village. Herris and Fulda hurried after him, both expostulating. None of the expostulations made much sense. That didn't surprise him; had things made sense to the villagers, they wouldn't have needed him to straighten them out.
He strode past the last hut. There was the pond: not much of a pond, perhaps, to a connoisseur of such, but enough. Ducks swam in it. In the mud by its edge, the village pigs wallowed. Their happy grunting filled the Fox's ears, much as the gabble from Herris and Fulda had done not long before. But not all of that grunting came from the edge of the pond, nor were all the quacks that punctuated it from ducks on the water.
After a second, more careful, look at the peaceful scene ahead, Gerin turned back to the village headman and the demigod's mother. 'I owe you an apology,' he said, not a common admission for a lord to make to a couple of serfs.
'What are we going to do, lord king?' Herris Bigfoot demanded.
'I-don't-know.' Gerin stared out at the pond. Most of the ducks there were of the ordinary sort, the males with shiny green heads, the females drab and brown all over. A couple of them, though…
A couple of them, Gerin's eyes confirmed, were ducks only from the neck down. From the neck up, they were pigs. Because their heads were smaller than they had any natural business being, the grunts those heads admitted sounded strange, but they were undoubtedly piggy grunts.
And, sure enough, one of the piggy bodies by the pond sported an outsized green head with a flat bill, and another a head similar but brown. Neither pork nor fowl, the Fox thought dazedly.
'What are we going to do?' It seemed to be the sort of day where everyone repeated himself: Herris' turn again.
'I don't know.' Gerin was echoing his own words, too. Then he found something new to add: 'Hope they breed true, maybe.'
Herris and Fulda both stared at him. He'd succeeded in startling them, anyhow. Well, they-and Ferdulf-had succeeded in startling him, too. Suddenly, the village headman started to laugh. 'I wonder if they'll lay eggs or have live young,' he said.
Fulda voiced a more immediately pragmatic consideration: 'I wonder what they'd taste like.'
Gerin tried to imagine a flavor halfway between duck and pork. His stomach rumbled; he didn't know whether his imagination was accurate, but it was vivid enough to make him hungry. He said, 'If you find out what they taste like now, you won't find out later whether they lay eggs or not.'
'You're right, lord king.' Fulda didn't seem to have thought so far ahead.
But Herris Bigfoot said, 'Lord king, what will you do to Ferdulf on account of this? Even if he is a god's son, he's got no business changing things around so. What if he starts putting the wrong heads on people next?'
'A lot of people are wrongheaded enough without getting switched around,' Gerin said. But that was a quip, not an answer. Knowing it was necessary, the Fox went on, 'I'll have a word with him.' And what if he decides to put the wrong head on me? There was a thought the Fox wished he hadn't had. Pretending-most of all to himself- it had never crossed his mind, he turned to Fulda. 'Is he back at your house?'
'Yes, lord king,' she said. She hesitated, torn between a mother's love for her child and the certain knowledge the child she had borne to Mavrix was not of the ordinary sort. 'Whatever you do, lord king, be careful.'
That was good advice. It was such good advice, in fact, that Gerin wished his career had given him more chances to take it. As things had worked out for him, though, had he been careful, he probably would have been dead several times over.
He started back toward the hut where Fulda lived. She and Herris trailed after him. He discovered Ferdulf had come out while he was staring at the pigducks in the pond and the duckpigs by it. Ferdulf was whacking at something in the grass with a stick, for all the world like any other four-year-old. But he was not any other four- year-old. He looked up at Gerin and spoke in his mellow baritone: 'I wonder how you'd look with a big green duck's head.' He frowned in concentration.
Nothing happened, for which the Fox was duly grateful. 'Probably pretty silly,' he replied after considering. He refused to let Ferdulf put him in fear-or rather, he refused to let Ferdulf see he put him in fear. In the same mild, thoughtful tones he'd just used, he went on, ' I wonder how you'd look with your backside all red and sore.'
'You wouldn't dare,' Ferdulf said. 'You know whose son I am.'
Gerin did know, only too well. 'I've spanked you before, when you earned it,' he answered, which was also true. He didn't tell Ferdulf he'd gone back to Fox Keep and got drunk afterwards, to celebrate surviving the experience.
Ferdulf frowned. 'I was littler then. I didn't know all the things I could do.'
'Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it,' Gerin said. If Ferdulf thought he was coming into his full powers at four, what would he be like at fourteen? At thirty-four? The Fox did his best not to think about that. He also did his best not to think about how unlikely it was for Mavrix's get to understand what restraint meant.
'Why not?' Ferdulf asked with what sounded like genuine curiosity. Sure enough, he didn't understand Gerin's point.
Patiently, Gerin explained, 'Because some of the things you can do either frighten people or make them unhappy.'
'So what?' Yes, Ferdulf was Mavrix's son, all right.
'How do you like it when someone frightens you or makes you unhappy?' Gerin asked.
'You're about the only one who ever tries to do anything like that,' Ferdulf answered. He looked thoughtful. 'I wonder if I could stop you.'
The Fox felt fingers prying in his mind: that was how he recalled the sensation later, at any rate. It showed him that Ferdulf, however strong he was by merely mortal standards, was weak by those of the gods-Mavrix had rummaged through Gerin's thoughts and memories like a man going through a beltpouch in search of a pin.
'Stop that!' the Fox said, and tightened his mental muscles. He wasn't sure that would do any good, but had no intention of yielding to the little demigod without first putting up whatever fight he could.
Ferdulf looked astonished, as he usually did when things failed to go as he'd thought they would. 'How are you doing that?' he demanded. 'You're supposed to be thinking about what I want you to think about, not what you want to think about.' By his tone, that latter wasn't worth contemplating.
Those probing mental fingers groped harder. Gerin grunted. Ferdulf had told him his resistance had some success (something an older, wiser foe would have known better than to do), so he kept on resisting, as the palisade to Fox Keep had withstood a Trokm? siege.
He got the feeling resistance wasn't enough, not by itself. ' Here,' he said. 'You're going to think about what I want you to think about.' He couldn't reach out and touch Ferdulf's mind, not directly. But there were other ways of gaining the demigod's attention. Gerin grabbed Ferdulf and flipped him over his knee.
Ferdulf let out a squeal of pure outrage. 'I said you wouldn't dare!' he cried. The probing fingers vanished from Gerin's mind. If nothing else, the Fox had managed to distract him.
'Just because you said it doesn't make it so.' Not without a certain amount of trepidation, Gerin brought down the hand that wasn't restraining Ferdulf.
The demigod's howl was quite satisfactory. Ferdulf tried to rise straight up into the air, as he had while playing at Fox Keep. He did rise, too, but not very far, not with the Fox holding onto him.
'Have I got your attention yet?' Gerin asked. Even with his feet off the ground, he retained enough presence of mind to administer another dose of the medicine he had chosen. 'Why don't you put us both down, and we can talk about it some more instead of fighting?'
'Oh, very well.' Ferdulf's petulant tones were an echo of those Mavrix used when, as did happen once in a while, the Sithonian god was compelled to change his ways.
'Thank you,' Gerin said, most sincerely, when his feet touched the ground again.
'You're welcome,' Ferdulf answered, an unexpected bit of politeness he must have acquired from his mother. He gave the Fox a dirty look. 'Why are you so much harder to change than pigs and ducks?'
As the implications of that sank in, Herris Bigfoot and Fulda gasped. Gerin gulped. Ferdulf had been trying to give him a duck's head, then. 'I don't know why,' he said. 'I'm just glad I am. And I want you to remember I am. The next time you try to change me-or anything else-you're going to be in trouble. Have you got that?'
'Yes, I've got it.' Ferdulf didn't look happy about it, either, which was a long way from breaking Gerin's heart. The little demigod glared up at him. 'How come you get to tell me what to do, when you're only a mortal?'
