King of the North by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575121003
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-28T21:00:00+00:00

“There it is.” Gerin breathed a great sigh of relief. Fox Keep still stood; the land around it hadn’t been disturbed since the last Gradi raid. He thought he would have heard of any catastrophe as he traveled through his own holding, but you could never be sure. Sometimes the only way you found news was by stumbling over it.

The lookout in the watchtower was alert. Gerin heard, thin in the distance, the horn call he blew to alert the garrison to the approach of the army. Armed men popped up on the palisade with commendable speed.

“Ride out ahead,” the Fox said, tapping Duren on the shoulder. “We’ll let them know we came through in one piece.” He’d hoped to be coming back in triumph. That hadn’t happened. He’d feared coming back in defeat, perhaps with a force of fierce Gradi in pursuit. That hadn’t happened, either. Had he won, then, or had he lost? If he didn’t know himself, how was he supposed to tell anybody else?

Someone up on the wall shouted, “It’s the Fox!” The warriors cheered. They didn’t know what he’d done, any more than he knew what had gone on here. As he had been after the earthquake that toppled Biton’s shrine, he was on the outermost ripple of spreading news.

“All well, lord prince?” Rihwin the Fox called down to him.

“All well—enough,” Gerin answered. “And you? And the keep? And the holding? How has the weather been?”

“You go off to war and you ask about the weather?” Rihwin demanded. When Gerin only nodded, the southern noble who’d chosen to come to the northlands spread his hands in confusion. At last, pierced by his overlord’s stare, he answered, “Weather’s not been bad. On the cool side, and more rain than I remember most summers, but not bad. Why? How was the weather farther west?”

“Well, let’s see—how do I put it?” Gerin mused. “If it weren’t for the sleet’s getting me prepared, I would have liked the hail even less than I did.” That drew all the incredulous comments he’d thought it would. He waved impatiently. “Let down the drawbridge and we’ll tell you what went on.”

The drawbridge lowered. Duren drove the chariot into the keep. The rest of the force followed. Questions rained down on them: “Did we beat the Gradi?” “Did the Gradi beat us?” “Is Adiatunnus ally or traitor?” “Will we go back out on campaign again this season?”

Gerin answered abstractedly, for Selatre was waiting for him in the courtyard with their children. Seeing her and them reminded Gerin he had indeed come home. Seeing her also reminded him she’d been the intimate of a god, even if Biton was in many ways Mavrix’s opposite. He wanted to talk with her before summoning—or trying to summon; you never could tell with gods—the Sithonian deity.

Before he could talk with his wife, though, he had to keep on answering questions and to deal with what seemed like everything that had happened at Fox Keep while he was away on campaign.

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