus laughed. He supposed that was funny, too. But then the laughter froze on his lips. "If the Banished One is trying to look ahead, too, he'll see the same thing, won't he?"

"If he doesn't, Your Majesty, I'd be astonished," Pterocles said.

"Huzzah," Grus said somberly. Fighting against the Menteshe south of the Stura would be hard enough anyway. No Avornan army had successfully pushed south for more than four hundred years. How much harder would it be if the Banished One knew the Avornans were coming ahead of time? Well, we'll find out.

Beaters and royal bodyguards surrounded King Lanius, Prince Ortalis, and Arch-Hallow Anser as they rode out of the city of Avornis to hunt. Chainmail jingled on the guardsmen. The beaters — Anser's men — wore leather, either left brown or dyed green. They looked like a pack of poachers. If they hadn't served the chief prelate of the Kingdom of Avornis, most of them probably would have been in prison.

Anser cared more about the hunt than he did about the gods. Grus' bastard son always had. But he was unshakably loyal to the man who'd sired him. To Grus, that counted for more than religious zeal. And Anser, along with being unshakably loyal, was also unshakably good-natured. There had been worse arch-hallows, though Lanius wouldn't have thought so when Grus made the appointment.

"Well, let's see how we do today," Anser said, smiling in the sunshine. "Maybe you'll make another kill, Your Majesty."

"Maybe I will." Lanius hoped he didn't sound too unenthusiastic. He didn't care for the hunt, and went out every now and again only to keep from disappointing Anser. No one wanted to do that. Lanius always shot to miss. He was anything but a good archer. Not so long before, he'd hit a stag altogether without intending to.

"Venison. Boar. Even squirrel." Ortalis sounded enthusiastic enough for himself and Lanius at the same time. Grus' legitimate son liked the meat the hunt brought in. He also liked killing the meat in the hunt. He liked killing very much. If he killed animals, he didn't need the thrill of hurting — or killing — people so much.

Of course, Bubulcus was still dead. Lanius' obstreperous servant had outrageously insulted Ortalis. People often thought outrageous insults reason enough to kill a man. And it did seem that Ortalis had killed in a fit of fury, not for the sport of it. All the same, he remained far too fond of blood for Lanius' taste.

The woods that served as a royal game preserve were a couple of hours' ride outside the city of Avornis. The hunting party hadn't gone a quarter of that distance before Lanius took a deep breath and said, "By the gods, it's good to get away from the capital for a while."

Anser and Ortalis both nodded. So did the guards and beaters. Anser said, "The clean air would be reason enough to come hunting even without the chase."

"Almost reason enough," Ortalis said.

When they got to the woods, the new leaves uncurling from their buds were a brighter, lighter green than they would be once they'd been out for a while. Lanius pointed to them. "That's the color of spring," he said.

"You're right," Ortalis said. They nodded to each other. In the palace, they didn't get on well. That wasn't just because of Ortalis' streak of bloodlust, either. Grus' legitimate son wanted to be King of Avornis himself one day, and to have the crown pass to his sons and not Lanius'. At the moment, he had no sons, only a toddler daughter. But who could say how long that would last?

Here in the woods, differences of rank and ambition fell away. Lanius swung down off his horse. He rubbed his hindquarters when he did; he was not a man who made a habit of riding. Anser laughed at him. The arch-hallow loved horses only less than hunting. Even Anser's mockery was good-natured. What would have been infuriating from Ortalis only made Lanius laugh, too, when Grus' bastard did it.

Why couldn't they have been reversed? Lanius wondered. I would never have to worry about a usurpation from Anser. And Ortalis — Ortalis would have made an arch-hallow to set evildoers trembling in their boots. Things were as they were, though, not as would have been convenient for him. He knew that only too well. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been a small, oft-captured piece in the great Avornan political game for so much of his life.

Carrying bows and quivers, he and Ortalis and Anser went in among the trees. The beaters spread out to drive game their way. Some of the guards accompanied Anser's raffish crew. Others stayed with the king, the prince, and the prelate. Lanius' boots scuffed through the gray-brown rotting leaves that had fallen the autumn before. Try as he would, he couldn't move quietly. Ortalis was far better at it. As for Anser, he might have been a poacher himself by the way he silently slid along.

A squirrel jeered at them from high in a tree. Ortalis started to reach for an arrow, then checked the motion. "No point to it," he said. "I'd never hit him up there, not shooting through all those branches."

One of the royal guards who'd gone on ahead came pounding back. Anser winced at the racket he made. The guards, however, refused to let Lanius go off without them. If that hurt Anser's hunting, they didn't care. This one said, "There's a nice clearing up ahead."

That made the arch-hallow happier — it didn't take much.

"Lead us to it," he said. "Without too much jingling, if you can."

"I'll do my best," the guard said. And, no doubt, he did. That his best was no good… Anser was too kindly to twit him too much.

And the clearing was as good as he'd claimed. Fresh bright grass smiled at the sun. A magpie, all black and white and iridescent purple, hopped on the grass. It flew away squawking when Lanius stuck his head out.

Faintly embarrassed, the king drew back behind a tree trunk. "This does seem a likely spot," he said.

"Well, yes, if you don't frighten away everything within five miles," Ortalis said. Had Anser said the same thing, Lanius would have laughed and forgotten about it. From Ortalis, it annoyed him. Anser might have meant it just as much. He probably would have, as passionate for the hunt as he was. But the words wouldn't have stung coming out of his mouth. Coming out of Ortalis', they did.

What Anser said now was, "Don't worry, Your Highness. The beaters will make sure we don't go home empty-handed. Pity the antlers won't be as fine as they would in the fall."

"I don't care," Ortalis said. "I want the venison." He sounded hungry, all right. Was it for meat? Maybe. Lanius thought it was more likely to be for the kill itself.

A deer bounded into the clearing. "Go ahead, Your Majesty," Anser said. "First arrow of spring."

Awkwardly, Lanius drew his bow, took aim, and let fly. The arrow whisked over the deer's head. That was where he'd aimed it, so he wasn't particularly unhappy. He liked eating venison, too, but he didn't care to be the one who'd killed it.

Killing didn't bother Ortalis. Even as the deer bounded away, he loosed his own shaft. Unlike Lanius, he always took dead aim. He was a good shot, too, also unlike the king. His arrow flew straight and true, and struck the deer in the side.

"A hit!" he cried, and was out of cover and running after the wounded animal. Anser ran after him, bow at the ready. So did Lanius, a little more slowly. "An easy trail!" Ortalis said, laughing with pleasure. Sure enough, the deer's blood marked its path. Well, it will be over soon, Lanius thought. The deer won't suffer long. It won't wander through the woods a cripple.

There it was, thrashing in some bushes it hadn't had the strength to leap. Ortalis drew a knife that would have done duty for a smallsword. "Careful!" Anser called. "Those hooves are still dangerous." If his half brother heard, he gave no sign. Avoiding the feet that flailed ever more feebly, he cut the deer's throat.

More blood fountained free. "Ahhh!" Ortalis said, almost as if he'd just had a woman. As soon as the deer was dead, or perhaps even a moment before, he flipped it over and began to gut it. Arms red almost to the elbows, he turned and smiled up at Lanius and Anser.

"Good shot," Anser said, and clapped him on the back. Lanius managed a nod that didn't seem too halfhearted. But that avid expression on Ortalis' face as he wielded the knife chilled the King of Avornis. Yes, he thought, this is why he hunts.

When Grus first got to know Hirundo, his general had been a bright young cavalry captain. King Grus himself had been a bright, reasonably young river-galley skipper. Now his beard was gray and the tendons on the backs of his hands all knobbly and gnarled. How did I get to be sixty? He wondered, as any man will with so many years behind him and so few probably ahead.

Hirundo was a few years younger, but only a few. He still had traces, though, of the dash he'd shown all those years ago. "South of the Stura, eh?" he said gaily.

"We've been looking at this for a while now — ever since Ulash's sons started squabbling over the bones of his realm," Grus said.

"Oh, yes. We've been looking at it and thinking about it," Hirundo agreed. "Most of what we've been thinking is, This doesn't look like such a great idea right now. And what do you think now, Your Majesty? Do you think Pterocles and the other wizards really can cure the thralls south of the Stura? Do you think they can keep the Menteshe from turning our army — and us — into thralls if we cross the river?"

Before the Menteshe overran the lands south of the Stura, those lands had belonged to Avornis. The peasants on them had been no different from the ones anywhere else in the kingdom. The descendants of those peasants were different now. Dark sorcery from the Banished One had made them into thralls, only a step or two brighter than the domestic animals they tended. The same cruel fate had befallen the last Avornan army that dared go south of the Stura. Fear that such a disaster could happen again had kept Kings of Avornis from troubling the Menteshe in their homeland for more than two centuries.

The sorcery that made men and women into thralls wasn't perfect. Every so often, a thrall would get out from under the spell and cross the Stura into freedom. But the Banished One sometimes used thralls pretending to have escaped from thralldom to spy on Avornis. That made any runaways hard to trust. The Banished One's magic was so deep, so subtle, that Avornan wizards had an almost impossible time telling a thrall who had truly broken away from it from one serving as the enemy's eyes and ears.

Since the very beginning, Avornan wizards had tried to craft magic to break the spell of thralldom. They'd had very little luck. An escaped thrall could seem free of all traces of the sorcery that enslaved him — until, sometimes years later, he did the Banished One's bidding.

Pterocles thought he'd succeeded where everyone else had failed. He had a hard-won advantage over the wizards who'd come before him. Up in the Chernagor country, a spell from the Banished One had all but slain him. When he recovered — a slow, painful process — he'd understood the Banished One's sorcery from the inside out, as only one who had suffered from it might do.

He had freed one thrall. Otus still lived under guard in the royal palace. No one wanted to take too many chances with him. But, by all appearances, he was a thrall no more. Pterocles could track the Banished One's wizardry deeper than any other sorcerer had ever been able to. By all he could sense, Otus was free.

Grus sighed. "I think our wizards can keep us free and free the thralls, yes. That's what we're gambling on, isn't it? When the army crosses the Stura, I'm going with it. I won't ask you or the men to face anything I don't have the nerve to face myself."

Hirundo bowed in his seat. "No one has ever questioned your bravery, Your Majesty. No one would dare to now."

"Ha!" Grus shook his head. "You're too sunny, Hirundo. People always have. They always will. If someone doesn't like you, he'll find reasons not to like you whether they're there or not."

"Maybe," Hirundo said — as much as he would admit.

Laughing, Grus added, "Besides, I have another reason for crossing the Stura this year. I want to get down to Yozgat."

"The Scepter of Mercy?" Hirundo asked.

"That's right." Grus laughed no more. His nod was heavy. "The Scepter of Mercy."

Kings of Avornis had coveted the potent talisman for more than four hundred years. The nomads — and the exiled god — kept it in Yozgat, the strongest citadel they had. If the Avornans ever got it back, it would make a great shield and a great weapon against the Banished One. He had never been able to wield it himself. If he ever found some way to do that, he might storm his way back into the heavens from which he'd been expelled.

"Do you think we can?" Hirundo, for once, sounded altogether serious. No one could take the Scepter of Mercy lightly.

"I don't know. I just don't know," Grus said. "But if not now, when? We have — we hope we have — a spell to cure the thralls. The Menteshe are in disarray from fighting one another. When will we ever have a better chance?"

"If you can bring it off, your name will live forever," Hirundo said.

Grus started to tell him that didn't matter. But it did, and he knew it. All a man could leave behind were his children and his name. Ortalis had always been a disappointment, even if Grus was reluctant to admit it even to himself. As for his name… He'd kept the Thervings from lording it over Avornis. He had — or he hoped he had — stopped the Chernagors' piratical raids on his coasts, and he'd kept the Banished One from gaining a foothold in the Chernagor country. He'd also kept Avornan nobles from taking the peasants under their wings — and taking them away from their loyalty to the king and to the kingdom as a whole. The nobles didn't love him for it, but that — since he'd beaten a couple of rebels — wasn't his biggest worry.

If he could bring the Scepter of Mercy back to the capital in triumph… Well, if that wasn't enough to get him remembered for a long, long time, nothing ever would be.

He noticed Hirundo watching him. The general smiled, noticing him notice. "You do want it," Hirundo said. "It's as plain as the nose on your face."

Considering how formidable that nose was, it must have been plain indeed. "I can't tell you you're wrong," Grus said. "Ever since the Scepter got stolen, there hasn't been a King of Avornis who didn't want to take it back."

"Yes, but how many of them have had a chance to do it?" Hirundo asked.

"I don't know," Grus answered. "I'm not even sure I have that chance. But I aim to find out."

"One thing, Your Majesty — you can leave Lanius behind to run things here while you go off to war," Hirundo said. "He'll do fine while you're away."

"Yes." King Grus let it go at that. Lanius had done fine running things in the city of Avornis while he went on campaign himself. He wasn't sure whether that was good or bad, though. He'd kept Lanius away from power as long as he could. The more the scion of the ancient dynasty held, the less secure Grus' grip on the rest was.

Lanius had never tried to rise against him. If he did.. Grus didn't know what would happen. Not knowing worried him. He was reaching the end of his prime of life as Lanius entered his. He realized that. He wondered if the other king did, too.

He hoped not.

Lanius washed down his breakfast porridge with a sip of wine, then said, "I'm off to the moncats."

Queen Sosia looked back across the table at him. "Is that where you're going?" she murmured.

Lanius' ears heated. That had nothing to do with the wine. "Yes, that is where I'm going," he said. "You're welcome to come along if you care to."

His wife shook her head. "No, thank you — never mind. If I came along, that would be where you went." She took a long pull at her own cup of wine.

"It was where I was going anyway," Lanius said. Sosia didn't answer. The king got up from the table and left in a hurry. Anything he said after that would make things worse, not better. There were times when he told Sosia he was going to visit the moncats and he paid a call on a serving girl instead. It wasn't that he didn't care for the queen. He hadn't expected to when Grus arranged their marriage, but he did. But he was king, even if he was the second of two kings, and he could do more or less as he pleased. Every so often, he pleased to yield to temptation.

Grus was in no position to tell him what a wicked fellow he was. The other king didn't hesitate, either, when he saw a face or a form that struck his fancy. Queen Estrilda had given him as much trouble for it as Sosia gave Lanius.

This time, though, Lanius left the small dining room by his bedchamber in a warm glow of injured innocence. He really had intended to go to the moncats and nowhere else. Well, almost nowhere else — he stopped in the kitchens for some scraps of meat first. "You're going to waste more good food on those thieving, miserable creatures," one of the cooks said, sadly shaking her head.

"They aren't miserable." Lanius couldn't deny that moncats stole, because they did. The cook only sniffed.

When the king got to the moncats' chamber, he opened the door with care. He didn't want them getting out. With their grasping hands and feet and with their agility, they were hard as a demon to catch when they got loose.

Some of the moncats in the room were washing themselves, some sleeping with their tails wrapped around their noses, and some climbing on the framework of boards and branches that did duty for a forest. They stared down at Lanius out of green or yellow eyes.

They were clever animals, clever enough to give him the uneasy feeling they were measuring him with those glances, measuring him and finding him.. perhaps barely adequate. "Pouncer?" he called. "Are you here, Pouncer, you miserable beast?" He stole the cook's word now that she couldn't hear him do it, though he meant it for reasons different from hers.

He laughed at himself. He was a fairly miserable creature in his own right if he expected Pouncer or any other moncat to come when called. Moncats weren't just like ordinary house cats. Thanks to their hands and sharp wits, they could make bigger pests of themselves than house cats could. But they were every bit as cross-grained as the most ordinary tabby.

Pouncer should have been here. The moncat shouldn't have been able to get out. But it could. Lanius had yet to figure out how it managed the trick. Once, Pouncer had disappeared right before his eyes. He'd stopped watching the moncat for a moment — no more than a moment — and when he looked back, Pouncer wasn't there to be watched anymore. It made the king wonder who was smarter than whom.

Moncats crowded around him. They knew he often brought them treats. He doled out a few scraps of meat. A couple of snarling squabbles broke out; moncats had no more in the way of manners than any other animals (or, for that matter, small children) did. As Lanius fed the others, he kept looking around for Pouncer — and finally spotted the male at the top of the climbing apparatus.

Lanius lay down on his back. He thumped his chest with his free hand. Pouncer knew what to do when that happened. The moncat scrambled down and jumped up on top of the king. "That's a good boy," Lanius said, and scratched it under the chin and behind the ears.

Pouncer wasn't a bad-tempered beast, and put up with it. All the same, the moncat practically radiated impatience. I'm not doing this trick for your sake, it would have said if it could talk. Where's my meat?

"Here, you greedy thing." Lanius held out a piece. Pouncer took it from his hand with a clawed thumb and forefinger. The moncat didn't snatch, but was careful not to hurt the person giving it a reward.

Once Pouncer had the treat, what point was there to staying with Lanius any longer? Away the moncat went, back up on the boards. Lanius stared after it. I taught you an ordinary little trick, he thought. What could someone who really knows how to train animals do?