The Chernagor Pirates

“You refuse to give them back, then?” Farrukh-Zad’s voice was silky with danger.

Avornan wizards still studied the thralls, learning what they could from them. Maybe the Banished One wanted them back because he was afraid the wizards would find out something important. Maybe. Lanius didn’t know what the odds were, but he could only hope. “I do,” he said. “As long as they have done no wrong in Avornis, they may stay here.”

“I shall take your words back to Prince Ulash,” the envoy said. “Do not believe you have heard the last of this. You have not.” His last bow held enough polite irony to satisfy even the most exacting Avornan courtier. Having given it, he didn’t wait for any response, or even dismissal, from King Lanius, but simply turned and strode out of the throne room, the other Menteshe in his wake.

Lanius stared after him. He’d always thought about the power that went with being king in fact as well as in name. As he began to use it, he saw that worry went with the job, too.

Riding as usual at the head of his army, Grus got his first good look at Nishevatz. Seeing the town did not delight him. If anything, it horrified him. “Olor’s beard, Hirundo, how are we supposed to take that place?” he yelped.

“Good question, Your Majesty,” his general replied. “Maybe the defenders inside will laugh themselves to death when they see we’re crazy enough to try to winkle them out.”

It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but it wasn’t good. Nishevatz had originally been a small island a quarter of a mile or so off the coast of the mainland. Before the Chernagors took the northern coast away from Avornis, the townsfolk had built a causeway from the shore to the island. The slow wheel of centuries since had seen silt widen the causeway from a road to a real neck of land. Even so, the approach remained formidable.

King Grus tried to make the best of things, saying, “Well, if it were easy, Vsevolod wouldn’t have needed to ask us for help.”

“Huzzah,” Hirundo said sourly. “He was still in charge of things when he did ask us here, remember. He’s not anymore.”

“I know. We’ll have to see what we can do about that.” He called to Vsevolod, who rode in the middle of a small party of Chernagor noblemen not far away. “Your Highness!”

“What you want, Your Majesty?” Vsevolod spoke Avornan with a thick, guttural accent. He was about sixty, with thinning white hair, bushy eyebrows, and an enormous hooked nose.

“Do you know any secret ways into your city?” Grus asked. “We could use one about now, you know.”

“I know some, yes. I use one to get away,” Vsevolod replied. “Vasilko know most of these, too, though. I show him, so he get away if he ever have trouble when he ruling prince. I not show him this one, in case I have trouble.” He jabbed a large, callused thumb—more the thumb of a fisherman or metalworker than that of a ruling prince—at his own broad chest.

“Can an army use it, or just one man?” Grus asked.

The ousted ruler ran a hand through his long, curly beard. A couple of white hairs clung to his fingers. He brushed his hand against his kilt to dislodge them. “Would not be easy for army,” he said at last. “Passage is narrow. Few men could hold it against host.”

“Does Vasilko know how you got out? Or does he just know that you did?”

“He did not know of this way ahead of time. I am sure of that,” Vsevolod replied. “He would have blocked. If he knows now… This I cannot say. I am sorry.”

Hirundo said, “Maybe our wizard could tell us.”

“Maybe.” Grus frowned. “Maybe he’d give it away trying to find out, too.” He frowned again, hating indecision yet trapped into it. “We’d better see what he thinks, eh?”

Pterocles seemed determined to think as little as possible, or at least to admit to as little thought as possible. “I really could not say, Your Majesty. I know little of the blocking magics the Chernagors use these days, and how they match against ours. We haven’t warred with them in their own lands for a long time, so we haven’t had much need to learn such things. Maybe I can sneak past whatever wizardly wards he has without his being the wiser, or maybe I would put his wind up at once.”

“Helpful,” Grus said, meaning anything but. “Duke Radim is bound to have a wizard or two with him, eh? Talk to them, why don’t you? You can see what sorts of things the Chernagors do. Maybe that will tell you what you need to know.”

“Maybe.” Pterocles seemed glum, not convinced. Grus longed for Alca. He longed for her a couple of ways, in fact, even if he had made up with Estrilda.

He would have pushed Pterocles when the army camped that night, but a courier galloped into the encampment with a long letter from Lanius. Reading about the visit from Farrukh-Zad, Grus wished he were back in the city of Avornis. By what was in the letter, Lanius had done as well as anyone could have hoped to do. Grus wondered how closely the letter reflected truth; Lanius was, after all, telling his own story. Even if Lanius had gotten everything straight, was that all good news? Would he decide he liked this taste of real kingship and crave more?

Grus summarized the letter in a few sentences for the courier, then asked, “Is that how it happened?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, as far as I know,” the man replied. “I wasn’t in the throne room, you understand, but that pretty much matches what I’ve heard.”

Ah, gossip, Grus thought with a smile. “What all have you heard?” he asked, hoping to pick up some more news about the embassy, or at least to get more of a feel for what had gone on.

That wasn’t what he got. The courier hesitated, then shrugged and said, “Well, you’ll have heard about that other business by now, won’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Grus answered. “What other business?”

“About your son.”

“No, I hadn’t heard about that. What about him?” Grus tried to keep his tone as light and casual as he could. If he’d asked the question the way he wanted to, he would have frightened the courier out of saying another word.

He evidently succeeded, for the fellow just asked, “You haven’t heard about him and the girl?”

“No,” Grus said, again in as mild a voice as he could muster. “What happened? Is some serving girl going to have his bastard?” Next to a lot of the things Ortalis might have done, that would be good news. The only real trouble with royal bastards was finding a fitting place for them once they grew up.

But the courier said, “Uh, no, Your Majesty, no bastards. Not that I know about, anyhow.”

That Uh, no worried Grus. Carefully, he asked, “Well, what do you know about?” Staying casual wasn’t easy, not anymore.

“About how he—” The courier stopped. He suddenly seemed to remember he wasn’t passing time with somebody in a tavern. “It wasn’t so good,” he finished.

“Tell me everything you know,” Grus said. “About how he what? What wasn’t so good?” The courier stood mute. Grus snapped his fingers. “Come on. You know more than you’re letting on. Out with it.”

“Your Majesty, I don’t really know anything.” The man seemed very unhappy. “I’ve just heard things people are talking about.”

“Tell me those, then,” Grus said. “I swear by the gods I’ll remember they don’t come from you. I don’t even know your name.”

“No, but you know my face,” the courier muttered. King Grus folded his arms and waited. Trapped, the man gave him what was bound to be as cleaned-up a version of the gossip he’d heard as he could manage on the spur of the moment. It boiled down to the same sort of story as Grus had already heard about Ortalis too many times. At last, the man stumbled to a stop, saying, “And that’s everything I heard.”

Grus doubted it was. Such tales were usually much more lurid. But he thought he would need a torturer to pull anything else from the fellow. “All right, you can go,” he said, and the courier fled. “I’ll deal with this… whenever I get a chance.” Only he heard that.

He looked ahead to Nishevatz. The Chernagor city-state would take up all of his time for who could guess how long. He sighed. Whatever Ortalis had done was done. With a little luck, he wouldn’t do anything worse until