By that evening, they were guests of Hlafarr the Are, in his city that had once been Androllys, seat of the westernmost province of House Andras. Its new owners called it Torkyn, Battle-town, and filled it even more awkwardly than the Geillari of much smaller Floodholding: parks had been turned into pasturage, houses torn down in ghost-exorcisms, and Raian sickened when he recognized one burned-out shell as a former college and library. Mercifully, they left next day, moving north towards hill country. Hlafarr seemed eager to give his new lord a thorough tour of Bordegund.

Deorgard, however, had taken a strong liking to Toryarl of Fenustad. He praised Bordegund in noble words but brief and turned resolutely south and west. Raian saw Hlafarr tear at his red beard, but he grinned before Deorgard and bowed to his whim.

A day or two later, at his border Hlafarr paused.

“Allow me to leave you, lord, with our noble brother,” he nodded, rather ungraciously, at Toryarl. “Not the duties of my court alone call me back: on my north and west lie the House of the Bear, and that of the Hawk—” by which he meant, Wolf and Raian realized with a start, Tregaron and Felindras—“and we patrol against them without rest. I am over late to ride the border myself. Perhaps one day the might of Dunmadroch shall join with us to scour them from the mountains, and open new lands for our people!”

Deorgard stirred. Perhaps impatience for that conquest tugged at him; perhaps, also, he sensed Hlafarr’s attempt to seduce him away from Fenustad and resented the manipulation. But Raian thought, “Oho! So that’s why you wanted Dunmadroch’s overlordship!” And he wondered further, seeing in Hlafarr’s face the flush of suppressed wrath: was this man the sort to turn against his tool when it had done the work asked of it?

In the event, Deorgard fell more silent than usual on the further ride, but when Toryarl apologized mildly, “I’m afraid I’ve no such challenges to offer you, lord: Andras seldom crosses the southern river,” the Madroch relented with a laugh.

“We’ll get them,” he shrugged, and his mood lightened.

Riding slowly into Fenustad, they rode into harvest season, and harvest festivities. Though still smarting from Bordegund’s late war, as Deorgard’s army passed, the farmers laid aside their work to hurry to meet them in the villages, the gathering-places for the far-flung holdings. News of their king’s release from bondage had flown ahead, and joyous riot met them. Deorgard wallowed in their adulation, gave gifts lavishly from the further hoard that Bordegund pressed on him at parting—some of which being lately looted from Fenustad, on one occasion he happened to return a ring to its former owner: Wolf overheard the commotion it raised and pointed it out to Raian, though Deorgard himself never learned of it.

Deorgard was made to supplant each local chief, whom harvest tradition carried in a litter together with his wife, wreathed and crowned in braided wheat and oats, sunwise around the palisaded walls. He rode with the wives, he accepted the first apples or the last sheaf or whatever was being celebrated that day; he judged their mead and their cakes and their cattle at the fairs; he even held court for them—to an extent.

For all his air of irritable power, Deorgard loved courtly pomp like a child: Raian, so often dressing the king for the occasion, had finally learned to read his charge’s fidgeting. But the business of court he loathed, equally childishly. Without Bradgith to bind him to his duty, Deorgard put up with two or at most three petitions for justice, before abruptly closing court and storming off to some other duty, archery practice, perhaps, or spear-chucking, or swordplay. From village to village, petitioners followed after him, hoping to be heard, anxious to be heard, desperate to be heard. Many gave up, to what final settlement Raian never learned. Some tried to bribe the heralds to place their cases foremost. The heralds stayed up late, drinking and considering their bribes and bemoaning as usual the annual defection of the thrice-damned bards. Being often left to serve Engobrad, Deorgard’s herald, when the king retired with some woman, Raian acquired an unwitting headful of issues, but it gave him something to think about when mending shields proved insufficiently demanding of his attention.

One enterprising group called at Deorgard’s quarters, but there was only the dragonfolk-thrall to greet them: the king had ridden out an hour or more before. No, he had not entrusted his slave with his destination. Raian looked at their weary, wretched faces, at how they stood, aimless in the doorway, bereft of their own and only destination.

Well? Deorgard would never know, so long as he, Deorgard, could avoid it. Raian sucked a cold breath and chanced it.

“Masters,” he began, with all of what scant diffidence he could assume, “it is not my place to speak—”

“Of what?” demanded the particular plaintiff, a tall, rangy man burnt brown between his yellow thatch and yellow-gray beard.

“I have overheard his majesty speak of your case—not secretly!” he added hastily, throwing up a warding palm. “Only considering it with one of his older men.”

All four men—the plaintiff and his equally-blond son, the dark lugubrious defendant and his sunnier berry-brown brother—fixed him with hungry eyes. Raian waited, contriving to look anxious till the father, after a sharp glance that swept the other three, urged him gently, “Speak, boy. If ’t was openly spoken, ’t is fair to speak again.”

“Yes, master. He said—at the last I heard, you understand—that he would ask you, Freeman,” he nodded to the elder brother, “what you would have done, if it had been your father’s cow in question, and what you would have expected of your father in return. And you the same,” he went on to the yellowbeard, “if it had been your father’s pasture: what would you expect of him? Iyuhh His Majesty thought to set that as your guide, for we are surely most just to our own people, and by this is the love among us strengthened. Unlike among the imperials,” he added in his own voice, and was sourly gratified to see all four take the note he intended. It was true enough, though: no people was free of fraternal strife, but the last two centuries starkly bared the divisiveness of the Sferiari and the cohesion of the barbarians.

Father Yellowbeard scowled, and his son still more fiercely. The elder brother’s woe deepened. But the younger one laughed. “Ay, well, there’s wisdom enough! Let us take that old cow and throw t’ whole village a feast. And won’t we look like great men then!” he added, when the others hesitated.

How dearly the Geillari admired hospitality! Raian suspected a stingy streak among the other three, but this way they lost more or less equally. They shook on it, there in the doorway, and left without further heed of the thrall—save the younger brother, who gave Raian an outrageous wink before he hurried after.

Raian gaped, the Madroch’s sherte forgotten in his hands. Was that only thanks—or did he know, did he suspect? Raian had heard no such thing, of course. Deorgard was even less likely to discuss a case than hear it in the first place. He had overheard the heralds, Deorgard’s man Engobrad together with Toryarl’s and the local chief’s, as they debated which cases they could set before the king.

Deorgard would never know. The heralds would never know. The bards—very well, the bards would probably never know that a slave boy had put his own words in the mouth of the king. Please.

He turned back to his work and froze. Two of Toryarl’s own thralls, both rather elderly men, hastily resumed their own tasks. Trying to feign nonchalance, he hurried through his work. At last one of his unwelcome companions sidled over.

“Said he so, the Man-wolf?” the gaffer ventured cautiously, as if the answer might bite him, but his only reply was a stern glance and a lifted chin.

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“’T is fair to say what was openly said!” Raian echoed Father Yellowbeard, masking his real fear behind the spoken one.

The old man cowered, and tried to laugh. “I’d not thought him so wise—well, well! Well!” He must have been satisfied, for nothing more came of it except Wolf thumping him soundly for his temerity.

Two days later saw them at Toryarl’s own hall. Raian discovered that rumor of the purely-Geillari—the “wild” Geillari, as folk in the Uissig thought them—spoke truth about one custom: a man, a nobleman, who held another in brotherly esteem did offer the women of his house for the pleasure of such a friend. The man so honored must in turn refuse the wife—amid lavish compliments—but refusing a daughter, unmarried herself and of suitable age, of course, or close cousin if the host were daughterless, amounted to insult and repudiation. Children were not merely accepted but hoped for, partly as such a father was expected to gift the mother handsomely, wealth she would bring to whomever she married. Deorgard’s own daughter had such a child. Toryarl was a man blessed with five daughters. One was too young, but the twins and the other two were not, and, once Engobrad had at last slid witless under the tables, Raian spent his nights blushing under Toryarl’s haystacks. Wolf did not understand Raian’s squeamishness.

“No? Would you do that, with your sister and—and me?”

“If she wanted you,” Wolf retorted, with mock scorn Raian was too preoccupied to catch. “Though I don’t count—I’m not nobly cursed, I mean born. ’Course, Nehest—” “cat-woman” was only her nickname, and Raian was not sure he knew her right name—“she’d claw out my eyes if I tried it with someone she didn’t like. Toryarl’s lot seem like chicks of the same hatching, if you follow me. How about the eldest, that redhead? You’d better not close your eyes till she’s happy, I bet!”

There was a silence. Finally Raian ventured, “Uh? Wolf? How—er, how do you do that? How do you know she’s happy, I mean?”

“Oh, ye gods. Yah, boy, you were the one who stood truant for Proving!”

Raian stared aghast at the stars, being eaten now by mustering clouds. “I thought that was just—tests of courage and, and hardihood, and ritual re-birth—which always sounded beastly silly. . . .”

“It was. Well, mine was. My cousin thought his was the greatest thing.”

“The one who became priest of Teodhan?”

“Teodhan and Mauri, yah, that one.” Wolf sighed. “Up to me, is it, then? All right, Rai, let me think about it.”

Raian meekly fell silent to wait. Presently, when Wolf began to snore, he did not rouse him.

He could not get a straight answer out of him anyway. He could get barely a coherent word. It seemed to be the funniest thing Wolf had ever heard, ever, in his entire life, that Raian had been innocent enough to think Proving was only about bravery. “Woo-hoo! So it’s true! I always thought it—your kind are sooo sheltered when you’re infants, and sooo wicked when you’re grown! Wow!” Still, he was loyal enough to keep close the source of his hilarity, even when some other thralls tried to torture it out of him. Raian gave up on him and began to look for some more sympathetic advisor. But not very hard.

And then they were within a fortnight of Mid-autumn, the re-balance of Light and Dark. One of the villages held a Nutting Day festival, and all the unmarried men wrestled to be Hazelnut King, to choose his Fair bride and Queen from the single women; to everyone’s secret relief, his glorious majesty the high king declined to participate. Toryarl’s son did, but his competitors respected and trusted his father enough to beat him if they could. Blackberries came in, and even Deorgard went picking, accompanied by the redheaded daughter, and at least for this day silenced the young men beginning to grow restless for fiercer sport.

The bards returned. For three days, all work ceased at noon as, after the noon-meal, everyone gathered at the village bonfire-hearths to hear their bards stand forth with news from every corner of Peria and beyond. Deaths of chieftains of faraway clans, and the election of their successors; names of champions of many sports and the tales of their victories (amid many a murmur of “I could best that” and wagering to attend next year’s matches); battle and war and plunder; interesting challenges of the law and their resolutions. The Prince of near-mythical Rodrantir had warred with the Sorceror-king of far Isorchia, to a draw, and his emissaries sailed up and down the Dragon Sea, plying mercenaries with gold. A rain of toads in Talkirth; dragons sighted in the mountains of Inkirth; Ilmatian pirate raids against Daria.

As for the bards’ great annual Competition: many great songs and poems had been offered and taught, with which to brighten the long dark nights of winter to come. Several locals had done very well; Toryarl’s senior bard sang a song, for the best part of an hour, praising one of his subordinates who had surpassed him in the contests, though his jaw strained and he begged to retire to his cot when he had done. They had crowned the King of the Bards; Raian did not catch the name, but, this being his thirteenth straight crown, he seemed to be known as Again.

“What, Again?”

“Not Again!”

“Yes, Again!”

Strangest was the news they kept for last. At sunset on the third day, Bradgith, the most senior bard present and winner of plenty of his own prizes, stalked around the great bonfire and told the silent crowd of the silence of Sparca.

Bards of Dunhaldring and Dun Garlaf had come late to the Competition. They themselves had ventured over the Wall, touched with their own hands the lintels and beams of empty houses and barns, stirred with their own fingers the dust of hearths forgotten, and felt, everywhere, the breath of ghosts. Voices could be heard at night, they said, rumor of laughter and song in the distance, a great distance that yet seemed just at hand. One night they had endured, and then fled, and every one of them swore, between Maolin below and Dere above, they would never tread there again. No, they had not yet composed their songs of it: the dread still lay too heavy on them. But when those songs were made, once they were heard, not the boldest Geilla would cry them fainthearted.

Everyone retired rather early that evening, and huddled close with one another, and listened in the dark to the night-sounds from the forest beyond their palisade walls.

Justice came or, rather, returned. Bradgith held his lord firmly to his royal duty; and if the judgments rendered were often cursory, even arbitrary, at least they came from the king. It is probable that there were resentments; but there was no higher court under Heaven.

But soon the defendants before Deorgard became his own men of the many clans. Young men, full of their power, grow swiftly fractious. They would fight: one another, or the farmers, for want of sterner foes. There had even been a rape, though she in return had nearly excised one of his kidneys and the healers were uncertain of his life. Toryarl’s Godenaldring, the Council of the Wise, came before Deorgard and begged him to take the dogs—ah, the young heroes away, to find them sport to match their high hot blood.

Deorgard nodded, then stared at them till they went away. He meant to stare then at Bradgith, but the old man in his wisdom closed court at his king’s first glance.

Toryarl pulled at his gold-braided moustaches. “Come with me to the buckwheat harvesting in the morning. It may be my little land has challenge for you yet.”

Side by side they sat their mounts, Deorgard’s black monster dwarfing Toryarl’s stout bay, upon the crest of a hill high above the fields, for Fenustad’s western marches approached the rocky spine of Peria. The sun burned fine and golden in the easternmost skirts of a flawless blue sky; the weeds and grasses, chest-high to the horses, rippled down from the two kings to the brown fields below, already half-striped in trim windrows. The harvesters sang to keep rhythm, and their voices floated up the sweet air to their kings.

Corn and grain

Corn and grain

Die for us and rise again

Grain and corn

Grain and corn

All that dies shall be reborn

Beyond the fields, the land rose in another green swell, and beyond it a line of still higher hills. Then all along the western rim, the hem of the sky had been torn, roughly dagged by the dark summits of the Dur Rusannmar. And tallest of these, sombre as green shadow, rose the smooth, even sides of a great double-toothed peak. Toryarl pointed.

“The Myrinine,” he said. And Deorgard glowered west as though the mountains, too, must yield to his gaze.