The thing screeched. The driver hit it again, craack!, this time across its muzzle, just missing one eye. The monster clapped a hand to the wound and fled.
Along with three or four other chariots, Gerin's overlapped the end of the Trokme line. 'Come on! We'll roll 'em up!' he shouted with fierce joy, and led his men around the enemy's flank. The chaos they created was marvelous to behold-and would have been more marvelous still had the woodsrunners' line not overlapped his on the other wing. But it did, and the whole battle spun round, a mad wheel of destruction.
The Fox found himself face-to-face with Adiatunnus. The Trokme had lost his helm somewhere in the fighting; his bald pate glowed red from exertion and sun. His eyes, though, were cold and shrewd, 'Well, lord Gerin,' he said with a mocking salute, 'we lie athwart your way home now, don't we?'
'You do that,' Gerin answered in the Trokme tongue, 'but no more than we lie athwart yours.'
Fighting ebbed as the leaders parleyed. Adiatunnus scowled; perhaps he'd hoped to panic Gerin, but he'd failed. He looked over the field. 'You've hurt us about as bad as the other way round,' he said. 'Are you fain to go on, now, or shall we say enough and have done?'
Gerin gauged the field, too. The Trokme chief had the right of it; the battle was drawn. The woodsrunners had wrecked Mannor Trout's village, but he'd had his revenge there: he'd hurt Adiatunnus' lands worse. Fighting till only a handful of men still stood had scant appeal to him, especially with the monsters on the loose.
'Enough-for now,' he said reluctantly, 'if you can hold thosethings-to a truce to let us separate.'
'That I can, though I'll thank you for not speaking ill of my friends and allies here,' Adiatunnus said. 'And 'for now' indeed-we'll have at each other again, I have no doubt. Och, and when we do, I'll be after having more in the way of friends and allies, but you, Foxwhat will you do?'
Gerin pondered that question as the rival forces warily passed through each other. He was still pondering it when he crossed back over the border into his own holding, and when he came home to Fox Keep. Ponder as he would, though, he found no answer that satisfied him.
VIII
'My poor ear,' Rihwin moaned for what had to be the five hundredth time. Gerin prided himself on being a patient man, but when his patience snapped, it snapped spectacularly.
'By all the gods, I'm sick to death of listening to your whining,' he growled, and grabbed Rihwin. The southerner tried to twist free, but Gerin was the best wrestler in the northlands. He twisted one of Rihwin's arms behind his back and started frog-marching him toward the shack where he worked his magics.
'What are you doing?' Rihwin yelped.
'I am going to fix that ear of yours, one way or the other,' the Fox said. Rihwin hadn't struggled hard till then, but he started to. Gerin twisted his arm up a little higher. Rihwin gasped as he felt his shoulder joint creak.
Inside the shack, Gerin slammed him down onto the one rickety chair in front of the table where he labored at his sorcery. He'd managed to overawe Rihwin, which wasn't easy. The southerner made no effort to bolt. In a small voice, he repeated, 'What are you doing?'
'What I said I'd do: use the law of similarity to build that ear of yours back to where it's the same as the other one. The spell should be simplicity itself: what could possibly go wrong?'
Now Rihwin did try to rise. 'I'd really rather not find out. Given the choice between a half-trained wizard- which, you must admit, is a charitable description of your talents-and keeping silent about my mutilation, I opt without hesitation for silence.'
Gerin slammed him down again. 'You've said that before, over and over. You've gone back on your word, too, over and over. Now, don't be a donkey-just sit there and I'll set you right in no time. Unless you' d rather I tried that operation you described-'
'No,' Rihwin said hastily. 'You're sure you know what you're doing?' He had the look of a man sitting down to gamble against a fellow notorious for using loaded dice.
'I know what I have to do,' Gerin answered, which was not quite an affirmative. He flipped through the vellum pages of a codex until he came to a cantrip which was a general application of the law of similarity. Then he paused a while in thought. Suddenly he smacked one fist into the other palm. 'The very thing!' he exclaimed. He turned to Rihwin. 'I'm going out to find something to tailor the spell to your very problem. You'd better be here when I get back.'
'What are you looking for?' Rihwin still sounded suspicious.
Gerin grinned triumphantly. 'Earwigs.'
'Well, father Dyaus, that's ingenious,' Rihwin said. 'Perhaps I shall be here when you return.'
With that Gerin had to be content. He went out and started turning over stones in the courtyard. Under one not very far from the stables, he found several of the shiny, dark brown insects. They tried to crawl away, but he grabbed them and carried them back to the shack. 'Even the little pincers on their posteriors will serve symbolically to represent the ring you wore in your ear.'
'Why, so they will.' All at once, Rihwin went from dubious to enthusiastic. 'Don't fribble away the time. Get on with it.'
Gerin got on with it, but first spent more time studying the spell in the grimoire. He knew his own inadequacy as a sorcerer, and also knew he would never get the chance to make two serious blunders. Fitting a general spell to a specific application required certain adaptations of both verse and passes. He muttered to himself, planning in advance the rhymes he'd use and the passes he'd have to change. The spell was intended to be simple, which meant most of the passes used the right hand. That hindered him more than it helped. He'd overcome the problem before, though, and expected to be able to do it again.
He felt confident as he launched into the chant. His right hand was clumsy, but seemed to be doing what he required of it. He poured rose water over the earwigs he'd imprisoned in a bronze bowl. They didn't drown quite as fast as he'd thought they would, but surely that degree of exactitude wouldn't matter.
'My ear feels strange,' Rihwin remarked. He brought his hand up to the ruined flap of flesh. 'You've not changed it yet, but the potential for change is manifestly there.'
'Shut up,' Gerin said fiercely, though Rihwin had given him good news. The donkey had to know he didn't need to be distracted, not when he was coming to the climactic moment of the spell. His right hand twisted through the last pass; he grunted in satisfaction at having done it correctly. He cut a red wool thread with a bronze knife he never used for any other purpose and cried, 'Transform!'
'You've done it!' Rihwin said exultantly. 'I can feel the change.'
Gerin turned to see what his magic had wrought. He suffered a sudden coughing fit, and hoped his face would not betray him. He had changed Rihwin's ear, but not quite in the way he'd intended. It was indeed whole, but not pink and round: it was long and pointed and hairy.
He knew what had gone wrong. He'd called Rihwin a donkey, and then thought of him as a donkey when he'd spoken up at the wrong time. Somehow, the resentful thought had leaked into the conjuration and left his fellow Fox with a donkey's ear.
A fly buzzing around the inside of the shack chose that moment to light on the new-formed appendage. As a donkey's ear will, it twitched. The fly flew away. Rihwin started violently and clapped a hand to his head. The evidence, alas, was all too palpable. 'What have you done to me, you muddler?'
'Muddled.' Gerin kicked at the dirt floor of the shack, feeling smaller and more useless than the earwigs he'd drowned.
'Well, what are you going to do about it? You were going to give me an ear, you-you moldy pigeon dropping, not this-this excrescence.' Gerin had never heard an unwounded man scream through three consecutive sentences before; in the abstract, the feat was to be admired.
'I'll try my best to set it right,' Gerin said. 'I should be able to manage a simple reversal of the spell.' He reached for the grimoire.
'You said the spell itself would be simple, too,' Rihwin reminded him. He wasn't screaming any more, but sarcasm sharp and sour as vinegar dripped from his tongue.
'So I did,' Gerin admitted. 'Look, if all else fails, I'll buy you a hat.' That sent Rihwin's voice back into the upper registers.
