"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.

* * *

Gerin made for a little shack he'd built over in a back corner of the courtyard. It was far enough from the palisade that, if it caught fire, it wouldn't burn down the castle outwall along with itself. Thus far, he hadn't even managed to set the shack ablaze.

"Maybe today," he muttered. He was going to try a conjuration from a new grimoire he'd bought from a lordlet to the southwest whose grandfather might have been able to read but who was himself illiterate and proud of it. As with most spells in grimoires, it sounded wonderful. Whether results would match promises was another question altogether.

The codex of the grimoire had silverfish holes on several of its pages, and mice had nibbled its leather binding while it lay forgotten on a high shelf in a larder. The spell in which Gerin was interested, though, remained unmutilated. In a clear hand, the mage who'd composed it had written, "A CANTRIP WHICH YIELDETH A FLAMING SWORD."

That yieldeth had made Gerin suspicious. Along with wizardry and history, he'd studied literature down in the City of Elabon. (And where, he wondered, will Duren be able to learn such things, if he should want to? The answer was mournfully clear: in the northlands, nowhere.) He knew Elabonian hadn't used those archaic forms for hundreds of years, which meant the author was trying to make his work seem older than it was.

But a flaming sword . . . false antique or no, he reckoned that worth looking into. Not only would it make ferocious wounds, the mere sight of it should cast terror into the hearts of his foes.

He hefted the bronze blade he'd use. It was hacked and notched to the point where it would almost have made a better saw than sword. Bronze was the hardest, toughest metal anyone knew, but it wasn't hard enough to hold an edge in continued tough use.

Gerin had the crushed wasps and bumblebees and the dried poison oak leaf he'd need for the symbolic element of the spell. Chanting as he worked (and wearing leather gauntlets), he ground them fine and stirred them into melted butter. The grimoire prescribed olive oil as the basis for the paste, but he'd made that substitution before and got by with it. It was necessary; the olive wouldn't grow in the northlands, and supplies from south of the High Kirs had been cut off.

He was readying himself for the main conjuration when someone poked his head into the hut. "Great Dyaus above, are you at it again?" Rihwin the Fox asked. His soft southern accent reminded Gerin of his student days in the City of Elabon every time he heard it.

"Aye, I am, and lucky for you at a place where I can pause," Gerin answered. If anyone had to interrupt him, he preferred it to be Rihwin. The man who shared his ekename knew more magic than he did; Rihwin had been expelled from the Sorcerers' Collegium just before his formal union with a familiar because of the outrageous prank he'd played on his mentor.

He walked into the hut, glanced at the sword and the preparations Gerin had made for it. He'd stopped shaving since he ended up in the northlands, but somehow still preserved a smooth, very southern handsomeness. Maybe the big gold hoop that glittered in his left ear had something to do with that.

Pointing to the wood-and-leather bucket full of water that stood next to the rude table where Gerin worked, he said, "Your precautions are thorough as usual."

Gerin grunted. "You'd be working here beside me if you took them, too." Rihwin had been rash enough to summon up Mavrix, the Sithonian god of wine also widely worshiped in Elabon, after Gerin had earned the temperamental deity's wrath. In revenge, Mavrix robbed Rihwin of his ability to work magic, and left him thankful his punishment was no worse.

"Ah, well," Rihwin said with an airy wave of his hand. "Dwelling on one's misfortunes can hardly turn them to triumphs, now can it?"

"It might keep you from having more of them," Gerin replied; he was as much given to brooding as Rihwin fought shy of it. He'd concluded, though, that Rihwin was almost immune to change, and so gave up the skirmish after the first arrow. Bending over the grimoire once more, he said, "Let's find out what we have here."

The spell was no easy one; it required him to use his right hand to paint the sword blade with his mixture while simultaneously making passes with his left and chanting the incantation proper, which was written in the same pseudoarchaic Elabonian as its title.