Geroge looked dubious as Gerin walked up to him carrying a small bowl filled with fine, moist clay. The monster's thin lips skinned back from his teeth. Those teeth looked so extremely formidable, Gerin wondered whether he wanted to go through with what he had planned.

He decided he did. "Open your mouth," he told the monster.

"You're going to have me eat clay?" Geroge protested. "You didn't tell me I'd have to eat clay."

"You don't have to eat it," Gerin told him. "You just have to let me press it up against your teeth so I can get the shape of the fang you have left. I'll use the mold you're giving me to make a gold tooth like it to put on the other side, to take the place of the one the gods under Ikos took."

"It'll taste horrible," Geroge said. "I don't think I want to do it."

"It's only dirt," Gerin said. "It's not even very dirty dirt, if you know what I mean: it's the fine clay they use for baking pots." When Geroge still shook his massive head, the Fox sighed and said, "When we're done, I'll give you a jack of ale to wash away whatever taste there is."

"Oh, all right." Geroge still sounded reluctant even after Gerin's promise, which showed how unwilling he had been before.

"Open your mouth," Gerin said again.

Eyes rolling, Gerin did. The Fox brought the lump of clay up to it with more than a little trepidation: if Geroge chose to bite down now, he'd spend the rest of his days one-handed. Geroge grunted as Gerin made the impression of his fang and the teeth near it. He went from grunt to growl, but held still.

"Splendid," Gerin said, gently freeing the clay. "If you'd wiggled there, I would have had to do this all over again." Oh, what a liar I'm getting to be, he thought. Doing it once had been hard. Doing it twice… He didn't care to contemplate doing it twice.

Geroge peered down with interest at the marks his teeth had made in the clay. "They're big, aren't they?" he remarked. "I didn't know they were that big. I thought they were more like yours."

"Did you?" Gerin said. That's what comes of living among humans all your life-we're your touchstone, your standard of comparison. That probably made Geroge and Tharma a lot safer to be near than they might have been otherwise.

He took the bowl with the impression to the oven the potter used in his trade and fired it, as the potter would have fired a platter or a storage jar. When it came out and had cooled, he took it to the shack where he worked his magic. He had no intention of doing anything magical to it, but had a small furnace of his own there. In it in another small bowl he put some armlets and rings from his treasury: loot taken from the Trokmoi. He stoked the little furnace and used goatskin bellows to make the fire burn hotter yet.

He'd carved his tongs himself, of wood, and faced them with bronze so they wouldn't char so fast or even catch fire at an inopportune moment. With them, he lifted the bowl and poured molten gold into the mold he prepared for it. The mold took almost all the metal he had melted; Geroge did indeed have big teeth.

When the metal had cooled, he broke the mold. He used a bronze chisel to cut away the gold that filled the impressions of other teeth near the fang, then polished the fang by shaking it in a hide bag full of fine sand. After he'd attached a couple of thin wires to the base, he took the gold tooth to Geroge.

This time, the monster opened his mouth willingly enough. Gerin put the gold tooth in the gap the monsters' gods had left when they ripped the real fang from Geroge's mouth. He used the wires to anchor the artificial fang to the genuine teeth on either side of it. "What do you think?" he asked Geroge.

The monster explored with his tongue the change in his mouth. "It feels all right," he said. Then he opened his mouth in an enormous smile. "What does it look like?"

"Your other fang, except it's gold," Gerin answered.

That was literal truth, but it wasn't what Geroge wanted to hear. He waved to Tharma, who was walking across the courtyard, and pointed to Gerin's dentistry. "How do I look?"

Like a monster with a gold tooth, Gerin thought, but held his tongue, waiting to see what Tharma would say. "I think you look very handsome," she replied after grave contemplation. Geroge preened and swaggered. Gerin didn't know whether the answer, and Geroge's response to it, pleased or worried him more.

Chariot wheels rumbled on the paving blocks of the Elabon Way. Along with the chariots, Gerin led a good-sized force of men riding horses. The army he headed was smaller than the one he had taken west over the Venien against the Gradi, but more than large enough to be formidable. Like the force that had traveled west, it included both Elabonians and Trokmoi, Adiatunnus having sent a contingent of woodsrunners at Gerin's request.

Van looked back and chuckled. "If this doesn't have 'em ready to piss their breeches, nothing ever will."

"That's the idea," Gerin answered. "Anything worth doing is worth doing properly-or worth overdoing, if you'd rather think of it like that."

"Aye, that suits me pretty well," the outlander said. Considering his excesses whenever he got out of Fand's sight, Gerin had to agree with him.

Duren pointed ahead. "There's the border post between Bevander's holding and Ricolf's."

"No, that's not right," his father told him. "There's the border post between Bevander's holding and yours. And if anyone has any doubts about that, well, I expect we can convince him to change his mind." He waved back over his shoulder to show what he meant.

The guards on Ricolf's side of the border stared in popeyed wonder at the army bearing down on them. Gerin started to tell Duren to stop and parley with them, then decided to hold his tongue: Duren was going to be the baron here, not himself. Duren did stop. In a shaken voice, one of the border guards asked, "Who, ah, who comes to the holding formerly of Ricolf the Red?" He sounded as if he couldn't decide whether to sell his life dear or flee for the nearest woods.

His companion at the border crossing added, "Not just who-why?" He was gawping at the Trokmoi, as if wondering if they'd decided to settle down in the neighborhood.

"I am Duren Gerin's son, grandson to Ricolf the Red and heir to this holding through my mother, Ricolf's daughter Elise," Duren answered. "Having completed the service I owed my father, I have come to take my rightful place as baron here. From this day forth, I stay in this holding."

"Brought a few, ah, friends along, have you, lord?" the first guard asked. He was looking at the Trokmoi, too.

"He has my support, as you might have guessed he would," Gerin put in.

Both border guards nodded. "Oh, yes, lord prince," they chorused.

Gerin, Van, and Duren grinned at one another. Being at the forefront of news was always enjoyable. To the guards, Duren said, "Allow me to present you to my father, Gerin the Fox, king of the north, so proclaimed first by Adiatunnus the Trokm- after we all vanquished the Gradi together."

In a way, Gerin thought, it was too bad the two guards had already been staring. Their eyes couldn't get much wider; they jaws couldn't drop much farther. The first one, the one with the slight hitch to his speech, said, "I would, uh, be glad to have more of that, uh, tale, lord."

"And I would be glad to give it-another time," Duren answered. "Now I want to settle myself in the keep that is mine." He flicked the reins. The horses began to trot. Because he was driving the lead chariot in the army, that was the best signal he could give for the rest of the cars to enter the holding that was now becoming his.

On the way down to the keep that had been Ricolf's, peasants who saw Duren's army fled for their lives. "I don't like that any better than you do, Father," Duren said, pointing to serfs running for the shelter of the woods.