The Fox dug a trench in the ground with his dagger, then drew sword and put an end to the duck's angry squawking with a stroke that might have parted a man's head from his shoulders, much less a bird's. He drained the duck's blood into the trench for the ghosts. Van took charge of the carcass. "It'll be greasy and gamy, but what can you do?" he said as he opened the belly to get rid of the entrails.
"Gamy or no, I like the flavor of duck," Selatre said. "Duck eggs are good, too; they have more taste than those from hens."
"That's so, but hens are easier to care for—just let 'em scavenge, like pigs," Gerin said. He glanced around. "Even though we were slow with the offering, the ghosts are still very quiet. Lady, I think that's your doing, no matter that we happened to touch again."
Selatre cocked her head to the side, listening to the ghosts as they wailed and yammered inside her head. "You may be right," she said after she'd taken their measure. "I remember them louder and more hateful than this when I was still living in my village, before Biton made me his Sibyl. But I am Sibyl no more; the god himself said as much, and your touch sealed it—" She shook her head in confusion; the dark hair that had spilled over one shoulder flew out wildly.
Gerin said, "I don't think holiness is something you can blow out like a lamp. It doesn't so much matter that I touched you—certainly I didn't do it with lust in my heart, or aiming to pollute you. What matters is that the god touched you. My touch is gone in an instant; Biton's lingers."
Selatre thought about that and slowly nodded, her finely molded features thoughtful. Watching her in the firelight, Gerin decided Van had been right: she was attractive enough to make Fand jealous. Was she more attractive than the Trokmê woman? Their looks were so different, the comparison didn't seem worthwhile. But that it had even crossed his mind made him wonder if Ricolf hadn't been wiser back at his keep than the Fox had thought at the time.
He scowled, angry at himself for so much as entertaining that notion. Selatre said, "What's wrong? You look as if you just bit into something sour."
Before he could come up with anything plausible, Van saved the day, calling, "Come over here by the fire, both of you, and bite into something that's going to be gamy and greasy, like I said before, but better all the same than a big empty curled up and purring in your belly."
The duck was just as Van had predicted it would be, but Gerin fell to gratefully even so. A full mouth gave him the excuse he needed for not answering Selatre's question, and a full belly helped him almost—if not quite—forget the thoughts which had prompted that question in the first place.
* * *
The wagon came out from behind the last stand of firs that blocked the view toward Castle Fox. "There it is," Gerin said, pointing. "Not a fortress to rival the ones the Elabonian Emperors built in the pass south of Cassat, but it's held for many long years now; the gods willing, it'll go on a bit longer."
Selatre leaned forward in the rear of the wagon to see better, though she was still careful not to brush against the Fox or Van. "Why are most of the timbers of the palisade that ugly, faded green?" she said.
Van chuckled. "The lady has taste."
"So she does." Gerin refused to take offense, and answered the question in the spirit in which he hoped it had been asked: "It was a paint a wizard put on them, to keep another wizard from setting them afire."
"Ah," Selatre said. Thin in the distance—Gerin did not allow trees and undergrowth to spring up anywhere near the keep; if anyone set ambushes, he'd be that one—a horn from the watchtower said the wagon had been seen.
He twitched the reins and rode forward with a curious mixture of anticipation and dread: seeing his comrades again would be good, and perhaps some of them had word of Duren. But the trouble he expected from Fand cast a shadow over the homecoming.
"We were free peasants in the village where I grew up; we owed no lord service," Selatre said. "Not much of what we heard about Elabonian barons was good, and I came to have a poor opinion of the breed. You tempt me to think I may have been wrong."
Gerin shrugged. "Barons are men like any others. Some of us are good, some bad, some both mixed together like most people. I'm bright enough, for instance, but I worry too much and I'm overly solitary. My vassal Drago the Bear, whom you'll meet, isn't what you call quick of wit and he hates anything that smacks of change, but he's brave and loyal and has the knack of making his own people like him. And Wolfar of the Axe, who's dead now, was vicious and treacherous, if you ask me, but he'd never shrink from a fight. As I say, we're a mixed bag."
"You speak of yourself as if you were someone else," Selatre said.
"I try sometimes to think of myself that way," the Fox answered. "It keeps me from making too much of myself in my own mind. The fellow who's sure he can't possibly go wrong is usually the one who's likeliest to."
A couple of men came out of the gate and waved to the approaching wagon: squat Drago with slim Rihwin beside him. "Any luck, lord?" Drago called, raising his voice to a shout.
"What did the Sibyl say?" Rihwin asked, also loudly.
"We're still the ripple of news furthest out from where the rock went into the pond," Van said.
"So we are." Gerin nodded, adding, "I like the picture your words call to mind." Behind them and in every other direction, others would also be spreading word of what had happened at Ikos. Soon the whole of the northlands would know. But for now, there was a dividing line between those who did and those who didn't, and he and Van were on it.
He raised his voice in turn to answer his vassals: "By your leave, I'll tell the tale in the great hall and not sooner. That way I'll have to retell it only once, and there's a good deal to it."
"Is that Duren in the wagon behind you?" Rihwin asked.
Drago's sight had begun to lengthen as he aged. Today, that served him well. "No, loon," he said. "That's a man grown. No, I take it back—a woman?" The Fox didn't blame him for sounding surprised.
Rihwin's agile wits let him leap to a conclusion that wouldn't have occurred to Drago. "You've caught up with Elise?" he said loudly. "Did she steal the boy away, lord Gerin?" That his wits were agile, of course, didn't necessarily mean he was right.
At that moment, Gerin wished he'd kept quiet. The rumor would be all over the keep, all over the serf villages, and would spread faster than the truth could follow it. "No, it's not Elise," he said, even louder than Rihwin had spoken. "This is the lady Selatre, who up till bare days ago was Biton's Sibyl at Ikos."
Warriors up on the palisade, who'd already begun to gossip about Rihwin's speculation, abruptly fell silent. Then they started buzzing again, more busily than before. Maybe Rihwin's wild guess wouldn't go everywhere after all, Gerin thought: the truth was so much stranger that it might take precedence.
He drove the wagon over the drawbridge and into the keep, then got down from it. Van slipped off from the other side. They both stood back to let Selatre descend with no risk of touching either of them.
Gerin introduced his vassals to her one by one. He wondered how good she'd be at matching unfamiliar names to equally unfamiliar faces; that often gave him trouble. But she coped well enough, and showed she knew who was who when she spoke to the men. The Fox was impressed.
Widin Simrin's son asked the question they all had to be thinking: "Uh, lord Gerin, how did you come to have the holy Sibyl riding with you?"
"You felt the earthquake a few days past?" Gerin asked in turn.
Heads bobbed up and down. Drago said, "Aye, we did, lord. Like to scare the piss out of me, it did. We lost some pots, too, and spilled ale from a couple of broken jars." He sighed in sorrow at the misfortune. Then he scratched his head. "Has that aught to do with the lady here?"