King of the North Read online

  Having two monsters around was interesting, especially since they seemed bright for their kind, which made them about as smart as stupid people. They’d grown up side by side with his own children, younger than Duren but older than Dagref, the Fox’s older son by Selatre. They were careful with their formidable strength, and never used their fearsome teeth for anything but eating.

  But soon Tharma would be a woman—well, an adult female monster—and Geroge mature as well. The Fox was anything but certain he wanted more than two monsters in the northlands, and just as uncertain what, if anything, to do about it. He’d kept putting off a decision by telling himself he didn’t yet need to worry. That was still true, but wouldn’t be much longer.

  “Take that in to the cooks,” he told Geroge. “Venison steaks tonight, roast venison, venison ribs—” Geroge slung the gutted deer over his shoulder and carried it into the castle. Tharma followed him, as she usually did, although sometimes he followed her. She ran her tongue across her wide, thin lips at the prospect of plenty of meat.

  “I need more ale,” Walamund muttered. “We’re supposed to eat alongside those horrible things?”

  “They don’t mind,” Gerin said. “You shouldn’t, either.”

  Walamund sent him a resentful glare, but the memory of recent punishment remained fresh enough to keep the serf from saying anything. Geroge and Tharma came out into the courtyard again, this time accompanied by Dagref and his younger sister Clotild, and by Van’s daughter Maeva and his son Kor.

  Behind the children strode Fand. “You might have told me you were back,” she said to Van, a Trokmê lilt to her Elabonian though she’d lived south of the Niffet since shortly after the werenight. A breeze blew a couple of strands of coppery hair in front of her face. She brushed them aside with her hand. She was perhaps five years younger than Van, but beginning to go gray.

  He stared over toward her. “I might have done lots of things,” he rumbled.

  Fand set hands on hips. “Aye, you might have. But did you, now? No, not a bit of a bit. Hopped in the car you did instead, and went off a-hunting with not a thought in your head for aught else.”

  “Who would have room for thoughts, with your eternal din echoing round in his head?” Van retorted. They shouted at each other.

  Gerin turned to Nania. “Fetch them each the biggest jack of ale we have,” he said quietly. The serving girl hurried away and returned with two jacks, each filled so full ale slopped over the side to make its own libation. Gerin knew he was gambling. If Van and Fand were still angry at each other by the time they got to the bottom of the jacks, they’d quarrel harder than ever because of the ale they’d drunk. A lot of the time, though, their fights were like rain squalls: blowing up suddenly, fierce while they lasted, and soon gone.

  Maeva gave Dagref a shove. He staggered, but stayed on his feet. The two of them were very much of a size, though he had a year on her. Maeva showed every promise of having much of her father’s enormous physical prowess. Gerin wondered if the world was ready For a woman warrior able to best almost any man. Ready or not, the world was liable to face the prospect in a few years.

  Clotild said, “No, Kor, don’t put that rock in your mouth.”

  Instead of putting it in his mouth, he threw it at her. Fortunately, he missed. He had a temper he’d surely acquired from Fand. Four-year-olds were not the most self-controlled people under any circumstances. A four-year-old whose mother was Fand was a conflagration waiting to happen.

  Van and Fand upended their drinking jacks at about the same time. Gerin waited to see what would happen next. When what happened next was nothing, he allowed himself a tiny pat on the back. He glanced over at Fand. Hard to imagine these days that he and Van had once shared her favors. Getting to know Selatre afterwards was like coming into a calm harbor after a storm at sea.

  The Fox shook his head. That that image occurred to him proved only that he’d done more reading than just about anyone else in the northlands (which, though undoubtedly true, wasn’t saying much). He’d never been on the Orynian Ocean—which lapped against the shore of the northlands far to the west—or any other sea.

  Shadows lengthened and began to gray toward twilight. A bronze horn sounded a long, hoarse, sour note in the peasant village a few hundred yards from Fox Keep: a signal for the serfs to come to their huts from out of the fields, both for supper and to keep themselves safe from the ghosts that roamed and ravened through the night.

  Van looked around to gauge the hour. He nodded approval. “The new headman keeps ’em at it longer than Besant Big-Belly did,” he said. “There were times when he’d blow the horn halfway through the afternoon, seemed like.”

  “That’s so,” Gerin agreed. “The peasants mourned for days after that tree fell on him last winter. Not surprising, is it? They knew they’d have to work harder with anybody else over them.”

  “Lazy buggers,” Van said.

  The Fox shrugged. “Nobody much likes to work. Sometimes you have to, though, or you pay for it later. Some people never do figure that out, so they need a headman who can get the most from ’em without making ’em hate him.” He was happy to talk about work with his friend: anything to distract Van from yet another squabble with Fand.

  Fand, however, didn’t feel like being distracted. “And some people, now,” she said, “are after calling others lazy while they their ownselves do whatever it is pleases them and not a lick of aught else.”

  “I’ll give you a lick across the side of your head,” Van said, and took a step toward her.

  “Aye, belike you will, and one fine day you’ll wake up beside me all nice and dead, with a fine slim dagger slid between your ribs,” Fand said, now in grim earnest. Van did hit her every once in a while; brawling, for him, was a sport. She hit him, too, and clawed, and bit. The outlander was generally mindful of his great strength, and did not use all of it save in war and hunting. When Fand was in a temper, she was mindful of nothing and no one save her own fury.

  Van said, “By all the gods in all the lands I’ve ever seen, I’ll wake up beside somebody else, then.”

  “And I pity the poor dear, whoever she is,” Fand shot back. “Sure and it’s nobbut fool’s luck—the only kind a fool like you’s after having—you’ve not brought me back a sickness, what with your rutting like a stoat.”

  “As if I’m the only one, you faithless—!” Van clapped a hand to his forehead, speechless despite the many languages he knew.

  Gerin turned to Trasamir, who happened to be standing closest to him. “Isn’t love a wonderful thing?” he murmured.

  “What?” Trasamir scratched his head.

  Another one who wouldn’t recognize irony if it came up and bit him on the leg, the Fox thought sadly. He wished he had the wisdom of a god, to say the perfect thing to make Van and Fand stop quarreling. With that, he’d probably need other divine powers, to make sure they didn’t start up again the moment his back was turned.

  Selatre came out to the entrance to the great hall. “Supper’s ready,” she called to the people gathered in the courtyard. Everyone, Van and Fand included, trooped toward the castle. Gerin chuckled under his breath. He hadn’t known what to say to get Van and Fand to break off their fight, but Selatre had. Maybe she was divinely wise.

  The notion wasn’t altogether frivolous. Selatre had been Biton’s Sibyl at Ikos, delivering the prophecies of the farseeing god to those who sought his wisdom, until the earthquake that released the monsters tumbled the god’s shrine in ruins. Had Gerin and Van not rescued her while she lay in entranced sleep, the creatures from the caverns below would have made short work of her.

  Biton’s Sybil had to be a maiden. Not only that, she was forbidden so much as to touch an entire man; eunuchs and women attended her. Selatre had reckoned herself profaned by Gerin’s touch. Plainly, she would have preferred him to leave her in her bed for the monsters to devour.

  So matters had stood then. Now, eleven years, three living children, and one small grav
e later, Selatre tilted up her face as Gerin came back into Castle Fox. He brushed his lips against hers. She smiled and took his hand. They walked back toward the Fox’s place of honor near the hearth and near the altar to Dyaus close by it. The fat-wrapped thighbones of the stag Van, Geroge, and Tharma had killed smoked on the altar.

  Selatre pointed to them. “So the king of the gods gets venison tonight.”

  “He’d better not be the only one,” Gerin said in a voice intended to carry back to the kitchens, “or there’ll be some cooks fleeing through the night with ghosts baying at their heels to drive them mad.”

  A serving girl set rounds of thick, chewy bread on the table in front of each feaster. When another servitor plopped a couple of still-sizzling ribs on Gerin’s flatbread, it sopped up the grease and juices. The Fox reached out to a wooden saltcellar in front of him and sprinkled some salt onto the meat.

  “I wish we had pepper,” he said, fondly remembering the spices that had come up from the south till the Empire of Elabon sealed off the last mountain pass just before the werenight.

  “Be thankful we still have salt,” Selatre said. “We’re beginning to run low on that. It hasn’t been coming up the Niffet from the coast as it used to since the Gradi Started raiding a couple of years ago.”

  “The Gradi,” Gerin muttered under his breath. “As if the northlands didn’t have troubles enough without them.” North of the Niffet lay the forests in which the Trokmoi dwelt: or rather, had dwelt, for the fair-haired barbarians had swarmed south over the Niffet near the time of the werenight, and many still remained: some, like Fand, among Elabonians; others, such as Gerin’s vassal Adiatunnus, in place of the locals, whom they had subjected, driven away, or slain.

  The homeland of the Gradi lay north of the Trokmê country. Before coming down into Elabon, Van had been through the lands of both the Gradi and the Trokmoi. Gerin had seen a couple of Gradi at Ikos once, too: big, pale-skinned men with black hair, sweltering in furs. But, for the most part, the Trokmoi had kept the Elabonians from learning much about the Gradi and having much to do with them.

  So it had been for generations. As Selatre had said, though, the Gradi had lately begun harrying the northlands’ coastal regions by sea. Maybe they’d got word of disorder in the northlands and decided to take advantage of it. Maybe, too, their raids had nothing to do with whatever was going on locally, but had been spawned by some convulsion in their own country. Gerin did not know.

  “Too much we don’t know about the Gradi,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. Though he styled himself prince of the north, his power did not extend to the coast: none of the barons and dukes and petty lordlets by the sea acknowledged his suzerainty. If they were learning about the seaborne raiders, they kept that knowledge to themselves.

  Selatre said, “I’ve been through the scrolls and codices in the library. Trouble is, they don’t say anything about the Gradi except that there is such a people and they live north of the Trokmoi.”

  Gerin set his hand on hers. “Thanks for looking.” When he’d brought her back to Fox Keep from Ikos, he’d taught her letters and set her in charge of the motley collection of volumes he called a library, more to give her a place of her own here than in the expectation she would make much of it.

  But make something of it she had. She was as zealous now as he in finding manuscripts and adding them to the collection, and even more zealous in going through the ones they had and squeezing knowledge from them. If she said the books told little about the Gradi, she knew whereof she spoke.

  She glanced down at the table. Compliments of any sort made her nervous, a trait she shared with Gerin and one that set them apart from most Elabonians, for whom bragging came natural as breathing.

  “What are we going to do about the Gradi, Father?” Duren asked from across the table. “What can we do about them?”

  “Watch and wait and worry,” Gerin answered.

  “Are they just raiding, do you suppose, or will they come to settle when they see how fragmented that part of the northlands is?” Selatre asked.

  The Fox picked up his drinking jack and raised it in salute. “Congratulations,” he told his wife. “You’ve given me something brand new to worry about. Here I spend half my time trying to figure out how to bundle the Trokmoi back across the Niffet from what ought to be a purely Elabonian land, and now I have to think about adding Gradi to the mix.” He gulped ale and spat into the bosom of his tunic to avert the evil omen.

  Selatre sent him a look he could not fathom until she murmured, “A purely Elabonian land?”

  “Well, in a manner of speaking,” he said, feeling his cheeks heat. Selatre’s ancestors had dwelt in the northlands for years uncounted before Ros the Fierce added the province to the Empire of Elabon. They’d taken on Elabonian ways readily enough, and most of them spoke Elabonian these days, which was what had led him to make his remark. Still, differences lingered. Selatre’s features were finer and more delicate than they would have been had she sprung of Elabonian stock: her narrow, pointed chin was a marker for those of her blood.

  “I know what you meant,” she said, her voice mischievous, “but since you pride yourself on being so often right, I thought surely you would take the correction in good part.”

  Gerin enjoyed being told he was wrong, even by his wife, no more than most other men. But before he could come back with a reply sardonic enough to suit him, one of Walamund’s relatives shouted at Trasamir, “I know how you got that cursed dog to come when you called it. You—” The suggestion was remarkable for both its originality and its obscenity.

  The Fox sprang to his feet. He could feel a vein pulse in his forehead, and was sure the old scar above one eye had gone pale, a sure sign he was furious. And furious he was. “You!” he snapped, his voice slicing through the racket in the great hall. Walamund’s kinsman looked over to him in surprise. The Fox jerked a thumb toward the doorway. “Out! You can sleep in the courtyard on the grass and wash your mouth with water, not my good ale, for I’ll waste no more of that on you. On your way home tomorrow, think about keeping your mind out of the midden.”

  “But, lord prince, I only meant—” the fellow began.

  “I don’t care what you meant. I care what you said,” Gerin told him. “Ana I told you, out, and out I meant. One more word and it won’t be out of the castle, it’ll be out of the keep, and you can take your chances with wolves and night ghosts where no torches and sacrifices hold them at bay.”

  The foul-mouthed peasant gulped, nodded, and did not speak. He hurried out into the night, leaving thick, clotted silence behind him.

  “Now,” Gerin said into it, “where were we?”

  No one seemed to remember, or to feel like hazarding a guess. Van said, “I don’t know where we were, but I know where I’m going.” He picked up Kor, who’d fallen asleep on the bench beside him, and headed for the stairs. Fand and Maeva followed, off to the big bed they all shared. The quarrel between Van and Fand hadn’t flared again, so maybe it would be forgotten … till the next time, tomorrow or ten days down the road.

  Once upon a time, Duren had been in the habit of falling asleep at feasts. Gerin sighed; remembering things like that and comparing them to how matters stood these days was a sign he wasn’t getting any younger.

  He looked around for Duren and didn’t see him. He wouldn’t be out in the courtyard, not with only a drunken, swill-mouthed peasant for company. More likely, he was back in the kitchens or in a corridor leading off from them, trying to slip his hands under a serving girl’s tunic. He’d probably succeed, too: he was handsome, reasonably affable, and the son of the local lord to boot Gerin remembered his own fumblings along those lines.

  “Dyaus, what a puppy I was,” he muttered.

  Selatre raised one eyebrow. He didn’t think she’d done that when he first brought her to Fox Keep; she must have got it from him. “What’s that in aid of?” she asked.

  “Not much, believe me,” he answered with
a wry chuckle. “Shall we follow Van and bring our children up to bed, too?”

  Their younger son, named Blestar after Selatre’s father (Gerin having named Duren and Dagref for his own brother and father, whom the Trokmoi had slain), lay snoring in her lap: he had only a couple of years to him. Dagref and Clotild were both trying to pretend they hadn’t just yawned. The Fox gathered them up by eye. “Upstairs we go,” he declared.

  “Oh, Papa, do we have to?” Dagref said through another yawn. Along with belief in the gods, all children seemed to share an abiding faith that they had to deny the need for sleep under any and all circumstances.

  Gerin did his best to look severe. Where his children were concerned, his best was none too good, and he knew it. He said, “Do you know what would happen to anyone else who presumed to argue with the prince of the north?”

  “You’d cut off his head, or maybe stew him with prunes,” Dagref said cheerfully. Gerin, who’d been taking a last swig from his drinking jack, sprayed ale onto the tabletop. Dagref said, “If Duren argued with you, would you stew him with prunes? Or isn’t he part of ‘everybody else’?”

  Down in the City of Elabon, they’d had special schools to train the officials who interpreted the ancient and complex code of laws by which the Empire of Elabon functioned. The hairsplitting in which those schools indulged had once struck Gerin, who reveled in minutiae himself, as slightly mad: who could not only make such minute distinctions but enjoy doing it? Watching Dagref grow, he regretted being unable to send the boy south for legal training.

  When he got upstairs, he opened the door to the chamber he shared with his wife and children and went inside to bring out a lamp. He lighted it at one of the torches flickering in a bronze wall sconce in the hallway, then used its weak glow to let Selatre go into the chamber and set Blestar at the edge of the big bed. Dagref and Clotild took turns using the chamber pot that stood by the side of the bed before getting in themselves, muttering sleepy good-nights. The straw in the mattress rustled as they lay down.