"You'll curb him before it comes to that," Selatre said confidently. She had more confidence in Gerin, sometimes, than he had in himself.

"The gods grant you're right," he said.

From Fox Keep, the land sloped down to the Niffet a few furlongs away. Gerin drilled his vassals on the expanse of grass and bushes where sheep and cattle usually grazed. Some of the warriors grumbled at that. Drungo Drago's son complained, "This practicing is a silly notion, lord prince. We go off, we find the cursed Trokmoi, and we smash 'em into the ground. Nothing to worry about in any of that." He folded massive arms across a wide chest.

"You're your father come again," Gerin said. Drungo beamed, but Gerin had not meant it altogether as a compliment. Drago the Bear had been strong and brave, but up to the day he clutched his chest and keeled over dead he'd not been long on thought.

"Aye," several men said together. "Turn us loose on the Trokmoi. We'll take care of what happens next."

"You practice with the bow, don't you?" the Fox asked them. They nodded. He tried again: "You practice with the spear and the sword, too?" More nods. He did his best to drive the lesson home: "You practice in your chariots, I expect, so you can do the best job of fighting from them?" When he got still more nods, he bellowed, "Then why in the five hells don't you want to practice with a whole swarm of chariots together?"

He should have known better than to expect logic to have anything to do with their answer. Drungo said, "On account of we already know how to do that, on account of we've all been in a bunch of fights already."

"Brawls," Gerin said scornfully. "Every car for itself, every man for himself. The woodsrunners fight the same way. If we have an idea of what we're going to do before we do it, we'll have a better chance of winning than if we make it up as we go along. And besides"?he pointed off to the right wing? "we'll be trying something new on this campaign."

"Yes, and those fools on horses' backs aren't worth anything, either," Drungo said, eloquently dubious, as his gaze followed the Fox's finger.

"You are your father's son," Gerin told him, feeling old. Sixteen years ago now, back before the werenight, Drago had mocked Duin the Bold, claiming the art of equitation was more trouble than it would ever be worth. They'd almost brawled then. Now Gerin was going to find out whether Duin had known what he was talking about.

When his overlord pointed to him, Rihwin the Fox waved from the stallion on whose back he perched. He led a couple of dozen mounted men, most of them only half his age. His years were the main reason Gerin, halfway against his better judgment, had placed him in command of the riders. With luck, he would have more sense than the hotheads he led, but he was also living proof that experience did not necessarily bring maturity.

"We'll try another practice charge," Gerin said to Drungo. "Maybe you'll see what I'm driving at." He had thought about giving up the chariot himself and going over to riding a horse, but his long partnership with Van and their driver Raffo had kept him in the car.

He brought down his arm. The chariots jounced across the meadow in a line less ragged than it had been a few days before. And over on the right flank, the horses moved faster than any team hauling car and warriors both. They also made their way without effort over ground that would surely have made a chariot flip over. Rihwin even leaped his horse across a gully: you would have had to be mad to urge a team to try such a stunt (which might not have deterred Rihwin, but would have given anyone else pause).

"There," Gerin said when the exercise was over. "Do the lot of you think this business of riding horses may have something to it after all?"

Again, Drungo spoke for the conservative majority, just as Drago had in his day: "Maybe a small something, lord prince, but no more than that. Horses for scouts and for flank attacks: aye, I'll give you so much. But it's the chariots that'll finish the foe."

As he was still fighting from a chariot himself, Gerin could not very well argue with that. In fact, he more or less agreed. Having stood up against a chariot charge, he knew how it turned opponents' blood to water and their bones to gelatin. The drum of the hooves, the rattle and bang of the cars as they thundered down on you, the fierce cries of the warriors standing upright in them, weapons ready to hand… If you could stand up against such without quailing, you were a man indeed. Cavalry alone would not be nearly so fearsome.

What he said, then, was, "We will be using the cavalry on the flanks, to disrupt the charge our foes try to make against us. We've not done that before, not in war. That's why I've been bringing us out here the past few days: so we could see how it would go, see how the flank chariots need to stick close to the riders and how the riders can't get too far out in front of the chariotry?"

"Well, why didn't you say so, lord prince?" Drungo demanded.

The Fox couldn't decided whether to throttle his literal-minded vassal or merely to pound his own head against the side rail of his car. By Drungo's self-righteous tones, the notion that they had been out there for any reason save Gerin's perverse obstinacy had till that moment not penetrated his thick skull and actually reached his brain.

After a long sigh, the Fox said, "We'll try it again, this time charging down toward the Niffet. If the woodsrunners on the north side are peering across, as they likely are, we'll give them something new to think on, too."

They pounded down toward the Niffet, as he'd ordered, and then, after a pause to let the horses rest, back up toward Fox Keep. The men on the palisade there gave them a cheer. Gerin took that as a good omen. Very often, looking bloodthirsty was a sign you would fight well.

"You know something, Fox?" Van said as Raffo drove the chariot at a slow walk toward the drawbridge. "By the time Duren's son is the big man here, most of his warriors will be on horseback, and they'll listen to the minstrels' old songs about chariot battles and wonder why the singers couldn't get it right."

"D'you think so?" Gerin said. Van's big head bobbed up and down. That surprised Gerin; in matters military, the outlander was for the most part as conservative as Drungo. "Well, you may be right, but I'd bet on the bards to change their tunes by then."

He thought about what he'd just said, then shook his head. "No, I take that back. You're likelier to be right than I am. The minstrels have a whole great store of stock phrases and lines about chariots, same as they do about keeps and love and everything else you can think of. If they have to start singing about horses instead of chariots, their verses won't scan."

"And most of 'em, being lazy as everybody else, won't have the wit to come up with anything new on their own, so we'll hear the same songs a bit longer yet, aye." Van cocked his head to one side, studying the Fox. "Not everybody would up and own he was wrong like that."

"What's the point to defending a position you can't hold?" Gerin asked. Put that way, it made sense to the outlander. He nodded again, jumped down from the chariot, and headed into Castle Fox afoot.

Gerin let Raffo drive him into the stables. There, his lungs full of the green, grassy smell of horse manure, he said to Rihwin, "You did well in the practice. I want to see how well your lads fare at charging home with the spear and at archery from horseback, too."

"I'd not care to be a man afoot trying to stand against me when I have a leaf-pointed spear of shining bronze aimed at his belly," Rihwin replied, sounding a bit like a bard himself. "Riding him down or putting the point through his vitals should be no harder than gigging trout from a stream."