12

Gannon laughed. “See, you’re a snoop, too. But no matter. Here’s a question for you: why do you think you’re here with me, instead of with her father?” He gestured toward Lena with his chin.
“I don’t know. Some kind of emergency in Torwell?”
“That’s a pretty good guess. But not quite. Several years ago, the king got the idea that we should ally ourselves with the Dina. They’re great warriors, but they’ve always had trouble feeding their people. We, on the other hand, are great farmers, but our armies are fair to middling at best. In the king’s mind, we could be perfect allies. They would supply most of the military might, and, in turn, we would supply most of the food. It sounded like a good idea, but the king’s Mask warned him that if we allied ourselves with the Dina, that they would drag us into a war that we could not, and would not win.”
“So, what happened?”
“The fool ignored his Mask. He finalized the alliance just three hours after he heard the warning, and we’ve been sending our surplus food to Aster and Torwell ever since.” He paused. It was starting to get dark. I had been listening to him too carefully, and had barely started my cage, but he had been working as he talked and had finished another cage. “Let’s put these things away, and go get some dinner. You can finish the other cages as we drive tomorrow.”
He gathered up the willow switches and carried them over to the wagon. I put the newly-repaired cages into their places in the bird hutch, and piled the remaining ones under the bench of the wagon where I could access them easily the next day.
When I got to Lena’s fire, she was serving Gannon salt pork, beans, and an apple in tight-lipped silence. I picked up a bowl and ladled out some of the beans for myself, and chose a seat between them. For a moment, we ate in silence.
Gannon swallowed a bite of his apple, and started talking. “About eight months after the alliance was finalized, a Heffian ambassador showed up in Kingsbury with his entire entourage. Nobody had even known that he was coming, but he walked into Kingsbury dressed in scarlet and gold, and announced that he had come to speak to the king.” He paused, gulped a spoonful of the beans, took a long drag at his bottle, and continued. “Of course the king tried to delay, tried to make it look as if he wasn’t worried, but it was pretty obvious that there were some very worried people at the court.”
When Gannon paused for another bite, I found myself willing him to hurry up. I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to know right away.