Sure enough, he managed to persuade Ferdulf to accompany the force of riders. After the shouting Ferdulf put up when he made the request, though, Gerin wouldn't have blamed Rihwin if he'd buried Mavrix's son upside down in the ground. That, at least, would have made Ferdulf shut up.

Watching the little demigod wheel and swoop above the horsemen, Gerin was also just as well pleased not to be under there, in the same way he would have been just as well pleased not to be under a flock of crows with griping bowels. The crows would have let fly-or let fall-at random. Ferdulf, if the evil mood took him, could aim.

Van was not watching Ferdulf as the riders trotted away. He was trying to spot Maeva among the warriors on horseback, and not having much luck. Turning to Gerin, he said, "I still wish you'd made her go home."

"She's doing what she wants to do, you know," the Fox answered. "You couldn't stop it more than another couple of years at the most."

"That would be good," Van said. "In a couple of years, likely enough, we wouldn't be worrying about the imperials any more."

"Unless we'd already lost to them, of course," Gerin replied. "No, wait-I take your point. But we would be worrying about Aragis or the Trokmoi or the Gradi or somebody, by the gods. If Maeva wanted to fight somebody, she'd find somebody to fight. And if you didn't feel like letting her, she'd fight you."

"Maybe. Maybe." The prospect didn't make Van look any happier. "But that's not the only thing I fret about. Come on, Fox-you know what soldiers are like."

"Well, what if I do?" the Fox said. "Anyone who tried to take anything she didn't feel like giving would regret it as long as he lived, and that might not be long, either. We've been over this ground before, you know."

"Oh, aye." The outlander let out a long, sad sigh. "Why couldn't she have just stayed home and come to notice Dagref, say? We could have married them off, and that would have been an end to it."

Gerin didn't gape like a fool. He didn't burst into hysterical laughter. He didn't even suffer a coughing fit. The effort he needed to keep from doing any of those things would have let him lift the temple at Ikos over his head and throw it from one end of the valley to the other.

In an offhand tone that somehow wasn't more elaborately casual than it should have been, he answered, "If they like the idea, you wouldn't see me complaining. We'll have to see if we can make it seem as if they're the ones who came up with it, not us."

"Truth that," Van said, one of the turns of phrase he'd learned from the Trokmoi that still occasionally showed up in his speech. "If anybody older than I was came up with a notion back when I was a sprat, I didn't want anything to do with it." He cocked his head to one side and studied the Fox. "And you! You must have been a terror when it came to listening to your elders."

"Who, me?" Gerin did his best to look like innocence personified. His best, evidently, wasn't good enough, for Van guffawed.

"Aye, you, Captain," he said. "Go on and look sweet all you fancy. My guess is, you weren't any more ready to pay the least bit of attention to what your father told you than Dagref is for you."

"My father hit me harder and more often than I've hit Dagref," Gerin said after a brief pause for thought. "That made me more likely to listen, but I think less likely to agree."

Van smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. "Sometimes you'll settle for getting them to listen that way."

"You say that now," Gerin said. "What did you say then?"

"Ahh, what difference does that make?" the outlander replied with a grin. "I was just a brat then, wet behind the ears. Of course, I wouldn't have believed that if anybody told it to me, mind you."

Rihwin began sending back prisoners and the occasional wagon pilfered from the imperials and news of what Swerilas the Slippery was up to. "The Empire's general looks to be pulling all his men back into a knot," one of Rihwin's riders reported, "the same way a snail will go back into its shell if you poke it in one of its little horns." He held up a couple of fingers, imitating a snail.

"The creatures have their eyes at the ends of those stalks," Gerin said, a fact he'd picked up in the City of Elabon. He'd never had occasion to trot it out in all the many years since, but his fiendishly tenacious memory hadn't let him forget it.

Now that he finally did get to use it, he discovered the horseman didn't believe him. With a laugh, the fellow said, "That's funny, lord king."

"I mean it," Gerin said indignantly. "If those little black dots on the ends of the stalks aren't eyes, where would a snail keep 'em?"

"How am I supposed to answer a question like that?" the rider said. "The whole world knows snails have no eyes."

"But they do," the Fox insisted. He couldn't persuade the horseman he wasn't joking. Finally, in disgust, he sent him back to Rihwin. Gerin was still fuming when he turned to Van, who had listened to the last part of his exchange with the scout. "Can you believe the stubborn ignorance of that man?"

Van chuckled. He shook his head, but not in the way Gerin would have wanted. "Oh no you don't, Captain," the outlander said. "You can try and confuse a rider from some backwoods keep as much as you like, but you're not going to do it to me, by the gods. When you come right down to it, that fellow was right-everybody knows snails don't have any eyes."

Gerin snarled a curse and stalked off.

He snarled another curse a couple of days later, when the imperials mauled a detachment of Rihwin's riders. The damage done was bad enough that Rihwin felt he had to come back himself to explain. "They outwitted me," he said, sounding angry and embarrassed at the same time. "They had a small band showing, making their way through wheatfields. But more of them were lurking in the trees. As soon as we were well engaged with the decoys, out they swarmed."

"That's… unfortunate," Gerin said. He looked down his nose at Rihwin. "It's also unfortunate that you let yourself be fooled by the sort of trick we've used so often ourselves."

"I didn't expect it of the imperials," Rihwin said, a little sullenly. "One of the reasons I came north of the High Kirs all those years ago, if you'll remember, is because interesting things happen here while all stays stodgy south of the mountains. The way the Emperor's men fought in this campaign had given me little reason to change my view."

"Except for the forces commanded by this Swerilas the Slippery," Gerin said. "He beat us when we were almost down to Cassat, and he did it the same way he did here: he stuck out one force, and then he struck with another one we didn't expect. If bait looks too juicy to be true, my fellow Fox, it likely is."

"But it didn't look too juicy to be true." Rihwin angrily kicked at the dirt. "By the gods, you would have sent in the riders with no more hesitation than I showed. It was a chance encounter, nothing more."

"No, it seemed a chance encounter-or you wouldn't have been ambushed," Gerin said. "He must have set it up by gauging where your detachment was, which way they were headed, and how fast." He kicked at the dirt, too. "Which means Swerilas is very slippery indeed."

"I want another crack at him," Rihwin said. "No one does that to me, not without paying for it."

"Unfortunately, someone did do it to you," Gerin answered, "and I don't want you charging after the imperials all wild for revenge. Swerilas will be waiting for something like that."

For a wonder, he got through to Rihwin. "Aye, belike you're right," Rihwin said. "It's just what a man from the City of Elabon would expect in the northlands-let the locals make fools of themselves, and then count on them to make bigger fools of themselves trying to recover."