Are you sure it’s mine? But no, he couldn’t ask that. He didn’t think she’d played him false since they’d become lovers, and they’d been together long enough so the father couldn’t be anyone from before even if she hadn’t made it plain she’d slept alone since her husband died. Grus said, “Well, well. I’ll take care of you, and I’ll take care of the baby. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Alauda breathed. By the way she said it, she had worried. In her place, Grus supposed he would have, too.
He shook his head. He might have been trying to clear it after a punch in the jaw. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I still don’t intend to bring you back to the capital with me. I don’t think my wife would understand.” Actually, Estrilda would understand altogether too well. That was what Grus was afraid of.
“I’m not worried about that,” Alauda said quickly. “You told me you wouldn’t once before.”
“All right. Good.” He realized he needed to do something more, and went over and gave her a kiss. She clung to him, making her relief obvious without a word. He kissed her again, and patted her, and lay down beside her. She fell asleep almost at once. She’d said being pregnant left her sleepy. Lying awake beside her as she softly snored, Grus sighed and shook his head. He’d been thinking about saying good-bye to her. He couldn’t very well do that now.
And he was drifting off to sleep himself when a new thought woke him up again. What would Alca think when she found out? After that, sleep took even longer to find Grus.
Lanius studied Grus’ letters from the south with the obsessive attention of a priest trying to find truth in an obscure bit of dogma. Naturally, Grus put the best face he could on the news he sent up to the city of Avornis— what he said quickly spread from the palace out to the capital as a whole. Piecing together what lay behind his always optimistic words was a fascinating game, one made more interesting when played with a map.
Just now, Lanius suspected his fellow king of cheating. Grus wrote of a night attack his army had beaten back, and then said, We have entered a town on the north bank of the Thyamis River, from which, as opportunity arises, we will proceed against the Menteshe.
“Which town on the north bank of the Thyamis?” Lanius muttered, more than a little annoyed. It could have been Naucratis, it could have been Chalcis, or it could have been Pelagonia. Grus didn’t make himself clear. Depending on where he was, he could strike at the nomads several different ways.
From the context, the Avornan army seemed most likely to be in Pelagonia. But why hadn’t Grus come out and said so? Up until now, he’d at least told people in the capital where he was, if not always why he’d gone there. Figuring out why was part of the game, too.
And then, after one more glance from the letter to the map, Lanius said, “Oh,” and decided he knew where the army was after all. If Estrilda saw the name Pelagonia, she wouldn’t need to look at a map to know where it was. She already knew that, in the only way likely to matter to her—it was where Grus had sent his mistress. What was he doing there now? That was what she would want to know. Did it have anything to do with fighting Prince Ulash’s men, or was the king seeing the witch again?
If Grus failed to send a dispatch up to the capital, everyone there would wonder what disaster he was trying to hide. But if he sent a dispatch that said, We have entered a town on the north bank of the Thyamis River —well, so what? If Estrilda saw the dispatch, would she realize a town on the north bank of the Thyamis River meant Pelagonia?. Not likely.
From being annoyed at Grus, Lanius went to admiring him. The other king had had a problem, had seen it, and had solved it in a way that caused him no more problems. If that wasn’t what being a good king was all about, Lanius didn’t know what would be.
Back in the palace, Lanius had problems of his own. He might have known rumors about Limosa would race through it like a fire through brush in a drought. He had known it, in fact. And now it had. Servants gossiped and joked, careless of who heard them. He didn’t want the royal family mocked. He was touchy about his own dignity—after people had called him a bastard through much of his childhood, who could blame him for that? And he was touchy about the dignity of the family.
“What can we do?” he asked Sosia. “I don’t believe it, but people still spread it.”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t really think we can do anything about it. And I’m not so sure I don’t believe it. Why would Zenaida lie about something like that?”
“How could Limosa seem so happy if it’s true?” Lanius retorted. “We’ve seen what happens when Ortalis starts abusing serving girls. You can’t tell me that’s happening now.”
His wife shrugged. “Maybe not. Whether the stories are true or not, though, all we can do is ignore them. If we say they’re lies, people will think we have reasons for hiding the truth. If we pretend we don’t hear, though, what can they do about it?”
“Laugh at us.” To Lanius, that was as gruesome as any other form of torture.
But Sosia only shrugged again. “The world won’t end. Before long, some new scandal will come along. Some new scandal always does. By this time next month, or month after at the latest, people will have forgotten all about Limosa.”
Things weren’t quite that simple, and Lanius knew it. Limosa was part of the royal family now. People would always wonder what she was doing and gossip about what they thought she was doing. Yet Sosia had a point, too. When new rumors came along, old ones would be forgotten. People didn’t shout, “Bastard!” at him anymore when he went out into the streets of the city of Avornis. His parentage had been a scandal, but it wasn’t now. People had found other things to talk about. They would with Limosa, too.
“Maybe you’re right,” Lanius said with a sigh. “But I don’t think it will be much fun until the rumors do die down.”
Grus looked south across the Thyamis River from the walls of Pelagonia. Clouds of smoke rising in the distance showed the Menteshe had no intention of leaving Avornis until he threw them out. As he’d known, this wasn’t a raid; this was a war. The king had been eager to come into Pelagonia for reasons of his own. Now, for different reasons, he was just as eager to leave the town.
His bodyguards stirred and stepped aside. Pterocles was one of the men who could come—limp, these days—right up to him without a challenge. At Grus’ gesture, the guardsmen moved back so Pterocles and he could talk in privacy.
“I owe you an apology, Your Majesty,” the wizard said.
“You do?” That wasn’t something Grus heard every day. “Why?”
“Because I thought Alca the witch was a sly little snip who was clever without really knowing what she was doing,” Pterocles answered. “I was wrong. I admit it. She’s really very sharp.”
“Oh? How do you know that?”
The look Pterocles gave him said the wizard wondered whether be was very sharp. “Because I’ve been working with her ever since we got here, of course. Do you think I’d say that about somebody I didn’t know?”
“No, I don’t suppose you would,” Grus admitted. “But I wondered, because I haven’t seen her since we got here.”
“Do you want to?” Pterocles sounded surprised. “Uh, meaning no disrespect, Your Majesty, but you’ve got another woman with you, and Alca knows it.”
“Oh,” Grus said. “Does she?” Pterocles nodded. The king wondered whether Alca knew Alauda was pregnant. She wouldn’t be very happy about that if she did. Even so, Grus went on, “I would like to see her, yes. Not because… because of what we used to be, but because she’s a powerful witch.”