'What will you do with me, lord king?' For his part, the prisoner seemed grateful enough to be corrected with words rather than with something hard slammed against the side of his head.
'Take him back that way, Maeva,' Gerin said, pointing over his shoulder. 'Don't do anything to him as long as he behaves himself. If he doesn't behave himself… well, the ghosts will have fresh blood to drink tonight.' To the captured imperial, he went on, 'I don't quite know what we'll end up doing with you. We may let you farm on a peasant village, but I won't lie to you-you may end up in the mines. It depends on where we can get the most and the most useful work out of you.'
'Lord king, if it's use you're after, I know something of smithcraft,' the prisoner said.
'If that turns out to be true, you won't go to the mines,' Gerin said. 'And if it turns out not to be true, you will, for having lied.' The imperial didn't quail, from which Gerin concluded he was either telling the truth or had some small practice lying. 'Take him away, Maeva.'
'I do thank you for getting her out of the brawling for a while,' Van said.
'You're welcome, for whatever it may be worth,' Gerin answered, his voice mild; he understood what was in the outlander's mind.
Dagref, on the other hand, spoke to Van in the same hectoring tones he'd used on the prisoner Maeva had taken: 'You do understand, don't you, that she gets to go out of the brawling now because she was in it before?'
'Oh, aye, I understand that, lad,' Van said, manfully resisting the temptation to break Dagref over his knee or offer him some other form of great bodily harm. 'Now if you want to ask me whether I like the idea or not, I may just have a different answer for you. Aye, I may.'
For a wonder, the brittle edge in his voice got through to Dagref, who suddenly made himself very busy steering the chariot. Gerin caught Van's eye and raised an eyebrow. Van coughed a couple of times. They both laughed.
'Stop talking about me,' Dagref said without looking back, which only made his father and Van laugh harder.
More prisoners came back as the Fox's advance drove in the scouts the imperials had set up to keep an eye on him. He was mournfully certain his horsemen and chariots were not capturing all those scouts. He pushed south and west harder, to hit the main imperial army before the foe was ready for him.
Instead of finding the imperial force concentrated to receive his men, he found it scattered in detachments. He hit them one after another, glad of his good fortune. They would skirmish with him and then draw off, retreating toward the west every time. The peasants in the eastern part of Aragis' kingdom did not seem delighted to have him foraging from the countryside rather than the soldiers of the Elabonian Empire.
Some of them, in fact, probably would have preferred to have the imperials remain. Being strangers in the northlands, and unused to some of the ways of the peasants there, the men from south of the High Kirs missed stores that Gerin and his men had no trouble sniffing out. They'd dealt with the local peasants all their lives, and knew their tricks.
Flatbread made from coarse-ground flour baked in the hot ashes of a campfire was not the most appetizing meal, but it kept a man going. Van said, 'We may run those buggers right out of here yet. If they keep giving us ground, by the gods, we'll take it.'
'So we will,' Gerin said, gnawing on flatbread. He kept looking toward the west. His expression was glum.
Van noted that. 'You ought to be glad we've broken out of that cramped little stretch of ground where they'd pinned us back. If you are, you've not told your face of it.'
'I am glad. We would have got hungry after a bit. But I'm not delighted. You see what they're doing, don't you?'
'Running,' Van said with a sniff.
'Running, aye,' the Fox said. 'But running with a purpose.' Van let out an interrogative grunt. Gerin explained: 'They're keeping themselves between Aragis and us. They don't want us joining up with him until their other force has hit him hard, unless I miss my guess.'
'Ah.' Van took a bite of flatbread, too. He chewed on the bread and the idea at the same time. By the look on his face, he didn't much care for the taste of either. He tried to make the best of things: ' Well, they'll be the ones with the harder foraging now.'
But the Fox shook his head. 'I have my doubts about that. If they can bring two armies up over the High Kirs, they'll have a supply train with 'em, too, to keep them fed.' He listened to his own words. A smile slowly stole over his face. 'And they've gone and let us out.'
Van's smile spread till it matched Gerin's. 'Wagons and wagons full of good things to eat-that's what you're saying, isn't it, Fox?'
'Good things to eat,' Gerin agreed. 'Probably more wine, to help Rihwin get drunk. Probably arrows and such, too. All sorts of things we could use. All sorts of things we'd be happier if the imperials didn't have. And they're falling back toward the west, to keep us away from Aragis the Archer.'
'Don't they realize you'd think of the supply train?'
'Do you know, I don't believe they do,' Gerin said. 'To them, after all, I'm just a backwoods half-barbarian.' He winked. 'But I'll tell you something: I'm going to show them they're wrong.'
**
'This will be grand fun,' Van boomed as the chariot jounced along the stretch of the Elabon Way Gerin's counterattack had opened up. ' Grand fun for us, I should say-the imperials won't like getting a door slammed on their prongs even a little bit.'
'Wouldn't much care for that myself.' Gerin had all he could do not to clutch at himself at the very idea. 'But aye, if it goes as we hope, it'll do us some good and make life harder for our chums from south of the mountains.'
He'd taken as many of Rihwin's riders as he could while still leaving enough to scout for the main mass of warriors he'd left behind. He'd also taken the chariots with the fastest horses and those with the fiercest crews, including a good many of Adiatunnus' Trokmoi. Set the prospect of booty in front of the woodsrunners and they'd go after it the way a pack of hounds would run baying down the scent track of a stag.
He glanced east. Somewhere not far over there, beyond forests and low hills, lay the village where Elise had her tavern. Gerin wondered what had happened when the imperials went through there after him.
A rider came galloping north up the Elabon Way toward his force. ' Wagons!' the fellow was shouting. 'Wagons!' When he was sure the Fox had heard him, he pointed in the direction from which he had come.
'Let's go,' Gerin said, and waved his men forward. They whooped with glee. The troopers in chariots urged their teams ahead. The riders booted their mounts up from slow trot to quick. Sure enough, as soon as the paved highway rose a little, the Fox saw the ox- and donkey-drawn wagons coming toward him. The riders were already whooping and reaching over their shoulders for arrows.
The drivers saw Gerin's oncoming men at about the same time as he spotted them. They had a few chariots along to protect them against bandits, but not nearly enough to hold back a force like the one Gerin had assembled. The charioteers did what they could: they rolled up the highway in a spoiling attack to try to give the wagon crews time to form a defensive circle.
Gerin was having none of that. 'Roll past them!' he shouted. 'Don' t let them slow us down. Once we get in among the wagons, we'll be able to throw the chariots into the bag, too.'
Arrows flew as the imperials tried to delay his troopers. A couple of men on either side tumbled out of their cars. But then, despite shouts of scorn and dismay from the warriors from south of the High Kirs, the Fox and his followers were by, speeding on toward the wagons.
A fierce grin stretched his mouth wide: the circle remained incomplete. His men knew they had to make sure it stayed incomplete, too. They broke in among the wagons. Some of the men from the chariots dismounted and set upon the wagon drivers. The drivers fought back as best they could, but they were not armored, and many of them carried nothing more lethal than knives.
