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  The Scepter_s Return

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  Dan Chernenko

  The Scepter_s Return

  DAN CHERNENKO

  CHAPTER ONE

  Down in the southern part of the Kingdom of Avornis, spring had come some little while before. It was just now reaching the capital. The city of Avornis had had a long, hard winter. It wasn't as bad as it could have been – the Banished One hadn't tried to bury the city in snow and ice, as he had a few years earlier – but no one who'd been through it would have called it mild.

  Today, King Lanius was glad to be able to leave the royal palace without a hooded fur cloak that reached down to the ground and sturdy felt boots with wool socks inside them to keep his toes from freezing. His breath still smoked when he did go out, but the icicles had melted from under the eaves of steep-pitched slate roofs and all the snow was gone from the streets, leaving those that weren't cobblestoned (which was most of them) calf-deep in stinking mud.

  A few of the oaks and maples around the palace showed the buds that foretold new leaves. Some of the season's earliest birds perched in the mostly bare branches. The songs they sang sounded relieved and perhaps a little surprised; as though they too had trouble believing winter might be over.

  Prince Crex and Princess Pitta, Lanius' son and daughter, stood beside him. They were happier to get out of the palace than he was. Snowball fights and snowmen were all very well, but they'd had to spend most of the winter indoors, and that had chafed at them. If the smell from those nearby muddy streets bothered them, they didn't show it.

  Pitta pointed to one of the birds in the closest oak. "What kind is that, Father?" she asked, confident Lanius would know. People were always confident Lanius knew any number of small, mostly useless things. They were usually right, too.

  "The one on that second branch there?" he asked, squinting toward it – he was a bit shortsighted. His daughter nodded. He said, "That's a goldfinch."

  "How come it isn't gold, then?" Crex asked.

  And Lanius knew that, too. "They're only gold in the later spring and the summer and the first part of fall," he answered. "The rest of the time, they're this sort of greenish yellow color. But you can tell what they are by the song they sing." He whistled a few notes of it, not very well.

  He wondered if Crex would ask why the birds were gold only half the time. He would have, when he was a boy. But he'd always been wildly inquisitive about everything. He still was. Crex – and Pitta, too – had only ordinary children's curiosity.

  He smiled down at them with a strange blend of affection and exasperation. Most ways, they took after their mother's side of the family, not his. Queen Sosia was King Grus' daughter, and Grus was as practical and hardheaded a man as had ever been born. Lanius did not like his father-in-law very much. How could he, when Grus had grafted his family onto Avornis' ancient royal dynasty and held in his own hands most of the royal power? That Grus' hands were extremely capable made matters no better. If anything, it made them worse.

  Crex and Pitta even took after that side of the family in their looks. They were solidly made, where Lanius was tall and on the scrawny side. His beard had always been scraggly. Crex didn't have one yet, of course, but Lanius was ready to bet it would come in thick and luxuriant, like Grus'.

  The children looked more like their mother than they did like him, too. Lanius laughed at himself. That wasn't so bad. He was ordinary at best, while Sosia was a nice-looking woman. Her brother, Prince Ortalis, was darkly handsome. Ortalis' problems lay elsewhere. In looks, he and Sosia both resembled Grus' wife, Queen Estrilda. The one who looked like Grus, all nose and chin, was his bastard boy, the Arch-Hallow Anser. Yet Anser was as good-natured as Grus was tough. You never could tell.

  "I'll bet the moncats would like climbing the trees," Crex said.

  Lanius laughed again, this time out loud. "I'll bet they would, too," he said. "And I'll bet they'd get away if we ever gave them the chance. That's why they stay inside the palace, and mostly inside their rooms."

  Mostly. They were supposed to stay in their rooms all the time. The Chernagors had brought him his first pair of moncats from an island somewhere in the Northern Sea. The beasts were much like house cats, except that they had clawed, gripping hands and feet like a monkey's – hence the name they'd gotten here. They also added a monkey's sharp cleverness to a cat's unreliability. Lanius sometimes thought it was a good thing they'd never figured out the bow and arrow, or they might be the ones keeping people caged up.

  Pitta echoed that thought, asking, "How does Pouncer keep getting away all the time, Father?"

  "If I knew, sweetheart, he wouldn't do it anymore." Lanius was a thoughtful as well as an honest man. After a moment, he shook his head. "I take it back. He wouldn't do it that way anymore. He'd probably figure out some other way pretty soon, though."

  Even by moncat standards, Pouncer was a pest. Somewhere in the room where he was kept, he'd found a secret way out. There were ways through the palace, too, ways too small for a man to use but perfect for a moncat. Pouncer would hunt mice in the royal archives and sometimes give them to Lanius as prizes. He would show up in the kitchens, too. Sometimes he stole food. More often, though, he ran off with silverware. Lanius had never figured out why – probably because the moncat was inherently a nuisance. He was particularly fond of big, heavy silver serving spoons. Maybe he planned to pawn them to pay for his getaway. That made as much sense as anything else Lanius had come up with.

  "I can climb a tree like a moncat," Crex said, and started for the nearest one. It was an old oak; its branches didn't begin until well above the level of Lanius' head. Crex might have been able to get up into them anyway. He was much more agile than his father had been at the same age. Whether he could come down after going up was a different question.

  Lanius didn't try to tell him that. It would have made no sense to him. What the king did say was, "Oh, no, you don't, not in your robes. Your mother and the washerwomen will scream at you if you tear them up and get them all filthy."

  "Oh, Father!" Crex sounded as disgusted as only a small boy could.

  "No," Lanius said. Crex didn't care if Sosia and the washerwomen yelled at him. But they wouldn't yell just at him. They'd yell at Lanius, too, for letting Crex get his clothes filthy. That was the last thing Lanius wanted. There were times when a king was a lot less powerful than his subjects imagined him to be.

  King Grus knew he would never make a wizard. That didn't keep him from watching as Pterocles shaped a spell. Nor did it keep Pterocles from explaining as he worked. The wizard, a man who wore his breeches and tunic as though he'd fallen into them, liked to hear himself talk.

  "Spells of foretelling have their risks," Pterocles said.

  "The biggest one is, they're liable to be wrong," Grus put in.

  Pterocles laughed. "Yes, there is that," he agreed. "But that mostly depends on how the magic is interpreted. The principle underlying the spell is sound. It is based on the law of similarity. The future is commonly similar to the present, for the present is what it springs from."

  "Fair enough," Grus said. "If you can, then, tell me whether the Menteshe will go on with their civil war this summer."

  "I'll do my best," the wizard answered. When he laughed again, much of the mirth had leaked from his voice. "The Banished One is probably trying to see the same thing."

  Grus granted. That was too true for comfort. Civilized folk, led by the King of Avornis, worshiped King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens. Centuries before, the gods had cast the Banished One out of the heavens and down to the material world below. He still burned to resume his place and take his revenge, and the
Menteshe nomads in the south gave him reverence instead of Olor and Quelea and the other gods. Here in the material world, the Banished One was something less than a god. But he was much, much more than a man.

  "If you find your magic vying with his, break yours off and get away," Grus said.

  "You don't need to worry about that, Your Majesty," Pterocles said feelingly. "I will. I'd be lucky to come off second best in a meeting like that. I'd be lucky to come off at all."

  He set three silver coins on the table in front of him. One was minted by Prince Ulash, who for many years had been the strongest Menteshe chieftain. Ulash, a man of courage and intelligence, would have been dangerous even without the Banished One's backing. With it, he'd been doubly so, or more than that.

  The other two coins were shinier and more recent. They'd been struck by Sanjar and Korkut, Ulash's sons. Neither prince was willing to see the other succeed their father. They'd been fighting each other for years now, and the Menteshe to either side had joined in the war – at least as much to plunder what had been Ulash's realm as for any other reason.

  Both Sanjar and Korkut had even appealed to Avornis for aid. That was a pleasant novelty for Grus; the Menteshe were more in the habit of raiding Avornis than appealing to her. The spectacle must have infuriated the Banished One, but not even he seemed able to stop the nomads from squabbling among themselves.

  Pterocles put Sanjar's and Korkut's coins on top of Ulash's so that their edges touched. He sprinkled a little dirt over them. "Dirt from the south bank of the Stura," he told Grus. The Stura was the last of the Nine Rivers that cut across the rolling plains of southern Avornis from east to west. Its southern bank was not Avornan territory at all, but belonged to the Menteshe.

  To Grus, the dirt looked like… dirt. He didn't say anything. He trusted Pterocles to know what he was doing. So far, the wizard had earned that trust. Pterocles began to chant. The spell started out in modern Avornan, but quickly changed to the old fashioned language only priests, wizards, and scholars like Lanius used these days.

  As he chanted, the dirt began to swirl and writhe above the coins, as if caught up in one of the dust storms so common in the lands the Menteshe ruled. The coins struck by Sanjar and Korkut sprang up on their edges and started spinning. Round and round they went, faster and faster.

  "Does that mean they're going to keep fighting?" Grus asked. Without missing a word or a pass, Pterocles nodded.

  Suddenly, it seemed to Grus that three coins were spinning on the tabletop. He thought Ulash's silverpiece had gotten up from where it lay to join the dance, but it was still there. He wondered if his eyes had started playing tricks on him.

  Pterocles' incantation slowed. So did the spinning coins – and there were three of them. The dirt and dust that had floated above the table settled back to its surface. Sanjar's coin and Korkut's settled down on top of Ulash's so that their edges touched once more.

  The last coin, the one that appeared to have come out of nowhere, wobbled over and lay down covering parts of Sanjar's, Korkut's, and Ulash's. Pterocles raised his hands above his head. He fell silent. The spell was over.

  Grus picked up that last coin. No Menteshe had minted it. His own craggy features, stamped in silver, stared back at him from the palm of his hand. He held the Avornan silverpiece out to Pterocles. The wizard stared at it. "Olor's beard!" he muttered. "I never thought – "

  "Does this mean we're going to get mixed up in the fighting south of the Stura this year?" Grus asked.

  More unhappily than otherwise, Pterocles nodded. "I can't see how it could mean anything else, Your Majesty. It wasn't part of the sorcery I planned. Where it came from…" He gathered himself. "Sometimes the magic does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do."

  "Does it?" Grus said tonelessly. He looked at the image of himself, there on his palm. "Is the magic telling us that we ought to get mixed up in the nomads' civil war, or just that we will get mixed up in it?"

  "That we will, Your Majesty," the wizard answered. "You may take that as certain – or as certain as anything magic can point out. Whether we will become involved in a big way or a small one, whether good or bad will come from whatever we do – whatever you do – I can't begin to say."

  "If I order my men to move against the Chernagor city-states in the north instead – " Grus began.

  "Something will happen to make us fight in the south anyway," Pterocles broke in. "You're bound to leave garrisons down by the Stura, to beat back whatever Menteshe raiders come over the border. Maybe some of your men will chase after the nomads. Maybe it will turn out to be something else. But we will meet Korkut's men, and Sanjar's, on land that once belonged to Ulash. So much, I would say, is clear."

  "And will we win?" Grus kept looking at the coin he held. "My silverpiece came out on top, after all."

  "I'd like to say yes, Your Majesty," Pterocles answered. "I'd like to, but I won't. I simply don't know."

  "All right. I'd rather have an honest answer than a lie trotted out to make me feel good… I suppose." Grus laughed. He supposed that was funny, too. But then the laughter froze on his lips. "If the Banished One is trying to look ahead, too, he'll see the same thing, won't he?"

  "If he doesn't, Your Majesty, I'd be astonished," Pterocles said.

  "Huzzah," Grus said somberly. Fighting against the Menteshe south of the Stura would be hard enough anyway. No Avornan army had successfully pushed south for more than four hundred years. How much harder would it be if the Banished One knew the Avornans were coming ahead of time? Well, we'll find out.

  Beaters and royal bodyguards surrounded King Lanius, Prince Ortalis, and Arch-Hallow Anser as they rode out of the city of Avornis to hunt. Chainmail jingled on the guardsmen. The beaters – Anser's men – wore leather, either left brown or dyed green. They looked like a pack of poachers. If they hadn't served the chief prelate of the Kingdom of Avornis, most of them probably would have been in prison.

  Anser cared more about the hunt than he did about the gods. Grus' bastard son always had. But he was unshakably loyal to the man who'd sired him. To Grus, that counted for more than religious zeal. And Anser, along with being unshakably loyal, was also unshakably good-natured. There had been worse arch-hallows, though Lanius wouldn't have thought so when Grus made the appointment.

  "Well, let's see how we do today," Anser said, smiling in the sunshine. "Maybe you'll make another kill, Your Majesty."

  "Maybe I will." Lanius hoped he didn't sound too unenthusiastic. He didn't care for the hunt, and went out every now and again only to keep from disappointing Anser. No one wanted to do that. Lanius always shot to miss. He was anything but a good archer. Not so long before, he'd hit a stag altogether without intending to.

  "Venison. Boar. Even squirrel." Ortalis sounded enthusiastic enough for himself and Lanius at the same time. Grus' legitimate son liked the meat the hunt brought in. He also liked killing the meat in the hunt. He liked killing very much. If he killed animals, he didn't need the thrill of hurting – or killing – people so much.

  Of course, Bubulcus was still dead. Lanius' obstreperous servant had outrageously insulted Ortalis. People often thought outrageous insults reason enough to kill a man. And it did seem that Ortalis had killed in a fit of fury, not for the sport of it. All the same, he remained far too fond of blood for Lanius' taste.

  The woods that served as a royal game preserve were a couple of hours' ride outside the city of Avornis. The hunting party hadn't gone a quarter of that distance before Lanius took a deep breath and said, "By the gods, it's good to get away from the capital for a while."

  Anser and Ortalis both nodded. So did the guards and beaters. Anser said, "The clean air would be reason enough to come hunting even without the chase."

  "Almost reason enough," Ortalis said.

  When they got to the woods, the new leaves uncurling from their buds were a brighter, lighter green than they would be once they'd been out for a while. Lanius pointed to them. "That's the color of s
pring," he said.

  "You're right," Ortalis said. They nodded to each other. In the palace, they didn't get on well. That wasn't just because of Ortalis' streak of bloodlust, either. Grus' legitimate son wanted to be King of Avornis himself one day, and to have the crown pass to his sons and not Lanius'. At the moment, he had no sons, only a toddler daughter. But who could say how long that would last?

  Here in the woods, differences of rank and ambition fell away. Lanius swung down off his horse. He rubbed his hindquarters when he did; he was not a man who made a habit of riding. Anser laughed at him. The arch-hallow loved horses only less than hunting. Even Anser's mockery was good-natured. What would have been infuriating from Ortalis only made Lanius laugh, too, when Grus' bastard did it.

  Why couldn't they have been reversed? Lanius wondered. I would never have to worry about a usurpation from Anser. And Ortalis – Ortalis would have made an arch-hallow to set evildoers trembling in their boots. Things were as they were, though, not as would have been convenient for him. He knew that only too well. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been a small, oft-captured piece in the great Avornan political game for so much of his life.

  Carrying bows and quivers, he and Ortalis and Anser went in among the trees. The beaters spread out to drive game their way. Some of the guards accompanied Anser's raffish crew. Others stayed with the king, the prince, and the prelate. Lanius' boots scuffed through the gray-brown rotting leaves that had fallen the autumn before. Try as he would, he couldn't move quietly. Ortalis was far better at it. As for Anser, he might have been a poacher himself by the way he silently slid along.

  A squirrel jeered at them from high in a tree. Ortalis started to reach for an arrow, then checked the motion. "No point to it," he said. "I'd never hit him up there, not shooting through all those branches."

  One of the royal guards who'd gone on ahead came pounding back. Anser winced at the racket he made. The guards, however, refused to let Lanius go off without them. If that hurt Anser's hunting, they didn't care. This one said, "There's a nice clearing up ahead."