“I suppose so,” his son said. “His woman and her brats are taken care of. Lanius made sure of that. Can I go now, or do you want to yell at me some more? I don’t kill servants for fun.”
“All right,” Grus said, and Ortalis left. Grus sighed. Considering what Ortalis did do for fun, was it any wonder that Grus had wondered? He didn’t think so.
Business, the king thought. If he was going to pick business, he wanted to pick interesting business to start with. He went to the chamber where Otus the former thrall dwelt. “Sorry, Your Majesty,” a guard said. “He’s not here right now.”
“Where is he?” Grus asked.
“He’s got a lady friend. He’s with her,” the guard answered.
“At this hour of the morning?” Grus exclaimed. The guard smirked and nodded. Grus said, “If I were wearing a hat, I’d take it off to him. Shall I wait until he’s, ah, finished?”
“I can fetch him, if you like,” the guardsman said.
“No, never mind,” Grus said. “I’ll come back and visit him later. He wouldn’t thank me for interrupting him, would he?”
“I don’t know about that, Your Majesty, but /wouldn’t,” the guard replied, chuckling at his own cleverness.
“All right, then. I’ll try again in an hour or so,” Grus said, and left.
When he came back, the guard nodded to him. “He’s here now, Your Majesty,” the fellow said. “He’s waiting for you.”
“Your Majesty!” Otus said when Grus walked into his chamber. “It is good to see you again.”
“Good to see you,” Grus answered. “I’m more pleased than I can tell you at how well you’re doing.” That was the truth. Only Otus’ southern accent and a certain slight hesitation in his speech said that he had been a thrall. He looked bright and alert and altogether like a normal man. He evidently acted like a normal man, too. “Who’s your, ah, friend?” Grus asked.
“Her name is Calypte, Your Majesty.” Otus seemed less happy than Grus had thought he might. “She is very sweet. And yet… You know I have a woman down in the south, a woman who is still a thrall?”
“Yes, I know that.” The king nodded.
Otus sighed. “I do her wrong when I do this. I understand that. But I am here, and she is there—and she is hardly more than a brute beast. I loved her when I was a beast myself. I might love her if she were a beast no more. Your Majesty, so many thralls down there! Save them!”
Otus’ appeal didn’t surprise Grus. The power with which the ex-thrall phrased it did. “I’ll do what I can,” the king answered. “I don’t know how much that will be. It will depend on the civil war among the Menteshe, and on how well wizards besides Pterocles can learn to cure thralls.”
And if they truly can, he thought. He didn’t say that to Otus, who seemed normal enough. If Otus hadn’t seemed normal, Grus wouldn’t have thought of campaigning south of the Stura at all.
“You could make beasts into men.” If the former thrall wasn’t cured, he sounded as though he was. “Who but the gods could ever do that until now? You would be remembered forever.”
Grus laughed. “Are you sure you weren’t born a courtier?”
“I’m sure, Your Majesty,” Otus said. “Courtiers tell lies. I’m too stupid to do that. I tell you the truth.”
“I’m going to tell you the truth, too,” Grus said. “I want to fight south of the Stura. I don’t know if I can. It’s dangerous for Avornan kings to go over the frontier. There have been whole armies that never came back. I want to cure thralls. I don’t want to see free men taken down into thralldom.”
“You wouldn’t!” Otus exclaimed. “Look at me. I’m free. I’m cured. Whatever the Banished One can do, he can’t make me back into what was.”
From what Lanius wrote, Otus bad always insisted on that. The trouble was, he would have insisted on it as vehemently if it were a lie as he would have if it were true. Grus didn’t know how to judge which it was. He didn’t know what to do, either.
“I already told you—I’ll decide what to do come spring,” he said after some thought. “If the Menteshe have a prince by then and they’re solidly behind him, I may have to sit tight. If they don’t… If they don’t, well, I’ll figure out what to do next then, that’s all.”
“You ought to be ready to move, whether you do or not,” Otus remarked.
That held a good deal of truth. “I already have soldiers in the south,” Grus said. “There’s one other thing I need to check up on before I make up my mind.”
“What’s that?” Otus asked.
Grus didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, he chatted for a little while longer and then took his leave. He went to a small audience chamber and told a servant, “Find the serving girl named Calypte and tell her I’d like to talk with her, please.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The servant dipped his head and hurried off.
Calypte came into the room less than a quarter of an hour later. Until then, Grus couldn’t have matched her name with her face. She was in her late twenties, short, a little on the plump side, with a round face, very white teeth, and dark eyes that sparkled. She wore a leaf-green dress and had tied a red kerchief over her black hair and under her chin. Dropping Grus a curtsy, she said, “What is it, Your Majesty?” She sounded nervous. Grus didn’t suppose he could blame her. She had to think she was either in trouble or that he was about to try to seduce her.
He said, “You’re… friends with Otus, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.” Now that she knew where the ground lay, her nerves vanished. She stuck out her chin. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
A feisty little thing, Grus thought, and hid a smile. “No reason at all,” he answered. “I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about him.”
“Why?” Calypte demanded. “What business is it of anybody except him and me?”
“It’s also the kingdom’s business, I’m afraid,” Grus said. “You haven’t forgotten he used to be a thrall, have you?”
“Oh.” The maidservant’s face clouded. “If you really want to know, I had forgotten until you reminded me. He doesn’t act like a thrall—or the way I suppose a thrall would act. He just acts like—a man.” She looked down at the mosaics on the floor and turned pink. Grus got the idea Otus had acted very much like a man earlier in the morning.
This time, he didn’t try to hide his smile. He said, “I don’t want to know about any of that. It isn’t any of my business—you’re right. What I want to know is, have you ever seen any places where he doesn’t act just like a man, where being a thrall left him different?”
Calypte thought that over. She didn’t need long. When she was done, she shook her head. A black curl popped free. Tucking it back under the kerchief, she said, “No, I don’t think so. He hasn’t been in the palace for years, the way most people I know have, so there are things he doesn’t understand right away, but anybody new here is like that.”
“Are you sure?” Grus asked. “It could be more important than you know.”
“I’m not a witch or anything, Your Majesty,” Calypte answered. “I can’t cast a spell or do things like that. But from what I know, he’s as much of a man as a man could be.”
She was right. Pterocles could make tests she couldn’t even imagine. But the wizard would have admitted— had admitted—he couldn’t be altogether sure of the answers he got, not when he was measuring himself against the strength and subtlety of the Banished One. But the tests Calypte applied (not that she would have called them such) were ones that, by the very nature of things, Pterocles was not equipped to administer.