Corvus’ hands folded into fists. “Nobody talks to me that way,” he said.
In a voice like ice, Lepturus said, “You’re speaking to the King of Avornis. You had better remember it if you ever want to see your estates again. He’s earned the right to be angry at you, considering how much you threw away.”
“I was stabbed in the back,” Count Corvus repeated.
“By your own stupidity, maybe—no one else’s,” Lepturus said.
“Enough,” Lanius said. “If we fight among ourselves, who wins? King Dagipert.” Not that he hasn’t won already, he thought. But he added, “And who laughs? The Banished One.”
Lepturus bowed. “That’s so, Your Majesty, every word of it. You’ve got good sense.”
Lanius thought he had tolerably good sense, too. And what has it gotten me? he wondered. I could be a drooling idiot, and I’d still wear the Avornan crown. More than a few people might like it better if I were a drooling idiot. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about what I thought, because I wouldn’t think anything at all.
“The Banished One laughed when Grus betrayed Corax,” Corvus said furiously. Neither Lanius nor Lepturus said a word. They both just looked at him for a long time. Lanius wasn’t sure what his own expression seemed like. He was sure he wouldn’t have wanted anyone with Lepturus’ scowl glaring at him. And Corvus, most reluctantly, yielded. “All right,” he muttered. “Let it go.”
A stone-thrower hurled a rock as big as a man’s head—Lanius glanced at Corvus to make the comparison—out toward the Thervings. They had no weapons to match the catapult. But it did less good than it might have. It skipped—as a smaller, flatter stone might have skipped on water—and landed harmlessly, well beyond the clump of men at whom it was aimed.
The soldiers serving the siege engine cursed furiously. “They’ve got a wizard out there working for them,” one of the men said. “By the gods, why haven’t we got wizards here to put their bastard down?”
“That’s a good question,” Lanius said. “Why haven’t we, Lepturus?”
“Because somebody’s gone and botched things, that’s why,” the commander of his bodyguards answered. Wizardry was a rare talent; reliable wizardy even rarer. Still, a sorcerer should have been on the wall. Corvus brayed laughter. “Oh, shut up,” Lepturus told him, “or we’ll shoot that boulder on top of your neck at the Thervings next.” Lanius snickered. He couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t the only one who’d had that thought, then.
Scowling, Corvus stalked away. If he could have raised fur on his back like an offended cat, he would have done it. Lanius sighed. “I suppose we shouldn’t bait him.”
“Why not?” Lepturus said. “He shouldn’t just be baited—he should be bait. You could catch plenty of fish with bits of him on the hook.”
“Heh,” Lanius said, though he didn’t think the guards commander was joking.
The Thervings held their ring around the city of Avornis. Out beyond that ring, they did as they pleased. Pillars of smoke marked the funeral pyres of farmhouses, villages, towns. Lanius began to wonder if any of the northwestern part of the kingdom would remain unravaged by the time Dagipert finally decided to go home for the harvest.
Instead of going home, the King of Thervingia launched a furious, full-scale assault on the capital three days later. His wizards did their best to hide his preparations, and then, when the attack was launched, they hurled fireballs and lightning bolts and sudden storms of rain at the Avornans on the walls.
More than a few of the first messengers who brought word of the attack back to the palace sounded panicky. Like most people inside the city, Lanius had thought Dagipert would know he couldn’t take it, and so wouldn’t try very hard. To find out he was wrong alarmed him, as it always did. Might he also have been wrong about the city’s invulnerability?
He couldn’t ask Lepturus. The guards commander was on the walls himself, seeing to the defense. Lanius tried to go out there, but palace servants stopped him. “Sorry, Your Majesty,” said a steward who sounded not sorry in the least. “Your mother has forbidden you to go to the fighting.”
Lanius fumed and pouted. Later, he realized he might have done better to bribe the man. That might have worked. His show of temper didn’t. He had to stay and wait and wonder if the next soldiers he saw rushing toward the palace would be Avornans or ax-wielding Thervings.
Only as the sun set behind the Bantian Mountains did the din abate. A last messenger came to the palace. “Olor be praised,” he said simply. “We’ve thrown ’em back.”
Even then, though, King Dagipert refused to withdraw. Instead, he went back to ruining the Avornan countryside. Trapped within the capital, all Lanius could do was watch the smoke rise. After a week, Dagipert sent a messenger up to the walls under flag of truce. “Hear my master’s terms,” the Therving shouted in good Avornan.
Lepturus let him enter through a postern gate and sent him to the palace. There he bowed to Queen Certhia and, a little less deeply, to Lanius himself. “King Dagipert must see he can’t break into the city of Avornis,” Certhia said. “What do we have to give him to make him go away?”
“You Avornans must see you cannot drive King Dagipert from your land,” said the envoy, whose name was Claffo. “He says, Thervingia and Avornis should not have to fight anymore. He says, we should make them one, to keep it from happening again. He says, let King Lanius wed Princess Romilda, as was agreed once before.”
Lanius no longer looked at the idea with automatic horror, as he had a few years earlier. If Romilda had a pretty face and a nice shape, he was willing to think about it. But his mother spoke only one word, and that was “No.”
“King Dagipert says he will make you sorry if you refuse,” Claffo warned.
“No,” Certhia repeated. “Tell Dagipert he cannot make me as sorry as I would be if that wedding went forward.”
“I will tell him,” Claffo said mournfully. “But you will regret this.”
After he’d gone, Lanius said, “Mother, maybe I could—”
“No,” Queen‘ Certhia said yet again. “Bedding serving girls is one thing.” Lanius looked all around again, his face heating with embarrassment. His mother went on, “Taking a queen is something else again, and I will not have the Therving as your father-in-law. I’ve made mistakes, but I won’t sell Avornis to Thervingia. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Mother.” Lanius didn’t always think his mother ran Avornis wisely—which meant she didn’t always do things the way he would have, had he been of age. Here, though, he couldn’t quarrel with Certhia’s choice. Marrying him to Romilda meant marrying Avornis to Thervingia, and he knew which partner would rule the roost.
“All right, then,” his mother said. “Dagipert can’t break in here. We’ve seen that—and if he does, everything’s over anyway, so there’s no point worrying about what to do next. Sooner or later, his men have to run short of food. The way they’re tearing up the countryside, it’ll probably be sooner. Once they start getting hungry, what can they do but go home?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” Lanius said. “Still, I wish they’d go home sooner than that.”
“So do I,” Certhia said. “But I don’t know how to make them do it. Do you? If you think you do, I’ll be glad to listen.”
She sounded as though she meant it. Lanius pondered. At last, scowling because he couldn’t come up with a right answer when he needed one most, he shook his head. “No, Mother. I’m sorry. I wish I did.”