He did ride out to the country a few days later. While he was interested in what Pouncer had learned, riding out to see the moncat was not his idea of fun. Some people enjoyed horseback riding for its own sake. Lanius found that almost as strange – and almost as perverse – as Limosa's taste for the lash. He'd become a good enough rider to stay in the saddle if his horse didn't get too frisky, and he rode placid geldings to try to make sure that didn't happen. He could do it, but he did it without enjoyment.

There was something he had in common with Grus. The other king wasn't a natural equestrian, either; Hirundo, who was, never tired of teasing him. But Grus did well enough not merely to ride but to fight on horseback. Grus might not – did not, in fact – have a lot of education, but he'd proved competent in any number of ways.

A hawk wheeled overhead in the blue. Somewhere in the fields of ripening grain scurried the rabbits and mice on which it lived. Lanius couldn't see them or smell them, but the hawk could. As often as not, peasants shot at hawks or netted them because they sometimes stole chickens and ducks. Lanius thought they did more good than harm, and by a wide margin, too.

He wondered if a royal edict would keep peasants from killing them. As far as he knew, no king had ever issued a decree like that. In the back of his mind, he heard Grus saying, Don't make a law if you can't enforce it. People won't obey it, and they won't respect the other laws so much, either.

That was probably true, however little he cared for it. And he knew he could not force people to obey a law protecting hawks. He sighed. Good ideas often broke to pieces when they ran up against brute fact.

The road was dusty. The only time roads weren't dusty was when they were muddy, which made them worse. How much would cobblestoning all the kingdom's main roads cost, how long would it take, and how many men would it need? Too much, too long, and too many – the answer formed almost as fast as the question.

Collurio and his son didn't know the king was coming. The animal trainer greeted him with a bow and the words, "By the gods, Your Majesty, you were right."

"Was I?" Lanius always liked hearing that. "Uh, about what?"

"About hawks, Your Majesty," Collurio replied. "The soldiers have shot three of them that tried to swoop down on the moncat."

" Have they?" Lanius said, surprised in spite of his precautions.

Collurio nodded. "They sure have. One eagle – biggest bird I've ever seen, I think – one fish-hawk, and one ordinary hawk. Others were circling around, too, but they didn't do anything more than circle. It was almost like they knew to stay away from the archers' bows."

" Was it?" Lanius said, and Collurio nodded again. The king plucked at his rather unkempt beard. "Isn't that interesting?" He remembered the hawk he'd seen floating in the air earlier in the day. Maybe it hadn't been thinking about mice and rabbits. Maybe it had been thinking of moncats instead. And maybe the Banished One had been doing its thinking for it.

Grus looked down into the well. The stench wafting up from the shaft told him what the Menteshe had done, but he wanted to see for himself. Sure enough, the cut-up carcasses of a couple of sheep, or possibly goats, bobbed in the water.

Hirundo looked down the shaft, too. "Well, we won't get any use out of that one," he said matter-of-factly.

"They've poisoned quite a few of them," Grus said. "It's getting to be a nuisance." It was getting to be more than a nuisance, but he tried to admit as little as he could, even to himself.

"Where there's one well, odds are we can dig another one close by," Hirundo said.

"Yes, that's true, but whenever we have to stop and dig, it takes time," the king answered. "I worry about every day we don't spend pushing on toward Yozgat. You can only stretch a campaigning season so far."

"If we can get supplies down from the north, we'll do all right," Hirundo said. "We could stay through the winter if we had to. No blizzards to worry about here, not like in the Chernagor country or even in Avornis."

"No, I suppose not." Grus looked south just the same. If the Banished One wanted to badly enough, could he bring a snowstorm screaming down on an army besieging Yozgat? Grus didn't know, and hoped he wouldn't have to find out the hard way. He brought his thoughts back to more immediate worries. "Do we have enough water to keep moving?"

"For now, yes," Hirundo answered. "If we don't come across any in the next couple of days, then we have a problem. But I'm not going to fret about that. Something will turn up. It usually does."

"I hope so." Grus envied the general's easy optimism. Hirundo had been saying things like that his whole life long, and he'd been right most of the time. If he happened to be wrong here, that would be more than a problem. It would be a disaster. The king pounded a fist against his thigh. "This country is a lot drier than Avornis."

"We've managed to get this far." Yes, Hirundo had no trouble staying cheerful. "Yozgat's just over the next rise – oh, not really, but close enough. Don't worry, Your Majesty. We'll do all right."

"Maybe we will," said Grus, who certainly wanted to believe it. "This is liable to be hard on the thralls, though. Everything lately has been hard on those poor people – war across their fields, the plague during the winter, and now this."

"Not everything," Hirundo said. "They're free – the ones who are left are free, anyhow. And I'll tell you something else, Your Majesty. I'll bet the freed ones will know of more wells and such than the Menteshe do. If we run into what looks like trouble, asking them is likely to do us more good than anything else."

"Mm, I'd say that's a pretty good bet," Grus agreed after a little thought. "And it's something the Banished One and the Menteshe are liable to miss. Who pays attention to thralls unless he has to?"

"We do," Hirundo answered.

Grus nodded, wondering whether that was a weakness the enemy could exploit or a strength that might help Avornis win this struggle. He had no idea – it would all depend on how things played out. And caring about the thralls also might turn out not to matter one way or the other.

The army did move forward, and found more poisoned wells in its path. Men and animals started getting thirsty. Most streams were either dry or tiny trickles in the summer heat. Grus sent wizards ahead with the scouts, to bring freedom to some thralls and try out Hirundo's notion.

It worked even better than the general might have guessed. The thralls found wells and streams and even a pond the Menteshe had missed. The army got enough water to keep going – not a lot of water, but enough. And the thralls, even with the darkness freshly lifted from their spirits, were not just willing but eager to do all they could for the Avornans. The Menteshe had been hard on them and hard on their ancestors for hundreds of years. How much of that oppression did they really understand? Enough to know which side they were on; that was clear.

"Well, you were right," Grus told his general as they encamped for the night.

Hirundo bowed. "Thank you kindly, Your Majesty. One of the reasons people want to do things for you is that you say things like that. Plenty would just take the credit, whether it belonged to them or not."

"I've known officers like that – who hasn't? Nothing's ever their fault, either," Grus said. Hirundo nodded. The king continued, "If you have a choice, you'd rather lean on the other kind. I do try to remember that myself."

Hirundo bowed again. He didn't say anything. His silence was part of the price Grus paid for being king. If he had spoken, Grus was sure he would have said something like, Most people would forget all about that as soon as they got a crown on their head. It was probably – no, certainly – true, but it wasn't the sort of thing you told a sovereign, even an easygoing one.