Rihwin would have smiled at the joke, or at least recognized that it was one. It flew past Pruanz and Arabel, a clean miss. 'Words, they're cheap,' Pruanz said. 'Want to give you something better, show we really mean what we say.'
'Pruanz is right,' Arabel said. 'You come back with me to the house, I'll make you feel as good as I know how.' Even in darkness, he saw her twitch her hips at him.
'Lord prince, she's lively,' Pruanz said. 'You'll like what she does.'
Gerin looked from one of them to the other. They meant it. He sighed. He'd taken his pleasure with peasant women a good many times, but he didn't feel like it now, not with Selatre waiting for him back at the keep. As gently as he could, he said, 'I don't want to take your wife from you, Pruanz. I was just doing as a liege lord should, and I have a lady of my own.'
Pruanz didn't answer, but Arabel did, indignantly: 'Well! I like that! What does she have that I don't?' She rubbed herself against the Fox. By the feel of her, she did indeed possess all female prerequisites.
He was embarrassed enough to wish he'd left her and her husband in the hut to be devoured. He managed to free his arm from Arabel and said to Pruanz, 'The best way for the two of you to show you're glad you're alive is to bed each other.'
Arabel let out a loud, scornful sniff. 'Well! Maybe I should leave you to your fancy lady, lord prince, though I don't suppose she gets much use out of you, neither.'
'Arabel!' Pruanz hissed. 'That's no way to talk to him what saved us.'
'And who saved him, smashing a jug over that horrible thing's head?' she retorted. 'I expect that means you saved me, too.' She all but dragged her husband back toward their hut. Gerin suspected his suggestion was about to be fulfilled, even if he'd given it to the wrong one of the pair.
He gathered up his troopers. They didn't have torches for the walk back to Fox Keep, but the ghosts were fairly quiet. Why not? he thought as he neared the drawbridge-the night spirits were no doubt battening on the new gift of blood they'd just received from the dead peasants and monsters.
Some of the warriors went off to bed right away. Others paused in the great hall for a jack of ale-or several jacks of ale-before they slept. After Gerin had put his armor and the bow he'd recovered back on their pegs, Van planted an elbow in his ribs, hard enough to make him stagger. 'Fox, that's twice now lately you've turned it down when you had the chance to take some,' he said. 'You must be getting old.'
'Oh, you heard that, did you?' Gerin looked up his nose at his taller friend, who stood there chuckling. 'If you want to get much older, you'd be wise to tend to your own affairs and leave mine-or the lack of them-to me.'
'Affairs, forsooth.' Van drained his drinking jack, poured it full, drained it again. Then he headed for the stairs, a fixed expression on his face. For his sake, Gerin hoped Fand was in, or could be cajoled into, the mood. If she wasn't, or couldn't, she'd throw things.
'That's the closest they've come to here,' Drago the Bear said, yawning. 'I don't like it, not even a little bit.' By his matter-offact tone, he might have been talking of a hot, sticky summer's day.
'I don't like it, either,' Gerin answered. 'I'm stretched far too wide-seems that's all I say lately. Men and cars off in Schild's holding, more of them down in the south fighting Bevon and his bastard boys-'
'They were born in wedlock, far as I know,' said Drago, who could sometimes get the letter and miss the spirit.
'They're bastards all the same,' Gerin said. 'Lining up with the Trokmoi is bad enough, but anyone who lines up with the monsters deserves whatever happens to him. I intend to happen to Bevon and Bevonis and Bevion, but while I'm dealing with them, I can't be dealing with Adiatunnus and his monster friends. And if my men can't push Bevon off the Elabon Way, and if Aragis' troopers fail too, what then? I can't see anything-except us losing the war, I mean.'
'Never happen,' Drago said, and fell asleep at the table, his head in his hands.
Gerin wished he had his vassal's confidence-and naivete. He knew only too well how easy losing the war would be; his nimble imagination, usually an asset, betrayed him with images of blood and defeat and treachery. So many ways things could go wrong. What he had trouble coming up with was ways they could go right.
He emptied his own drinking jack and went upstairs himself. He opened the door to his bedchamber as quietly as he could, expecting Selatre to be asleep. But he found the lamp lit and her sitting up in bed waiting for him. She wasn't spending the time idly, either; she'd gone down the hall to the library and fetched back a codex to read until he returned. She put it down and said, 'Biton and the other gods be praised that you're all right. Every time you go out to fight now-'
'Not a scratch,' he said, turning to bar the door. 'We hurt the monsters worse than they hurt the village, so that's-well, not all right, but better than it might have been.' He didn't want to talk about the skirmish; all he wanted to do was forget it. 'What do you have there?'
She flipped back to the first leaf of parchment. 'On the Motions of the Moons, by one Volatin of Elabon. It was the first volume I saw in the library, the reason being that you left it out on the table there instead of returning it to its proper niche.' She fixed him with the severe look of a librarian whose sense of order had been transgressed.
'I'm sorry,' he said; rather to his surprise, he found himself meaning it. 'So you're trying Volatin, are you? What do you make of him?'
'Not much, I'm afraid,' she admitted. 'Endless numbers and curious signs you didn't teach me and other obscurities and oddments. What do they all mean?'
'They mean that if I'd looked through his book five years ago I'd have known the werenight was coming, for he showed it beyond doubt in those columns of numbers. But I just thought of the book as a curiosity I'd brought back from the City of Elabon, and so it sat idle and useless on my shelf.' He scowled in self-reproach.
'What could you have done about the werenight had you known of it?' Selatre asked.
'Given that I was traveling when it happened, probably nothing,' he said. 'But it's made me pay close attention to the phases of the moons ever since. Ten-no, eleven-days from now, Math will be full, the day after that Elleb and Nothos, and the day after that Tiwaz. It's not quite a dreadful werenight like the one we had before-from what Volatin says, those come less than once in a thousand years. But men with a were streak in them will come closer to changing then than on any other night for a long time to come. It's-'
'-One more thing to worry about,' Selatre finished for him.
He stared at her in surprise and delight. 'Well, well,' he said. ' I didn't know you spoke my language.'
'I'm learning,' she said.
X
Three days after the monsters attacked Besant's village, the lookout in the watchtower blew a long blast on his horn and shouted, ' A chariot approaches from the south!' A few minutes later, he added with some excitement, 'It's Utreiz Embron's son, by the gods!'
Gerin was in the stables, fitting a new spoke to a chariot wheel. He dropped the knife with which he was making a final trim of the spoke. Raffo, who was helping him, said, 'Well, we'll know one way or the other.'
'That we will,' Gerin answered, and hurried out into the courtyard.
Men were also bustling out from the keep itself: everyone in Castle Fox-everyone in Gerin's domain-had a vital stake in learning whether the Elabon Way had been reopened. Van caught the Fox's eye and said, 'Wishing you luck, Captain.'
'I'll take all I can get, thanks,' Gerin said.
The drawbridge seemed to be crawling down. Gerin's hands folded into fists; his nails bit into his palms. At last, with a thump, the drawbridge met the ground on the far side of the ditch around the palisade. Utreiz's chariot thumped over it. Even before the warrior spoke, a great weight lifted from Gerin's heart, for he, his driver, and the other warrior in the car were all wreathed in smiles.
'Dyaus and all the gods be praised, we smashed 'em!' Utreiz cried. He tried to go on, but a great cheer from everyone in the courtyard drowned the rest of his words. Rihwin the Fox leaped up into the car and planted a kiss on the startled Utreiz's cheek. He had no designs on the other man's body; that was just a southern way of showing joy at good news. In the rougher northlands, though, it was best used with caution. 'Get off me!' Utreiz
