Dagref's the second real live scholar spawned in the northlands. You have a notion of what you' ve got there, while your father had never a clue with you.'
'Ah,' Gerin said. 'Well, there's some truth in that, sure enough. How about it, Dagref? Do you like it better that I can guess along with you some of the time, or would you rather I had never a clue?'
Dagref looked back over his shoulder at the Fox again. 'I can guess along with you some of the time, Father. What in the world makes you think you can guess along with me?' Van guffawed. Gerin felt his ears heat.
**
Riders and charioteers fanned out through the countryside around the village by which Gerin had chosen to camp for the night. They brought back cattle and sheep and ducks and chickens. 'Had to let the air out of a shepherd before he'd cough up his beasts,' one rider said, patting his bow so as to leave no possible doubt about what he meant.
Under other circumstances, Gerin would have been angry at him for alienating the peasantry. As things were, the Fox hardly noticed the comment. He had his sword in his left hand, and was wondering if he'd have to start carving chunks off the village headman, who was doing his best to act like an idiot from birth.
'No,' the fellow said, 'we don't have no grain stored in pits. We don't have no beans in pits, neither.'
'That's very interesting,' Gerin said, 'very interesting indeed. I suppose you get through every winter by not eating during most of it.'
'Seems that way, a lot of the time,' the headman answered sullenly.
'Well, all right.' Gerin's voice was light and blithe. 'I suppose we'll just have to burn this place down so all these houses here don't get in our way while we're searching.'
The headman sent him a look full of loathing and led him over to the storage pits, which had been concealed by grass growing over them. 'I thought you had a name for being soft alongside Aragis,' the peasant grumbled.
'Only goes to show you can't always trust what you hear, doesn't it?' the Fox returned with a smile. The village headman's glare held even more hate than it had before. Having got what he wanted, Gerin generously affected not to notice. Keeping his army fed was at the moment more important than keeping Aragis' peasants happy.
That was his opinion, at any rate. He discovered the next day that Aragis had a different one. A chariot bearing the Archer's son, Aranast, came jouncing over a side road toward Gerin's army. When Aranast had made his way up alongside the Fox, he spoke without preamble: 'Lord king, my father forbids you from foraging on the countryside while in lands whose overlord he is.'
'Does he?' Gerin answered. 'That's nice.'
Aranast took off his bronze, potlike helm and scratched his head. 'Does that mean you will obey this prohibition?'
'Of course not,' Gerin replied. 'If he can teach me how to subsist on no food while I cross his lands, I might try it. Otherwise, though, I'll do what I have to do to get through them.'
'You dare go against my father's stated will?' Aranast's eyes went round and wide and staring. No one in Aragis' lands had dared go against his stated will for many years. Though Aranast gave signs of being a fairly formidable fellow in his own right, he seemed astonished anyone might imagine going against his father's stated will.
'I just said so. Weren't you listening?' Gerin asked politely. ' He's not my suzerain, so I'm under no obligation to obey him, and he's told me to do something impossible, which means I'd be an idiot to obey him. Do I look like an idiot to you, young fellow?'
Aranast didn't answer that, which might have been just as well. His frown did its best to be severe to the point of threatening. People were no doubt much more in the habit of calling him things like prince and heir and maybe your highness than young fellow. Taking a deep breath, he said, 'My father entered into alliance with you in good faith. He did not enter into it to give you leave to plunder his holdings.'
'Oh, don't be a pompous twit,' Gerin said, which flicked Aranast on his vanity much harder than young fellow had done. The Fox went on, 'I told you once, I don't aim to let myself starve. If I were plundering, though, I'd have booty with me, wouldn't I? I'm feeding myself and I'm feeding my men. Would you like some roast mutton?'
'Generous of you to offer me what already belongs to my father,' Aranast remarked. Dagref was much younger, but would have done the sarcasm better than Aranast even so. Still, the effort was there.
Gerin rewarded it with sarcasm of his own: 'Glad you think so.' That drew another glare from Aragis' son. 'Where is your father, anyhow?' the Fox asked.
'West of here,' Aranast answered. 'The imperials still press him hard. Some of them are between him and you. I had to thread my way past them to deliver his word to you, and to have you set it aside as being of no account.'
'It was a foolish word to deliver, and you can tell him I said so. He might be better off if more people let him know when he was being foolish,' Gerin said. 'But he sees no hope of linking with me again?'
'He does not, being too sore beset,' Aranast answered. 'He hoped you might rejoin him, and also expressed the hope that you would use your skill at magic to good effect in the struggle against the Empire.'
'I'll do everything I can,' Gerin said with a sigh. Aragis persisted in believing he could do things he couldn't. He held up a forefinger. 'Has Aragis also forbidden the imperials from plundering his holdings?'
Aranast shook his head. 'No, for he did not think it would do any good. You, however, are not his enemy, unless you choose to make yourself so.'
'Or unless he makes me one by insisting I do things I can't,' Gerin said. 'A man who asks too much of his friends starts finding out he doesn't have so many friends as he thought he did.'
'I will take your words back to my father, that he may judge them for himself,' Aranast said stiffly.
'Fine,' the Fox told him. 'Tell him this, too: if he wants to fight a war against me after we beat the Empire, I'll be ready, the same as I was ready to fight a war against him before I knew the imperials were on this side of the High Kirs.'
He kept astonishing Aranast. 'You challenge my father?' Aragis' son said. 'No one challenges my father.'
'I've done it for more than twenty years, as he's challenged me all that time,' Gerin answered. 'Tell him I'm doing what I have to do here, no more-and no less.'
Still scowling, still muttering to himself, Aranast Aragis' son got back into his chariot and rattled off toward the west, toward whatever was left of Aragis' army. 'Well, he doesn't lack for nerve, that's certain,' Van said, eyeing the dust the horses' hooves and the chariot's wheels kicked up from the track along which it traveled.
'Who doesn't?' Gerin asked. 'Aragis or Aranast?'
'Both of 'em, now that I think on it,' the outlander replied. Gerin watched that receding plume of dust, too. After a moment, he nodded.
**
Getting livestock and grain from the peasants who lived under Aragis' rule turned out to be, for the most part, easier than Gerin had expected. The majority of village headmen had lived so long under the Archer, they seemed to have forgotten the possibility of cheating an overlord. 'Take what you will, lord,' one of them told Gerin. ' Whatever you take, you'd do worse to us if we tried to hide it from you.' The men and women who came up to listen to him talking with the Fox nodded. Aragis, evidently, had given lessons of that sort.
A few villages, though, appeared to have no substance whatsoever: only huts and whatever was ripening in the fields. Gerin's men found no livestock even on searching the nearby woods, and the headmen at such places staunchly denied having grain pits anywhere by their huts.
'Do what you want with me,' one said. 'I can't give you what I haven't got.'
'You should be careful saying things like that,' Gerin told him. ' If you said them to Aragis or his men, they'd
