"I don't," Lanius said, which was true. He would have said the same thing about Ortalis, and sounded just as sincere – and he would have been lying through his teeth. About Limosa, though, he did mean it. Despite her husband, despite her father, he had nothing at all against her. He tried to figure out why, and to put it into words. The best he could do was, "You just – like what you like, that's all."
"Yes, that really is all." Her eyes glowed. "You see? You do understand. Oh! I could just kiss you!"
He could tell she meant it. And, if the look on her face meant what he thought it did, things could easily go on from there after a kiss. The idea of putting a cuckold's horns on his unloving and unlovable brother-in-law had a certain delicious temptation to it. But Lanius was too relentlessly practical to take it any further than being tempted. An affair with a serving girl annoyed nobody but Sosia, and both he and the kingdom could deal with that. An affair with a princess carried much more baggage. Nor did he think Ortalis would wear horns gracefully. On the contrary.
And so, as gently as he could, Lanius said, "I thank you for the thought, but that might not be a good idea."
Limosa's eyes fell open. Maybe she saw for the first time where that kiss might lead. Her cheeks turned the color of iron just out of the forge. "Oh!" she said again, in an altogether different tone of voice. "You're right. Maybe it isn't."
Gently still, Lanius added, "Besides, what you like isn't… what very many people like."
She turned redder yet, which he wouldn't have believed if he hadn't seen it. In a faintly strangled voice, she said, "That isn't all I like."
Lanius was willing to believe her. She wouldn't have borne Capella and Marinus if she hadn't done other things, and they were things she was likely to like if she did them. But exactly what she liked and didn't like wasn't really his business, or anyone's except hers and perhaps Ortalis'.
She must have realized that, too, because she squeaked, "Please excuse me," and hurried away. Lanius stared after her. He sighed. Maybe they would be able to talk more openly with each other from now on. Or maybe they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Time would tell, nothing else.
"Time will tell." Lanius said it out loud. It was true of so many things. He wanted to know whether Sosia would have a boy or a girl. Time would tell. He wanted to know how Grus' army was doing down in the Menteshe country. Time would tell. He wanted to know if Grus would reclaim the Scepter of Mercy. Time would tell. He wanted to know what the Scepter could do in the hands of a King of Avornis. Time would – or might – tell.
"But it won't tell soon enough!" Lanius said that out loud, too. He wanted to know all those things now. He didn't want to have to wait to find out. News from Grus might be only minutes away. Lanius hoped so. He surely wouldn't have to wait more than days for that. With the others, though, he would have to be more patient.
He'd had a lot of time to learn patience. Snaking through the archives had helped him acquire it. So had years of being altogether powerless. If he hadn't been patient then, he might have gone mad. He laughed. Some of the people in the palace probably thought he had, although, he hoped, in a harmless way.
And patience had paid. Now he had more power than he'd ever expected, more power than he'd ever dreamed of in those first few years after Grus put the crown on his own head.
"Your Majesty! Your Majesty!"
The call brought Lanius' head up like a hunting hound's. "I'm here," he said. "What's going on?" Good news? Bad news? Scandal? One thing was certain – it wasn't Pouncer stealing a spoon from the kitchens. But had another moncat finally found Pouncer's way out of the chamber?
"A courier's looking for you, Your Majesty," a maidservant answered.
"Well, bring him here, by the gods!" the king exclaimed. If this was news from the south, time would tell very soon indeed.
When he saw the courier, he thought the man had news from Grus. The fellow had plainly ridden hard. But the message he gave Lanius had nothing – or rather, not much – to do with events south of the Stura. A plague had broken out in the town of Priene, on the coast. The city governor asked the king to send wizards to help put it down.
"I can do that," Lanius told the courier. "I will do that, as fast as I can." Priene was an out-of-the-way place, a backwater where things happened slowly if they happened at all. The pestilence that had been such a worry along well-traveled routes during the winter was getting there only now.
Lanius called for pen and ink and paper. He wrote a message to the people of Priene, telling them help was on the way. Then he wrote a message to Aedon the wizard, telling him either to go to Priene himself or to send another wizard familiar with the spell he'd used to cure Queen Estrilda. Knowing the inconvenience of this request, I promise the reward will be commensurate to it, he finished.
Once both messages were on their way, Lanius started laughing again. Time would tell him what he wanted to know, all right, but at its pace, not his.
"By the gods!" Grus said softly. "Will you look at that?"
Hirundo looked south with him. The general spoke a word no Avornan general had ever used before in sight of the thing of which he spoke. "Yozgat."
"We're here." Grus shook his head in wonder. "We're really here. I can hardly believe it."
"Well, you'd better, because it's true. Now all we have to do is take the place." Hirundo made it sound easy. Maybe it was, compared to advancing from the Stura all the way to Yozgat. Compared to anything else? Grus didn't think so.
They were still three or four miles from the city that held the Scepter of Mercy, the city that had been Prince Ulash's capital for so long, the city that now belonged – however tenuously – to Prince Korkut. The drawbridge over the moat was down; the gates were open. Tiny in the distance, Menteshe horsemen were riding into Yozgat. The warriors inside had plenty of time to close the gates before the Avornans drew near enough to threaten the place.
Grus got his first look at the fortifications he would face, and liked none of what he saw. Trabzun, the year before, hadn't been easy. Yozgat, by all the signs, would be harder. Its walls were higher and better built; that was obvious even from a distance. Inside the city, tall towers would make formidable strongpoints even if the Avornans forced an entry. And the palace – on a hill near the center of the town – plainly doubled as a citadel. If what Lanius said was right, that citadel housed not only the reigning Menteshe prince, whoever he happened to be, but also the Scepter of Mercy.
The king made himself smile. "If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago. But we've already done a lot of hard things. One more? By now, one more hard thing should be easy for us."
He knew he was talking more to cheer up his men than for himself. He also knew he was making things simpler than they really were. Taking Yozgat wouldn't be one hard thing to do. It would be scores, hundreds, thousands of hard things. They would have to surround the city, have to fend off whatever attacks Menteshe outside the walls made on them, have to force a breach in the walls, have to defeat the garrison, have to storm the citadel…
"One more hard thing," Hirundo said. "That's just right." The soldiers who heard him would believe him. Grus gave him a sharp look. If Hirundo hadn't just said, You must be out of your mind, nobody ever had. But the general's face was as innocent as that of a graying, bearded, scarred, lined, leathery child.
"We'll put some stone-throwers upstream along the river-bank," Grus said. "Curse me if I want the Menteshe sneaking supplies in there by boat."