“You’re welcome,” Lanius answered, but he was talking to Ortalis’ back.
“I haven’t seen him have a spell like that for a long time,” Sosia said once the door had closed behind Grus’ son.
“I wouldn’t be sorry never to see another one,” Lanius said. “You can’t tell what he’s going to do when he’s in a temper.” To him, nothing was more damning than lack of predictability.
“If I were Father, I’d try to arrange it so that Ortalis didn’t find out about any magic he worked,” Sosia said.
“If I were your father, I wouldn’t have let Ortalis know I knew anything out of the ordinary,” Lanius replied. Then he shrugged. “Something like that, though… If you know, how can you help showing you know?”
“I wish we didn’t know.” Sosia grimaced. “I wish there weren’t anything to know. I wish—I wish Ortalis were just like everybody else.”
“Too much to hope for,” Lanius said.
“He has been better,” Sosia said. Lanius nodded, for that was true. She went on, “Even here, he didn’t lose all of his temper. And he calmed down when you gave him an explanation he hadn’t thought of.” Lanius nodded again. His wife sounded like a woman lavishing praise on a poor child that finally stammered out “Mama” at six or seven. He started to say as much, but then noticed Sosia’s eyes were bright with tears.
He kept quiet.
Crex came in a few minutes later. Pitta pattered after him. He was tossing a leather ball stuffed with feathers up into the air and catching it—or, more often, dropping it. When he did, Pitta would grab it. Crex got it back and threw it in Lanius’ direction. The king reached for it but missed. Before Crex could run after it and pick it up, Sosia grabbed him and gave him a fierce hug. She didn’t seem to want to let him go.
“Put me down!” the little boy squawked.
“In a little while,” Sosia told him.
“Now!” Crex said.
Sosia gave him a last squeeze. He twisted free, got the ball away from Pitta, and threw it to his father. Lanius missed it again. The king laughed anyway. Sosia hugged Pitta. Lanius tickled Crex as he went by. Crex squealed. Lanius laughed louder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Petrosus didn’t look happy. The treasury minister pointed out through the windows at the drifts of snow surrounding the royal palace. He said, “Winters like this, Your Majesty, make your legislation concerning the purchase of smallholders’ land by the nobility more difficult to implement.”
“I’m not sure I follow that,” said Grus, who was sure he didn’t. “What’s the weather got to do with whether laws get followed or not?”
To his surprise, Petrosus had not only an answer but one that made sense. He said, “Hard winters make smallholders more likely to fail, and to fall into debt. Because of that, they are more likely to wish to sell their property. And, when they do sell it, who is more likely to buy than the local nobles?”
“Hmm.” Grus plucked at his beard. “Maybe we ought to add to those laws—something to the effect that they have to try to sell to relatives and neighbors before they’re allowed to take money from nobles.”
“That may do some good,” Petrosus said judiciously. “I’m not sure how much it will do, though—their relatives and neighbors are liable to be looking at the same sort of trouble, don’t you think?”
“I wish you made less sense than you do,” Grus said. “Draft the revisions anyhow, though, if you’d be so kind. Maybe they won’t work so well. But we’ll never know if we don’t try, will we?”
“No, Your Majesty,” the treasury minister replied. “I do admire your optimism, I must say.”
“We have to try,” Grus said again. “If things don’t work out the way we hope, we’ll try something else, that’s all.” His laugh wasn’t in the least self-conscious. “I’m a tinker and a tinkerer, Petrosus. I’ll keep fiddling with something till I get it right or till I see it won’t work no matter how much tinkering I give it.”
“I have noticed that, yes.” By the way Petrosus said it, he didn’t mean it as praise.
“Draft the revisions,” he said once more. “Draft them, and I’ll issue them.” Petrosus nodded. At Grus’ gesture, the treasury minister left the room. He would do as he’d said, and he’d do a good job of making the new laws as likely to be obeyed as he could. He might think Grus a few bricks short of a wall, but he followed the king’s commands simply because they were the king’s commands.
Under a bad king, a man like that would be very dangerous, Grus thought. He hoped he wasn’t a bad king. He didn’t think he was, but what bad king ever did? Even Scolopax, a bad king if ever there was one, had surely believed he was doing the best job he could.
Having finished his business with Petrosus, Grus went back to the royal chambers. Playing with his grandchildren was more fun than talking about taxation policy with the treasury minister. Or it would have been, if he’d gotten the chance to do it. But the first person he saw there was Estrilda.
They’d been married a long time—long enough for him not even to notice the hard, set expression on her face. That turned out to be a mistake. Without preamble, she said, “I hear—later than I should have, but I do hear—Alca the witch’s husband has left her.”
“Do you?” Grus said, hoping he could evade disaster.
He couldn’t. “I certainly do,” Estrilda said. “And I hear why he left her, too.”
“Do you?” Grus said again. He wished something—the announcement of an invasion from Thervingia, for instance— would let him escape, but no such luck.
“Yes, I do.” Estrilda walked—stalked—up to him. “And I’ll tell you exactly what I think about it, too.”
“What?” Grus asked. She sounded calm and reasonable, which gave him some cause to hope.
That also proved misplaced. “This!” she shouted, and slapped him in the face, a roundhouse blow that snapped his head back. Then—but only then—she burst into tears.
She started to swing on him again. Though his ears were ringing, he caught her wrist. “That’s enough,” he said. “It was… just one of those things.”
“Oh, I’ll bet it was,” Estrilda said. “Let go of me, you—” She called him a few names he wouldn’t have expected from Nicator, let alone his own wife.
When he did let her go, she tried to slap him again. He managed to grab her wrist once more. “Stop that!”
“Why should I? You didn’t.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Grus protested.
“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t,” Estrilda said. “You were away for a long time, you got lonely, and there she was…”
In another tone of voice, the words might have been sympathetic. As things were, the sarcasm flayed. Grus’ face heated. He raised a hand and cautiously touched his cheek. It already felt on fire. “But—” he tried.
“No buts.” Estrilda effortlessly overrode him. He might have tried harder to argue back if he hadn’t known all too well he was in the wrong. She went on, “I might believe that if I hadn’t heard it all before. But I have, gods curse you. That’s what you told me after your other little slut went and had Anser. I could believe it once. Once, I tell you. If you try to give me the same tired lies twice, you’re a fool, and I’d be a bigger one to pay any attention to you.”
“But it’s true,” Grus said—the ancient and useless cry of wandering husbands (and wives) through the ages when they were found out. And he even meant it. Would I have gone to bed with Alca if we’d stayed here in the city of Avornis? he asked himself. Of course not.