That left Gerin alone with Ferdulf, not a position he would have chosen. But the choice was not his to make. He thought about walking off, as Rihwin had. Ferdulf, after all, had been the author of his own troubles. The Fox was mildly surprised to discover himself not hardhearted enough to leave the battered little demigod by himself in his pain.
"Are you all right?" he asked Ferdulf.
"You can bugger off, too," Ferdulf growled. "You're laughing at me. You hate me. Everybody hates me."
"Not quite everybody," Gerin answered, "though that certainly isn' t from any lack of effort on your part. You seem to go out of your way sometimes to make yourself hateful."
"Go away," Ferdulf said. "You're not my father. I haven't got a father. As far as I'm concerned, he isn't real. He doesn't exist."
"You were scandalized about the foolish god of the Weshapar, who said the same thing about his neighbor gods," Gerin said. "Do you think it sounds any wiser coming out of your mouth?"
"I don't care," Ferdulf said. "I just don't care. You had a proper father, a father who cared about you."
Gerin burst into laughter so bitterly raucous, it made Ferdulf stare. The Fox said, "What in the five hells do you know about it? My father thought he could cure me of books and make me a warrior with the back of his hand. It was only when he finally figured out he was wrong that he shipped me over the High Kirs to be rid of me."
"But you ended up a warrior anyhow," Ferdulf said.
"So I did," Gerin said. "But that was my doing, not his-and I didn't waste his time and mine with a pack of childish tricks and tries for revenge."
"I am not a child," Ferdulf said. "I am a demigod."
"You are a demigod," the Fox agreed. "But you're also a child. That's what makes things so difficult for everyone around you."
"Good," Ferdulf said, and drifted away, apparently none the worse for wear from the beatings Mavrix had given him and just as apparently intent on taking no notice whatever of Gerin's sermon. The Fox sighed. He didn't suppose he should have been surprised.
**
"Aye, lord king, that's how it is," Fandil Fandor's son said as he rubbed down his horse. "I got around the imperials with no great trouble, but it didn't do me as much good as I would have liked. It didn't do you as much good as you'd like, either." He patted the horse's neck. "I will tell you this, though-I had no trouble getting through the bastards and back again."
"Wonderful," Gerin said sourly. "But, once you did get through, you found that Aragis had gone to earth?"
"That's what I said, lord king." Fandil returned to rubbing the horse's back. Gerin sympathized with the animal. Fandil's father had been called Fandor the Fat. Fandil was more along the lines of the Chubby, but Gerin wouldn't have wanted to try carrying him on his back.
"He doesn't plan on doing any more fighting out in the open, then?" Gerin persisted.
"Not if he can help it," Fandil answered. "He and his army are holed up in the strongest keeps they can find, and he doesn't think the imperials can pry him out of them before winter comes and they get too hungry to stay in the field. If they tear up the countryside but then go home, what does he care? He's ahead of the game."
"His peasants aren't," Gerin said, but that only made him laugh at himself. As long as the imperials went away, Aragis didn't care what happened to the peasantry. Gerin supposed he had to sympathize with that, but Aragis didn't care what happened to the peasantry any other time, either.
Fandil said, "Looks like the imperials are settling down to the sieges, too. Don't know whether they'll try knocking down walls or just sit there and starve the places out one at a time-if they can."
"If they can," Gerin agreed. "The one thing I'm sure of is that Aragis wouldn't put his men into castles that are easy to take, and he wouldn't put them into castles that don't have plenty in their cellars, either."
"You know best about that, lord king," Fandil said. "But what it looks like to me is, we're on our own over here."
Gerin sighed. "It looks that way to me, too, Fandil. We've been on our own over here all along, and we haven't done any too well so far."
"You'll come up with something." Gerin might not have confidence, but Fandil, like a lot of his men, did.
"I hope so," Gerin said. "To the crows with me if I have the faintest notion what it is, though." Fandil didn't seem to hear that, any more than Aragis had heard Gerin when he said he wasn't a sorcerer. Not for the first time, nor for the five hundredth, either, he wondered why people didn't pay more attention to what other people said. They already had their own ideas, and that seemed to be enough for them.
The next morning, he and Van and Dagref rode out along the picket line of horsemen he kept west of his force to warn him if the imperials decided to come at him again. For the moment, the men of the Elabonian Empire were holding back. They had pickets out, too, in chariots, to warn of any sudden move Gerin might make against them.
"They're not bad fellows," one of Rihwin's riders said, pointing toward an imperial chariot perhaps a quarter of a mile away. "For business like this, they don't bother us and we don't bother them. When the time comes to really fight again, they'll really go after us, I suppose, and we'll do our best to fill 'em full of arrow holes, but what's the use till then?"
"None I can see," Gerin allowed. "It's a pretty sensible way of going about things, when you get down to it."
He glanced over at Van. In the outlander's younger days, odds were he would have thundered out something about killing the foe whenever you found any chance to do it. Had Gerin had Adiatunnus with him, the Trokm? chieftain probably would have said the same thing now. But Van only shrugged and nodded, as if to say the horseman's words made good sense to him, too. Little by little, he was mellowing.
A couple of riders farther along the line, Maeva patrolled a stretch of meadow. "No, lord king," she said when Gerin asked her, "I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary." As the earlier rider had, she pointed toward an imperial chariot out of arrow range to the west. "They're keeping an eye on us, same as we're keeping an eye on them."
"All right," Gerin said. "Right at the moment, I'm not sorry things are quiet. We need the time to pull ourselves back together."
"They're probably thinking the same thing about us, lord king," Maeva answered seriously. "We had to pull back, aye, but we bloodied them."
"They have more room to make mistakes than we do, though," Van said. "By the gods, we didn't make any mistakes I could see in that last fight, and we lost it anyhow."
Dagref said nothing at all. That was unusual enough to make Gerin keep an eye on his son, as Maeva kept an eye on the force from the Elabonian Empire and as the imperials kept an eye on Gerin's army. For his part, Dagref was keeping an eye on Maeva. As best Gerin could tell from watching the back of his son's head, Dagref's eyes did not leave her.
She kept looking at him, too. Well, well, the Fox thought. Isn't that interesting? Gerin looked over at Van again, too. The outlander was also eyeing his daughter, but not, Gerin judged, with that kind of suspicion. Van was still trying to figure out why in blazes she wanted to take the field, and not worrying about anything else.
Life would get even more interesting if Maeva's belly started to bulge. Gerin had had that thought before. He wondered whether Dagref worried about such things. He might well not have himself at that age. A man and a woman-or a boy and a girl-could enjoy each other a good many ways without running the risk. Did Dagref know about them? He had little in the way of real experience, but who could guess what all he' d heard, what all he'd read? Who could guess what all Maeva knew, either?
Still shaking his head, Gerin tapped Dagref on the shoulder. "Let' s get moving," he said. With obvious reluctance-obvious to the Fox, at any rate, and probably to Maeva, too-Dagref flicked the reins. The horses began to walk, and then to trot.