The servant took him to the courier, who waited in an anteroom with a cup of wine and a chunk of brown bread. The man jumped to his feet and bowed. "Your Majesty, I was to give you this first," he said, and handed Lanius a rather crumpled scrap of parchment.

Lanius recognized Grus' firm hand at once. Please don't eat the man who carries this if he bothers you while you're in the archives, the other king wrote. The news he carries will be worth the hearing. A flush rose all the way to the top of Lanius' head. Grus knew him much too well.

"All right. You're eating here. You're not being eaten," Lanius said, and the courier managed a nervous smile. Lanius held out his hand. "Give me this news King Grus says you have."

His fingers trembled as he broke the seal on the letter the courier took from his tube. Now it would be official. Now the world could know. There was the other king's script again. The moncat fetched it, Grus wrote without preamble. I have it. I've used it. It's even more astonishing than we hoped it would be. I'm bringing it back to the city of Avornis. It belongs to the kingdom again. Lanius didn't run and whoop after all. He knew too much joy for that. He just stood there, smiling while tears ran down his face.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Before, whenever Grus found himself near the south bank of the Stura, the north bank had always seemed much farther away than the width of the river should have suggested. It was as though he were leaving a different world, one that hated him and did not want him to escape.

He didn't get that feeling now. Maybe it had always been his imagination, but he didn't think so. He'd noted it too often for that.

He turned to Hirundo, who rode beside him. "When we get back into Avornis proper with the Scepter of Mercy, all this will truly start to seem real," he said.

"It already does to me," the general replied. "When the Menteshe didn't come after us in swarms to try to take the Scepter back, that's when I knew for sure you'd taken care of things."

"The Banished One couldn't set them in motion against us. He couldn't." Grus repeated the word with amazement in his voice. "And there are no more thralls. None, not as far as I can tell."

"Doesn't look that way," Hirundo agreed. Thralls weren't his chief worry. He cared much more about bad-tempered horsemen with double-curved bows. "The nomads raided us a few times, harried us a little – but that's all." He sounded amazed, too.

Ferries moved back and forth across the Stura. "Do you know what we're going to have to do one of these days? We're going to have to bridge the river," Grus said. Hirundo eyed him as though he'd gone mad. But there had been bridges over the Stura before the Menteshe came. Why not again?

Hirundo had no trouble putting his objections into words, asking, "Do you really want to give the Menteshe a free road into the kingdom?"

"If they're their own men, if they're not the Banished One's cat's-paws, why not?" Grus said. "I'd rather trade them than shoot arrows at them all the time."

"I'd like to do a lot of things," Hirundo said. "That doesn't mean I'm going to do them, or even that I ought to do them. The nomads are dangerous even as their own men."

Grus stared at him. Usually the king was the one with the calm, cool, gray good sense, and Hirundo the smiling optimist, always sure things would turn out for the best. Here they'd reversed roles. Hirundo had spent his whole career worrying about the Menteshe as enemies; he didn't have an easy time changing the way he'd thought for so long. Grus could do it. But then, he had an advantage – he'd held the Scepter of Mercy in his hand.

Instead of a bridge, a river galley waited to take them over the Stura to Cumanus. That seemed fitting. He'd started his rise to the crown as captain of a river galley. Now he would bring the Scepter back to Avornis in one.

He held the talisman as he boarded the galley, and savored the awe on the faces of officers and oarsmen. When he began to savor it perhaps too much, the Scepter seemed heavier, as though warning him that, while it deserved all the respect they gave it, he didn't. He laughed. Humility evidently walked hand in hand with mercy. Well, fair enough.

At the captain's order, the oarmaster called the stroke. He used the tap of a drum to help the men at the bow hear the rhythm. It was all as familiar to Grus as a pair of old shoes. He could have given the commands himself. The skipper was a young man. Did he remember the days when Grus had walked the deck on a ship like this? Had he even heard of those days?

And did this young skipper have the same kind of ambition as Grus had once known? Did he dream of wearing the crown himself one day? Whatever he dreamed of, it wouldn't be as big as bringing the Scepter of Mercy back where it belonged. From now on, Kings of Avornis and those who longed to be kings would have to have smaller goals. The big one, the one that had eluded so many for so long, was finally done.

The galley arrowed across the river. The wharves and piers of Cumanus drew ever closer. Then, very smoothly, the ship came up to a pier. A sailor tossed a line to a waiting longshoreman who made the bow fast to the pier. By the river galley's stern, another burly longshoreman was doing the same.

"We're here, Your Majesty," the captain said softly, as though Grus wouldn't have noticed without being told.

"By the gods, we are," Grus agreed. Yes, with the Scepter of Mercy in his hands, those first three words were something more than a common figure of speech. Olor and Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens might not care much about what went on in the material world, but they'd cared enough – or worried enough – to give mankind the Scepter.

"Let out the gangplank," the skipper said, and grunting sailors scrambled to obey. The captain bowed to the king. "Go ahead, Your Majesty."

"Thanks," Grus said, and he did. The gangplank echoed under his boots. It shook a little from the motion of the river on the boat. The thudding continued when Grus stepped off the gangplank, but the motion ceased. He walked toward the open gate in the wall alongside the river. He wanted to be on true Avornan soil at last.

There. Now his boots thumped on hard-packed, sandy dirt. I've done it, he thought. I've brought the Scepter of Mercy home.

Soldiers trotted toward him. For an anxious moment, he wondered if he ought to have a sword in his hand, not the Scepter. If the Banished One had somehow suborned those men… Enormous grins on their faces, they crowded around him, shouting congratulations.

From behind him, Pterocles said, "Everyone rejoices to see the Scepter of Mercy return to its homeland."

"So it seems." Grus would have guessed the Scepter legendary at best to most people, or more likely all but forgotten.

He seemed to be wrong. Memory of the talisman and its power survived in more places than the palace in the city of Avornis.

Shadow swallowed him as he went through the gate. Then he was in the sunshine again, and inside the walls of Cumanus. That was another milestone. He saw more ahead – bringing die Scepter of Mercy into the capital, and then bringing it into the palace. Avornis had waited four hundred years to see that day.

"Your Majesty!" That wasn't a shout of congratulations. It was a woman's voice, high and shrill and urgent. She struggled to force her way past soldiers and plump officials, and wasn't having much luck.

"What is it?" Grus called to her. He gestured with his free hand to let her pass. No one seemed to notice. Then he gestured with the Scepter, and people scrambled to get out of the woman's way. He didn't know how it did what it did, but he couldn't doubt that it did it.

She fell to her knees before him. When he helped her up, mud stained her shabby wool skirt. She said, "Help me, Your Majesty! My little daughter has a terrible fever. She'll die if she doesn't get better soon. Can you… Can you use the Scepter to save her?"