To his great relief, neither Marlanz nor Widin changed shape, so he released them both when all four moons had risen into the sky.
The bear that walked like a man did not return to the camp of Aragis' warriors, either in man's form or its own. Gerin had wondered if a taste for ale would draw it back.
'Just as well it's staying away,' said Drago, a Bear himself, when Gerin remarked on that. 'We don't need a thirsty bear when we have a thirsty Fox.' He sent Rihwin the Fox a sly look. Rihwin ostentatiously ignored him.
Late the next afternoon, Parol Chickpea came into Fox Keep, riding in the back of a peasant's oxcart. 'By the gods, I'm glad to see you,' Gerin exclaimed. 'When I left you behind there, I feared you'd never come out of that village again.'
'I feared it myself, lord, but I went were night before last, and here, look at this.' Parol thrust the hand from which he'd lost a couple of fingers under Gerin's nose.
'I see what you mean,' Gerin said. The wound, instead of being festering and full of pus, looked as if he'd had it for years. The rapid healing werebeasts enjoyed hadn't been able to restore his missing digits, but had done the next best thing. Somehow, the Fox doubted it would ever become a popular part of medicine all the same.
'The bite on my arse is better, too,' Parol said confidentially, ' but I don't suppose you want to see that.'
'As a matter of fact, you're right,' Gerin said. 'I wasn't interested in your hairy bum before you had a chunk bitten out of it, and I'm not interested in it now, except to see if it makes you sit at a tilt.'
'It doesn't, by Dyaus!' Parol was the picture of indignation till he noticed the smirk Gerin was trying to hide. He laughed sheepishly. 'Ah, you're having a joke on me.'
'So I am.' Gerin felt embarrassed; jokes at the expense of Parol were too easy to be much fun. To make amends, he told the warrior something about which he'd just made up his own mind: 'Now that we've passed through the little werenight, we'll start the move against Adiatunnus and the monsters come sunrise tomorrow.'
Parol beamed. 'Ah, that's very fine, lord. I owe those horrible creatures something special for all they've done to me, and I aim to give it to them.'
'Stout fellow!' Gerin said. Parol was not the best fighting man he had, lacking both Rihwin's grace and cleverness on the one hand and Drago the Bear's indomitable strength on the other. But he was not in the habit of backing away from trouble, and that covered a multitude of sins.
The tents in which Aragis' men had passed the nights since they reached Fox Keep came down. The warriors stored most of them inside the keep, bringing along only a few in which they could crowd together in case of rain. Gerin was less worried about Aragis' men coming into Fox Keep than he had been when they first arrived. Not only had the grand duke shown he didn't intend treachery, but enough of Gerin's troopers had come into the area to put up a solid fight if Aragis suddenly changed his mind. The force that rolled southwest against Adiatunnus and the monsters had more of Gerin's men in it than Aragis'.
Leaving Fox Keep stirred mixed feelings in Gerin: hope that this fight, unlike the ones that had gone before, would yield decisive results; sorrow at leaving Selatre behind; and a separate mixture over Duren: sorrow at leaving him, too, but also joy that he was there to be left.
Aragis brought his chariot up alongside the Fox's. 'You have a good holding here,' he said. 'Plenty of timber, streams where you need them, well-tended fields-you must get a lot of work out of your peasants.'
Gerin didn't care for the way Aragis said that: it brought to his mind a picture of nobles standing over serfs with whips to make them sow and weed and harvest. Maybe such things happened on Aragis' landhe had a reputation for ruthlessness. The Fox said, 'They work for themselves, as much as they can. I don't take a certain proportion of what they raise, whether that's a lot or a little. I take a fixed amount, and they keep whatever they produce above that.'
'All very well in good years,' Aragis answered, 'but what of the bad ones, when they don't bring in enough to get by after you've gathered your fixed amount?'
'Then we dicker, of course,' Gerin said. 'If my serfs all starve giving me this year's dues, I'm not likely to get much out of them next year.'
Aragis thought that over, then saw the joke and laughed. 'I don't dicker with peasants,' he said. 'I tell them how it's going to be, and that's how it is. As you say, starving them is wasteful, but I always remember I come first.'
'I believe that, grand duke,' Gerin said, so innocently that Aragis again paused for a moment before sending him a sharp look. Smiling inside, Gerin went on, 'I haven't had a peasant revolt since I took over this holding, and we've been through some lean years, especially the one right after the werenight. How have you fared there?'
'Not well,' Aragis admitted, but his tone made that seem unimportant. 'When the peasants rise up, we knock them down. They can' t stand against us, and they know it. They've no weapons to speak of, and no experience fighting, either.'
'But if they're going to fight the monsters, they'll need more weapons than they have, and if they spend a good deal of time fighting the monsters, they'll get some experience at that, too,' Gerin said.
Aragis gave him a look that said he hadn't thought so far ahead, and wished the Fox hadn't, either. After a long silence, he answered, 'You must be of the view that solving one problem always breeds another.'
'Oh, not always,' Gerin said blithely. 'Sometimes it breeds two or three.'
Aragis opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally shook his head without speaking. He tapped his driver on the shoulder. Gerin was not surprised when the grand duke's chariot dropped back behind his own. Van laughed a little and said, 'Here you went to all the trouble of making an ally of the Archer, and now you do your best to drive him away.'
'I didn't mean to,' Gerin said. He sounded so much like Duren after he'd dropped a pot and broken it that he started to laugh at himself.
When the dirt road went through the woods, it narrowed so that the chariots had to string themselves out single file. It was wider in the cleared lands between the forests; the cars bunched up again there.
The peasants working the fields paused to stare as the chariots rolled by. Some of them cheered and waved. Gerin wondered what Aragis thought of that. From all he'd said, and from all the Fox had heard, he ruled his serfs by force. He was a hard and able man, so he'd got away with it thus far, but was his heir likely to match him? Only time would answer that.
Gerin noted that a fair number of peasants cultivated their wheat and barley and beans and peas and turnips and squashes with full quivers on their backs. As one of them moved down a row, he bent, picked up his bow, carried it along with him, and then set it down again. Herdsmen also carried bows, and spears in place of their staves. What they could do against the monsters, they were doing. But an unarmored man, even with a spear in his hands, was not a good bet against the speed and cleverness the creatures showed.
The Fox saw only one monster that first day of the ride southwest. The thing came out of the woods a couple of furlongs ahead of his chariot. It stared at the great host of chariotry rattling its way, then turned and swiftly vanished back between the beeches from which it had emerged.
'Shall we hunt it, Captain?' Van asked.
Gerin shook his head. 'We'd be wasting our time. If we can beat Adiatunnus, we'll take their refuge away from the creatures. That'll do us far more good over the long haul than picking them off one and two at a time.'
'Sometimes you think so straight, you cook all the juice out of life,' Van said, but let it go at that.
As sunset neared, Gerin bought a sheep from a village through which he passed. That provoked fresh bemusement from Aragis, who, like a large majority of lords, was accustomed to taking what he needed from his serfs regardless of whether it was properly part of his feudal dues. The grand duke also seemed surprised when the Fox told some of his warriors to cut firewood rather than taking it from the serfs or putting them to work. But he did not question Gerin about it and, indeed, after a few minutes ordered his own men to help those of his ally.
With all four moons now past full, the early hours of the night were unusually dark. Although the evening was warm and sultry, Gerin ordered the fires kept burning brightly. 'The last thing I want is for the monsters to take us unawares,' he said, after which he got no arguments.
The dancing flames kept more men sitting around them and talking than would have happened on most
