again. Again, the king nodded. Now he waited. Alauda licked her lips and then asked, “Why didn’t you just throw me over for her, then?” That was what she’d really wanted to know all along.
Alauda surprised him again, this time by laughing. “When we got there, you thought you were going to be, though, didn’t you?”
“Well… yes,” he said in dull embarrassment. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed that. Now he asked a question of his own. “Why didn’t you bring up any of this when we were there?”
She laughed once more, on a self-deprecating note. “What good would it have done me? None I could see. Safer now, when I’m here and she’s not.”
She did have her share of shrewdness. Grus had seen that before. “Now you know,” he said, although he’d told her as little as he could. He changed the subject, asking, “How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” she answered. “I’m supposed to have babies. I’m made for it. It’s not always comfortable— about half the time, breakfast doesn’t want to stay down—but I’m all right. Is the war going as well as it looks?”
“Almost,” Grus said. “We’re still going forward, anyhow. I hope we’ll keep on doing it.”
“Once we chase all the Menteshe out of Avornis, how do we keep them out for good?” Alauda asked.
“I don’t know,” Grus said, which made her blink. He went on, “Avornans have been trying to find the answer to that for a long time, but we haven’t done it yet. If we had, they wouldn’t be in Avornis now, would they?” He waited for Alauda to shake her head, then added, “One thing I can do—one thing I will do—is put more river galleys on the Stura. That will make it harder for them to cross, anyhow.”
She nodded. “That makes good sense. Why weren’t there more river galleys on the Stura before?”
“They’re expensive,” he answered. “Expensive to build, even more expensive to man.” The tall-masted ships that aped the ones the Chernagor pirates made cost more to build. River galleys, with their large crews of rowers, cost more to maintain. And every man who became a sailor was one more man who couldn’t till the soil. After the disasters of this war, Avornis was liable to need farmers even more desperately than she needed soldiers or sailors. The king hoped she could find enough. If not, lean times were coming, in the most literal sense of the words.
Lanius liked coming into the kitchens. He nodded to the head cook, a rotund man named Cucullatus. “Tomorrow is Queen Sosia’s birthday, you know,” he said. “Do up something special for her.”
Cucullatus’ smile was almost as wide as he was, which said a good deal. “How about a kidney pie, Your Majesty? That’s one of her favorites.”
“Fine.” Lanius hoped his own smile was also wide and seemed sincere. Sosia did love kidney pie, or any other dish with kidneys in it. Lanius didn’t. To him, cooked kidneys smelled nasty. But he did want to make his wife happy. He worked harder to keep Sosia happy since he’d started taking lovers among the serving women than he had before. He thought himself unique in that regard, which only proved he didn’t know everything there was to know about straying husbands.
“We’ll take care of it, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus promised. “And whatever kidneys don’t go into the pie, we’ll save for the moncats.”
“Fine,” Lanius said again, this time with real enthusiasm. The moncats loved kidneys, which didn’t stink nearly as much raw.
The king started to leave the kitchens. A startled noise from one of the sweepers made him turn back. There was Pouncer, clinging to a beam with one clawed hand. The moncat’s other hand clutched a big wooden spoon. Reading moncats’ expressions was a risky game, but Lanius thought Pouncer looked almost indecently pleased with itself.
“Come back here! Come down here!” the king called in stern tones. But Pouncer was no better at doing what it was told than any other moncat—or any other cat of any sort.
Cucullatus said, “Here, don’t worry, Your Majesty. We can lure it down with a bit of meat.”
“Good idea,” Lanius said. But the sweeper who’d first spotted Pouncer wasn’t paying any attention to either Cucullatus or the king. He tried to knock the moncat from the beam with his broom. He missed. Pouncer yowled and swung up onto the beam, with only its tail hanging down. The sweeper sprang, trying to grab the tail. He jumped just high enough to pull out a few of the hairs at the very end. Pouncer yowled again, louder this time, and took off like a dart hurled from a catapult.
“You stupid, manure-brained idiot!” Cucullatus bawled at the poor sweeper. Then he turned on the rest of the men and women in the kitchens. “Well? Don’t just stand there, you fools! Catch the miserable little beast!”
If that wasn’t a recipe for chaos, Lanius couldn’t have come up with one. People bumped into one another, tripped one another, and cursed one another with more passion than Lanius had ever heard from them. Several of them carried knives, and more knives, long-tined forks, and other instruments of mayhem lay right at hand. Why they didn’t start stabbing one another was beyond the king.
After a couple of minutes of screaming anarchy, somebody asked, “Where did the stinking creature go?”
Lanius looked around. So did the kitchen staff, pausing in their efforts to tear the place down. “Where
Pouncer had disappeared. A wizard couldn’t have done a neater job of making the moncat disappear.
“But the moncat is gone, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus said reasonably.
“I know that. I’ll eat them myself,” Lanius said. Cucullatus stared. “Never mind what I want with them,” the king told him. “Just give them to me.”
He got them. Servants gaped to see him hurrying through the palace corridors with strips of raw, dripping beef in his hand. A couple of them even worked up the nerve to ask him what he was doing. He didn’t answer. He just kept on, not quite trotting, until he got to the archives.
When he closed the heavy doors behind him, he let out a sigh of relief. No more bellowing cooks, no more nosy servants. Only peace, quiet, dust motes dancing in sunbeams, and the soothing smell of old parchment. This was where he belonged, where no one would come and bother him.
Even as he pulled some documents—tax registers, he saw they were—from the shelf of a cabinet that had known better centuries, he was shaking his head. Today, he hoped he would be bothered. If he wasn’t… If he wasn’t, Pouncer had decided to go back to the moncats’ chamber instead. Or maybe the perverse beast would simply wander through whatever secret ways it had found until it decided to come out in the kitchens again.
Lanius looked at the registers with one eye while looking all around the archives chamber with the other. He didn’t know where Pouncer would appear. Actually, he didn’t know whether Pouncer would appear at all, but he did his best to forget about that. He did know this was the best bet he could make.
And it paid off. Just when he’d gotten engrossed in one of the registers in spite of himself, a faint, rusty, “Mrowr?” came from behind a crate that probably hadn’t been opened in at least two hundred years.
“Come here, Pouncer!” Lanius called, and then he made the special little chirping noise that meant he had a treat for the moncat.
Out Pouncer came. The moncat still clutched the spoon it had stolen. Even the spoon paled in importance, though, before the lure of raw meat. “Mrowr,” Pouncer said again, this time on a more insistent note.
“Come on,” Lanius coaxed, holding a strip of beef where the moncat could see—and smell—it. “Come on, you fuzzy moron. You know you want this.”
Want it Pouncer did. Sidling forward, the moncat reached out with a clawed hand. Lanius gave it the first piece of meat. The moncat ate quickly, fearful of being robbed even though none of its fellows were near. In some ways it was very much like a man. Once the meat had disappeared, Pouncer held out that little hand and said, “Mrowr,” yet again.
