been asked: 'It was a paint a wizard put on them, to keep another wizard from setting them afire.'
'Ah,' Selatre said. Thin in the distance-Gerin did not allow trees and undergrowth to spring up anywhere near the keep; if anyone set ambushes, he'd be that one-a horn from the watchtower said the wagon had been seen.
He twitched the reins and rode forward with a curious mixture of anticipation and dread: seeing his comrades again would be good, and perhaps some of them had word of Duren. But the trouble he expected from Fand cast a shadow over the homecoming.
'We were free peasants in the village where I grew up; we owed no lord service,' Selatre said. 'Not much of what we heard about Elabonian barons was good, and I came to have a poor opinion of the breed. You tempt me to think I may have been wrong.'
Gerin shrugged. 'Barons are men like any others. Some of us are good, some bad, some both mixed together like most people. I'm bright enough, for instance, but I worry too much and I'm overly solitary. My vassal Drago the Bear, whom you'll meet, isn't what you call quick of wit and he hates anything that smacks of change, but he's brave and loyal and has the knack of making his own people like him. And Wolfar of the Axe, who's dead now, was vicious and treacherous, if you ask me, but he'd never shrink from a fight. As I say, we're a mixed bag.'
'You speak of yourself as if you were someone else,' Selatre said.
'I try sometimes to think of myself that way,' the Fox answered. ' It keeps me from making too much of myself in my own mind. The fellow who's sure he can't possibly go wrong is usually the one who's likeliest to.'
A couple of men came out of the gate and waved to the approaching wagon: squat Drago with slim Rihwin beside him. 'Any luck, lord?' Drago called, raising his voice to a shout.
'What did the Sibyl say?' Rihwin asked, also loudly.
'We're still the ripple of news furthest out from where the rock went into the pond,' Van said.
'So we are.' Gerin nodded, adding, 'I like the picture your words call to mind.' Behind them and in every other direction, others would also be spreading word of what had happened at Ikos. Soon the whole of the northlands would know. But for now, there was a dividing line between those who did and those who didn't, and he and Van were on it.
He raised his voice in turn to answer his vassals: 'By your leave, I'll tell the tale in the great hall and not sooner. That way I'll have to retell it only once, and there's a good deal to it.'
'Is that Duren in the wagon behind you?' Rihwin asked.
Drago's sight had begun to lengthen as he aged. Today, that served him well. 'No, loon,' he said. 'That's a man grown. No, I take it back-a woman?' The Fox didn't blame him for sounding surprised.
Rihwin's agile wits let him leap to a conclusion that wouldn't have occurred to Drago. 'You've caught up with Elise?' he said loudly. 'Did she steal the boy away, lord Gerin?' That his wits were agile, of course, didn't necessarily mean he was right.
At that moment, Gerin wished he'd kept quiet. The rumor would be all over the keep, all over the serf villages, and would spread faster than the truth could follow it. 'No, it's not Elise,' he said, even louder than Rihwin had spoken. 'This is the lady Selatre, who up till bare days ago was Biton's Sibyl at Ikos.'
Warriors up on the palisade, who'd already begun to gossip about Rihwin's speculation, abruptly fell silent. Then they started buzzing again, more busily than before. Maybe Rihwin's wild guess wouldn't go everywhere after all, Gerin thought: the truth was so much stranger that it might take precedence.
He drove the wagon over the drawbridge and into the keep, then got down from it. Van slipped off from the other side. They both stood back to let Selatre descend with no risk of touching either of them.
Gerin introduced his vassals to her one by one. He wondered how good she'd be at matching unfamiliar names to equally unfamiliar faces; that often gave him trouble. But she coped well enough, and showed she knew who was who when she spoke to the men. The Fox was impressed.
Widin Simrin's son asked the question they all had to be thinking: 'Uh, lord Gerin, how did you come to have the holy Sibyl riding with you?'
'You felt the earthquake a few days past?' Gerin asked in turn.
Heads bobbed up and down. Drago said, 'Aye, we did, lord. Like to scare the piss out of me, it did. We lost some pots, too, and spilled ale from a couple of broken jars.' He sighed in sorrow at the misfortune. Then he scratched his head. 'Has that aught to do with the lady here?'
'It has everything to do with the lady here,' Gerin said. Van nodded, the crimson horsehair plume on his helm drawing eyes to him. The Fox went on, 'Let's all go into the great hall. I hope not all the ale spilled.' He waited until reassured on that before finishing, ' Good, for I'll need a mug or two to ease my throat as I-and Van, and the lady Selatre-tell you what happened, and why she's here.'
He waved toward the entrance to the castle. Drago and Widin and Rihwin and the rest hurried inside. Selatre waited till they'd gone through the door before she too went in. Even if she'd consciously decided not to let getting touched every once in a while bother her, she aimed to avoid it where she could.
Gerin did not go into the great hall until even Selatre was inside. He told himself that was politeness, and so it was, but it was also anxiety: he put off for a moment the likelihood of confronting Fand.
He knew that was foolish: putting off trouble, even for a little while, wasn't worth the effort, and often made it worse when it finally came. But knowing that and facing up to a screaming fight with Fand were two different things. At last, bracing himself as if walking into a winter wind, he walked into the great hall.
His stiff pose eased as his eyes adjusted to the gloom within: Fand had to be still upstairs. 'Took you long enough,' Van rumbled, though he no doubt had the same concern. 'If you'd stayed out there much longer, the ale would've been drunk by the time you got around to joining us.'
'Can't have that.' Gerin went over to the jar and dipped a jack full. He wet his throat, then told what had happened on the way to Ikos and after he and Van had got there. His vassal barons muttered angrily when he spoke of the peasants who'd hunted him in the night. He shook his head. 'I was angry at the time, too, but it all fades away when you set it alongside what came later.'
He spoke of the trip down to the Sibyl's cave and of the disturbing oracular response Biton had delivered through Selatre's lips. His listeners muttered again, this time with the same dread he'd felt when those doom-filled words washed over him. Selatre broke in, ' I remember lord Gerin and Van coming into my underground chamber, but nothing after that, for the mantic trance had possessed me.'
Gerin went on with the rest of the story: Selatre's continued and abnormal unconsciousness, the meeting with Aragis in the temple, the carouse afterwards (now that his hangover was gone, Van grinned in fond memory), and the earthquake the next morning.
Sometime while he was going through all that, Fand came down and sat beside Drago the Bear. Maybe the vassal baron's bulk kept Gerin from spotting her right away, or maybe he'd kept from looking toward the stairs on purpose. But she leaned forward when he spoke of the monsters that had emerged from the ruins of Biton's temple. Again, he had his listeners' complete and dismayed attention. Fand kept quiet while he spoke of the battle the creatures had had with the temple guards in the sacred precinct.
Then he said, 'We'd gone back there, Van and I, because our innkeeper said the Sibyl still hadn't come to her senses. After the quake, we feared her cottage would burn like so many buildings in the town of Ikos. Since we'd been responsible for pitching her into the fit, we thought we should make amends for it if we could. As it happened, her dwelling hadn't caught fire, but the monsters would have made short work of her if we hadn't got there when we did.'
Fand stirred but still did not speak. Selatre said, 'I woke up in their wagon some hours later, with my world turned all topsy-turvy.'
Actually hearing Selatre seemed to draw Fand's notice to her. The Trokme woman leaned forward, her chin on her hands, intently studying the former Sibyl. Then, to Gerin's dismay, she got to her feet and looked from him to Van. In a voice low but no less menacing because of that, she said, 'And which of you was it, now, who was after wanting to trade me for the first new bit o' baggage you chanced upon, like a wandering tinker mending a pot in exchange for a night's rest and a bit o' bread in the morning?'
'Now, lass, didn't you listen to the Fox?' Van usually had no trouble with women, but now he sounded nervous, which didn't help. 'It wasn't her body we had designs on, just saving her life.'
'Likely tell,' Fand snarled. 'Sure and you'd have been just as eager to go back for her had she been old and toothless, not young and toothsome, sure and you would.'
