Ortalis pinched his lips together and didn’t reply. “If you don’t tell him, I will,” Anser said.
That drew another glare from King Grus’ legitimate son. “Oh, all right,” he said again. “I got tired of chasing boar and deer and rabbits, that’s all. I was wondering what it would be like to hunt some worthless man.”
“And kill him?” Lanius said in rising horror. Hunting might have sated Ortalis’ bloodlust for a while. Clearly, it hadn’t gotten rid of that taste for cruelty altogether.
“Well, if he deserved it,” Ortalis answered. “If he was a condemned criminal, say. He’d have it coming to him then.”
“I don’t think anybody deserves being hunted to death,” Lanius said.
“I don’t, either,” Sosia said. “And I’m sure Father wouldn’t. You know that, too, don’t you?”
By Ortalis’ fierce scowl, he knew it all too well. “Nobody wants me to have any fun!” he shouted.
“That isn’t the only kind of fun you were talking about,” Anser said.
“I was joking!” Ortalis said. “Can’t anybody tell when I’m joking?”
“Hunting men was one thing, you said,” Anser went on, “but hunting women—”
“I was joking!” Ortalis screamed. Servants stared at him. All through the palace, far out of sight, heads must have whipped around at that cry. Lanius was as sure of it as of his own name. He’d heard some things about Ortalis and serving girls. He didn’t know whether he believed them, but he’d heard them. He didn’t want to believe them—he did know that.
Sosia said, “If Father ever finds out about this, Ortalis—”
“He won’t, if you can keep your big fat mouth shut,” her brother whispered furiously. “And you’d better, because I was just joking.”
“We’ll make a bargain with you,” Lanius said. Beside him, Sosia stirred, but she kept silent. Anser just nodded, waiting to hear what Lanius would propose. He went on, “Here—this is it. We won’t tell Grus anything about this, as long as you promise never even to talk about hunting people again, men or women, joking or not. Is that a deal?”
Ortalis looked as though he’d bitten into something nasty. “Everybody gets so excited about every stupid little thing,” he muttered.
“Is it a deal?” Lanius asked again.
“Oh, all right.” His brother-in-law still looked and sounded disgusted at the world.
“Promise, then,” Lanius said.
“Promise in the holy names of King Olor and Queen Quelea and all the other gods in the heavens,” Anser added. To Lanius’ surprise, King Grus’ bastard son could sound like a proper, holy Arch-Hallow of Avornis after all.
Ortalis blinked. Evidently, he hadn’t thought Anser could sound like a proper, holy arch-hallow, either. He coughed a couple of times, but finally nodded. “By Olor and Quelea and the other gods, I promise,” he choked out.
“The gods hold your words,” Anser said. “If you break your promise, they will make you pay. It may not be soon, it may not be the way you expect, but they will make you pay.” He nodded to Ortalis, then to Lanius and Sosia, and walked out of the palace, his crimson robes flapping around him.
“I don’t know why he started having kittens. I was only joking,” Ortalis said. Neither his sister nor his brother-in-law answered. He said something else, something pungent, under his breath and went off in a hurry, his shoulders hunched, his face pinched with the fury he had to hold in for once and couldn’t loose on the world around him.
Quietly, Sosia said, “You did well there.”
“Did I?” Lanius shrugged. “I don’t know. He can’t hunt people. I do know that. The rest?” He shrugged again. “Maybe we should tell your father. But maybe Ortalis really was joking. Who can say?”
His wife sighed. “He wasn’t joking. You know it as well as I do. He’ll do whatever he thinks he can get away with. If he decides he can’t get away with hunting people for sport, he won’t do it. I hope to the heavens he won’t do it, anyhow.”
“He won’t do it with Anser, that’s certain,” Lanius said. “More to him than I thought there was. I’m glad to see it.” He’d been scandalized when Grus named his illegitimate son Arch-Hallow of Avornis. But if Anser could sound like a proper arch-hallow, maybe he could do everything else a proper arch-hallow needed to do, too. Lanius dared hope.
By the way Sosia sounded, so did she. “I thought I’d despise Anser—after all, I don’t like to think about Father running around on Mother, any more than I’d care to think of you running around on me. But I don’t. The more I see him, the better I like him.”
“Yes, the same with me,” Lanius answered. He didn’t say anything about running around on Sosia. He hadn’t, not yet. But he had noticed a serving woman or two casting glances his way. He could do something about that if he ever decided he wanted to. Even if the palace held a new royal bastard afterward, Grus would hardly be in a position to criticize him.
Lanius laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. If Grus wanted to criticize him—or to do worse than that to him—he would. That was what being King of Avornis—being the King of Avornis with the real power in the land—meant. Grus wouldn’t need reason or right on his side, only strength. And strength, without a doubt, he had. If anyone in the kingdom was in the position to appreciate the difference between rank and strength, Lanius knew all too well he was the man.
“I don’t much care for this country,” Alca said as the river galley drew up to a pier in Cumanus. “It’s warmer than it ought to be at this season of the year. The soil’s the wrong color. People have funny accents, too. And they go around looking nervous all the time.”
King Grus smiled at her. “I lived down here in the south for years and years. It seems like home to me, at least as much as the city of Avornis does. Red dirt’s as good as brown. If you manure it well, it yields fine crops. I can talk this way as well as the way I usually do.” For a sentence, he put on a nasal southern accent.
Alca made a face. “Maybe you can, but I don’t see why you’d bother.”
“And if you had the Menteshe right across the river from you,” Grus went on, “don’t you think you’d have an excuse for looking nervous, too?”
The witch couldn’t very well argue with that. She didn’t even try. “Something must be wrong, badly wrong, on the other side of the Stura,” she said. “If it’s stirred up the thralls”—she shuddered—“it must be truly dreadful.”
“Maybe,” Grus said.
“How could it be otherwise?” Alca asked.
“That’s what you’ve come to find out—how it could be otherwise, I mean,” Grus answered. “Or if it is otherwise.”
“What else could it be but some upheaval?” Alca said.
“I don’t know,” Grus said. “The point is, you don’t know, either.”
Thralls worked their fields, took mates—they could hardly be said to marry—and endured whatever their Menteshe overlords chose to dish out to them, year after year after year, till they died. They wore clothes. They spoke—a little. Otherwise, they weren’t much different from the beasts they tended. Most of what made men men was burned out of them. So it had been for centuries, in lands where the Menteshe ruled. So the Banished One wished it were all over Avornis.
Every so often, as the Avornans had seen, a thrall would by some accident shake off the dark spell that clouded his life. Then, if he could, he would flee north to Avornis.
But why would a still spellbound thrall suddenly flee over the Stura? Why would hundreds of such thralls come north into Avornis? Grus hoped Alca would be able to tell him. No answer he’d imagined for himself came close to satisfying him.