"You're strong yet," Gerin said, alarmed for his host. Few men spoke so openly of death, lest a god be listening. "If you do go out, you'll go fighting."

"That could happen, too," Ricolf said. "I'm not as fast nor as strong as I was, and there's plenty of fighting around. And what becomes of the holding then? I'd hoped to last long enough to pass it on to Duren, but now—"

"Aye, but now," Gerin echoed. If Ricolf died heirless, his vassal barons would brawl over the holding, just as Bevon's sons had been doing for so long further north. And Ricolf's neighbors would be drawn in, Aragis coming up from the south, the Trokmoi from the west perhaps biting off a chunk . . . and the Fox did not see how he could stand aloof. He even had a claim of sorts to the barony.

As if picking that from his head, Ricolf said, "Aye, a couple of my vassals might think well of you because you were wed to Elise. More of 'em, though, are likely to think less of you because she ran off. And if she ever came back here wed to a man with a fighting tail of his own—"

Gerin upended his drinking horn, poured the last draft down his throat. That thought, or rather nightmare, had crossed is mind, too, most often of nights when he was having trouble sleeping. He said, "I have no notion how likely that is, nor what I'd do if it happened. A lot would depend on who and what the fellow was."

"On whether you thought you could use him, you mean." Ricolf spoke without rancor. He drained his own rhyton, then pushed to his feet. "I'm going up to bed. Do you want to come along, so I can show you the chamber I've set aside for you? The keep's not packed with suitors now; I don't have to give you one of the little rooms down here off the kitchens."

"I'll come," Gerin said, and rose, too. Ricolf carried a lamp as they went up the stairs. He didn't say anything. The Fox counted that something of a minor triumph. He'd been dreading this interview since the day Elise left him, and he seemed to have got through it.

Ricolf opened a door. As Gerin walked through it into the little bedchamber the lamplight revealed, the older man asked quietly, "Do you miss her?"

Another knife in the night. Gerin said, "Yes, now and then. Quite a lot, sometimes." He stepped into the room and shut the door before Ricolf could stab him with any more questions.

* * *

South of Ricolf's holding, the land grew debatable once more. Gerin and Van traveled in armor, the Fox keeping his bow ready to hand. The Elabon Way seemed all but deserted. That suited Gerin fine: the fewer people he saw, the fewer people who saw him. He knew too well how vulnerable the wagon was to a good-sized band of raiders.

The roads that ran into the Elabon Way from east and west were dirt tracks like the ones up in the Fox's holding. Pieces of the Elabon Way were just dirt here, too; peasants had prised up the paving stones for the houses, and maybe barons for their keeps, too. That hadn't been so the last time Gerin visited Ikos, five years before.

He said, "Taking stones from the roadway used to be a crime that would cost a man his head or put him up on a cross. A good law, if you ask me; roads are a land's lifeblood."

"No law left up here but what comes from the edge of a sword," Van said. "Most lands are like that, when you get down to it."

"South of the High Kirs, Elabon isn't, or wasn't," Gerin said. "Law counted for more than might there, for a lot of years. It was even true here for a while. No more, though. You're not wrong about that."

They rolled slowly past another connecting road. At the crossroads stood a granite boulder carved with pictures showing where the road led: a crude keep surrounded by farms and horses. "That's not the one we want, eh, Captain?" Van said.

"No. We're looking for an eye with wings—that's Biton's mark. We're not far enough south to come to it yet, I don't think. I hope it will still be there; some of the crossroads stones I thought I remembered from my last trip to the Sibyl aren't here any more."

"You were paying attention to stones?" Van shook his head in disbelief. "Far as I could see, you were so busy panting over Elise, you didn't have eyes for anything else."

"Thank you, my friend. I needed that just now, I truly did," Gerin said. The visit with Ricolf had left him glum enough. If Van was going to rub salt in the wounds, they'd sting even worse.

But Van, perhaps mercifully, kept quiet after that. Like Gerin's, his eyes went back and forth, back and forth. Every time the wagon went by a clump of bushes or some elm saplings growing closer to the road than they should have, he shifted the reins to his left hand so he could grab his spear in a hurry if he needed it.

The Fox soon became certain some crossroads stones were missing: he and Van rolled past a hollow in the ground that showed where one had recently been removed—so recently the grass hadn't filled in all the bare dirt. "Someone's losing trade on account of that," he said sadly. "I wonder if he even knows."

About halfway between noon and sunset, Gerin spied the winged eye he sought. "I'd have guessed it'd be there," Van said. "You steal it, you're fooling with a god, and what man with a dram of sense does that?"

"How many men have sense?" Gerin returned, which made his comrade grunt. He added, "Not only that, how many are wise enough to realize they're stealing from Biton and not just from some petty lordlet?"

"They don't know beforehand, they'll find out pretty soon," Van said, which was likely enough to be true that Gerin had to nod. The farseeing god looked after what was his.

The wagon swung east down the road that led to the Sibyl and her fane. Gerin remembered the lands away from the Elabon Way as poorer than the baronies along the main north-south route. They didn't seem so now. That wasn't because they'd grown richer. Rather, the holdings along the chief highway had suffered more from the Trokmoi and from the nobles' squabbles among themselves.

When Elabon conquered and held the northlands, the road that bore the Empire's name had also been one of the chief routes along which colonists had settled. Farther from the Elabon Way, the folk native to the land were more in evidence. They were dark like Elabonians, but slimmer and more angular, their faces full of forehead and cheekbones.

Old customs lingered away from the highway, too. Lords' castles grew scarce; most of the peasant villages held freeholders, men who owed no part of their crop to a baron. Gerin wondered how they'd fared when Trokmê raiders swooped down on them: they had no lords to ride to their defense, either.

The freeholders measured him and Van with their eyes when the travelers paused in a village to buy a hen before evening caught them. "You're for the Sibyl, then?" asked the man who sold it to them. His Elabonian had a curious flavor to it, not quite an accent, but old-fashioned, as if currents of speech had swept up the Elabon Way, too, but never reached this little hamlet.

"That we are," Gerin answered.

"You've rich gear," the peasant observed. "Be you nobles?"

Van spoke first: "Me, I'm just a warrior. Anyone who tries taking this corselet off my back will find out what kind of warrior I am, and won't be happier for knowing, either."

"I can take care of myself, too," Gerin said. Peasants without lords had to defend themselves, which meant they needed weapons and armor. Robbing people who already had them seemed a likely way to acquire such.

If that was in the peasant's mind, he didn't let on (but then, he wouldn't, Gerin thought). He said, "Aye, the both of you have that look. Go on, then, and the gods watch over you through the night."

As soon as they were out of earshot, Gerin spoke to Van, who was driving: "Put as much space between that village and us as you can. If you find a side road just before sunset, go up it or down it a ways. We'll want to camp where we can hide our nightfire."