"Oh," Duren said. "All right." After a moment, he asked, "Why were you and Van at Ikos?"
"To ask the god to tell us through the Sibyl where you were," Gerin answered.
"Oh," Duren said again. "But I was with Tassilo." By his tone, that was as much a fact of nature as trees' leaves being green.
"But we didn't know you were with Tassilo," the Fox reminded him. "And even if we had known it, we didn't know where Tassilo was."
"Why not?" Duren asked, at which point Gerin threw his hands in the air.
He said, "Let's bring up some of the good ale from the cellar, slay an ox and some sheep, and rejoice that we have enough bold warriors here now to take on the Trokmoi and the monsters." Or so I hope, at any rate, he thought. If we don't, we're in even more trouble than I reckoned on before.
"Nothing finer than a good sheep's head, all cooked up proper, with plenty of ale to wash it down," Drago the Bear declared. Baron though he was, he had a peasant's taste in food.
The Fox looked to the sky. With sunset near, all the moons were up: Tiwaz at first quarter near the meridian, then Elleb halfway between first quarter and full, and then, close together and low in the east, Math and Nothos. Gerin shook his head. Five years earlier, he'd paid attention to the motions of the moons mostly to let him gauge the time by night; seeing them crawl together now sent a shiver of dread through him. This stretch, surely, would not approach the horrors of the werenight, but how bad would it be? No way to know, not yet.
He said, "The blood of the beasts slaughtered for our supper will hold the ghosts at bay. If you like, grand duke, we'll do some of the butchering outside the keep, that your men's encampment may also gain the boon of blood."
"A good thought," Aragis said. "Do it." He was so direct, he even used words like soldiers, sending forth no more than he needed to carry out his plans.
"Might we not broach even one of the jars of wine we have from Schild to help us rejoice in this alliance?" Rihwin asked.
"No," Gerin and Van said in the same breath. Gerin pretended not to see the curious look Aragis sent him for quashing the question so quickly. He was heartily glad he'd taken those jars out of the cellar and hidden them deep under straw in the stables. To Rihwin, he went on, "Ale suffices for the rest of us, so it will have to do for you, too." Rihwin's pout made him look positively bilious, but he finally gave a glum nod.
Duren kept running around the courtyard and in and out of the great hall, as if making sure things hadn't changed while he was gone. Every once in a while, his voice would rise in excitement: "I remember that!" He'd been gone a quarter of a year, no small chunk of a four-year-old's life.
Selatre came over to Gerin and said, "He's a promising boy."
"Thank you. I've always thought so," the Fox answered. "I just praise Dyaus and all the gods that he doesn't seem to have suffered badly in Tassilo's cursed hands. The minstrel must have reckoned he'd need him hale and not too unhappy as a hostage." That sparked a thought in him. He called his son over and asked, "How was it that you went away with Tassilo when he took you away from here?"
"He promised he'd teach me his songs and show me how to play the lute," Duren answered. "He did, too, but my hands are too small to play a big one. He said he would make me a little one, but he never did do that." And then, to the Fox's surprise, Duren started chanting what Tassilo had called the song of Gerin at his visit to Fox Keep. He did it better than he'd ever sung before he was kidnapped; in that, at least, the minstrel had kept his promise. It wasn't remotely enough.
One of the cooks came out and said, "Lords, the feast begins!" The warriors streamed into the great hall. Even with chairs and benches brought down from upstairs, it was still packed tight.
Fat-wrapped thighbones smoked on Dyaus' altar by the hearth. When a servant brought Gerin a jack of ale, he poured a libation to Baivers and the rest of the ale down his throat. A serving woman picked her way down the narrow space between benches, pulling rounds of flatbread from a platter piled high and setting one in front of each feaster in turn.
She would have gone faster had more than a few men not tried to pull her down onto their laps or to grab at her as she went past. One of them wound up with flatbread draped over his face instead of on the table before him. "I'm so sorry, noble sir," she said, very much as if she meant it.
A cook with a sheep's head on a spit carried it to the fire and carefully started singeing off the wool. "Oh, that will be fine when it's finished," Drago said. He thumped his thick middle. "Have to remember to save some room for it."
Servants with meat more quickly cooked—steaks and chops and roasted slices of hearts and kidneys and livers—came by and set the sizzling gobbets on top of the flatbreads. The feasters attacked them with belt knives and fingers. They threw gnawed bones down into the dry rushes that covered the floor. Dogs growled and snarled at one another as they scrambled for scraps.
Aragis the Archer raised his drinking jack in salute to Gerin, who sat across the table from him. "You're a generous host, lord prince," he said.
"We do what we can, grand duke," the Fox replied. "Once in a while, for celebration, is all well and good. If we ate like this every day, we'd all starve, serfs and nobles together, long before midwinter rolled around."
"I understand that full well," Aragis said. "Between war and hunger and disease, we live on the edge of a cliff. But by the gods, it's fine sometimes to step back from the edge and make life into what it was meant to be: plenty of food, plenty of drink—you brew a fine ale—and no worries, not for today." He raised his jack again, then drained it. A servant with a pitcher made haste to refill it.
Selatre turned to Gerin. Under the noise of the crowd, she said, "Surely there's more to life than a full belly."
"I think so, too," he said, nodding. "So does Aragis, no doubt, or he'd be content to stay in his castle and stuff himself. If you ask me, he'd sooner drink power than ale." But then, trying to be just, he added, "If you don't have a full belly, not much else matters. Years the harvest fails, you find out about that." He paused thoughtfully. "What civilization is, I suppose, is the things you find to worry about after your belly's full."
"I like that," Selatre said. Now she nodded. "Well said."
Van sat at Gerin's right hand, with Duren between them. He'd been talking with Fand, and missed Gerin's words. Selatre's brisk statement of approval caught his notice. "What's well said, Fox?" he asked.
Gerin repeated himself. Van thought it over—perhaps a bit more intensely than he might have at other times, for he'd emptied his drinking jack again and again—and finally nodded. "Something to that." He waved a big arm in a gesture that almost knocked a plate out of a servant's hands. "You Elabonians, you've a great many things past farming. I give you so much, that I do."
Fand rounded on him. "And what o' my own folk?" she demanded. "Sure and you're not with the southrons who call us woodsrunners and barbarous savages and all, are you now?"
"Now, now, lass, I said nothing of the sort. I didn't speak of the Trokmoi at all, just of the folk of my friend here," Van answered, mildly enough. Gerin breathed a silent sigh of relief; he'd seen trouble riding Fand's question as sure as rain rode a squall line. Then, to his dismay, the outlander, instead of leaving well enough alone, went on, "Though now that you ask me, I will say that, since I traveled the forests of the Trokmoi from north to south, I'd far sooner live here than there. More good things to life here, taken all in all."