Bradgith lit a single oil lamp in the anteroom of the king’s house—the Serpent-King’s house, surrendered to his overlord’s use—and the dim yellow glow washed over many fine things, carved chests and stools, bright blankets and hangings, that nonetheless managed to convey a war-camp’s transitory character, as though the house and the furnishings knew the new resident would move on in a few days and they could sink back to their accustomed temper. Big canvas bags and leather travel-boxes, strangers awaiting unpacking, crowded the herb-carpeted floor.

Raian noted that, for all the richness of the furnishings, the sad little lamp was no more than a bowl of oil with a wick: even the peasants at home, though their bowls might be simple clay and not worked gold, still veiled a lamp with a bit of oiled cloth or gut so that it illuminated, like sunlight behind high cloud, rather than burned one bright hole in one’s sight. If he could have thought of a way to achieve the effect magically, he would have done, for scorn’s sake.

He steeled himself against a shudder at the cold touch of the hinged bronze band Bradgith closed about his neck. The lock snicked. And then he heard the old man mutter soft, strange syllables, and felt him touch the lock: a warding-spell. Raian spun away, and stared up at him in horror.

“We too have our magics, Dragon-son,” Bradgith chided him, smugly.

Raian stared up at him, tall even as the weight of his years began to bend him down. “I am also a son of the Golden Clans, holy one.”

It was perilous to look a bard in the eyes: he might do more than merely read the challenger’s soul. Raian frankly hoped he tried. He could hold his own, for a little while, and even losing such a contest would win him at least some guess about the extent of the old man’s power, which was more than he had now. Behind those dark, hollow orbs lay all the lore and law of Dunmadroch. Raian wondered what he would think of the Kinnaithen-Dunwyrding library, and the legacy of Godrach.

Bradgith disdained the challenge of a child, even this one. “You are here, and not in the stables or the kitchens, because you interest the king, son of the Dragon. You will stay by him as his body-thrall, and teach him what he will know of your people—your mother’s people,” he amended, amused, seeing Raian’s protest rise in his eyes. “There is much we need to understand.”

“You will not conquer the mountains of the Uissig!”

The bard’s steady gaze, though it never left Raian’s face, seemed to pass through the youth to some remoteness. “No,” he agreed in an old, dry murmur. And then his shaggy grey brows knitted: “No?” He stepped back from Raian and eyed him up and down, still scowling thoughtfully.

Wondering what I’m good for, Raian thought grimly. He stepped back, and fingered his dreadful new ornament. “Why?” he demanded coldly, raising anger to beat down his fear.

Bradgith surfaced from his far pool of thought, and raised his grey eyebrows.

“This,” Raian gestured fiercely at his collar. “This is done to war-captives and vagabonds. I have given my Houses and my cause, thus I am no wanderer. And I have never raised any weapon against the Madroch, thus I am no enemy!”

Bradgith’s expression did not flicker. “Is not one lie-spoken an enemy of all?”

Anger failed. Raian felt sick. Yes, he had spoken lie, after a fashion, but—“Wise one,” he cast, now desperately, “when the bard Fergu dressed as a woman, to win the Princess-under-Mountain for his king: did King Badroc lie when he called Fergu Nilka the White Maid?”

Interest fluttered upon the old man’s deep-riven face. But he shrugged. “Who are you to challenge my king?

“I shall send in a girl with what you need,” he went on abruptly, moving softly to the door. There he paused, and turned back to wink, though not in friendship. “If you behave, you need not be chained to the bed.”

The door snicked shut. Raian stood where he was, staring at nothing and shivering in shock. Prisoner. Slave! And ‘Rothric’ still unaware of the peril that stalked her. How could he have failed her so, her, and his faithful Wolfman too? He stared stupidly down at the huge boots still clutched in his hand.

Who are you to challenge my king?

An arrogant fool, is who. What a great commander I am! To think that men—real men, proper men—could be led like the children of Teginau! Blindly he turned about, as though by some miracle a door back into his enclave might lie hidden in the shadows. The room seemed still more alien.

Who are you to challenge my king?

Though the slave-collar laid lightly about his throat, he felt it choked, found it hard to swallow past. Wolfman—where was he, what would Dunmadroch lay on him, if he lived? Would he, too, wear a collar? Raian’s knees failed him, dropped him to the rushes of the floor. Hagurd of Coppertree! he called his friend’s half-forgotten name in his heart, I am so sorry! Too wretched to beg an impossible forgiveness, he folded onto the conqueror’s floor and surrendered his heart’s blood to Despair’s icy fangs.

Who are you to challenge my king?

He blinked, snorted, stared up at the ceiling. If I’d folded like this when I had that wolf in my face last winter, he sneered at himself, I wouldn’t have lived to gibber like a coward now.

There wasn’t time to fold then, he reflected.

Oh? So it’s acceptable strategy, is it, to fold when there is time?

No! No—but what am I to do? What? With that wolf, it was strike, or die. What the hell can I do here?

Well, rolling around on the floor weeping like a babe isn’t it.

He sat up sharply, shrugging off the demon as a disappointed woodcrafter discards a bit of flawed wood. He glared at the boots in his hand, looking through them into the future. Who, indeed? Who did he need to be, to challenge Deorgard?

The door opened. The ‘girl’ came in, an axe-faced woman in her forties, who glared at him in impersonal hatred and began brusquely laying out a sleeping-pallet at the foot of the king’s bed. She wore a shawl of Dunmadroch colors; a kin-thrall, Raian supposed. When she thrust at him a basket of leather-soaps and cleaning rags, he defied her hostility to ask courteously, “Who are you?”

She gaped vilely, baring a few uneven yellow teeth and the withered stump of a severed tongue. He flinched, as he was meant to, but he recovered before she could savor her bitter triumph. “I’m sorry.”

She glared more wildly at that, and stormed out, slamming the door. Raian shrugged. He regretted it, but he would not allow her savagery to unmake his civility.

He spent the next hour discovering every corner, every crevice, every crack of his royal prison, investigated every box and shelf therein, even crawled under the bed to study the lashings beneath the hay-stuffed mattress. He had lost the dirks from his sleeves when he and Wolfman had been captured, but he still had his boots, and though the knives he kept in them were not favorite, they were sharp, and they were here.

At last he sat, cross-legged on Deorgard’s bed, and weighed the king’s boots in his hands. He could escape the room—Bradgith had not bothered even to witch-ward the door, and it bolted from within. He could probably escape the royal “enclave” into the town without, and maybe even that as well. But not with the Wolfman, sick and wounded; and then there were unknown miles to sneak through, marked by their collars—he expected Wolf, if he lived, would fare no freer than he—as escaped thralls and liable to death on sight by any Geilla who found them.

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He could talk to the king: as his personal slave, he should have rich opportunity. But Deorgard had denied him in court, which boded ill for a private change of heart. Thrice a liar—so, he had been caught on all three hedges, and the Geillari were slow to forgive erring speech; but why a boor? He could not imagine whence that charge came but it hardly mattered: would a king of Deorgard’s temper subsume his pride to the friend’s-quest even of a man grown? That course, too, seemed hopeless.

Slave. Thrall. The ugly names twisted knifelike in his thought, and his dragon-dream of the past spring rose wraithlike to mock his ambitions. The Horse-marshal’s son of bright Teginau, enslaved to an oafish warlord who thought reed floors and smoky timbers made a great city—he clutched the king’s boots in his hands as if to crush them from existence as his impotent rage burned through him.

Clean the boots? He would more gladly stuff them down the kinglet’s throat. He would do no such thing, he would cast them down and let the lout trip over their muddy pile. Deorgard could call him slave, but he could not make him one.

He looked at the boots, black calf-high monsters so big he could get both his own feet into one, and he did not throw them. Any child could throw the boots and a tantrum. Any slave could ruin the boots for spite, feigning incompetence. Oh, how that would impress the great king!

Raian turned the boots over and about. He knew boot repair well: a Uissigari climber’s best friends were a trusty pair of warm footgear. These, roughened, stiff and tattered, had been too many weeks in indifferent hands. Raian would be ashamed to let even old wild Dagn be seen in such, if they came from his hands.

I am bigger than anything that can ever happen to me: Rothric’s prayer-like murmur in anxious times came back to him now. No, he would not let the kin-thrall’s bile poison his courtesy; and he would not let Dunmadroch thralldom—this attempt at thralldom—poison his pride. No slave could offer challenge to Bradgith’s mighty king. I will show you, he thought; I will show you a man. Raian of Raingold took wild Fury in his young hands and bent her to his will on the king of Maldan’s boots.

Deorgard’s thundering arrival, long after midnight, failed to wake Raian, so heavily he slept at last. The Serpent-king, Droghr of Dun Thorwil, paid him no more heed than so much luggage, but Harka glanced down at him in stern pity. The pity tried to become something else; but there was no time to consider it, in attending on his new over-king.

When his thanes had gone at last, Deorgard sat on the edge of his bed and examined his boots. Surely they were his boots. He explored each with more than a critical eye: no blades nor needles, poisoned or plain; not so much as a maliciously-placed burr. Yet they looked almost as fine as the day they were new, oiled, supple, even the laces new-cut.

He leaned over the footboard and glared down at the strange boy. Then he glared up at Bradgith, who but lifted his eyebrows and covered the lamp.

Raian woke to a brisk kick on his buttocks. Grabbing wildly for consciousness, he struggled up on the small straw pallet at the foot of the Madroch’s bed, on which he had slept curled like a dog. A rough blanket he had never seen before slid from his bare shoulders. A pale grey light drifted down from the smokehole high above: dawn.

“You disappoint me, boy.”

Deorgard sat on a stool before him, leaning on his knees, big bare feet spread wide. His frosted brown hair stood out in wild tangles around his broad face, and he had gotten no farther in his own dressing than his breechcloth.

Raian blinked, fighting an urge to scrub at his sandy eyes, fighting for dignity. “Oh? In what way?”

“‘Master,’” the king amended with a predatory growl.

Raian considered. Deorgard stood a full head taller and more, outweighed him thrice over, commanded the armies of many great clans and most of Maldan. Raian scarcely commanded himself—for the moment. “Master,” he agreed. Fully awake now, he kept his voice even, civil, for a man gave respect where it was due. “How have I disappointed you, lord?”

A glitter in the king’s brown eyes suggested that he marked the tone, but he only moved one stubby finger to point at Raian’s own boots. “Expected you to try to put one of those through my throat in the night.” Deorgard’s scorn burned in his voice. “Coward?”

His boot-knives—and still there: Raian could see the tip of one hilt gleam in the dimness. But, murdering Deorgard? The idea was too preposterous. “Canny. What would your death gain me?”

“Vengeance.”

“Vengeance can wait.”

Deorgard narrowed his eyes. Abruptly one meaty hand twitched, flipping to Raian a dark and slender object, a comb, carved of fragrant wood. Taking the hint, Raian rose grimly to try the king’s hair. He schooled himself to be heedless of his nakedness, and then he was glad of it: let the great Madroch wonder about the scars that boar-tusk and wolf-tooth had left on belly and thigh.

“Ow! Don’t pull, boy!” Deorgard snarled at his first effort.

“A little pain is the price of beauty—so my mother says,” he added pointedly, remembering Bradgith’s expressed interest in her heritage.

The king twisted his massive torso around slowly, ponderously, to glare up at him, incredulous. Raian held his breath. Deorgard’s arm slammed back into his ribs, tumbling him backwards, but he had not been caught unaware, and rolled back lightly to his feet. Deorgard snorted like a horse and turned away for him to continue.

The king’s hair was thick, long and recalcitrant. One more wallop from the king’s elbow taught him the price of carelessness, and he quickly tumbled on the trick of clutching a fistful tightly while combing out the ends first. Dressing hair as if he were a maidservant offended him deeply, almost as much as the public humiliation in court the night before, but still he refused to surrender to his temper. If he must be a hairdresser, then by Night and Fire he would be the best hairdresser the Madroch had ever known. He would command the king’s respect—one way or another.

Then he must help the king dress, with no chance to do likewise by himself, probably as a further humiliation. Raian clad himself in impeccable imagination.

Finally, Deorgard sat again on his stool, feet planted wide to claim the earth, and lunged abruptly aside for his boots. Plunking them down between his knees, he glared up at Raian as if to exact an accounting.

There was magic for ridding a thing of that-which-did-not-belong, useful on one’s person against, say, an infestation of lice, curiously ineffective against the excess of phlegm that attends a cold. Raian had tried it on Wolf, the first night of his fever, but to no avail. The magic involved having a clear idea of what the object or person in question properly was, which was why it was so hard to use on oneself in sickness, given the difficulty of remembering, when ill, just what health felt like. Raian lacked a healer’s grasp of what the Wolfman was in wholeness, and worse, the fever itself kept slipping in his thought to the side of that-which-belongs, despite his fiercest concentration.

He had done his best by the boots by ordinary means, with a stiff brush in the kin-thrall’s basket and with his knives. Then he had worked the spell on every grain of dust he could see or imagine, every stain, smell, or dampness, outside or in, till they were, truly, cleaner than when they first left the shoemaker’s hands. And the soles, though of two thicknesses, were unpadded except for a layer of grass: unthinkable. Only the lowliest Uissigari peasant, when he wore shoes at all, went thus. So Raian had cut pads from the woollen blanket that covered his mat, and when those seemed too thin, tripled the thickness. A seam on the left boot wanted a few stitches, too, but he had no tools for that, as he said now to Deorgard’s silent question.

The dark brows knitted. “What,” rumbled the king, “did you do?”

Surely he saw that they were clean, cleaner than he had any right to expect. Perplexed, Raian explained about the brush and the magic. Deorgard turned a suspicious eye on his footwear, and glared at Raian again.

“The Dragon of the World spills her blood to give you puny darklings magic, and you use it to clean boots, boy?”

“I use it to command my world. Master.”

Deorgard snorted. “And you command boots to be clean.” He prodded one with his thumb. “Why?” Seeing Raian again confused, he growled, “Why didn’t you just spit on ’em? Afraid of me, eh?”

Raian shrugged. “You could beat me. With or without reason, I suppose.”

“So? If you’re not afraid to get hurt—?” he nodded at the long purpled scar that slashed down over Raian’s left ribs.

Raian lifted his chin. “You made it clear before all your court that I am only fit to clean your boots. If you go out with grubby ones, would they not think me unfit even for that?”

The grim dark eyes wrinkled up, in amusement or perplexity, Raian could not tell. “Well, well, well,” he murmured in unaccustomedly low tones. “Well, now, there’s something I’d never have thought.” Suddenly he snatched up a boot and shoved in his foot. Encountering the wool softening, he shot a hard glance at Raian, but made no remark, and pulled on the other. The flick of a finger ordered Raian to lace and tie them, and then the big man bounded to his feet, bounced lightly in their newly cleaned and cushioned gear, and started for the door. He glanced back at Raian and grinned hugely. “Coming out like that, boy?”

As Raian scrambled to dress, the king bellowed his thunderous laughter and strode out like the passing of storm.