"What do I care?" Ferdulf stood on his head, supported by exactly nothing. His voice was not a four-year-old's, but the same rude, rich baritone he'd had since he was a newborn babe.

Marlanz said, "Lord king, will you please tell me what's going on here?" He took Geroge and Tharma in stride; he'd met them before. Ferdulf, however, was new to him. Like most men in the northlands, he viewed the new with suspicion.

Gerin didn't, in most cases. With Ferdulf, he made an exception. Trying to sound casual, he answered, "That's Mavrix's son by Fulda, a peasant woman here. Now do you understand?"

For a moment, Marlanz didn't. Then he did, and his eyes got wide. "Mavrix?" He tried his best to imitate Gerin's flat, unemphatic tones, but didn't have much luck. "The Sithonian god of wine?" Calm crumbled into astonishment: "You've got a god's get here, lord king?"

"Yes, the little bastard," Gerin said, which, in dealing-or trying to deal-with Ferdulf, had proved true in any number of ways.

Dagref plucked at his father's sleeve. "I brought you out here so you could do something about him," he said pointedly. "The last time he started going around up in the air this way, he piddled on all of us, and I wanted to see if we could keep that from happening again." The glare he gave the Fox said his father's reliability had just come down a peg for him.

"What exactly do you want me to do?" Gerin asked in some exasperation. "I can't lean a ladder against the air, the way I would against the palisade." He cast a cautious eye up toward Ferdulf's little pecker. Mavrix's get had divine powers and a four-year-old's sense of humor; the Fox was hard pressed to imagine a more terrifying combination.

Dagref took a deep breath. "If you don't come down from there this instant," he told Ferdulf, "none of the rest of us is going to play with you for a long time." His voice broke in the middle of the threat, so he didn't sound so fierce as he might have, but he did sound as if he meant what he said. He always sounded as if he meant what he said. He gestured to his comrades. Clotild and Blestar nodded. So did Maeva and Kor. And, a beat late, so did Geroge and Tharma.