Since Gerin had had the same thought about the craft of ruling men as recently as Aripert's arrival at Fox Keep, he glanced toward Carlun with considerable respect. As they came back to the keep, he said, "I have your gracious permission to keep the garrison here a while longer, eh?"

"Of course, lord prince," Carlun said, sounding on the lordly side himself. When Gerin gave him a sharp look, his burst of bravado collapsed and he added, "Not that you need it, mind you."

"There is that," Gerin agreed, happy Carlun knew his place after all.

Dagref, Clotild, and Blestar were playing with Maeva and Kor. Gerin watched the game with faint bemusement. Dagref was not only oldest but sharpest witted. A lot of the time, he couldn't be bothered playing with his sibs; his mind, though not his body or spirit, was nearly that of an adult. When he did join them and Van's children, the role he saw for himself was halfway between overseer and god: he invented not just rules but a whole imaginary world, and put himself and them through their paces in it.

"No, Maeva!" he shouted. "I told you. Don't you remember? The bark of that tree" — a stick- "is poisonous."

"No, it's not," Maeva said. To prove her point, she picked up the stick and whacked Dagref with it. "There. You see?" But for the high pitch of her voice, that self-satisfied directness might have come straight from Van. "Didn't hurt me a bit."

"You're not playing right," Dagref said angrily: by his tone, he could imagine no felony more heinous.

"Be careful, son," Gerin muttered under his breath. Dagref was older, but Maeva, girl or no girl, was both stronger and more agile. If Dagref forced a confrontation, he'd lose. If he wanted to get his way here, he'd have to figure out how to do it without getting into a fight.

Just then, Geroge and Tharma came out of the great hall. All the children greeted them with glad cries. The brewing quarrel between Dagref and Maeva was forgotten. The two monsters, though now approaching adulthood, had always been part of the children's games at Fox Keep. They were bigger and stronger than any of the others, which more than balanced their also being duller. Had they been bad-tempered, their strength would have made them terrors. Since they weren't, they became companions all the more desirable.

"What game are you playing?" Tharma asked Dagref.

"Well," he said importantly, "Clotild here is a wizard, and she's turned Kor into a longtooth" — a role well suited for one of Kor's fierce, blustery temper- "and we're all seeking ways to get him back his own shape. Maeva seems to be immune to poisons, and so-" He went on laying out the framework of the world that existed only inside his own head. Gerin noted he'd incorporated Maeva's recalcitrance into the structure of the game.

Geroge laughed, loud and boisterously-so loud and boisterously, Gerin's ears quivered in suspicion. Geroge sounded as if he'd been dipping deep into the ale jar again, in spite of earlier promises. He said, "That's a good game!" His voice quivered with enthusiasm. "Let's make the longtooth fly and see what happens then."

He picked up Kor and threw him high in the air-so high, he had time to circle under the little boy before he came down. The circling was wobbly-yes, he'd been drinking more than he should have.

Gerin started toward him on the dead run, but Geroge plucked Kor out of the air neat as you please. Tharma grabbed Blestar and threw him even higher. Even more than it had when Kor soared, Gerin's heart leaped into his mouth. He breathed out a harsh sigh of relief as his little son came down safe.

He and Kor both squealed with glee at their flights. The Fox was less amused. "This game is over," he said in a voice filled with as much doom as he could manage.

That evidently wasn't enough. Barons and Trokm- chieftains quailed before him. His own children, along with Van's and with Geroge and Tharma, protested loudly and bitterly. He held his ground. "We were fine," Clotild said, stamping her foot. "I wanted to go next. No one got hurt."

"No, not this time. But you were lucky, because someone might have," Gerin answered. He'd long since found out that arguments based on might have were for all practical purposes useless with children. So it proved here. But when he got a whiff of Geroge's breath, he had another, better argument. "Baivers and barley!" he exclaimed, wrinkling his nose. "You didn't just dive into the ale jar, you went swimming around in there."

Geroge looked as shamefaced as a tiddly monster could. The result would have made anyone who didn't know him flee in terror, but Gerin recognized the display of fangs as placatory, not hostile. "I'm sorry," Geroge said with a growl that also sounded more fearsome than it was. "I don't know what came over me. But I feel so good with the ale inside." He punctuated that with an enormous belch. Gerin's children and Van's dissolved in gales of laughter.

The Fox felt like laughing, too, but didn't let his face show it. He rounded on Tharma. "I thought you had better sense than he did," he said accusingly.

"I'm sorry," she answered, hanging her homely head. "But he started drinking the ale, and I-"

"If he decided to jump off the palisade and break his fool neck, would you do it, too, just because he did it?" Gerin had trotted that one out so many times for his own children, it sprang forth of its own accord now.

He'd used it on Geroge and Tharma a few times, too, generally to good effect. Today, though, Tharma looked back at him. "It wasn't like that," she protested. "It was like, like… something was pushing at us to drink the ale."

"Probably the same sort of thing that pushes at me when I feel like getting into the candied fruit or the honey cakes," Dagref said, sounding far more dubious than someone his age had any business doing. What will he be like when he grows up? Gerin thought uneasily. His eldest by Selatre would be a man to reckon with… if nobody murdered him young.

"It wasn't like that," Tharma said. "It really was… I could almost feel something pushing me toward the jar." Geroge's big head jerked up and down, up and down as he nodded agreement.

Gerin started to shout at both of them for being not just liars but stubborn liars to boot. He stopped, though, before the words passed his lips. Mavrix had used Rihwin as an instrument in a way much like this, prodding him to get drunk on wine and afford the Sithonian god an easy conduit into the northlands. But this wasn't Mavrix, who had nothing to do with ale. It was…

"Baivers." Gerin's mouth shaped the name of the god in silent astonishment. Baivers was as Elabonian a deity as any. And, up till now, the Elabonian gods had been uniformly quiet, even when Voldar and her Gradi cohorts added their weight to the invaders' power.

Up till now… Gerin wondered if he was a drowning man grabbing at straws as he tried to stay afloat. The affection Geroge and Tharma suddenly felt for ale might have nothing whatever to do with Baivers, might, in fact, have nothing to do with anything save an increasingly well-developed thirst, of the sort that turned ordinary men into drunks with no divine intervention whatever.

"Well," the Fox said, more to himself than to the monsters, much more to himself than to the still-disappointed children, "if you're going to grab at straws, by Dyaus-and by Baivers-grab at them. Don't let them slip through your hands."

"What are you talking about, Father?" Dagref, as usual, sounded highly insulted when Gerin said something he didn't follow.

"Never mind," Gerin said absently, which insulted his son all the more. To compound his crime, he took no notice of Dagref's annoyance. Instead, he seized Geroge's arm in one hand and Tharma's in the other. "Come back to the great hall with me, you two. You're going to drink some more ale."