The Chernagor Pirates

sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.

He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.

By all appearances, they didn’t care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.

The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn’t think he’d made any noise uncovering it, but that didn’t always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn’t the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.

That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall’s gaze. This thrall’s face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite- man) was as empty, as emptied, as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.

Did something glint in the thrall’s eyes? His face didn’t change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn’t feel like a beast’s stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.

Nonsense, Lanius told himself. That’s only a thrall, with no working wits in his head. He tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t.

The thrall kept staring and staring. Sometimes, during one of these episodes, a thrall would mouth something up at him, or even say something—a sure sign something more than the poor, damaged thrall was looking out through those eyes. Not this time. After a couple of minutes, the thrall turned away.

Lanius turned away, too, with nothing but relief. He covered the peephole. His knees clicked as he got to his feet. He rubbed his nose, as though that could get rid of the stink from the thralls’ room. Still, he kept coming back to look at them. He was no wizard. He couldn’t learn anything about them that would help anyone find out how to cure them—if, indeed, anyone could curs them. But he stayed intrigued. He couldn’t help wondering what went on in the thralls’ minds. Logic and observation said nothing much went on there, but he wasn’t sure how far to trust them. Where sorcery was involved, were logic and observation the right tools to use?

If they weren’t, what was? What could be? More good questions. Lanius could come up with any number of good questions. Finding good answers for them was harder. Maybe the hope of good answers was what kept him coming back to the peephole.

Not long after that thought crossed his mind, he walked past Limosa in the hallway. She nodded politely as she went by—she thought he’d tried harder than he really had to get her father out of the Maze. He nodded back, though it took an effort. He had plenty of good questions about her and Ortalis, too, but no good answers, however much he would have liked to have them.

What you need is a peephole into their bedchamber, he thought. That would tell you what you want to know.

He violently shook his head. What he wanted to know was none of his business. Knowing it was none of his business didn’t keep him from wanting to find out. Sosia would be angry at him if she learned he wanted to peep into other people’s bedrooms—except she was even more curious about this than he was.

No, he told himself firmly. Some curiosity doesn’t need to be satisfied. That went dead against everything he’d ever believed. He tried to convince himself of it anyway.

Here was the Stura. Grus had spent a lot of years traveling up and down the river in a war galley. Now he approached it on horseback. The sour smell of old smoke filled his nostrils. This was the valley the Menteshe had overrun most thoroughly. That meant it was the valley where Prince Ulash’s men had done the most damage.

Seeing that damage both infuriated and depressed the king. “How am I supposed to set this to rights?” he demanded of Hirundo.

“Driving the Menteshe back over the river would be a good start,” the general answered.

Hirundo smiled. He joked. But that was kidding on the square. Unless the Avornans could drive the Menteshe south of the Stura once more, Grus had exactly no chance of setting any of this to rights. And here, where their countrymen could slip north over the river in small boats by night, where the Menteshe could also bring river galleys— some of them rowed by brainless thralls—into the fight, driving them out of Avornis was liable to prove doubly hard.

“We can do it,” Hirundo said. “They don’t want to fight a stand-up battle. Whenever they try that, they lose, and they know it.”

“They don’t need to make a stand-up fight,” Grus said darkly. “All they need to do is keep riding around and burning things. What kind of harvest will anyone here in this valley have? None to speak of, and we both know it. The Menteshe know it, too. Wrecking things works as well for them as winning battles.” He waved toward what had been a vineyard. “No one will grow grapes here for years. No grapes, no wine, no raisins. It’s the same with olive groves. Cut the trees down and burn them and it’s years before you have olives and olive oil again. What do people do in the meantime?”

“I’ll tell you what they do,” Hirundo answered. “They do without.”

Another joke that held entirely too much truth. The trouble was that people couldn’t very well do without wine and raisins and grapes and olive oil. Here in the south, those things were almost as important as wheat and barley—not that the grainfields hadn’t been ravaged, too. A good harvest next year would go a long way toward putting that worry behind people… provided they didn’t starve in the meantime. But the other crops would take longer to recover.

“And what happens if the Menteshe swarm over the Stura again next spring?” Grus demanded.

“We try to hit them before they can cause anywhere near this much mischief,” Hirundo answered reasonably.

“But can we really do it? Wouldn’t you rather go up into the Chernagor country and finish what we’ve been trying to do there for years now? And what about the Chernagor pirates? What if they hit our east coast again next spring while the Menteshe cross the Stura?”

“You’re full of cheerful ideas,” Hirundo said.

“It could have happened this year,” Grus said. “We’re lucky it didn’t.”

Hirundo shook his head. “That isn’t just luck, Your Majesty. True, you didn’t take Nishevatz, but you came close, and you would have done it, odds are, if the war down here hadn’t drawn you away. And our ships gave the Chernagor pirates all they wanted, and more besides. It’s no wonder they didn’t move along with the cursed Menteshe. You put the fear of the gods in them.”

“The fear of the gods,” Grus murmured. He hoped some of the Chernagors still felt it, as opposed to the fear of the Banished One. But what he hoped and what was true were liable to be two different things, as he knew too well. Confusing the one with the other could only lead to disappointment.

As he was getting ready to lie down on his cot that evening, Alauda said, “Ask you something, Your Majesty?”

Grus looked at her in surprise. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. “Go ahead,” the king said after a moment. “You can always ask. I don’t know that I’ll answer.”

The peasant girl’s smile was wry. “I understand. You don’t have to, not for the likes of me. But when we were up in Pelagonia… You had another woman up there, didn’t you?”

“Not another woman I slept with,” Grus said carefully. He’d had enough rows with women (that a lot of those rows were his own fault never crossed his mind). He didn’t want another one now. If he had to send Alauda somewhere far away to keep from having another one, he was ruthlessly ready to do that.

But she only shrugged. “Another woman you care about, I mean. I don’t know if you slept with her or not.” She waited. Grus gave her a cautious nod. She went on, “And you’d cared about her for a while now,” and waited