Drago the Bear held the carved cubes of bone. Rumbling laughter, he handed them to Duren, who threw them down in the middle of the gamblers' circle. "Haw! Twelve! No one can beat that," Drago said. He scooped up his winnings, then glanced toward Gerin. "The boy brings luck, lord."
"Glad to hear it," Gerin answered shortly. Whenever he looked at his son, he couldn't help thinking of the boy's mother. When he'd wed Elise, he'd been sure the gods had granted him everlasting bliss. He'd thought so right up to the day, three years ago now, when she'd run off with a traveling horseleech. Only the gods knew where in the shattered northlands she was these days, or how she fared.
The Fox kicked at the dirt. Maybe if he'd noticed she wasn't happy, he could have done things to make her so. Or maybe she'd just tired of him. Women did that, and men, too. "The great god Dyaus knows it's too late to do anything about it now," he muttered.
"Too late to do anything about what, Captain?" Van of the Strong Arm boomed as he came out of the stables. The outlander overtopped Gerin's six feet by as many inches, and was nearly twice as thick through the shoulders, too; the red-dyed horsehair plume that nodded above his helmet only made him seem taller. As usual, he kept his bronze corselet polished almost to mirror brilliance.
"Years too late for us to do anything about getting imperial troopers up here," Gerin answered. He was the sort who guarded private thoughts even from his closest friends.
Van spat on the ground. "That for imperial troopers. It was too late for those buggers five years ago, when the carrion-stinking Empire of Elabon shut all the passes into the north sooner than help us keep the Trokmoi out."
"Dyaus knows we could have used the imperials then," Gerin said. "We could use them still, if they'd come and if—"
"If they'd keep their hands off what's yours," Van finished for him.
"Well, yes, there is that," Gerin admitted: he was given to understatement.
Van wasn't. He snorted, back deep in his throat. "Honh! 'There is that,' he says. You think the Emperor of Elabon would be happy with the title you've gone and taken for yourself? You know what he'd do if ever he got his hands on somebody who styled himself the Prince of the North, don't you? He'd nail you to the cross so the ravens could sit on your shoulders and pick out your eyes, that's what."
Since Van was undoubtedly right, Gerin shifted the terms of the argument. He did the same thing whenever he and his friend wrestled, using guile to beat strength and weight. In wrestling as in argument, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He said, "I'm not the only one in the northlands with a fancy new title since Elabon abandoned us. I'd have company on the crucifying grounds."
"Aye, so you would," Van said. "What's Aragis the Archer calling himself these days? Grand Duke, that's it. Honh! He's just a jumped-up baron, same as you. And there's two or three others of your Elabonian blood, and as many Trokmoi who came south over the Niffet with Balamung and stayed even after the wizard failed."
"I know." Gerin didn't like that. For a couple of centuries, the Niffet had been the boundary between the civilization of the Empire of Elabon—or a rough, frontier version of it, at any rate—on one side and woodsrunning barbarians on the other. Now the boundary was down, and Elabon's abandoned northern province very much on its own.
Van tapped Gerin on the chest with a callused forefinger. "But I tell you this, Captain: you have the loftiest title, so he'd nail you highest."
"An honor I could do without," the Fox said. "Besides, it's quarreling over shadows, anyhow. Elabon's not coming back over the mountains. What I really need to worry about is the squabbles with my neighbors—especially Aragis. Of the lot of them, he's the ablest one."
"Aye, he's near as good as you are, Captain, though not so sneaky."
"Sneaky?" Since Gerin's devious turn of mind was what had earned him his Fox sobriquet, he couldn't even deny that. He changed the subject again: "You're still calling me 'Captain' after all these years, too. Is that the sort of respect the Prince of the North deserves?"
"I'll call you what I bloody well please," Van retorted, "and if one fine day that doesn't suit your high and mightiness, well, I'll up and travel on. I sometimes think I should have done it years ago." He shook his head, bemused that after a lifetime of wandering and adventure he should have begun to put down roots.
Gerin still did not know from what land his friend had sprung; Van never talked of his beginnings, though he had yarns uncounted of places he'd seen. Certainly he was no Elabonian. Gerin made a fair representative of that breed: on the swarthy side, long-nosed and long-faced, with brown eyes and black hair and beard (now beginning to be frosted with gray).
Van, by contrast, was blond and fair-skinned, though tan; his bright beard was that improbable color between yellow and orange. His nose had been short and straight. These days it was short and bent, with a scar across the bridge. His bright blue eyes commonly had mischief in them. Women found him fascinating and irresistible. The reverse also applied.
"Roll the dice?" Duren squealed. "Roll the dice?"
Van laughed to hear Gerin's son say that. "Maybe we'll roll the dice ourselves later on, eh, Captain? See who goes to Fand tonight?"
"Not so loud," Gerin said, looking around to make sure their common mistress wasn't in earshot. "She'll throw things at both of us if she ever finds out we do that sometimes. That Trokmê temper of hers—" He shook his head.
Van laughed louder. "A dull wench is a boring wench. I expect that's why I keep coming back to her."
"After every new one, you mean. Sometimes I think there's a billy goat under that cuirass, and no man at all," Gerin said. Van might have settled in one place, but his affections flew wild and free as a gull.
"Well, what about you?" he said. "If her temper doesn't suit you, why don't you put her on a raft and ship her back over the Niffet to her clansfolk?"
"Dyaus knows I've thought about it often enough," Gerin admitted. After Elise left him, he'd thought about swearing off women forever. No matter what his mind said, though, his body had other ideas. Now he laughed, ruefully. "If either of us truly fell in love with her, we'd be hard-pressed to stay friends."
"Not so, Captain," Van answered. "If one of us fell in love with her, the other would say take her and welcome. If we both did, now—"
"You have me," Gerin admitted. He kicked at the dirt, annoyed at being outreasoned even in something as small as this. But if you couldn't grant someone else's reason superior when it plainly was, what point to reasoning at all?
Van said, "I think I'll roll the dice myself for a while. Care to join?"
"No, I'm going to take another pass at my sorcery, if you know what I mean," Gerin said.
"Have a care, now," Van said. "You're liable to end up in more trouble than you know how to get out of."
"Hasn't happened yet," Gerin answered. "I have the measure of my own ignorance, I think." He'd studied a bit of magic in the City of Elabon as a young man, back in the days when people could travel back and forth between the northlands and the heart of the Empire, but had to give up that and history both when the Trokmoi killed his father and elder brother and left him baron of Fox Keep.
"I hope you do," Van said. Pulling broken bits of silver from a pouch he wore on his belt, he made for the dice game. Before he could sit down, Duren sprang at him like a starving longtooth. He laughed, grabbed the boy, and threw him high in the air three or four times. Duren squealed with glee.
* * *