“Whom shall I examine next, Your Majesty?” Alca asked.
The smile Grus gave her was of a different sort. “For the time being, I think you can let your spell rest. If you use it too often, you’re liable to cause more disloyalty than you root out.”
She nodded. “I knew that. I wasn’t sure you did.”
“Oh, yes,” Grus said. “Oh, yes, indeed.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Lanius said to Sosia.
“Mind? Why should I mind?” she answered. “You’re my husband.”
Things weren’t quite so simple. Lanius knew as much. He was sure she did, too. Even so, he asked, “Do you know why your brother”—he didn’t want to call Ortalis Prince Ortalis, but didn’t dare leave off the title when speaking of him by name, either—“has that bandage on his right hand?”
“I don’t know, no,” Sosia said. “But I don’t think he had it before he went into the room where you keep Iron these days.”
Ice walked up Lanius’ back. “That’s what I thought, too. But Iron’s still all right. I bet it bit him or scratched him before he could hurt it. What am I going to do?”
“Talk to my father,” she said at once. “If anyone can put a stop to it for a while, he can.”
It wasn’t a long answer. Still, Lanius had seldom heard one that gave him more to chew on. That for a while was truly frightening. But so was the prospect of talking to King Grus. “Why should he do anything at all?” Lanius asked bitterly. “Ortalis… Prince Ortalis is his son. I’m just… me.”
“Oh, he knows about Ortalis,” Sosia said. “He’s known about Ortalis and animals for a long time. He can make Ortalis fear the gods… for a while. I don’t think anyone can make Ortalis do any more than that. It’s like he has a demon inside, and every so often it comes out—or maybe more like he has a hole inside himself, and every so often he falls into it. If you want to keep the moncats safe, you’d better talk to my father.”
Where nothing else would have, that did it. More than anything else, Lanius did want to make sure the moncats stayed safe. And so, nervously, he spoke to Grus. To his surprise, the man who’d stolen part of his throne and all of his power heard him out. The more Grus heard, the colder and harder his face got. When Lanius finished, Grus said, “Thanks for telling me. Don’t worry about the beasts. He won’t bother them again.”
“How will you stop him?” Lanius asked. “What will you do?”
“Whatever I have to,” Grus said grimly. For the first time, Lanius began to believe Sosia had known what she was talking about.
The next time he saw Prince Ortalis, his brother-in-law scuttled out of his way. Ortalis moved as though in some little pain, or perhaps some not so little. And he stayed away from the rooms where the moncats lived for a long time afterward. There, at least, Grus kept his promise.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Colonel Hirundo watched King Grus with more than a little amusement. Grus’ mount was a bay gelding calm as a pond on a breezeless day, but the king clutched the reins and gripped the horse with his knees as though afraid of falling at any moment—which he was. “Meaning no offense, Your Majesty, but you’ll never make a horseman,” Hirundo remarked.
“Really? Why on earth would you say such a thing? Because I’m as graceful as a sack of beans on horseback?”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes.”
“So what?” Grus said. “I give the men something to laugh at. Better they could laugh than quiver in their boots for fear of bumping into Dagipert and the Thervings.”
“When you put it that way, maybe,” Hirundo said.
“Whether I’m a horseman or not, Colonel, I have my reasons for coming along, believe you me I do,” Grus said. “I don’t want to stay in the capital the rest of my days. I want to see more of Avornis than that. How can I deal with what goes on in the kingdom if I don’t keep an eye on it?”
“Plenty of Kings of Avornis have tried,” Hirundo observed. Like Grus, he had risen in the world since their wars against the Menteshe in the south.
“I don’t intend to be one of them,” Grus said.
He was glad to escape the capital, even if escaping it meant going into battle against the Thervings. An army on the march, he was discovering, was different from a fleet of river galleys on the move. In one way, the army had the advantage—it could go anywhere, while available waterways limited the fleet. But the army carried its own stink with it, a heavy odor compounded of the smells of horses and unwashed men. It stayed in Grus’ nostrils and would not go away. Even after his conscious mind forgot about it, it lingered. He smelled it in his dreams.
He led the soldiers west, toward Thervingia, toward danger. No one could doubt the Thervings had used this route to come through Avornis and approach the capital in the recent past. The signs were all too clear—torched villages, empty farmsteads, fields that should have been full of ripening grain going to weeds, instead. Once, Grus’ army came upon what was left of a detachment of Avornan soldiers King Dagipert’s men had met and overwhelmed. Not much remained of the Avornans—only a few scattered bones still recognizable as human, and fragments of clothing enough to identify them as Grus’ countrymen. The Thervings had stolen everything they found worth taking.
“This could happen to us, too,” Grus told the men he led. “It could—if we aren’t careful. If we are, though, nothing can beat us. We just have to watch ourselves, don’t we?”
“Yes,” the soldiers chorused dutifully. He also watched them, sometimes in ways they didn’t expect. He posted extra sentries that evening on the roads leading east, for instance. Those sentries captured six or eight men trying to slip away from the danger they’d seen. Grus didn’t make examples of them, as he might have. But he didn’t let them desert, either. Back to the encampment they went.
Whenever the army passed woods on its way west, Grus sent scouts into them. He didn’t want to give Dagipert the chance to ambush him, as the King of Thervingia had ambushed other Avornan armies. Three days after the army found what was left of that Avornan detachment, the scouts Grus sent to examine a frowning pine forest burst out of it much faster than they’d gone in. They came galloping back toward the main mass of men.
“Thervings!” they shouted. “The Thervings are in the woods!”
“Good!” Grus exclaimed, though he was anything but sure how good it was. “Now we can make them pay for what they’ve done to Avornis.” He raised his voice to a shout like the one he might have used aboard a river galley. “Revenge!”
“Revenge!” the soldiers echoed.
Grus had never led a battle on land before. He didn’t try to lead this one now, either, not really. He’d brought Colonel Hirundo here for just that reason. Hirundo handled the job with unruffled competence. At his orders, horns bellowed from metal throats and signal flags waved. The Avornan soldiers shook themselves out, moving from column to line of battle as smoothly as Grus could have hoped. As they were deploying, Hirundo turned to Grus and asked, “What now, Your Majesty? Do we await the enemy on open ground here, or do we go into the woods after them?”
“Into the woods,” Grus replied at once. “They won’t surprise us now.”
Hirundo nodded. “All right. I hoped you’d say that. If you’d care to do the honors… ?”
“What do you—? Oh.” Grus raised his voice again, this time shouting, “Forward!”
The Avornans cheered as they began to advance. Grus and Hirundo both weighed those cheers, trying to gauge the army’s spirit from them. At almost the same instant, they both nodded. Despite the attempted desertions a few nights before, the soldiers seemed ready enough to fight.