The Menteshe prince came up onto the wall half an hour later. "What do you want?" he called in his fluent Avornan. "You know I have the Scepter," Grus said.
"I know it, ah, disappeared," Korkut answered bleakly. "If you say you have it, I will not call you a liar, though you could show it to me."
"No," said Grus, who'd left it in his pavilion under guard. Bringing it anywhere near the wall would have been all too likely to tempt the Menteshe to attack to get it back. "I have it. Believe me or not, as you like. The Scepter is what I came for. I told you that before. Since I have it, I'm going home. As far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to Yozgat. Your loving half brother may have a different idea about that, but the two of you are welcome to each other, too."
"You are – going home?" Korkut sounded as though he couldn't believe his ears.
"I said so from the beginning," Grus answered. "If you'd handed me the Scepter then, we never would have had a siege to begin with. But you need to know I'm leaving because I want to, not because I have to. We've won every stand-up fight against the Menteshe. We can win one more – or three or four more – if we have to."
"Can you fight the Fallen Star, thief?" Korkut asked.
"Yes," Grus said bluntly. "I can, and I have, and if I need to I will again." That made the Menteshe who understood Avornan stir on the wall, as he'd hoped it would. The rest would stir, too, once they'd translated it. Having said what he'd come to say, he went back inside the Avornan palisade. When he looked toward Yozgat again, Korkut was still up on the wall, staring out after him. Well, well. Grus smiled. Now he has something brand new to think about. Good.
More waiting. Lanius had always thought he was a patient man. He'd had to be patient. He'd been shoved into the background several times in several different ways. Even if Pouncer had succeeded down in Yozgat, he would stay in the background. Grus would get the credit, and Grus would deserve… a good deal of it, for he would be the one who wielded the Scepter of Mercy.
But he never would have had the chance to wield it if Lanius hadn't had the idea to train Pouncer to steal it.
Things had happened down in the far south. The dream the Banished One had sent made him sure of that. But he still wanted a human source for the news, a source he could pass on to others. Not having one yet made him itch worse than sitting in a bathtub full of fleas would have.
He buried himself in the archives so he wouldn't snap at whoever was unlucky enough to run into him. He expected that Grus and Collurio and Pterocles and Hirundo and Otus – maybe especially Otus – were rejoicing down there outside of Yozgat. He wanted to have a palpable excuse to rejoice himself. He wanted to run through the palace corridors whooping and waving his arms and kissing everybody he met – old men with brooms, serving girls (if Sosia didn't like it, too bad – but he would kiss her, too), fat cooks, Chernagor ambassadors (not that any Chernagor ambassadors were around right now, but the longer he waited for a letter, the more chance they had to show up), his children. Ortalis? He had to think about that, but in the end he nodded. He'd even kiss Ortalis.
But he couldn't, not just on the strength of a dream. He needed something written down in a man's hand. He ached for that – and he didn't have it.
As long as he didn't, he buried himself in tax registers that would have stupefied him in ordinary times – and he didn't stupefy easily. While he was concentrating on them, though, he wasn't thinking about anything else.
He learned that his great-great-great-grandfather was a thief and a cheapskate and a man any reasonable person would hate on sight. There were several uprisings in those days. Lanius' ancestor put them down with ferocious brutality and then taxed the rebels even more to make them pay for the cost of suppressing them. The king thought that, if he'd been alive in his multiple-great-grandfather's day, he would have wanted to revolt, too.
And yet his own father – a stem, hard man himself – would have probably put down the uprisings about the same way. And Mergus was a pretty good king, as far as Lanius could judge. The more you looked at things, the less simple they got.
One afternoon, someone knocked on the heavy doors that closed the archives off from the rest of the palace. Lanius jumped and swore. He'd trained the servants not to bother him in here unless it was the end of the world. Maybe it was.
With that in mind, Lanius didn't shout at the apprehensive servant waiting outside. "Yes? What is it?" he asked in his usual tone of voice.
Relief blossomed on the man's face. "Your Majesty, there's a courier up from the south waiting to see you."
"Up from the south? From south of the Stura?" Lanius asked, and the servant nodded. "Well, you'd better take me to him, then," the king said.
The servant took him to the courier, who waited in an anteroom with a cup of wine and a chunk of brown bread. The man jumped to his feet and bowed. "Your Majesty, I was to give you this first," he said, and handed Lanius a rather crumpled scrap of parchment.
Lanius recognized Grus' firm hand at once. Please don't eat the man who carries this if he bothers you while you're in the archives, the other king wrote. The news he carries will be worth the hearing. A flush rose all the way to the top of Lanius' head. Grus knew him much too well.
"All right. You're eating here. You're not being eaten," Lanius said, and the courier managed a nervous smile. Lanius held out his hand. "Give me this news King Grus says you have."
His fingers trembled as he broke the seal on the letter the courier took from his tube. Now it would be official. Now the world could know. There was the other king's script again. The moncat fetched it, Grus wrote without preamble. I have it. I've used it. It's even more astonishing than we hoped it would be. I'm bringing it back to the city of Avornis. It belongs to the kingdom again. Lanius didn't run and whoop after all. He knew too much joy for that. He just stood there, smiling while tears ran down his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Before, whenever Grus found himself near the south bank of the Stura, the north bank had always seemed much farther away than the width of the river should have suggested. It was as though he were leaving a different world, one that hated him and did not want him to escape.
He didn't get that feeling now. Maybe it had always been his imagination, but he didn't think so. He'd noted it too often for that.
He turned to Hirundo, who rode beside him. "When we get back into Avornis proper with the Scepter of Mercy, all this will truly start to seem real," he said.
"It already does to me," the general replied. "When the Menteshe didn't come after us in swarms to try to take the Scepter back, that's when I knew for sure you'd taken care of things."
"The Banished One couldn't set them in motion against us. He couldn't." Grus repeated the word with amazement in his voice. "And there are no more thralls. None, not as far as I can tell."
"Doesn't look that way," Hirundo agreed. Thralls weren't his chief worry. He cared much more about bad-tempered horsemen with double-curved bows. "The nomads raided us a few times, harried us a little – but that's all." He sounded amazed, too.
Ferries moved back and forth across the Stura. "Do you know what we're going to have to do one of these days? We're going to have to bridge the river," Grus said. Hirundo eyed him as though he'd gone mad. But there had been bridges over the Stura before the Menteshe came. Why not again?
Hirundo had no trouble putting his objections into words, asking, "Do you really want to give the Menteshe a free road into the kingdom?"
"If they're their own men, if they're not the Banished One's cat's-paws, why not?" Grus said. "I'd rather trade them than shoot arrows at them all the time."