In order to accommodate the influx of recruits drawn by rumors of war, the tables were butted end to end. They were clear of food, now, and the night's serious drinking had begun.
Hansen squeezed the shoulders of the men to either side of him, Malcolm and Maharg; muttered, "Wish me luck"; and ducked under the trestles to reach the service walkway between tables and hearth.
"Hey!" called one of his fellows. A husky woman with pitchers in either hand stopped so abruptly that some of her beer sloshed, but Hansen strode directly toward Golsingh at the crosstable.
He'd learned by now that Taddeusz wasn't going to permit an underling—particularly Hansen—to approach the king if he could help it. With the table between them, the warchief couldn't prevent the contact, unless he was willing to lower himself and his dignity by crawling under the trestles the way Hansen had done.
Malcolm sat less than a third of the way down the left bench now. Most of the recruits were gutter-sweepings, not respectable warriors. Good warriors were going elsewhere. That was one of the things Hansen had learned in talking with Malcolm and his fellows.
Servants fluttered out of Hansen's way. At the head table, Unn and Krita stared at him. The face of Taddeusz' daughter was flushed from the hearth, but Unn's pale skin was perfect except for a smudge of ash on her forehead.
Krita smiled, filled a square-bottomed cup of mammoth ivory, and handed it to Hansen without a word. He took it, startled out of his focus on what he was about to say to the king.
"Ah, Your Highness," he blurted.
"That's the servants' side of the table!" Taddeusz snarled. He'd started to rise when his daughter offered the cup to Hansen, but his chair and the table trammeled the abrupt action. He fell back. "Get out of there—and away from here!"
"I am His highness' servant," Hansen said, thinking of what he'd told Walker and smiling inside at his own duplicity.
But—he didn't trust the squirrel/titmouse/crow, and he didn't understand enough about what Walker was trying to do to protect himself. Hansen thought he understood Golsingh—and the other factors in this equation—well enough, certainly better than the actors did themselves.
Which didn't mean that Hansen was safe. Just that he knew the name of the lion into whose jaws he was sticking his head.
"Sir," he said, looking at the king and ignoring the way Taddeusz twisted his chair sideways so that he could get up, "if you'll let me talk with you, I can serve you better. Maybe—"
He bobbed his beard-stubbled chin toward the warchief with "—better than anybody else. Which may be why they're afraid of letting me talk."
"You—" Taddeusz bellowed, lifting his goblet of silver-mounted rock crystal. He might have thrown it, except that Krita stepped between her father and Hansen.
"Sit down, foster father," Golsingh said. Taddeusz remained frozen in a posture of agonized fury.
"Sit down!" cracked the king's voice.
"Yes, milord," Taddeusz muttered. He sank down as if in a state of exhaustion.
"Milord," said Hansen, wondering what the other warriors in the hall were making of this, "your father and your father's father were kings, but they didn't rule further than their armies could march in three days—and that only when their armies were marching. Is that correct?"
"We have the submission of a hundred lords!" Taddeusz snapped. "You're talking nonsense!"
"And those hundred lords fight each other, one pair or another of them every day, every year. They'll send you tribute, and they'll send a message of congratulation when you win a victory, but they won't send troops to join yours when you march—"
"Some—" said Golsingh with a frown.
"—unless you're marching by their keep on the way, with enough force to burn the place around their ears," Hansen continued, speaking with the same brutal frankness that had gathered him enemies regularly during his decade in Consensus bureaucracy.
That had its advantages too. His enemies had made sure Hansen was sent where it was hot; and, since he'd survived, he'd been promoted rapidly into the shoes of officers who hadn't.
"Do you want tribute and the name?" Hansen said. "Or do you really want peace—Golsingh the Peacegiver?"
The warchief shook his head in frustration. "The business of a king is war," he said. "And power. Milord, it's unkingly—unmanly, I'd almost say—to talk of imposing peace. The gods don't approve."
Golsingh's youthful features hardened. "I'm king here," he said sharply to his foster father. "The gods can rule in their heavens, but—"
He turned to face Hansen. His face was suffused with a hot passion not so very different from what roiled unseen in Hansen's mind.
"Yes," Golsingh said, "it's peace I want. A peace in which a man—a woman!—can walk from one end of my kingdom to the other and never be molested. A peace in which a purse can lie in the center of the road for a year and no one will steal it. That's what I want!"
Taddeusz got up. "My son," he said, "you're tempting the gods. I hope you think better of your words before it's too late."
The warchief's voice was firm with sadness and anger, but he was no longer trying to shout down the discussion. Taddeusz stalked out of the hall, his felt boots cushioning the beat of his heels on the puncheon floor.
Krita turned to watch him go. Hansen had been aware of the warmth of her body ever since she'd interposed between him and her father, although she'd moved a step away afterwards.
Hansen swallowed the beer in his cup with a surge of thirst and reaction.
"Milord," he said, "then the way isn't to fight each lordling who defies you. You've got to take Frekka, make it your capital, and use the trading wealth to build an army that—"
"Frekka?" said Golsingh. "Frekka? Don't be silly. My ancestors have lived at Peace Rock for generations, and—"
"Sir, your—"
"—and besides," Golsingh continued in his royal voice, "Frekka is already a part of the kingdom."
"Then why is the shipment of armor you're expecting—you need—for your expedition delayed?" Hansen retorted sharply. "And why are the merchants of Frekka paying subsidies under the table to whichever of your barons looks least trustworthy?"
"You don't know that!" Golsingh snapped.
"Everybody knows that," Hansen said with flat brutality. "We have the choice of pretending not to believe the report of every traveler who's come from Thrasey or Frekka in the past month. But we don't have the option of not knowing it."
"Why would they do that?" the king said in a suddenly gentler voice.
He set down the cup he'd been playing with and kneaded his cheeks with the fingers of both hands. "I'll give them safe roads for their commerce. That's one of the main things that I want for the kingdom, for everyone."
"You'll give them a king they have to obey," Hansen said simply. "The caravans from Frekka are safe enough on the roads now."
"But they have to hire guards to—" Golsingh protested. He caught himself. "Oh."
"Yeah," said Hansen. "That's what I've heard, too. That the Syndics of Frekka have more warriors in their hire now than you do."
He started to drink, remembered that he'd finished the beer in his mug—and found it full again. Unn smiled coldly and bobbed the silver pitcher in her hand.
"The Frekka merchants want the same sort of kingdom as you do, Lord Golsingh," Hansen said. "The only thing is, they want to be the rulers of it."
"Did you come here from Frekka, then?" Unn asked unexpectedly.
Hansen looked at her. "No, milady," he said. "I came from much farther away than that. And—"
He swigged beer in order to settle his thoughts before he finished the statement. "And I think it helps to come from a distance, sometimes, when you look at a problem."
Unn leaned forward to fill her husband's agate cup. There was nothing in her expression to suggest that she'd heard or spoken in the past moments.
"Lord Golsingh," Hansen said earnestly. "Give me five men of my choosing for the battle against Thrasey. Tell them to do exactly what I say for the next two days of training, and the same in the battle. And I'll win the battle for you."
"Don't be absurd!" Golsingh snapped with more anger than the request itself involved. "I'll do nothing of the sort. A nothing like you, with no pedigree and no war honors anybody's heard of!"
I asked him to do something that even he can't order these stiff-necked warriors to do and be obeyed, Hansen realized.
"And anyway . . . ," Golsingh added in a very different voice. "Even if I were to—do what you suggest. You'd never . . ."
The king looked down at his hands, then up so that he faced Krita but watched Hansen out of the corners of his eyes. "You'd never be able to do what you say. Would you?"
Hansen smiled his dragon smile at Golsingh. "One of these days, milord," he said, "you and I are going to find a way for you to give me what I want . . . and then I'll give you the kingdom you want."
He turned to go back to his seat, then turned again. "That's if we both live long enough, milord," he added.
Golsingh's face was expressionless. But Krita was smiling ferally . . . and so was Unn.