Gerin bowed slightly. When it came to judging how things ran in the short term, Aragis was as good as anyone he'd ever know-as good as he was, probably. Could he trust Aragis at his back? The only answer he could come up with was… sometimes. He said, "Knowing which enemy to pick counts for a good deal."
"Oh, indeed." Aragis bared his teeth in one of his alarming smiles. "Did I not rely on you to understand the Elabonian Empire was more dangerous to both of us than we are to each other? Did I not put my life in your hands on that understanding and no more?"
"You did." Gerin wondered whether he would have done that in reverse if, say, the Gradi had been on the point of beating him five years earlier. Maybe. Maybe not, too. Because Aragis lived so close to the here-and-now, every crisis was liable to seem a matter of life and death to him. Gerin was better at waiting than his hard-charging fellow king.
"We cast defiance in the envoy's teeth, then, and smash the Empire's army on the battlefield." Aragis' eyes had a fierce falcon's glint in them, too. He believed every word of what he was saying. Maybe that would help him make his belief real. Maybe it would make him try to do more than he really could. Gerin shrugged. He'd find out soon.
When the chariot bearing the envoy of the Elabonian Empire and those in which his retinue rode came into view, Gerin felt-not for the first time since leaving Fox Keep-he'd fallen back in time through close to half his life. Not since his last trip down to the City of Elabon, more than twenty years before, had he seen men dressed in the flowing robes the imperials south of the High Kirs affected.
Adiatunnus saw them, too, and did not know what to make of them. "Is the Empire after sending women to treat with us the now?" he asked, not quite in jest.
"No, that's just their style down there," the Fox answered. "And they shave not only their cheeks and chins, the way you Trokmoi do, but their upper lips as well. I did it myself, when I lived down in the city."
"But you had the sense to go back to a better way," Adiatunnus said.
Gerin shrugged. "Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse."
He looked around for Ferdulf. When he spied the little demigod, he waved for him to come over. Ferdulf came, looking suspicious. More often than not, Gerin was doing his best to make him go away. "What do you want?" Ferdulf growled.
"See those fellows up ahead?" The Fox pointed. "That's the envoy from the Elabonian Empire and his friends."
Ferdulf's lip curled in splendid scorn. "So? What do you want me to do about it? Miserable imperial-" His voice faded down into a scatological mumble.
That was just what Gerin wanted. "They probably won't like you any better," he said with a grin he did not show: Ferdulf seemed to have forgotten he too was an Elabonian. "They're the ones who hold down Sithonia, after all."
"I wonder what I can do to them," Ferdulf mused. Dagref looked back over his shoulder at Gerin. Gerin wished he hadn't done it; the look might have alerted Ferdulf to the notion that he was being manipulated. If Dagref did have to give Gerin a look, though, a look of approval was the one the Fox wanted. Dagref, as his father had learned to his own discomfiture, was better than anyone else at manipulating Ferdulf.
Up came the Elabonian chariots. The one in the lead had a shield painted in green and white stripes mounted on the pole between the two horses: a shield of truce. That chariot and the one behind it pulled away from the rest and approached the army that had set out from Fox Keep. "I am Efilnath the Earnest," the fellow in the fanciest robe called, "commissioner to his majesty Crebbig I, Emperor of Elabon. I see here Aragis the Archer, who presumes to make the error of styling himself king. Rumor has it that others in the province are equally rash. Be any such others present, that I might treat with and dismiss all such false claimants simultaneously?"
"I am Gerin the Fox," Gerin announced, "king of the north. I am here in alliance with Aragis. I note, Efilnath, that if you call claims false and say ahead of time you will dismiss them, you are not treating with those who make them, only disposing of them. I also note that they-and we-are not to be disposed of so readily."
He wondered who Crebbig I was. On his last journey down to the City of Elabon, Hildor III had reigned there: an indolent excuse for a monarch. Whatever Crebbig's faults-and, being a man, he was bound to have them-indolence did not seem to be among their number.
"As the Elabonian Empire does not recognize that this land has ever been anything but an imperial province, so naturally we cannot recognize any men styling themselves kings, save in recognizing them as rebels and traitors," Efilnath said.
Aragis the Archer growled something angry under his breath. Gerin was about to growl something out loud when his eye chanced to fall on one of the men in the chariot behind Efilnath's. The fellow was nothing special to look at-not too tall, not too wide, not too handsome-and wore a robe that would have been altogether ordinary in the City of Elabon. Nonetheless, perhaps by the way he carried himself, perhaps by a certain look in his eye, Gerin knew him for what he was: a wizard from the Sorcerers' Collegium.
And he recognized Gerin, too-not as an equal, as one who had completed the same arduous training, but as one who had some part of it. Those oddly compelling eyes of his widened, just a little; plainly, he had not expected to come across anyone in the northlands who shared even a fragment of his arcane expertise. Gerin understood that. The Elabonians south of the High Kirs reckoned the northlands a barbarous backwater. He knew they had a point, but not so much of one as they thought they did.
He smiled at the wizard, a bleak display of acknowledgment and warning. The Elabonian got down from his chariot and hurried over to Efilnath's. He whispered in the envoy's ear. Whatever he said-and the Fox had a pretty good notion of what it would be-Efilnath seemed unimpressed. "Come what may, a backwoods baron remains a backwoods baron," he said, a distinct sniff in his voice.
"Oh, Ferdulf," Gerin called sweetly, "come and say hello to these nice people, would you please?"
"What nice people?" Ferdulf snarled. "All I see is a bunch of Elabonians who think they're smarter than they really are-idiots who think they're halfwits."
As if his rumbling baritone wouldn't have been enough to alert the southerners that he was something out of the ordinary, he also strolled along a couple of feet off the ground. Efilnath gaped at him. So did the wizard, in a different, more intensely concentrated way. "Who are you?" he demanded, and then, a moment later, "What are you?"
By way of reply, Ferdulf stuck out his tongue. It went out improbably far. The tip wiggled like a serpent's tongue for a moment. Then he drew the whole thing back in with a wet plop. He smiled unpleasantly at the Elabonian sorcerer.
Sweetly still, Gerin said, "Lord Efilnath, lord wizard-"
"Call me Caffer," the wizard said. As the Fox knew, it was not his real name. Wizards warded those, to keep enemies from working magic with them.
"Lord Efilnath, lord Caffer, then," Gerin resumed, "allow me to present you to Ferdulf, the son of Mavrix, who, when he is not accompanying me, dwells in the village by Fox Keep."
"A son of the lord of the sweet grape, here?" Efilnath exclaimed. "Impossible!"
"Not impossible," Caffer said. "It is truth." He and the Elabonian envoy conferred again, more urgently this time.
Gerin hoped the idea that Ferdulf was at least in some measure under his control would get through to the imperials. Ferdulf didn't help, remarking, "And a bloody boring hole that village is, too."