The Scepter's Return Read online

  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 whistled 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 ha
ve 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 who.

  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 giv
ing 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?

  CHAPTER TWO

  King Grus swung up into the saddle. General Hirundo, who was already mounted, grinned slyly. “You’re getting pretty good at that, Your Majesty,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Grus answered, and Hirundo laughed out loud. The trouble was, the general was right, and Grus knew it. Over the years, he had become a pretty decent horseman. He’d never intended to. On a river galley—even on one of the tall-masted ocean-going ships the Avornans were building in imitation of the Chernagor pirates—he knew what he was doing. He’d never planned on riding very much. He’d never planned on becoming King of Avornis, either. That had worked out pretty well, at least so far. As for horsemanship … When he shrugged, his gilded mailshirt clinked on his shoulders.

  Instead of a stallion, he did ride a good-natured gelding. He’d done that even when he knew he was going to get in a fight. He valued control and obedience more than fire in a horse.

  “Are we ready?” he asked.

  “If we weren’t, would we be doing all this?” Hirundo said reasonably.

  “Let’s go, then.” Grus used the reins and the pressure of his knees to urge his horse into motion. Hirundo’s high-spirited charger pranced along beside it.

  As they rode out of the stables, mounted imperial lancers formed up around them. The guardsmen wore heavy shirts of mail and rode big, strong horses. Even the horses wore armor that protected their heads and breasts. The lancers’ charge was irresistible at close range. The problem was getting the Menteshe, who usually kept but loose order on their ponies, to bunch together long enough to receive a charge.

  “Your Majesty!” the guardsmen shouted. Grus waved to them. Under the bar nasals of their conical helmets, a good many of the troopers grinned at him.