past few days, and mostly supping on the fowls we've killed as blood-offerings for the ghosts.'
'Thought as much,' Ricolf answered, 'but I figured I owed you the choice.' He was indeed meticulous in observing the rituals of guestfriendship.
Inside Ricolf's great hall, fat-wrapped bones smoked on Dyaus' altar. At the cookfire, servants roasted ribs and chops. A big bronze pot boiled busily above it. Van stabbed a finger toward it. 'That'll be the tongue and tripe, the lungs and lights?' he asked.
'Aye,' Ricolf said. 'Which of the dainties do you care for most?'
'The tongue,' the outlander answered at once. 'Have you got any rock salt to scatter on it?'
'I do that,' Ricolf answered, a Trokme turn of phrase he probably would not have used before he got woodsrunners for neighbors. 'The holding has several good licks, one of them near big enough to mine salt from.'
Had Ricolf's holding been Gerin's, he suspected he would have mined salt and sold it to his neighbors. The only concern Ricolf had beyond his own borders was foes who might come at him. Past that, he was content with his land as he found it. Gerin wondered if he himself would ever be content with anything.
Bread and ale and meat distracted him from such worries. He gnawed roasted mutton from ribs, then tossed them to the dogs. Tripe was slippery and gluey under his knife, chewy in his mouth. The kidneys' strong smell cut through the smoke that filled the hall and foretold their flavor.
He stuffed himself full, but Van outdid him. Ricolf watched the outlander with awe tinged by alarm. He said, 'Dyaus, I'd forgotten how you put it away. You could eat a man out of his barony.'
'There's a deal of me to keep fed,' Van replied with dignity. ' Would you pass me the pitcher of ale? Ah, thank you, you're very kind.' He poured from the pitcher into a delicately carved rhyton, part of the great stock of southron goods Ricolf had laid on to impress the band of suitors for Elise's hand. Elise was gone. The drinking horns, the even more elaborately carved bathtub, and other such things remained, and probably lacerated Ricolf's spirit whenever he saw or used them.
Van poured the horn of ale down his throat, hardly seeming to swallow. He filled it again, drained it with the same ease. By the look Ricolf gave him, the older man expected him to slide under the table at any moment. Instead, he got up and spoke softly to one of the young women who'd fetched food. Gerin listened to her giggle and was not surprised when, a little later, she and the outlander went upstairs together.
The Fox wished he could have gone upstairs, too, even alone, but Ricolf's eyes held him. The white-haired baron said, 'Your harvests must have been good in spite of everything, or you'd not be able to afford to keep him around.'
'I don't begrudge him his appetites,' Gerin answered. 'Not any of them. The rest of his spirit is in proportion.'
'As may be, as may be.' But Van was not what Ricolf wanted to talk about, and Gerin knew it. Ricolf stared down at his own drinking horn for a while before he went on, 'Well, Fox, what in the five hells happened?'
'With Duren, you mean? You've heard everything I know about that,' Gerin answered. 'Someone snatched the boy, and when I find out who he was, he'll be sorry for the day his father woke up with a stiff one in his breeches.'
'Oh, no doubt.' Ricolf drank, smacked his lips, brought his fist down onto the table. 'You'll track the whoreson down and make him pay. You're bloody good at all that sort of thing. Prince of the North these days, are you? I'll not deny you've earned the title. You hold more land-or control it, which amounts to the same think-than anyone else in the northlands save maybe Aragis and one or two of the cursed Trokmoi, and you run it better, too.'
'You're generous.' The Fox also took a pull at his ale. He could feel it buzzing inside his head. Maybe that was what made him burst out, 'I wish I were shut of the whole business, and just left to be what I'd like.'
'So do we all,' Ricolf said. 'But you do it well, like it or no. Which brings me to what I'd truly learn: how was it you didn't do as well by Elise?'
Gerin wished he were drunk enough to fall asleep-or a good enough mime to pretend he was that drunk. But he wasn't, not either one-and he knew he owed Ricolf an answer. He drank some more, as much to give himself time to think as for any other reason. Ricolf waited, patient and stubbornly unmoving as a boulder.
'I suppose part of it was that her life at Fox Keep wasn't as different as she'd hoped from what she had here,' Gerin said slowly. He snorted air out through his nose. Wherever Elise was now, she'd surely found a different life. Whether it was better was a different question altogether.
'Go on,' Ricolf said.
'You know what the first flush of passion is like,' Gerin said. ' It masks everything bad or even boring about whomever it lights on. After a while, though, you can wake up and realize this isn't what you had in mind. I- suppose that's what Elise did.'
'None of it your fault, eh?' Ricolf's rumbling baritone flung sarcasm as a catapult flung stones.
'I didn't say that,' Gerin answered. 'Looking back, I guess I took a lot for granted. I figured everything was all right because she didn't complain out loud-and I've always been one who doesn't necessarily expect things to be perfect all the time, so I didn't worry so much when they weren't. I think perhaps Elise did after we fell in love, and when things got rocky, they looked worse to her than maybe they really were. If I'd realized that sooner… oh, who knows what I'd have done?'
Ricolf chewed on that with the air of a man finding something on his plate other than what he'd expected. Now he drank and thought a while before he spoke: 'I respect that knack you have, Fox, for looking at yourself and talking about yourself as if you were someone else. Not many can do it.'
'For this I thank you,' Gerin said.
'Don't.' Ricolf held up a big-knuckled hand. 'The trouble with you is, you don't know how to do anything but stand back from yourself, and from everybody around you. You talked about how my daughter might have felt after passion cooled, but what about you? Did you go back into that keep inside your head, the one you mostly live in?'
'You shame me,' Gerin said quietly.
'Why? For asking a question?'
'No, because the answer is so likely to be yes, and you know it very well.' If sarcasm had stung, truth cut like a knife, the more so for being unexpected.
Ricolf yawned. 'I'm getting old to sit around drinking half the night,' he said. 'Come to that, I'm getting old for anything else, too. Only a handful of serfs on this holding who were born before I was. One winter not so far from now lung sickness will get me, or I'll fall over with an apoplexy. That wouldn't be too bad-quick, anyhow.'
'You're strong yet,' Gerin said, alarmed for his host. Few men spoke so openly of death, lest a god be listening. 'If you do go out, you'll go fighting.'
'That could happen, too,' Ricolf said. 'I'm not as fast nor as strong as I was, and there's plenty of fighting around. And what becomes of the holding then? I'd hoped to last long enough to pass it on to Duren, but now-'
'Aye, but now,' Gerin echoed. If Ricolf died heirless, his vassal barons would brawl over the holding, just as Bevon's sons had been doing for so long further north. And Ricolf's neighbors would be drawn in, Aragis coming up from the south, the Trokmoi from the west perhaps biting off a chunk… and the Fox did not see how he could stand aloof. He even had a claim of sorts to the barony.
As if picking that from his head, Ricolf said, 'Aye, a couple of my vassals might think well of you because you were wed to Elise. More of 'em, though, are likely to think less of you because she ran off. And if she ever came back here wed to a man with a fighting tail of his own-'
Gerin upended his drinking horn, poured the last draft down his throat. That thought, or rather nightmare, had crossed is mind, too, most often of nights when he was having trouble sleeping. He said, 'I have no notion how likely that is, nor what I'd do if it happened. A lot would depend on who and what the fellow was.'
'On whether you thought you could use him, you mean.' Ricolf spoke without rancor. He drained his own rhyton, then pushed to his feet. ' I'm going up to bed. Do you want to come along, so I can show you the chamber I've set aside for you? The keep's not packed with suitors now; I don't have to give you one of the little rooms down here off the kitchens.'
'I'll come,' Gerin said, and rose, too. Ricolf carried a lamp as they went up the stairs. He didn't say anything. The Fox counted that something of a minor triumph. He'd been dreading this interview since the day Elise left him, and he seemed to have got through it.
