Ricolf opened a door. As Gerin walked through it into the little bedchamber the lamplight revealed, the older man asked quietly, 'Do you miss her?'
Another knife in the night. Gerin said, 'Yes, now and then. Quite a lot, sometimes.' He stepped into the room and shut the door before Ricolf could stab him with any more questions.
South of Ricolf's holding, the land grew debatable once more. Gerin and Van traveled in armor, the Fox keeping his bow ready to hand. The Elabon Way seemed all but deserted. That suited Gerin fine: the fewer people he saw, the fewer people who saw him. He knew too well how vulnerable the wagon was to a good-sized band of raiders.
The roads that ran into the Elabon Way from east and west were dirt tracks like the ones up in the Fox's holding. Pieces of the Elabon Way were just dirt here, too; peasants had prised up the paving stones for the houses, and maybe barons for their keeps, too. That hadn't been so the last time Gerin visited Ikos, five years before.
He said, 'Taking stones from the roadway used to be a crime that would cost a man his head or put him up on a cross. A good law, if you ask me; roads are a land's lifeblood.'
'No law left up here but what comes from the edge of a sword,' Van said. 'Most lands are like that, when you get down to it.'
'South of the High Kirs, Elabon isn't, or wasn't,' Gerin said. ' Law counted for more than might there, for a lot of years. It was even true here for a while. No more, though. You're not wrong about that.'
They rolled slowly past another connecting road. At the crossroads stood a granite boulder carved with pictures showing where the road led: a crude keep surrounded by farms and horses. 'That's not the one we want, eh, Captain?' Van said.
'No. We're looking for an eye with wings-that's Biton's mark. We' re not far enough south to come to it yet, I don't think. I hope it will still be there; some of the crossroads stones I thought I remembered from my last trip to the Sibyl aren't here any more.'
'You were paying attention to stones?' Van shook his head in disbelief. 'Far as I could see, you were so busy panting over Elise, you didn't have eyes for anything else.'
'Thank you, my friend. I needed that just now, I truly did,' Gerin said. The visit with Ricolf had left him glum enough. If Van was going to rub salt in the wounds, they'd sting even worse.
But Van, perhaps mercifully, kept quiet after that. Like Gerin's, his eyes went back and forth, back and forth. Every time the wagon went by a clump of bushes or some elm saplings growing closer to the road than they should have, he shifted the reins to his left hand so he could grab his spear in a hurry if he needed it.
The Fox soon became certain some crossroads stones were missing: he and Van rolled past a hollow in the ground that showed where one had recently been removed-so recently the grass hadn't filled in all the bare dirt. 'Someone's losing trade on account of that,' he said sadly. 'I wonder if he even knows.'
About halfway between noon and sunset, Gerin spied the winged eye he sought. 'I'd have guessed it'd be there,' Van said. 'You steal it, you're fooling with a god, and what man with a dram of sense does that?'
'How many men have sense?' Gerin returned, which made his comrade grunt. He added, 'Not only that, how many are wise enough to realize they're stealing from Biton and not just from some petty lordlet?'
'They don't know beforehand, they'll find out pretty soon,' Van said, which was likely enough to be true that Gerin had to nod. The farseeing god looked after what was his.
The wagon swung east down the road that led to the Sibyl and her fane. Gerin remembered the lands away from the Elabon Way as poorer than the baronies along the main north-south route. They didn't seem so now. That wasn't because they'd grown richer. Rather, the holdings along the chief highway had suffered more from the Trokmoi and from the nobles' squabbles among themselves.
When Elabon conquered and held the northlands, the road that bore the Empire's name had also been one of the chief routes along which colonists had settled. Farther from the Elabon Way, the folk native to the land were more in evidence. They were dark like Elabonians, but slimmer and more angular, their faces full of forehead and cheekbones.
Old customs lingered away from the highway, too. Lords' castles grew scarce; most of the peasant villages held freeholders, men who owed no part of their crop to a baron. Gerin wondered how they'd fared when Trokme raiders swooped down on them: they had no lords to ride to their defense, either.
The freeholders measured him and Van with their eyes when the travelers paused in a village to buy a hen before evening caught them. 'You're for the Sibyl, then?' asked the man who sold it to them. His Elabonian had a curious flavor to it, not quite an accent, but oldfashioned, as if currents of speech had swept up the Elabon Way, too, but never reached this little hamlet.
'That we are,' Gerin answered.
'You've rich gear,' the peasant observed. 'Be you nobles?'
Van spoke first: 'Me, I'm just a warrior. Anyone who tries taking this corselet off my back will find out what kind of warrior I am, and won't be happier for knowing, either.'
'I can take care of myself, too,' Gerin said. Peasants without lords had to defend themselves, which meant they needed weapons and armor. Robbing people who already had them seemed a likely way to acquire such.
If that was in the peasant's mind, he didn't let on (but then, he wouldn't, Gerin thought). He said, 'Aye, the both of you have that look. Go on, then, and the gods watch over you through the night.'
As soon as they were out of earshot, Gerin spoke to Van, who was driving: 'Put as much space between that village and us as you can. If you find a side road just before sunset, go up it or down it a ways. We'll want to camp where we can hide our nightfire.'
'Right you are,' Van said. 'I'd have done the same thing without your saying a word, mind, but I'm glad you have the same thoughts in mind as I do. On your watch, sleep with your bow, your sword, and your shield and helm where you can grab them in a hurry.'
'If I thought I could, I'd sleep in armor tonight,' the Fox said. Van grunted out a short burst of laughter and nodded.
They traveled until the ghosts began to wail in their ears. Then, setting his jaw, Gerin sacrificed the hen to calm the spirits. A boulder shielded the light of the fire from the little track down which they traveled to get off the main road to Ikos.
Gerin had the first watch. Nothos and Tiwaz stood close together, low in the east at sunset: both were approaching full, though swiftmoving Tiwaz would reach it a couple of days sooner than Nothos. Math would not rise until almost halfway through his watch, and Van alone could commune with Elleb, for the ruddy moon would stay below the horizon till after midnight.
The Fox moved as far away from the fire and the blood-filled trench near it as the ghosts would allow: he wanted to be sure he could spot trouble coming down the road from the village where he'd bought the chicken. His bow was strung, his quiver on his back and ready for him to reach over his shoulder and pull out a bronze-tipped shaft.
Sure enough, just about the time when golden Math began peeping through the leaves of the trees, he heard men coming along the road from the west. They weren't trying very hard to keep quiet; they chattered among themselves as they ambled eastward.
They all carried torches, he saw when they came to the crossroads. Even so, the ghosts bothered them. One said, 'This havering is fair to drive me mad. An we don't find them soon, I'm for my hut and my wife.'
'Ah, but will she be for you in the middle of the night?' another asked. The lot of them laughed. They paused at the narrow track down which Gerin and Van had gone. A couple of them peered toward the Fox. He crouched lower behind the bush that concealed him, hoping the light of three moons would not betray him to the peasants. Maybe their own torchlight left them nightblind, for they did not spy him. After some muttered discussion, they kept heading east down the main road.
Perhaps half an hour later, they came straggling back. Now their torches were guttering toward extinction, and they hurried on toward their village. 'Mayhap 'tis as well we found the whoresons not,' one of them said; Gerin recognized the voice of the fellow who'd sold him the hen. 'They'd have slain some or ever we overcame
