I hope it will, Lanius thought. Aloud, he said, "I want to know."
"Well, all right." The arch-hallow sounded patient and amused, both at the same time. He also sounded very much like his father, which amused Lanius. Anser went on, "If you've got to keep up with everything every hour of the day and night, you can send couriers out from the woods to the palace. That way, you won't hear the news much later than you would if you stayed here. And I don't suppose the riders would spook the game very much." He sounded like a man making a formidable sacrifice, and no doubt thought he was.
Because he worked so hard to meet Lanius halfway, the king didn't see how he could say no without sounding rude. "All right. You've talked me into it," he said, and Anser grinned enormously.
"Good. Let's go. I'll meet you in front of the palace as fast as I can change clothes and call my beaters," he said. Any excuse for getting out of the city was a good one, as far as he was concerned. His ecclesiastical duties worried him not even for a moment.
Laughing, Lanius held up a hand. "Let's make it first thing tomorrow morning," he said. "I don't know about you, but I have some things I need to take care of before I leave."
"Spoilsport." But Anser was laughing, too. "All right, Your Majesty – tomorrow morning it is. You'd better not give me any excuses then, that's all I've got to say, or I'll get up in the pulpit and start screaming about heretics."
If he'd meant that, Avornis would have needed a new arch-hallow. Leading clerics who got up in the pulpit and caused kings trouble had to be replaced. Otherwise, they thought they were the ones running the kingdom. Arch-Hallow Bucco had, back when Lanius was a boy. For a while, he'd been right – he'd led the regency council. He hadn't led it any too well, unfortunately.
But Anser had no ambitions along those lines. If ruling Avornis would have meant all the hunting trips and all the deer he wanted, he might have taken the idea more seriously. As things were, not a chance.
"Have fun," Sosia said when Lanius told her where he was going. "You're not chasing serving girls when you go out with Anser." If he wasn't doing that, she didn't mind whatever he did.
He nodded. "No, that's your brother."
Sosia grimaced. "I didn't mean like that," she said. If Ortalis chased serving girls through the woods, he was as likely to shoot them for the fun of it as he was to do anything else with them.
"Tonight, I'll show you what I do for fun," Lanius said.
"Oh, you will, will you?" Sosia gave him a sidelong look.
He did, too, and enjoyed it as much as he'd hoped. By all the signs, his wife did, too. After a last kiss, they both rolled over and fell asleep. The next thing Lanius knew, he was looking into the Banished One's inhumanly handsome face. "Worm, you think you can trick me!" the exiled god roared.
"How could I do that?" Lanius said, as innocently as he could. "I'm only a man. You must know so much more than I do, anything I try will be plain as day to you."
"Do you mock me? Do you dare mock me? You will pay for that!"
"I'm already paying for so many things," Lanius said. "After all of them, what's one more?"
"My curse shall fall all the more heavily upon you and your miserable joke of a kingdom, all built of mud and straw and sticks." The Banished One sounded ready to explode with fury. How long had it been since anyone had the nerve to twit him? Since he was cast out of the heavens? Lanius wouldn't have been surprised.
Somehow, the exiled god didn't leave the king quite as terrified as usual. Or maybe Lanius realized, even in a dream, that having the Banished One angry at him was liable to be better than having him angry at Grus. All Lanius' mental faculties were intact, as they always were in dreams the Banished One sent. That usually made those dreams worse for him. Here, now, he turned it to his advantage. "I know why they sent you down to earth," the king said.
"Do you?" The Banished One seemed to lean toward him. Even if Lanius was less frightened now than he had been in some other dreams, that alarmed him. In a deadly voice, the Banished One asked, "Why?"
"Because you're a bore," Lanius' dream-self said.
The Banished One's roar of fury was so enormous, Lanius thought for a moment that it was a real sound, not an imaginary one. He burst from sleep as though shot from a stone-thrower, the way he'd gotten used to doing when escaping one of the exiled god's dreams. Sweat ran down his face and trickled along his sides from his armpits. His heart drummed madly.
"What's the matter?" Sosia asked, sleep blurring her voice.
"Bad dream." Lanius' answer, as usual, was true but inadequate.
"You've had a lot of those lately." His wife sounded as sympathetic as she could around a yawn.
"Maybe I have." Lanius knew he had. The Banished One sensed he was doing something out of the ordinary, and tormented him because of it. So far, the Banished One hadn't worked out what the king had in mind. More than anything else, Lanius wanted that very partial ignorance to go on.
Sosia patted the pillow. "Well, go back to bed." She yawned again.
"Later, maybe." As usual after one of these jolts, Lanius was too excited to sleep. He got up and started for the door. He'd put a hand on the latch before noticing he was naked. That would have given any servants going through the palace corridors in the middle of the night something to talk about.
He slipped on the lightest, plainest robe he had, one made of a blend of silk and linen. No one would expect him to wear a heavy robe of state at whatever hour this was. He opened the door, slipped out, and closed it behind him as quietly as he could.
The palace was dim and quiet. Only a few torches were lit, which saved fuel. A little moth fluttered around one of the ones that still flickered. It would be sorry if it flew into the flame.
And what about me? he wondered. Am I flying into the flame when I go against the Banished One? Many before him had burned themselves up. He didn't think he would. But how many of the others had thought so? Hadn't they been sure they were doing something wonderful, something that would make Avornans remember their names until the end of time? Of course they had. The only trouble was, they'd been wrong. He had to hope he wasn't.
Someone came around the comer. It was Ortalis. He seemed as surprised to see Lanius as Lanius was to see him. "Oh, hello," Grus' son said. "What are you doing up at this time of night?"
"I might ask you the same question," Lanius said. "As for me, I had a dream that woke me." That would do. He didn't want or intend to go into details.
One of Ortalis' eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Did you? As a matter of fact, so did I."
"Really?" Lanius was not only surprised but also frightened. A dream bad enough to get Ortalis out of bed was likely to come from the Banished One. Why would the exiled god want to send Ortalis dreams? For no good reason – Lanius would have staked his life on that. Cautiously, he asked, "Was the nightmare very bad?"
"Nightmare?" Ortalis gaped at him as though he'd suddenly started babbling in Thervingian. "Nightmare?" he repeated; he might not have believed his ears. "This was the most wonderful dream I ever had in my life."
"Was it?" Lanius said, surprised all over again.
"It certainly was!" Ortalis had never spoken of anything, even hunting, with such enthusiasm before. Lanius laughed at himself. He'd jumped to a good many wrong conclusions. This looked to be one of the wrongest. Well, good, he thought.
"Here you are, Your Majesty." A weary-sounding courier handed Grus a message tube.
"Thanks," the king said, and then, sympathetically, "Have any trouble coming down here?"
"Did I ever!" The courier got livelier remembering. "This bunch of nomads started chasing me, and I was afraid they'd catch me before I could get to our next little fort. But then this other bunch of Menteshe came out from the side, and I really thought I was a goner. Instead of going after me, though, they pitched into each other, and I got away."