Ser Beornric got it first.

  “Ah,” he said. “You figure if the smell of gold is that strong to them, then they may dig some up overnight.”

  “Exactly,” Aefric said.

  “And if we check in the morning and they’re gone?” Ser Yrsa asked.

  “Then they’re gone,” Aefric said with a shrug. “I meant it when I said they were free to choose where they wanted to go. If they want to dig their way back to some underground society, then I’ll wish them godspeed.”

  Aefric smirked. “I admit, though. If they can smell gold — and maybe other precious metals — they might be handy to have around. Even the na’shek can’t do that.”

  “Bed then?” Ser Yrsa asked.

  “Bed,” Aefric said, and they returned to camp and made ready to get at least a few hours sleep before sunrise.

  Aefric hoped he’d be able to return to that dream about Maev. Or perhaps one of Byrhta. He hadn’t seen her in at least three aetts. He hoped she and Vercy were doing well down in Riverbreak.

  And Maev. He hadn’t heard from Maev in almost as long. She was still off in the kingdom of Varondam, forging an alliance. Possibly through marriage. That was certainly her father’s plan, and undoubtedly Varondam’s plan as well.

  It wasn’t Maev’s plan, the last Aefric had heard. What was it she called King Dalius in that letter? Ah, yes. A fop, with fewer scars than she had.

  Made Aefric wonder about Maev’s scars. He’d never seen any that were more significant than a couple of scratches on the back of her left hand. And she didn’t have any scars at all on her face, or neck, or arms…

  Aefric smiled, imagining getting the chance to go looking for those scars as he shifted about in his bedroll, seeking more comfort. It could be fun for the two of them to take some time and really explore each other’s scars…

  He felt guilty about his feelings there. Maev was a princess. Her marrying King Dalius — fop or not — would be good for Armyr. A solid alliance that would functionally surround the kingdom of Malimfar, who’d already tried to invade Armyr once this year.

  Truth was, the marriage might be good for Maev, as well. She would be queen of Varondam. And from the way she spoke of King Dalius, she could probably become the true ruler of that country.

  It was an excellent opportunity for her.

  But as he fell asleep, Aefric found his thoughts turning not to the women in his life, but to the other thing he’d learned tonight. Quite possibly the point Ser Beornric had intended to raise, before the conversation ran away from him.

  One of those caves where Po’rek had smelled gold had been on the north side.

  The Dragonscar was edge of Aefric’s land. North of the Dragonscar was the duchy of Silverlake.

  If Po’rek’s nose was right about the gold, did Aefric have the right to mine that north side cave? Did he have a responsibility to discuss the matter with Duke Wylyn of Silverlake? Did he need to present the question to King Colm for judgment, before taking action either way?

  Considering the possibilities there kept him awake much longer than he wanted to be…

  Dawn in the Dragonscar the next morning didn’t prove to be much warmer than the previous midnight.

  That wind from off the Risen Sea never let up down here. It had become such a constant that Aefric had begun noticing secondary smells, underneath the sea smell itself.

  Dust. Aefric was definitely beginning to notice the smell of dust from the chasm. But nothing green, and nothing pleasant.

  Well, the smell of that roast chicken stew being heated up for breakfast was pleasant.

  In general though, between the constant winds, the stark rocks, and distinct lack of green, this would truly be a miserable place to live.

  He hoped that the miners would find some way to mitigate those problems, when the time came.

  As for himself, Aefric knew he couldn’t dress for the wind today. By midday they’d be back up on the ridge, dealing with the midsummer heat. So from the limited selection of clothes he’d brought along, he chose a navy blue linen shirt. Same leather pants, though.

  He chuckled as he realized he’d been thinking that his leather pants needed cleaning. Truly, he was thinking more like a duke than like an adventurer these days.

  Time was, he’d only have thought about how his clothes needed cleaning if he were going to enter a town anytime soon.

  He donned the same calf-high leather boots, of course. Even as a duke he didn’t see the point of lugging along extra footwear on a trip like this one.

  But the cloak that had served as his extra blanket last night, that he packed in Windsong’s saddlebags, as he prepared his horse himself that morning.

  As Aefric looked around at his knights, tending their own horses, he realized he’d never seen any of them attended by squires.

  Of course, with the exception of Ser Yrsa, they were all knights of his personal guard. Perhaps that role was one that forbade squires?

  Perhaps. But if so, that didn’t explain why Ser Yrsa didn’t have a squire out here.

  He’d have to remember to ask about those things later.

  Once breakfast was finished, and the company packed and ready to move out, Aefric double-checked the final preparations.

  The nine dead soldiers — eight who’d died in the battle and one who’d fallen to his wounds overnight — were loaded aboard two horses. Five aboard Aefric’s Windsong, and four aboard Ser Yrsa’s white mare.

  That left six too wounded to walk. They were strapped to makeshift litters, made with blankets and headless pikes. The litters would be pulled by the horses of Ser Beornric and the other knights.

  Aefric and Ser Yrsa would lead their own horses. The others would be led by the six soldiers who were mobile, but too wounded to fight.

  There was only one last thing to take care of, before they left. Aefric and Sers Beornric and Yrsa walked back to the cave where the borogs were mining.

  As they approached the cave, Aefric realized he kept expecting to hear the sounds he associated with mining. The clang of a pick. The grind of a shovel. The sharp thump of a hammer striking rock.

  But the main thing he heard was the whip of the wind.

  “Perhaps they took off after all,” Ser Yrsa said.

  “Ge’rek! Po’rek!” Aefric called into the cave, without entering it. The early dawn’s rays barely scratched the surface of the cave’s gloom.

  By the time he heard their footsteps, Ge’rek and Po’rek were coming into view.

  That was disturbing. Ge’rek was taller than Aefric by half a head, and at least twice as broad. Po’rek was only about Aefric’s height, but at least half-again as broad as he was.

  He would not have expected them to move so quietly on the rocks. Certainly they hadn’t seemed all that quiet out in the chasm…

  “Chief,” Ge’rek said, and made a clumsy attempt at a bow, the way he’d seen the humans do it.

  “Chief,” Po’rek said, and his or her bow was slightly better.

  “We’re going to leave soon,” Aefric said. “Is there anything more you need from us, before we go?”

  “Notek,” Ge’rek said, and Po’rek snorted agreement.

  Aefric shook his head. Started to ask what that meant, but didn’t get further than, “I don’t—”

  “It’s like a blessing,” Ser Yrsa said. “You’re their chief, and they’re laboring in your name. They want your blessing, for want of a better word.”

  Aefric gave Ser Yrsa a flat look.

  The look she returned would probably have been innocent on anyone else. But that scar on the left side of her face kept her from pulling it off.

  “You speak Borog,” Aefric said.

  “Better than your grace does, I’m afraid,” she answered, not sounding at all apologetic.

  “And you didn’t mention this because…”

  “Your grace wished to handle the matter himself. And honestly, did quite well.”

  “We’re going to discuss this later, you know.”

  “I never doubted it, your grace.”

  Aefric noted, and not for the first time, that Ser Yrsa tended to address him much more formally when she was doing something she knew would aggravate him.

  And that it happened often enough that he’d noticed it more than once just made it more irritating.

  No doubt about it, though. That woman could hold a grudge.

  Aefric frowned, but asked her, “Is there a standard blessing?”

  “Speak from your heart,” she said. “If you can work in what you want for them and from them, so much the better.”

  Aefric transferred the Brightstaff to his left hand, and raised his right in benediction.

  He drew a deep breath, and thought about everything he knew about borogs and borog culture. Sadly, doing so did not take long.

  “As you labor in my service, dig well, dig deep, and gather honor and aur in my name.”

  “For chief!” Ge’rek said, and stamped.

  “For chief!” Po’rek echoed, and stamped.

  They both pumped their arms, and thumped each other’s chests.

  “God metal for chief!” Ge’rek bellowed so loudly it must’ve echoed up and down the Dragonscar.

  Aefric expected Po’rek to repeat the bellow, but no. Instead, Po’rek turned and went into the cave. He or she came back a moment later, carrying two handfuls of gold nuggets that looked as though they’d been professionally cleaned.

  Not so much as a speck of dirt diminished their sparkle. And if there were any impurities in the gold, Aefric couldn’t see them.

  Po’rek dropped to both knees with a loud thump. Head bowed, he or she offered the nuggets to Aefric.

  The eight nuggets looked light in Po’rek’s hands, but when Aefric took them, he realized they had to be at least a pound each. Of pure gold.

  And this had come from two borogs, digging without tools for only a few hours. From the cave that smelled to Po’rek as though it had the lesser of the two veins on this side of the chasm.

  There might be more gold down here than in all the Threepeaks Mountains.

  No wonder someone was willing to set traps and kill strangers to protect this discovery.

  Aefric stowed those gold nuggets in a special sack he kept tucked deep inside his backpack. The sack was a wonderful bit of magic, and one he hadn’t mentioned to anyone since his days of traveling with Karbin’s adventuring company, the Last Sons.

  Aefric still didn’t understand exactly how the magic of the sack worked. Not truly. And certainly not well enough to try to create such a thing himself.

  No, that sack was an intricate marvel of subtly woven planar workings, creating within a single, apparently normal canvas sack, a seemingly endless series of other sacks, organized by the magic of the sack itself.

  Aefric had only to place those nuggets in the sack, and they were gone. Irretrievable to anyone else, so long as the sack was keyed to him. Which, of course, Aefric had done properly, because he’d used the long, slow method to investigate the sack when he first obtained it, rather than the quick-and-dirty solution most adventurers relied on.

  Aefric’s personal fortune, or at least, what he’d accumulated through years of adventuring, was hidden away in that sack. Along with certain important trophies, and other objects that others … did not need to know he had.

  Aefric didn’t use that sack often, and almost never when there was a chance of anyone seeing what he was doing. He’d only brought it along now out of the hope of leaving with a bone from the rumored dragon skeleton at the end of the Dragonscar.

  But with those gold nuggets to bring back, he was glad he had it.

  Once that was done, he diverted the subject from gold by turning to Ser Yrsa and saying, “Now, about your command of the Borog language.”

  Ser Beornric and the other knights paused their final preparations to listen in on the conversation. And Aefric was pretty sure his nearby soldiers were doing the same thing.

  “Yes, your grace?” Ser Yrsa said, doing a poor job of hiding a smile in her eyes.

  “I want the real reason you didn’t tell me,” Aefric said.

  “As I said, your grace,” Ser Yrsa started, but Aefric cut her off with a quick wave of his hand.

  “No games,” Aefric said. “I want the truth.”

  “I don’t mean that as a game, your grace,” Ser Yrsa said. “When your grace endeavors to handle something himself, it is not my place to supplant him.”

  “So,” Aefric said with a nod that was anything but approval. “You withheld information from me on a technicality, and left me in a position where I might have stumbled into creating a problem where there didn’t have to be one. Is that it?”

  “Well, your—”

  “Is that it, General?” Aefric asked, now standing eye-to-eye with her.

  Ser Yrsa looked away first.

  “Not entirely, your grace,” she said, and met Aefric’s eye again, with a little more defiance. “I have not your grace’s trusting nature. I felt that, if they believed no one present had a good command of their language, Ge’rek and Po’rek might reveal something they intended to keep hidden from us.”

  “Tell me, General. Just what exactly is it that you expected them to be hiding? Keeping in mind that until today they’d been captives of slavers, on their way to a lifetime of service. Before we rescued them.”

  “We don’t know what they were doing before they were captured. For all we know, they might have been advance scouts for an invading army. An army coming this way.”

  “And for all we know,” Aefric said, “every other captive on that ship was a spy or assassin in disguise.”

  “Yes, your grace,” Ser Yrsa said. “A concern I shared with Ser Micham, before he left with them on his mission. And as for the time before that…”

  She called forward two archers. “Caul, Aleand.”

  They stepped forward and saluted.

  “Tell the duke the orders I gave you, just before we freed the slavers’ captives.”

  “Yes, General,” Caul said, speaking for both men. Caul was a thin, sallow man for a soldier, but he had a quick eye and quick hands. “You told Aleand and me to find a vantage point to keep an eye on the slaves, nock arrows, and wait for your signal.”

  Aefric looked at Ser Yrsa in amazement.

  “You were ready to shoot down unarmed, defenseless captives?”

  “No, your grace,” she said firmly. “I was ready to shoot down spies or assassins who might be here to attack my duke. Or perhaps men and women driven mad by captivity. Or any at all who would dare raise arms against my duke, whatever reason they might have in their heads.”

  “And you expected that to happen?”

  “No, your grace,” she said. “My job is to make sure it doesn’t happen. My job is to consider all of the nasty possibilities of life, and to make sure you survive, if any one of them should happen to come to pass.”

  “I must say, your grace,” Ser Beornric added quietly, “that some men and women are broken by captivity. Makes ’em do strange things, once they get free. Violent, sometimes. Seen it myself.”

  “All right,” Aefric said, knowing he’d heard of things like that before, in another life, even if he’d never encountered them himself.

  He turned back to Ser Yrsa. “All right. So. You understood everything Ge’rek and Po’rek were saying, even while I was flailing about like a fool, trying to make myself understood.”

  “Not like a fool,” Ser Yrsa said, just as firmly as she’d insisted on her other points. When Aefric frowned at her words, she continued, “Your grace has a love and respect for life and freedom beyond anything I have seen in a noble, myself. You showed those borogs a level of consideration they’ve likely never gotten from a human before. There’s nothing foolish about that.”

  “And yet,” Aefric said, “I could easily have made a critical error.”

  “No, your grace,” she said, with a single shake of her head. “I would have stepped in, had that happened. But until then, I had to put your safety ahead of your intentions. And that meant listening in on their conversation while they didn’t know I could.”

  “And? Did you learn anything interesting?”

  “So far as I can tell, your grace, they are as they present themselves. Including that they appear to be devoted to you as their chief. Which was why I finally admitted my understanding of Borog. They deserved the notek, and you deserved a chance to give it to them.”

  Aefric sighed. “I should still be angry at you, you know. For holding back that information, and making the decision without consulting me.”

  “Your grace certainly has that right,” Ser Yrsa said, straightening, to stand at attention. “If your grace wishes to punish me, I stand ready to receive my punishment.”

  Aefric cocked an eyebrow, curious. “Anything you’d like to say in your defense?”

  She didn’t even hesitate.

  “The nature of my position as general is such that I must make decisions in your grace’s name on a consistent basis. I must always do so with the utmost integrity, and the intention to safeguard your grace’s person and interests in all things.

  “This requires me to act on all information available to me, and not necessarily all information available to your grace. This includes instances when a situation arises in which I possess critical, time-sensitive information that I must act on, without the opportunity to first share that information with your grace.”

  “In other words,” Aefric said. “You didn’t tell me you spoke Borog at the time because it would ruin your stratagem, but if I were to have asked at any point, you would have told me?”

  “Exactly so, your grace,” Ser Yrsa said. “And I regret any undue embarrassment or other feelings your grace might have experienced in the process.”

  Aefric chuckled.

  “Damn it,” he said, still chuckling. “I was all ready to be mad at you.”

  “I apologize for failing you in that, your grace. I shall endeavor to give you proper reason to be angry with me at my first opportunity.”

  Aefric opened his mouth to object, but then he saw the laughter in her eyes.