barley for ale, rye for variety, beans, peas, squashes: all grew well under the warm sun. So did row on row of turnips and parsnips, cabbage and kale, lettuce and spinach. Gardens held vetch, onions, melde, radishes, garlic, and medicinal herbs like henbane.
Some fields stood vacant, the grass there lengthening for haymaking. Cattle and sheep grazed all the way out to the edge of the trees in others. A couple of lambs butted heads. 'They might as well be barons,' Gerin murmured to himself.
The peasants were hard at it as usual: weeding like Besant, repairing wooden fences to keep the animals where they belonged, unbaling straw to repair a leaky roof-all the myriad tasks that kept the village going. Gerin stopped to talk with a few of the serfs. Most seemed content enough. As overlords went, he was a mild one, and they knew it.
He spent more time in the village than he'd intended; the sun was already sinking toward the treetops when he headed back to Fox Keep. No, Besant won't blow the horn early tonight, not with me here so long, he thought. We'll have to see about tomorrow.
When he returned to the castle, the cooks were full of praise for the way Otes son of Engelers had fixed half a dozen pots. The Fox nodded approvingly. The large sale the jeweler had made to Fand (or rather, to Van) hadn't kept him from doing the other half of his job. On seeing Otes himself, Gerin invited him to stay for supper and pass the night in the great hall. By the way he grinned and promptly accepted, the neat little man had been expecting that.
In the great hall, Tassilo was fitting a new string to his lute and plucking at it to put it in proper tune. Duren watched him in popeyed fascination. 'I want to learn to do that, Papa!' he said.
'Maybe you will one day,' Gerin said. Stored away somewhere was a lute he'd had as a boy. He'd never been much good with it, but who could say what his son might accomplish?
After supper, Tassilo showed what he could do. 'In honor of my host,' he said, 'I shall give you some of the song of Gerin and the dreadful night when all the moons turned full together.' He struck a plangent chord from the lute and began.
Gerin, who had lived through that dreadful night five years before, recognized little of it from the minstrel's description. Much of that had to do with the way Tassilo composed his song. He didn't create it afresh from nothing; that would have overtaxed even the wits of Lekapenos, the great Sithonian epic poet.
Instead, like Lekapenos, Tassilo put his song together from stock bits and pieces of older ones. Some of those were just for the sake of sound and meter; the Fox quickly got used to hearing himself called ' gallant Gerin' every time his name was mentioned. It saved Tassilo, or any other poet, the trouble of having to come up with a new epithet every time he was mentioned in the story.
And some of the pieces of old songs were ones Gerin had heard before, and which didn't perfectly fit the tale Tassilo was telling now. The bits about battling the Trokmoi went back to his boyhood, and likely to his grandfather's boyhood as well. But that too was part of the convention. More depended on the way the minstrel fit the pieces together than on what those pieces were.
All the same, Gerin leaned over to Van and said, 'One thing I remember that Tassilo isn't saying anything about is how bloody frightened I was.'
'Ah, but you're not a person to him, not really,' Van replied. ' You're gallant Gerin the hero, and how could gallant Gerin be afraid, even with every werebeast in the world trying to tear his throat out?'
'At the time, it was easy,' Gerin said, which won a laugh from Van. He'd been through the werenight with Gerin. 'Bold Van,' Tassilo called him, which was true enough, but he hadn't been immune to fear, either.
And yet, the rest of Tassilo's audience ate up the song. Drago the Bear, who'd gone through his own terrors that night, pounded on the table and cheered to hear how Gerin had surmounted his: it might not have been true, but it sounded good. Duren hung on Tassilo's every word, long after the time he should have been asleep in bed.
Even the Trokmoi, whose fellows had been on the point of putting an end to Gerin when the chaos of the werenight saved him, listened avidly to the tale of their people's discomfiture. Well-turned phrases and songs of battle were enough to gladden them, even if they came out on the losing side.
Tassilo paused to drink ale. Diviciacus said to Gerin, 'Give me your answer now, Fox, dear. I've not the patience to wait for morning.'
Gerin sighed. 'It must be no.'
'I thought as much,' the Trokme said. 'Yes is simple, but no needs disguises. You'll be after regretting it.'
'So will your chief, if he quarrels with me,' the Fox answered. ' Tell him as much.' Diviciacus glared but nodded.
When Gerin, who was yawning himself, tried to pick up Duren and carry him off to bed, his son yelled and cried enough to make the Fox give it up as a bad job. If Duren wanted to fall asleep in the great hall listening to songs, he'd let him get away with it this once. Gerin yawned again. He was tired, whether Duren was or not. With a wave to Tassilo, he headed for his bedchamber.
What with Fand and Van in the next room, the noise up there proved almost as loud as what the minstrel made, and even more distracting. Gerin tossed and turned and grumbled and, just when he finally was on the point of dropping off, got bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. He mashed the bug, but that woke him up again. He lay there muttering to himself until at last he did fall asleep.
Because of that, the sun was a quarter of the way up the sky when he came back down to the great hall. Van, who was just finishing a bowl of porridge, laughed at him: 'See the slugabed!'
'I'd have gotten to sleep sooner if someone I know hadn't been making such a racket next door,' Gerin said pointedly.
Van laughed louder. 'Make any excuse you like. You outslept your guests, no matter what. All three lots of them are long gone.'
'They want to get in as much travel as they can while the sun's in the sky. I'd do the same in their boots.' Gerin looked around. 'Where' s Duren?'
'I thought he was with you, Captain,' Van said. 'Didn't you take him up to bed the way you usually do?'
'No, he wanted to listen to Tassilo some more.' Gerin dipped up a bowl of porridge from the pot over the fire, raised it to his mouth. After he swallowed, he said, 'He's probably out in the courtyard, making mischief.'
In the courtyard he found Drago the Bear pouring a bucket of well water over the head of Rihwin the Fox. Both of them looked as if they' d seen the bottoms of their drinking jacks too many times the night before.
'No, I've not seen the boy all morning,' Drago said when Gerin asked him.
'Nor I,' the dripping Rihwin said. He added, 'If he made as much noise as small boys are in the habit of doing, I'd remember seeing him
… painfully.' His eyes were tracked with red. Yes, he'd hurt himself last night.
Gerin frowned. 'That's-odd.' He raised his voice. 'Duren!' He put two fingers in his mouth, let out a long, piercing whistle that made Rihwin and Drago flinch.
His son knew he was supposed to come no matter what when he heard that call. He also wasn't supposed to go by himself too far from Castle Fox to hear it. Wolves and longtooths and other wild beasts roamed the woods. So, sometimes, did wild men.
But Duren did not come. Now Gerin began to worry. Maybe, he thought, the boy had gone off to the peasant village. He'd done that alone once or twice, and got his backside heated for it. But often a boy needed a lot of such heatings before he got the idea. Gerin remembered he had, when he was small.
He walked over to the village, ready to thunder like Dyaus when he found his son. But no one there had seen Duren, either. A cold wind of dread in his belly, Gerin went back to Castle Fox. He sent men out in all directions, beating the bushes and calling Duren's name. They came back scratched by thorns and stung by wasps, but without the boy.
Duren was missing.
