King Grus tried to make the best of things, saying, “Well, if it were easy, Vsevolod wouldn’t have needed to ask us for help.”
“Huzzah,” Hirundo said sourly. “He was still in charge of things when he did ask us here, remember. He’s not anymore.”
“I know. We’ll have to see what we can do about that.” He called to Vsevolod, who rode in the middle of a small party of Chernagor noblemen not far away. “Your Highness!”
“What you want, Your Majesty?” Vsevolod spoke Avornan with a thick, guttural accent. He was about sixty, with thinning white hair, bushy eyebrows, and an enormous hooked nose.
“Do you know any secret ways into your city?” Grus asked. “We could use one about now, you know.”
“I know some, yes. I use one to get away,” Vsevolod replied. “Vasilko know most of these, too, though. I show him, so he get away if he ever have trouble when he ruling prince. I not show him this one, in case I have trouble.” He jabbed a large, callused thumb—more the thumb of a fisherman or metalworker than that of a ruling prince—at his own broad chest.
“Can an army use it, or just one man?” Grus asked.
The ousted ruler ran a hand through his long, curly beard. A couple of white hairs clung to his fingers. He brushed his hand against his kilt to dislodge them. “Would not be easy for army,” he said at last. “Passage is narrow. Few men could hold it against host.”
“Does Vasilko know how you got out? Or does he just know that you did?”
“He did not know of this way ahead of time. I am sure of that,” Vsevolod replied. “He would have blocked. If he knows now… This I cannot say. I am sorry.”
Hirundo said, “Maybe our wizard could tell us.”
“Maybe.” Grus frowned. “Maybe he’d give it away trying to find out, too.” He frowned again, hating indecision yet trapped into it. “We’d better see what he thinks, eh?”
Pterocles seemed determined to think as little as possible, or at least to admit to as little thought as possible. “I really could not say, Your Majesty. I know little of the blocking magics the Chernagors use these days, and how they match against ours. We haven’t warred with them in their own lands for a long time, so we haven’t had much need to learn such things. Maybe I can sneak past whatever wizardly wards he has without his being the wiser, or maybe I would put his wind up at once.”
“Helpful,” Grus said, meaning anything but. “Duke Radim is bound to have a wizard or two with him, eh? Talk to them, why don’t you? You can see what sorts of things the Chernagors do. Maybe that will tell you what you need to know.”
“Maybe.” Pterocles seemed glum, not convinced. Grus longed for Alca. He longed for her a couple of ways, in fact, even if he had made up with Estrilda.
He would have pushed Pterocles when the army camped that night, but a courier galloped into the encampment with a long letter from Lanius. Reading about the visit from Farrukh-Zad, Grus wished he were back in the city of Avornis. By what was in the letter, Lanius had done as well as anyone could have hoped to do. Grus wondered how closely the letter reflected truth; Lanius was, after all, telling his own story. Even if Lanius had gotten everything straight, was that all good news? Would he decide he liked this taste of real kingship and crave more?
Grus summarized the letter in a few sentences for the courier, then asked, “Is that how it happened?”
“Yes, Your Majesty, as far as I know,” the man replied. “I wasn’t in the throne room, you understand, but that pretty much matches what I’ve heard.”
Ah, gossip, Grus thought with a smile. “What all have you heard?” he asked, hoping to pick up some more news about the embassy, or at least to get more of a feel for what had gone on.
That wasn’t what he got. The courier hesitated, then shrugged and said, “Well, you’ll have heard about that other business by now, won’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Grus answered. “What other business?”
“About your son.”
“No, I hadn’t heard about that. What about him?” Grus tried to keep his tone as light and casual as he could. If he’d asked the question the way he wanted to, he would have frightened the courier out of saying another word.
He evidently succeeded, for the fellow just asked, “You haven’t heard about him and the girl?”
“No,” Grus said, again in as mild a voice as he could muster. “What happened? Is some serving girl going to have his bastard?” Next to a lot of the things Ortalis might have done, that would be good news. The only real trouble with royal bastards was finding a fitting place for them once they grew up.
But the courier said, “Uh, no, Your Majesty, no bastards. Not that I know about, anyhow.”
That Uh, no worried Grus. Carefully, he asked, “Well, what do you know about?” Staying casual wasn’t easy, not anymore.
“About how he—” The courier stopped. He suddenly seemed to remember he wasn’t passing time with somebody in a tavern. “It wasn’t so good,” he finished.
“Tell me everything you know,” Grus said. “About how he what? What wasn’t so good?” The courier stood mute. Grus snapped his fingers. “Come on. You know more than you’re letting on. Out with it.”
“Your Majesty, I don’t really know anything.” The man seemed very unhappy. “I’ve just heard things people are talking about.”
“Tell me those, then,” Grus said. “I swear by the gods I’ll remember they don’t come from you. I don’t even know your name.”
“No, but you know my face,” the courier muttered. King Grus folded his arms and waited. Trapped, the man gave him what was bound to be as cleaned-up a version of the gossip he’d heard as he could manage on the spur of the moment. It boiled down to the same sort of story as Grus had already heard about Ortalis too many times. At last, the man stumbled to a stop, saying, “And that’s everything I heard.”
Grus doubted it was. Such tales were usually much more lurid. But he thought he would need a torturer to pull anything else from the fellow. “All right, you can go,” he said, and the courier fled. “I’ll deal with this… whenever I get a chance.” Only he heard that.
He looked ahead to Nishevatz. The Chernagor city-state would take up all of his time for who could guess how long. He sighed. Whatever Ortalis had done was done. With a little luck, he wouldn’t do anything worse until Grus got back to the capital. Grus looked up at the heavens, wondering if that could be too much to ask of the gods.
Every once in a while, Lanius liked getting out of the royal palace. He especially liked going over to the great cathedral not far away, partly because some of the ecclesiastical archives went back even further than those in the palace and partly because he liked Arch-Hallow Anser.
He didn’t know anyone who didn’t like Grus’ bastard son. Even Queen Estrilda liked Anser, and she’d borne Grus’ two legitimate children. Prince Ortalis liked Anser, too, even though they had quarreled now and again, and Ortalis rarely liked anybody.
That didn’t mean Lanius thought Anser made a perfect arch-hallow. He’d been a layman when Grus first named him to the post, and had worn the black, green, and yellow robes of the ascending grades of the priesthood on successive days before donning the arch-hallow’s scarlet garb. He still knew—and cared—little about the gods or the structure of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His chief passion, almost his only passion, was hunting.
But he was loyal to Grus. To the man who held the real power in Avornis, that counted for much more than anything else. Lanius might prove a problem for Grus. Ortalis might, too. Anser? No. Anser never would.