Lanius wasn’t at all sure he believed that. He asked, “What else?”
Now the tutor laughed. “For another, Your Highness, if I go away, who will tell you how clever you are?”
“You’re right,” Lanius said at once. “You must stay.” The tutor had praised him. If he could get praise for being clever, he would show the man he was very clever indeed. “Teach me!”
“I… will.” No one had ever spoken to the tutor with such urgency. “What would you like to learn?”
“Anything. Everything! Teach me. I’ll learn it. Where do we start?”
Lanius seemed desperate, like a drowning man grabbing for a spar. The tutor could no more help responding to such eagerness to learn than he could have helped responding to a pretty girl’s different eagerness in bed. “Your Highness,” he said, “I’ll do everything I can for you.”
“Just teach me,” Lanius told him.
Grus was glad to get out of the city of Avornis. He wished he could have gotten his family out of the capital, too. He didn’t like the way people were choosing between Arch-Hallow Bucco and former arch-hallow Megadyptes. That also meant they were choosing sides about whether Lanius was a bastard or King Mergus’ legitimate son—and so the likely heir and possible rival to King Scolopax. No matter how it ended, it would be messy.
Thanks to his victories over the Menteshe, Grus had been promoted to commodore—a captain commanding a whole flotilla. Nicator, his lieutenant aboard the Tigerfish in days gone by, now commanded Grus’ flagship. “That last one will take care of itself,” Nicator told him when he grumbled as the flotilla stopped in the town of Veteres one evening.
“How?” Grus asked. “Either you’re for one of ’em or the other. You can’t very well be for both, and nobody’s about to change sides.”
“I know, I know,” Nicator said patiently. “But Megadyptes is such a holy old geezer, he’s got to fall over dead one day soon. Then everybody will be for Bucco, on account of what choice will they have?”
“The people who follow Megadyptes will make a party, that’s what. They’ll say Scolopax never should have thrown him out, the way people were saying Mergus never should have thrown Bucco out. They’ll riot—you wait and see if they don’t.”
“And Scolopax’ll turn soldiers loose on ’em, and that’ll be the end of that.” Nicator saw the world in very simple terms.
“Well… maybe.” Grus didn’t think things were so simple, but he didn’t feel like arguing with his friend, either. He set a silver groat on the tavern table in front of him and rose to his feet. “Come on. Let’s get back to the ships.”
“Right,” Nicator said. “I’m with you.”
Veteres lay on the upper reaches of the Tuola River, heading up toward the foothills of the Bantian Mountains. River galleys couldn’t go much farther west. Some of the hill country beyond the Tuola belonged to Avornis. As in the south, the kingdom had once held more land. Over the past few years, though, King Dagipert and the Thervings ruled what had been western provinces of Avornis.
A couple of Thervings led a string of hill ponies through the streets of Veteres toward the market square. They were big, broad-shouldered men, bigger than most Avornans. They wore their fair hair down to their shoulders, but shaved their chins. Grus thought that looked silly. Foreigners had all kinds of odd notions. There was nothing silly about the sword on one Therving’s hip, though, or about the battle-ax the other one carried. Grus kept his mouth shut. Avornis and Thervingia weren’t at war—now.
Nicator muttered, “Miserable bastards.” But he made sure the Thervings didn’t hear him.
Down by the riverside, three or four more Thervings strode along the bank from one pier to the next. Their eyes were on Grus’ flotilla, so much so that they didn’t even notice Nicator and him coming up behind them. Pleasantly, Grus asked, “Help you with something?”
The big men jumped. One of them spoke in slow, accented Avornan. “We are just—how you say?—taking the air. Yes.” He nodded. “Taking the air.”
“That’s nice,” Commodore Grus said, still pleasantly. “Why don’t you take it somewhere else?”
He didn’t put his hand anywhere near his own sword. The Thervings could have given him and Nicator a hard time before more Avornans came to help. They didn’t. They went and took the air somewhere else. “Spies,” Nicator said.
“What else would you expect?” Grus said blandly.
Nicator pointed to a warehouse roof pole that stuck out from the building for some little distance. “We ought to hang them right there,” he said.
“Why?” Grus asked.
Nicator stared at him. “Olor’s throne, man!” he said. “We hang them because they’re spies.”
“But they’re very bad spies,” Grus said. “If we do hang them, King Dagipert will only send more, and the new ones may know what they’re doing.”
After chewing on that for close to a minute, Nicator finally decided to laugh. He said, “You’re a funny fellow, Skipper.”
Now it was Grus’ turn to be puzzled. “But I wasn’t joking,” he said.
With another man, or another pair of men, that might have started an argument, even a fight. Grus and Nicator ended up laughing about it. They got along even when they disagreed.
No bridges spanned the Tuola. A long time ago, when Avornis was stronger, there had been some. After the Thervings came, the Avoraans wrecked them—why make invasion easier? The Thervings found it easy enough even without bridges. It was still the custom, though, for Therving embassies to come down to the Tuola where the ruined end of a bridge still projected six or eight feet into the water. In the old days, embassies had crossed by that bridge. The custom had outlived the span.
A flag of truce flew above the embassy. Grus studied the Thervings from the deck of his river galley—an ambassador with a gold chain of office around his neck, a wizard, half a dozen guards. An Avornan embassy would have included a secretary, too, but not many Thervings knew how to write.
“Who are you? What do you want? Why do you come into Avornis?” Grus called. As the highest-ranking Avornan present, he asked the formal questions.
“I am Zangrulf,” the ambassador answered in good Avornan. “I come from King Dagipert, the mighty, the terrible, to King Scolopax to talk about renewing the tribute Avornis pays to Thervingia.”
Grus sighed. Most of him wished his kingdom didn’t pay tribute to the Thervings, even if it was cheaper than fighting. But, from what he’d heard and seen of Scolopax, he didn’t like the idea of his going to war against a sly old fox like Dagipert. “I will send a boat,” he said. “Then I will take you to Veteres, and you can go to the city of Avornis on the royal highway.”
Zangrulf and the wizard put their heads together. The ambassador waved out to the river galley. “I agree. Make it so.”
He had no business giving Grus orders, but Grus kept quiet. Thervings always acted as though they owned the world. The boat went to the riverbank. It wasn’t a big boat, and needed two trips to bring the whole embassy back to the galley. Zangrulf’s wizard came in the second trip.
Except for two rings in the shape of snakes—one silver, one gold—he wore on his little fingers, he looked like any other Therving: big, fair, long-haired, smooth-chinned. But his eyes—clever eyes—narrowed when he looked at Grus. Then he looked a little longer, and those clever eyes went wide. He spoke in Thervingian to Zangrulf.
The ambassador looked at Grus, too. He said, “Aldo says you are a great man.”
“Tell him thank you,” Grus answered, smiling. “Except for my wife, he’s the only one who seems to think so.”