but-' Her face softened. 'Since I am the fool, you may as well come in.'
She stood aside to let him pass, closed the door behind him. She kept the room scrupulously neat; it was, by all odds, the cleanest part of the castle. Gerin knew the tunics and skirts and drawers in the cedar chest against the wall would all be folded just the same way. Beside that chest, her sandals and shoes stood in precise pairs. He lavished that much care only on his weapons, where it could be a matter of life or death.
Fand must have been mending a tunic when he knocked: it lay on the wool coverlet to her bed. Candlelight glistened from the polished bone needle she'd used. She picked up the tunic, set it on the chest. She nodded toward the candle. 'Shall I blow it out?'
'Please yourself,' he answered. 'You know I like to look at you, though.'
That won him a smile. 'You southrons are sweeter in the tongue than men of my own folk, I'll say so much for you. Maybe there's the why of my staying here. A Trokme chief, now, he'd just tell me to be after spreading my legs and waste no time about it.'
Gerin's skeptical eyebrow rose. 'My guess is that any man who told you such a thing would be likelier to get a knife in the brisket than anything else.'
'Sure and that's the very thing he got, the black-hearted omadhaun,' she said. 'Why d'you think a puir lone woman would come to your keep at sunset, seeking shelter from the ghosts? Had his kin caught me, they'd have burned me in a wicker cage, that they would.'
He knew she was right-that or some other equally appalling fate. South of the High Kirs, they crucified their miscreants. He reckoned himself merciful: if a man needed killing, he attended to it as quickly and cleanly as he could. But he'd killed his share and more, these past few years.
His other thought was that Fand calling herself a poor lone woman was about as accurate as a longtooth claiming it was a pussycat. At need, she likely could have shouted down the ghosts.
She cocked her head to one side, sent him a curious look. 'What is it you're waiting for? I've no knife the now, nor even a needle.'
'And a good thing, too, I say.' He took a step toward her, she one toward him. That brought them together. Her face lifted toward his, her arms went round his neck.
She was cross-grained, quarrelsome, cantankerous-Gerin had never settled on just the right word, but it lay somewhere in that range. On the wool coverlet, though… she bucked like a yearling colt, yowled like a catamount, and clawed his back as if she were part wolverine.
In a way, it was immensely flattering. Even when he'd pleased Elise, which hadn't been all the time (nor, in the end, nearly often enough), she'd given little sign. With Fand, he had no room for doubt there. But a passage with her sometimes put him more in mind of riding out a storm than making love: the pleasure he felt afterwards was often tempered with relief for having got through it.
Their sweat-slick skins slid against each other as he rolled off her. 'Turn over,' he said.
'Turn over, is it?' she said. 'Why tell me that? You're not one of those who-do-you-call-thems-Sithonians, that's it-who like boys and use their women the same way. And I'm not one for that, as well you know.' But, the warning delivered, she did roll onto her belly.
He straddled the small of her back and started rubbing her shoulders. The warning growls she'd let out turned to purrs. Her flesh was warm and firm under his hands. 'Is that too rough?' he asked as he dug in with his thumbs.
She grunted but shook her head; her bright hair flipped back and forth, with a few shining strands covering his fingers and the backs of his hands. 'You've summat here we never found north o' the Niffet,' she said. 'Sure and there may be more to this civilization you're always after prating of than I thought or ever I came to Fox Keep.'
He wondered if he should tell her the best masseur he'd ever known, down in the City of Elabon, was a Sithonian who would have been delighted to do more with him than merely rub his back. He decided against it: the more people in the northlands who cherished civilization, for whatever reason, the better off the war-torn country would be.
As Gerin's hands moved from her shoulders down her spine, he moved down, too. After a bit, Fand exclaimed sharply, 'I told you, I'm not one for-' She broke off, then giggled. 'What a sneak of a man y'are, to put it in the right place from the wrong side.' She looked back at him over her shoulder. 'Different this way.'
'Better? Worse?' Even in such matters, even at such a time, he liked to know exactly how things went.
But she laughed at him. 'How can I tell you that, when we've hardly begun?' They went on, looking for the answer.
Gerin woke the next morning when Duren got out of bed to use the chamber pot. The light in the bedchamber was gray. The sun hadn't risen yet, but it would soon. Gerin got out of bed himself, yawned, stretched, and knuckled his eyes: the ale he'd drunk the night before had left him with a bit of a headache.
'Good morning, Papa,' Duren said.
'Good morning,' Gerin answered, yawning again; he woke up slowly. He tousled the boy's hair. 'I'm glad you're using the pot. Are you finished? My turn, then.' When he was through, he pulled on the tunic and trousers he'd tossed on the floor after he came back from Fand's room. They didn't have any new spots he could see, so what point in changing? People were more fastidious on the other side of the High Kirs, but not much.
Duren underfoot like a cat, Gerin walked down the hall to the stairs. Snores came from Fand's chamber. Louder snores came from Van' s, one door further down. In the great hall of the keep, some of the Fox's vassals were already up and stirring; others lay bundled in blankets on straw pallets. The fire in the altar still burned, holding night ghosts at bay.
The doors that led out into the yard stood open, to give the great hall fresh air and clear out some of the smoke from the cookfires. Gerin picked his way through the warriors and went outside. In the east, Tiwaz's thin crescent stood low in the brightening sky. The other three moons had set.
Torches smoked along the palisade. Even so, Duren, who had followed his father into the yard, whimpered and said, 'I don't like the ghosts yelling in my ears, Papa.'
To Gerin, the cries of the night spirits were not yells but whimpers and faint wails, none of them understandable. As he had fires lit and had given the ghosts blood in the great hall, they were not likely to do him or Duren harm. He set his jaw and endured the cries he heard only with his mind's ear. Children, though, were supposed to be more sensitive to the spirits than adults.
A couple of minutes later, the first rays of the rising sun touched the top of the tall watchtower that stood above the keep. The ghosts sounded frightened for an instant, then vanished back into whatever gloomy haunt was theirs while the sun ruled the sky.
'A new day,' Gerin said to Duren. 'This is the time for living men to go abroad in the world.' He patted the boy's back, heartening him against the terror that fluttered with the ghosts.
Van of the Strong Arm came out a few minutes later, whistling loudly but off-key. Smoke poured from windows and doorways as the cooks built up the fire to heat the morning porridge. Van squinted as a strand of smoke stung his eyes. 'There ought to be a way to cook your food without smoking everyone who eats it as if he were a sausage,' the burly outlander complained.
Gerin narrowed his eyes, too, but not at the smoke. There ought to be a way was a phrase that always set him thinking. Sometimes nothing came of it, but sometimes things did. He said, 'Remember the newfangled footholders Duin the Bold came up with so he wouldn't go over his horse's tail if he tried to ride? Maybe we could find a new way to get rid of smoke, too.'
'Remember what happened to Duin? He got himself killed with his newfangled scheme, that's what. Me, I'd sooner fight from a chariot any day.' For all his wandering, for all the strange things he'd seen and done, Van remained at heart a profoundly conservative man.
Gerin had more stretch to him. 'I think this business of riding to war will end up coming to something: a horse alone can cross terrain where a chariot can't go. But you have a special trouble there-where will you find a beast to bear your bulk?'
'I've never been small; that's a fact,' Van said complacently. ' From the rumbles in my belly, though, I'll be thin if I don't put something in there soon. They'll have bread and meat from last night to go with the porridge,
