"This truly does have to do with that?" Collurio asked once more.

"It truly does," Lanius agreed with a sigh. "Do you think… he would have visited you if it didn't? He is like the law in one way – he does not concern himself with trifles."

Shuddering, Collurio said, "In that case, I wish he wouldn't concern himself with me. I was happy to be a small man, bothering no one and bothered by no one."

"We all wish he wouldn't concern himself with us. We were all happier when he didn't," Lanius said gravely. "But wishes here have as much to do with what is as they usually do."

"Yes, Your Majesty." Collurio sounded no more delighted with the world. "I still sometimes wish I never stuck my big nose into this business." He gave the organ in question a mournful tweak.

He and Crinitus and the king worked with Pouncer until the moncat got tired or bored or full. Then they put Pouncer in the cage and took it back to the enclosure where the moncat stayed when it wasn't working. Pouncer climbed up the poles they had in there, found a perch to its liking, and fell asleep.

A few minutes later, a royal guardsman came up to Lanius and said, "Excuse me, Your Majesty, but Her Majesty the Queen has just arrived."

"Has she?" One of Lanius' eyebrows rose. He'd invited Sosia to come out and look this place over. He hadn't expected her to take him up on it, but here she was. He hadn't started fooling around with any maidservants; no frightened washerwoman hid under the bed not overburdened with clothing. Sosia could prod and poke as much as she pleased. She wouldn't find anything to complain about here.

She barely greeted Lanius. She prowled through all the tents around the slice of city, then pointed to it. "Let me have a look in there, if you please."

"All right," Lanius said. He had nothing female lurking inside.

He walked her through it. Her expression got odder and odder the farther she went. "This really is what you said it was, isn't it?" she said as the tour neared an end.

"Nothing else," Lanius answered.

"But – what good is it?" the queen asked. "You've built something enormous for Pouncer to run around in. Couldn't you have found something else to do with all that silver?"

"You sound like your father," Lanius said, and Sosia made a face at him. He went on, "Actually, your father knows what I'm doing here. He knows and he doesn't mind."

"If he knows, then he knows more than I do," Sosia said. "What are you doing here that's important enough to impress my father?"

"Staying out of his way and not causing trouble for anyone." Lanius did his best to sound annoyed as he said that. Grus would have been happy to keep him on a shelf doing nothing, or nothing worthwhile. Only the urgencies of what the other king had set himself to do had let Lanius gain a little – and just a little – freedom of action of his own.

The answer almost satisfied Sosia. When she said, "There has to be more to it than that," she didn't sound as though she believed it herself. "What a funny place this is," she added, as much to herself as to him.

"It's – not the city," Lanius said. "By the gods, I'm a city man, but even I like to get away once in a while. There isn't smoke in the air all the time here. I think that's part of the reason Anser likes to hunt. I'm – not all that fond of hunting, but I like it here myself."

His wife's nod was slow and hesitant, as though she found herself yielding a point she hadn't expected to. "I can see why," she said.

"I brought a good cook along, too," Lanius said. "And the food couldn't be any fresher. It doesn't have to travel into the capital. It's right here."

Supper proved that. The lamb they ate came from a farm only a few hundred yards away. The meat was so tender, it almost fell off the bone. The wine was a local vintage, too. Lanius had to admit he'd drunk better. But the finest wines came from special regions scattered across the kingdom, and this didn't happen to be one of them. The stuff wasn't dreadful. It just wasn't of the best.

If you drank enough of it, you stopped noticing it wasn't of the best. Sosia looked around the inside of the pavilion. "You kept your promise," she said.

"I told you I would," Lanius answered.

She waved that aside, as though of no account. "You've told me all kinds of things," she said. "Some of them are true. Some of them -" She stopped and shook her head. "I didn't come here to quarrel with you – as long as I didn't find you in bed with a milkmaid, anyhow."

"No milkmaids," Lanius said solemnly.

"I don't see any, anyhow," his wife said, which was not quite a ringing endorsement. But she shook her head again, this time apparently at herself. "You deserve a reward for keeping your word."

"A reward?" Lanius blinked. "What sort of reward?"

She looked at him sidelong. "What would you like?"

The cot in which he slept was crowded for two, but proved not too crowded. The reward left them both sweaty. "If we could give something like this to all the people in Avornis who do something good, we'd see a lot more done," Lanius said.

Sosia poked him in the ribs. He jerked; she'd hit a ticklish spot. Trying to keep her voice severe, she said, "This isn't something the kingdom supplies. And besides, what would you give to women?"

"Men?" he suggested. She poked him again. But she didn't ask him anything more about why he'd brought Pouncer out here. As far as he was concerned, that was part of her reward for him, too.

"Over the river!" Grus said triumphantly.

"Did you have any doubts?" Hirundo asked him. "If you did, maybe we shouldn't have started this campaign at all."

"Well, it's nice to know we can still fool the Menteshe, anyhow," Grus said. He'd used a familiar ploy to cross the Zabat – feinting a crossing at one place to draw the nomads there, then crossing somewhere else and hitting them from behind. A jug of wine sat on the folding table in his pavilion. He poured his cup full and added, "Now we get to find out how they can fool us."

"They didn't have much luck last year." Hirundo never lacked for confidence.

Grus had drunk enough wine to make him melancholy. "They made us lay siege to Trabzun. They didn't let us get all the way to Yozgat, the way I hoped they would." Looking back on things, that had probably been wild-eyed optimism on his part before he set out from the city of Avornis, but still…

"We'll get there," Hirundo said – confidently.

Menteshe horsemen shadowed the Avornan army when it started moving south the next day. Grus wondered whether they belonged to Korkut's faction or Sanjar's. He also wondered how much difference it made. If he penetrated deep enough into the Menteshe country, wouldn't the nomads abandon their feuds and band together to attack his men? They didn't last year, he thought, trying his best to be as hopeful as Hirundo.

The air was warm and moist – sultry was the word that came to Grus' mind. He nodded to himself. That seemed right, even if it wasn't a word he got to use very often. He hadn't gone far south of the Zabat before he saw trees that put him in mind of outsized feather dusters. Their trunks were long, bare columns, some straight, others gracefully curved. Leaves spread out fanlike only from the top.

Hirundo and Pterocles stared at the curious growths along with the king. "Aren't those the most peculiar things you ever set eyes on?" Pterocles said.

"Not when we're riding with you," Hirundo told him, and the wizard sent the general a wounded look.

"I know what they are," Grus said suddenly, and Pterocles and Hirundo both turned toward him. "They're palm trees!" he declared. "They have to be."

"They don't have to be anything," Pterocles said, which was bound to be true. He eyed the strange trees. "They don't have to be anything, no, but I'd say they're more likely to be palm trees than anything else."