the peasants looked up from their work in surprise: the sun was low in the west, but not yet brushing the horizon. The men came in happily enough, though.
'Shall we kill a pig, lord prince?' the headman asked.
'Aye, if you can without hurting yourselves,' Gerin answered. The thought of fat-rich pork made spit rush into his mouth. He added, 'The blood from the beast will give the ghosts what they want, too.'
'Some of the blood,' Tervagant corrected thriftily. 'The rest we' ll make into blood pudding.' In good times, serfs lived close to the edge. In bad times, they-and the nobles they supported-fell over it. They could afford to waste nothing.
The pig, like any other, was half wild, with a ridge of hair down its back. Tervagant lured it to him with a turnip, then cut its throat. He had to spring back to keep it from tearing him with its tushes. Blood sprayed every which way as the beast ran through the village until it fell over and lay kicking.
'That'll keep the ghosts happier than if the blood went into a nice, neat trench,' Van said.
The fire the villagers made was big enough to hold a fair number of ghosts away by itself. They butchered the pig, baked some of it in clay, and roasted the rest. Living up to his ekename, Tervagant went into his hut, came out with a pot full of honey, and glazed some of the cooking meat with it. The delicious aroma made Gerin hungrier than he had been before.
Along with bread, ale, and berries preserved in more of Tervagant' s honey, the pork proved as good as it smelled. A sizable pile of rib bones lay in front of Gerin when he thumped his belly and pronounced himself full. Van had found a pointed rock and was cracking a leg bone to get at the marrow.
'More ale, lord prince?' one of the peasant women asked.
'Thank you.' He held out the cup they'd given him. She smiled as she filled it for him. She was, he noticed, not bad-looking, with light eyes that told of a Trokme or two in the woodpile. She wore her hair long and unbraided, which meant she was unmarried, yet she was no giggling maid.
When he asked her about that, her face clouded. 'I had a husband, lord prince, you're right, I did, but he died of lockjaw year before last.'
'I'm sorry,' Gerin said, and meant it-he'd seen lockjaw. 'That's a hard way to go.'
'Aye, lord prince, it is, but you have to go on,' she said.
He nodded solemnly; he'd had quite a bit of ale by then. 'What's your name?' he asked her.
'Ethelinda, lord prince.'
'Well, Ethelinda,' he said, and let it hang there. Now she nodded, as if he'd spoken a complete sentence.
After supper, Tervagant waved Gerin and Van into a couple of huts whose inhabitants had hastily vacated them. 'The gods grant you good night, lord prince, master Van,' he said.
'Me, I intend to give the gods some help,' Van said. While he'd been sitting by the fire and eating, a couple of young women had almost come to blows over him. Now he led both of them into the hut Tervagant had given him. Watching that, Gerin shook his head. Too bad no one could find a way to put into a jar whatever the outlander had.
And yet the Fox was not altogether surprised to find Ethelinda at his elbow when he went into the hut the headman had set aside for him. 'You've no new sweetheart?' he asked her. Some lords took peasant women without thinking past their own pleasure. Along with hunger, though, that was the sort of thing liable to touch off an uprising. As usual, Gerin was careful.
But Ethelinda shook her head. 'No, lord prince.'
'Good.' Gerin had to duck his head to get into the hut. It was dark inside, and smelled strongly of smoke. He shuffled in, found a straw-filled pallet with his foot. 'Here we are.'
The straw rustled as he sank down onto it, then again when Ethelinda joined him there. She pulled her long tunic off over her head; that was all she wore. Gerin took a little longer getting out of his clothes, but not much. By the way she clung to him, he guessed she'd been telling the truth about having no sweetheart; he didn't think anyone had touched her so for a long time.
That made him take care to give her as much pleasure as he could. And, at the last moment, he pulled out and spurted his seed onto her belly rather than deep inside her. He thought he would make her grateful, but she said, 'What did you go and do that for?' in anything but a happy voice.
'To keep you from making a baby,' he answered, wondering if she'd made the connection between what they'd just done and what might happen most of a year later. Every time he thought he had the measure of serfs' ignorance, he ended up being startled anew.
Ethelinda knew that connection, though. 'I wanted to start a baby,' she said. 'I hoped I would.'
'You did?' Gerin rolled off her and almost fell off the narrow pallet. 'Why?'
'If I was carrying your baby, I could go up to Fox Keep and you'd take care of me,' she answered. 'I wouldn't have to work hard, at least for a while.'
'Oh.' Gerin stared through the darkness at her. She was honest, anyhow. And, he admitted to himself, she was probably right. No woman had ever claimed he'd put a bastard in her; he was moderate in his venery and, to keep such things from happening, often withdrew at the instant he spent. But he would not have turned away anyone with whom he'd slept.
Maybe you shouldn't have pulled out, the darker side of him murmured. With Duren gone, you're liable to need an heir, even if he is a bastard.
He shook his head. Sometimes he got trapped in his own gloom and lost track of what needed doing. He couldn't let that happen, not now. His son depended on him.
Ethelinda sat up and reached for her tunic. 'Do you want me to go away, lord prince?' she asked.
'We'll be crowded on this bed, but stay if you care to,' Gerin answered. 'The night's not so warm that we'd be sticking to each other wherever we touched.'
'That's so,' she agreed. 'I always did like having somebody in a bed with me. That's how I grew up, with all my brothers and sisters and my father and my mother while she was alive, all packed tight together. Sleeping just by yourself is lonely.' She tossed the tunic to the dirt floor. 'And besides, who knows what might happen later on?'
What happened was that Gerin slept the night through and didn't wake up till after sunrise, when Ethelinda rose from the pallet and finally did put her tunic back on. When she saw his eyes open, she gave him a scornful glance, as if to say, Some stallion you turned out to be.
He bore up under that without getting upset; unlike Van, he didn't wear some of his vanity in his trousers. He looked around the peasant hut for a chamber pot. When he didn't see one, he got up, dressed quickly, and went off into the bushes by the village to relieve himself. The reek that rose from those bushes said he was but following the peasants' practice.
When he came back, Van was standing outside the hut he'd been given, tweedling away on his flute. The two women who'd gone in there with him both clung to him adoringly. His grin was smug. The Fox felt like throwing something at him, but contented himself with saying, ' Time we got moving. We can eat as we travel.'
'As you will.' Van walked over to the horses, which were tethered to the low branches of a maple. 'You harness the leader, then, and I' ll see to the off beast. You're so hot to be on the road, the two of us together'll get us on our way in a hurry.'
That afternoon, the wagon rolled into the holding of Palin the Eagle. Palin, who had Trokmoi on his western flank, acknowledged Gerin as his suzerain and, because he'd needed the Fox's help more than once against the woodsrunners, was more sincere about his submission than Schild Stoutstaff.
Not far into Palin's land, Gerin and Van came upon a belt of devastation: for several miles, the Elabon Way and the land to either side of it had been cratered by Balamung's destructive sorcery. Now that weeds and shrubs had had five years to spread over the craters, they looked less raw and hideous than they had when they were new, but the ground remained too broken for farmers to work.
The Elabon Way itself was in fair repair. That was at Gerin's order; he did not want the main road south from Fox Keep to remain a ruin. The repairs, he knew, did not come up to the standard the Elabonian Empire had set when it pushed the highway north to the Niffet. With the resources of a realm behind them, the imperial artisans had built to last, with a deep bed of gravel and stone, stone flags cemented together, and good drainage to either
