A silence rather like the one just after the crash of a thunderbolt filled the courtyard to Ricolf's castle. Authari chuckled nervously. "Well, if the god is kind, he'll give us a response that tells us what we want to know. Then we won't have to worry about any of the rest of this."

Gerin pounced on that. "So you do agree-all four of you do agree-to let Biton speak on this matter?"

One after another, Ricolf's vassals nodded, Authari first, Hilmic last, looking as if he hated to be moving his head up and down. Ratkis Bronzecaster said, "Aye, we agree. We'll take any oath you set to bind us to it, and you'll take ours to do the same."

"Let it be so," Gerin said at once. Of the four of them, Ratkis impressed him as a man of sense. Hilmic and Wacho spoke before they thought, if they thought at all. He wasn't sure what to make of Authari, which probably meant Authari would play both ends against the middle if he thought he saw a chance.

"Let it be so," Authari said now, "and let us sup. Perhaps this will look better after meat and bread."

"Almost anything looks better after meat and bread," Gerin said agreeably.

Ricolf had always set a good table, if not a fancy one, and his cooks carried on after his passing: along with beef and roast fowl, they set out plates of boiled crayfish, fried trout, and turtles baked in their shells. There was plenty of good chewy bread to eat along with the meat and soak up the juices, and scallions and cloves of fragrant garlic to spice up the food. For the hundredth, maybe the thousandth, time, Gerin missed pepper, though he could find no complaint with what was set before him.

His men and those who owed allegiance to Ricolf-or rather, to his chief vassals-crowded the hall. They got on well enough, even after the servants had refilled their drinking jacks a good many times. Some of Gerin's retainers and some of Ricolf's had fought side by side in old wars, after the werenight and against the monsters and in the four-cornered struggle that had wracked Bevon's barony for so long. If they had to battle one another, it would not be with any great enthusiasm.

That didn't mean they wouldn't battle one another. Parol Chickpea said, "If the lord prince gives the order, we'll squash you lads underfoot like a nest of cockroaches. I won't much care for that, but what can you do?"

"You can get beaten back to your own land where you belong," said the fellow sitting beside him: one of Ricolf's troopers, and one who, by his look and bearing, a man of sense would not annoy.

Parol was a lot of things, but seldom sensible. A monster had bitten off a large chunk of one of his buttocks; Gerin wondered if sitting lopsided for years had unbalanced his brain. Probably not, the Fox judged. Parol hadn't been bright before he developed a list.

"No one in this hall wants to go to war with anyone else here," Gerin said loudly, wishing Parol would keep his mouth shut. "If we wanted to go to war, we would have done it already. I always reckoned Ricolf a friend and his men allies. Father Dyaus grant that my men and those of this holding always stay friends and allies."

"Truth there," Ratkis Bronzecaster said, and raised his drinking jack in salute. Gerin was pleased to drink with him.

A buxom young serving girl did everything she could to attract Duren's notice but plop herself down in his lap. Duren did notice her, too. His eyes stuck to her the way little scraps of cloth would stick to amber after you rubbed it. But he did not get up and follow her, despite the glances she kept throwing over her shoulder.

"Good for you," Gerin told him. "If you're going to rule this holding, you don't want to get a reputation as a man who thinks with his spear first and his head later. You're a likely-looking lad; finding willing women shouldn't be any trouble for you. But this wench-who knows what she's after, making up so soon to the fellow who's likely to be her overlord?"

"That's what I was thinking," Duren answered. What else he was thinking, though, was also obvious from the way he kept watching the girl.

Wacho Fidus' son breathed ale fumes into Gerin's face. "So you will be going on to Ikos, eh, lord prince?"

"A man with a gift for the obvious," Gerin observed, which, as he'd expected, made Wacho stare at him in beery incomprehension. Sighing, he went on, "As a matter of fact, what point in going on to Ikos if you retainers of Ricolf's try to ignore what the god tells you if it's not to your liking? I don't want to do it, mind you, but we might as well just fight the war. You'd have no doubt of what you were supposed to do then, anyhow."

Wacho understood that well enough, and looked appalled. He said, "No such thing, lord prince. We were just talking about what to do if the Sibyl's verse turned out to be obsc-ob-hard to make head or tail of, that's all. If it's plain, we have no quarrel."

"By everything you and your three comrades have said and done, you'd do anything to show the Sibyl's verse was obscure, regardless of whether that's really so," Gerin said. "I don't know why I'm wasting my time with you."

He knew perfectly well why he was wasting his time with them: he didn't want to get into a little war down here, not when two bigger ones were building in the west and Aragis the Archer loomed, watching and waiting, in the south. But if he could push Ricolf's vassals into forgetting that, he'd do it without hesitation or compunction.

Still looking horrified, Wacho went off and collared Authari, Ratkis, and Hilmic. The four of them put their heads together, then came back over to the Fox. "See here," Authari said, his voice full of nervous bluster. "I thought we had a bargain to abide by what the Sibyl at Ikos said."

"So did I," Gerin answered. "But when I got down here, what I found you people meaning was that you would interpret Biton's words they way they suited you, no matter what he said."

"We never said any such thing," Hilmic Barrelstaves said indignantly.

"I didn't say you said it. I said you meant it," Gerin told him. " `What do we do if we don't agree? What do we do if we don't agree? You might as well have been crickets, all chirping the same note." He got up as if to stamp out of the great hall, as if to stamp out of Ricolf's keep altogether, in spite of the ghosts that turned the night to terror.

"Give us an oath," Ratkis said. "Give us an oath we can swear and we will swear it. Authari was talking about that with you, I know, and I said as much earlier myself. We want-I want-fair dealing here."

Him Gerin believed. He was less sure about the other three. But a strong enough oath would attract the notice of even the rather lackadaisical Elabonian gods if it was violated. "All right. Will you swear by Father Dyaus and farseeing Biton to accept the words of the Sibyl on their face if there is any possible way to do so. Will you also swear that, should you violate your oath, you pray you will have only sorrow and misfortune in this world and that your soul will not even wander the world by night, but will rest forever in the hottest of the five hells?"

Ricolf's four vassals looked at each other, then went off to put their heads together again. When they came back, Authari Broken-Tooth said, "That's a strong oath you require of us."

"That's the idea," Gerin said, exhaling through his nose. "What point to an oath you don't fear breaking?"

"Will you swear the same oath?" Wacho demanded.

By his tone, he expected the Fox to recoil in dismay from the very idea. But Gerin said, "Of course I will. I don't fear what Biton says. If Duren isn't fated to rule this holding, the god will make that plain. And if he is so fated, Biton will tell us that, too. So I will swear that oath. I'll swear it now, this instant. Join me?"

They went off once more. Gerin sipped his ale and watched them argue. It seemed to be Authari and Ratkis on one side, Wacho and Hilmic on the other. He couldn't hear them, but he would have been willing to guess which men were on which side.