Darkness Descending

Fourteen

Fernao had seen the land of the Ice People in summer, when the sun shone in the sky nearly the whole day through and the weather, sometimes, got warmer than cool. The Lagoan mage had seen it in fall, which put him in mind of a hard winter in Setubal. Now he was seeing it in winter. He’d expected it would be appalling. He was finding out he hadn’t known what appalling meant.

Outside the tent he shared with a second-rank mage named Affonso, the wind howled like a live thing, a malevolent wild thing. The tent fabric was waterproofed and windproofed, but the gale sucked heat out of the tent in spite of the brazier by which the two sorcerers huddled.

“I won’t believe it,” Affonso said. “Nobody could want to live in this miserable country the whole year round.”

“It’s no accident the Ice People are hairy all over, men and women both,” Fernao answered. “And they like the austral continent fine. They think we’re the crazy ones for wanting to live anywhere else.”

“They’re mad, every cursed one of them.” Affonso picked up another chunk of dried camel dung--the most common fuel hereabouts--and put it on the brazier. Then he wiped his hands on his kilt. Under the kilt, he wore thick wooden leggings that came up far enough to meet his thick woolen drawers coming down. He might as well have had on trousers, but no kingdom of Algarvic stock took kindly to those Kaunian-style garments.

“No doubt, but they do live here, and we’re having a miserable time managing that for ourselves,” Fernao said.

The camel dung hissed and popped as it burned, and shed only a sullen red light. Across the brazier from Fernao, his colleague might have been a polished bronze statue, tall and skinny. Affonso had the long face typical of Lagoans, Sibians, and Algarvians, but a wide, flat nose told of Kuusamans somewhere down toward the roots of his family tree. In the same way, Fernao himself had narrow eyes set on a slant.

Only a minority of Lagoans thought such things worth fussing about. They were a mixed lot and knew it. Some few of his countrymen took pride in pure Algarvic blood, but Fernao thought they were fooling themselves.

Even with the brazier, Affonso’s breath smoked inside the tent. He must have seen it, too, for he said, “When I went out last night to make water, the wind had died down. It was so calm and quiet, I could hear my breath freeze around me every time I let it out.”

“I’ve never heard that, but I’ve heard of it.” Fernao didn’t know if the convulsive movement of his shoulders was shiver or shudder or something of both. “The Ice People call it ‘the whisper of stars.’ “

“They would have a name for it,” Affonso said darkly. He moved away from the brazier, but only to wrap himself in blankets and furs. “How far away from Mizpah are we?”

“A couple of days, unless we have another blizzard,” Fernao told him. “I’ve seen Mizpah, you know. If you had, too, you wouldn’t be so cursed eager to get there, believe you me you wouldn’t.”

Only a snore answered him. Affonso had a knack for falling asleep at once. That wasn’t a trick the Guild of Mages had ever investigated, or Fernao, himself a first-rank mage, would have known how to do it. He swaddled himself, too, and eventually dropped off.

He woke in darkness. The brazier had gone out. He fed it more camel dung and got the fire going with flint and steel. Most places, sorcery would have been easier. On the austral continent, sorcery imported from Derlavai or Lagoas or Kuusamo failed more often than it worked. The rules were different here, and few not born to them ever learned them.

Affonso also woke quickly and completely, something else for which Fernao envied him. “Another day’s slog,” he said.

“Aye,” Fernao agreed in a hollow voice. He got up and wrapped a heavy hooded cloak over his tunic. “If we march hard enough, I’ll almost be able to imagine I’m warm. Almost.”

“That’s a powerful imagination you have,” Affonso remarked.

“Comes with my rank,” Fernao said, and snorted to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. After the snort, he had to inhale. Burning camel dung wasn’t the only stink in the tent. “If I had a really powerful imagination, I could imagine myself bathing. Of course, then I’d have to imagine myself freezing to death the next instant.”

“They say the Ice People never, ever bathe,” Affonso said.

“They say it because it’s true.” Fernao held his nose. “Powers above, they stink. And we’re on our way to matching them.” He crawled toward the opening of the tent, a complicated arrangement with double flaps, designed to hold in as much heat as possible. “As for me, I’m on my way to breakfast.” Affonso nodded and followed him out.

The sun hadn’t climbed above the northeastern horizon yet but wasn’t too far below it; there was enough light by which to see. The cold struck savagely at Fernao as he got to his feet. Every inhalation felt like breathing knives. Every exhalation brought forth a new fogbank. He cocked his head to one side, listening, but couldn’t hear the whisper of stars. That horrified him all over again, for it meant the weather could get colder still.

Snow didn’t cover every inch of the local landscape. Parts of it were bare rock and frozen ground. That had perplexed Fernao till he realized the air down here was so cold, it held less moisture than it could farther north, and the endless ravening wind helped sweep the landscape clear.

Lagoan soldiers were emerging from their tents, all of them as muffled against the chill as Fernao and Affonso. Like Fernao’s, the fog from their breath hung around their heads. They stumbled toward the smoking cook fires, shivering and loudly cursing their fate.

Off in the distance, Ice People on shaggy, two-humped camels watched the Lagoan army. They’d been shadowing the force ever since it landed at the edge of the ice shelf that formed around the edge of the austral continent every winter. The nomads of the frozen waste had laughed then to see King Vitor’s men struggling over the ice. They weren’t laughing anymore. Fernao hoped they weren’t passing the army’s movements on to the Yaninans. If they were, the Lagoans couldn’t do anything about it; the Ice People could have run rings around them.

Man by man, the lines at the cook fires moved forward. A cook who looked not only cold but also bored slapped a glob of mush and a strip of fried camel meat--mostly fat--into Fernao’s tin. “Eat fast,” the fellow advised. “Otherwise you’ll break teeth on it after it freezes up again.”

He wasn’t joking. Fernao had seen that. The mage was also ravenous. In this weather, a man needed far more food than he would have in a better climate. Affonso ate with the same dedication. Only after their tins were empty did Affonso remark, “I wish this cursed country didn’t hold any cinnabar. Then we could let the Yaninans have it.”

“Then King Tsavellas wouldn’t want it,” Fernao answered. “Nobody would ever come to visit the Ice People, except once in a while to buy pelts from them.”

“Dragons.” Affonso turned the word into a curse. Fernao nodded. Quicksilver came from cinnabar. Without it, dragons couldn’t flame so hot or so far. Algarve, Yanina’s ally {Yaninds master was nearer the truth these days), had only small stocks of the vital mineral. If Lagoas could take the land of the Ice People away from King Tsavellas’ men, King Mezentio’s dragons would have to do without. That would make Algarve’s war harder.

Taking the cinnabar away from Algarve was making Fernao’s life harder. The army trudged toward Mizpah. The town had been a Lagoan outpost till the Yaninans seized it after Lagoas went to war with Algarve. Fernao had been in it then. He counted himself lucky to have escaped and something less than lucky to have returned to the austral continent.

Grudgingly, as if resenting the necessity, the sun rose. Fernao’s shadow, far longer than he was tall, stretched off to his left. Because the sun couldn’t get far above the horizon, its light remained red as blood. It was about to set when a couple of Ice People rode toward the Lagoan column on camelback, shouting at the tops of their lungs.

Lieutenant General Junqueiro, who commanded the Lagoan force, hurried over to Fernao. He was a big, bluff fellow with a bushy red mustache streaked with white. “What in blazes are they saying?” he asked the mage. “You speak their language.”

“Not a word of it,” Fernao answered, which made Junqueiro’s eyes open very wide. “If you listen closely, though, you’ll discover they’re speaking Lagoan, after a fashion.”

Junqueiro cocked his head to one side. “Why, so they are.” He sounded astonished. Then his expression changed. “Is what they’re saying true? Are the Yaninans really moving against us?”

Fernao eyed him in some exasperation. “I don’t know--this country isn’t friendly to magecraft, except the sort the shamans of the Ice People use. But don’t you think you’d better get ready to receive them, on the chance those nomads aren’t lying?”

“It’s almost night again,” Junqueiro said. “Not even the Yaninans would be mad enough to attack in the darkness ... I don’t think.” But he began shouting orders, and the army shook itself out from column into line of battle.

And, sure enough, the enemy did attack. Eggs started bursting not far from the Lagoan forces--releasing energy like that was sorcery so basic, it worked all over the world. The Yaninans swarmed forward, howling like mountain apes. Beams from their sticks pierced the darkness. Junqueiro held back response as long as he could. Then all the light egg-tossers the Lagoans had brought with them began flinging eggs back at the Yaninans. The Lagoan footsoldiers, waiting behind cover, blazed away at the men who followed King Tsavellas.

To Fernao’s delighted astonishment, the Yaninans broke in wild disorder. They must have thought they would be able to steal the battle by night, catching the Lagoans by surprise. When that didn’t happen, some fled, some threw down their sticks and surrendered, and only a stubborn rear guard kept Junqueiro’s army from bagging them all.

Even before twilight began to gray the northern horizon the next morning, the Lagoan commander declared, “The way to Mizpah is open!”

“You wouldn’t sound so happy if you’d ever seen the place,” Fernao said, yawning. Junqueiro paid him no attention. He hadn’t really expected anything different.

Talsu had got used to Algarvians swaggering through the streets of Skrunda. He felt less embittered toward the redheads than did a lot of Jelgavans, not least because he’d done more against them in the war than had most of his countrymen. His regiment had invaded Algarve, even if it never had succeeded in breaking out of the foothills of the Bratanu Mountains and seizing Tricarico. And he hadn’t thrown down his stick till Jelgava was truly beaten. Beaten his kingdom remained, but he didn’t blame himself for it.

His father had other ideas. Looking up from the tunic he was sewing for an Algarvian officer, Traku sighed and said, “If only we’d fought harder, I wouldn’t have to be doing this kind of work.”

By that, Talsu knew he meant, If only you’d fought harder. His father felt guilty about not seeing battle. Because he did, he had a low opinion of those who had seen it and hadn’t prevailed--like Talsu.

With a sigh of his own, Talsu answered, “No. Instead you’d be sewing jewels onto some noblewoman’s cloak, and you’d be grumbling about that.”

Traku grunted and ran his fingers through his hair. He was going gray but, like his son and most of his countrymen, was so blond it hardly showed. “Well, what if I would?” he said. “At least she’d be one of our own noblewomen, not a cursed redhead.”

Before Talsu answered, he looked out into the street. No one there looked like coming into the tailor’s shop above which Traku and Talsu and his mother and sister lived. Satisfied he could speak frankly, Talsu said, “If it weren’t for all out idiot noblemen clogging up the officer corps, maybe we wouldn’t have a cursed redhead calling himself King of Jelgava these days. I had to follow their orders, remember--I know what kind of soldiers they made.”

Traku opened the cash box, took out a small silver coin with Bang Mainardo’s beaky portrait stamped on it, and ground it under his heel. “That’s what I think of having any Algarvian, let alone King Mezentio’s worthless brother, set up as the ruler of a decent Kaunian kingdom.”

“Oh, aye, I have no love for him, either,” Talsu said. “Who does? But if King Donalitu hadn’t run away to Lagoas after the redheads broke in here, we wouldn’t have an Algarvian calling himself king now. You ask me, Father, Donalitu was as useless as his nobles.”

“That’s what the Algarvians want you to say,” his father answered. “A king doesn’t have a use, except to be king. He stands for his kingdom, or else he’s no use at all. And how can an Algarvian king stand for a Kaunian kingdom? It’s against nature, that’s what it is.”

Talsu had no good comeback for that. By everything he knew of magecraft--which wasn’t much--Traku was right. But Traku thought of the Jelgavan nobility in terms of luxuries used up and money wasted. That was how Talsu had thought of the nobles before the war. Now he thought of dukes and counts in terms of lives wasted, which were far more expensive.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, starting out of the shop. “Mother asked me earlier this morning to get her some olive oil and some garlic, and I haven’t done it yet.”

“Go on, then.” Traku was willing to let the argument lie. “You’d better, if you expect to eat supper tonight.”

Laughing--though his father hadn’t been joking--Talsu headed for the grocer’s a couple of blocks away. The weather was mild. Winter in Skrunda only rarely got chilly; the beaches on Jelgavas northeastern coast, the ones that looked across the Garelian Ocean toward equatorial Siaulia, were subtropical themselves. In happier times, they were a popular holiday resort for folk fleeing nasty weather farther south.

The grocer’s lay in the direction of the market square. As always, Talsu looked toward the square on the off chance he might spy something interesting. He didn’t but gave a small double take anyhow. That was foolish; the Algarvians had wrecked the triumphal arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire months before. But he still wasn’t used to its being gone.

One reason Talsu didn’t mind going to the grocer’s was his pretty daughter, Gailisa. She was behind the counter when he walked in, and smiled to see him. “Hello, Talsu,” she said. “What can I get you today?”

“A pint of the middle-grade olive oil and some fresh garlic,” he answered.

Gailisa said, “There’s plenty of garlic, but we’re out of the middle-grade oil. Do you want the cheap stuff or the extra-virgin?” Before he could answer, she held up a warning hand. “If you make jokes about that the way the miserable Algarvians do, I’ll clout you with the jar, do you hear me?”

“Did I say anything?” Talsu asked, as innocently as if such thoughts had never entered his mind. The grocer’s daughter snorted; she knew better. Talsu went on, “Let me have the good oil, if you please.”

“All right--since you asked for it so pretty.” Gailisa reached behind her, pulled an earthenware jar off the shelf, and set it on the counter. “Do you want to choose your own garlic, or shall I grab one for you?”

“Go ahead,” Talsu told her. “You’d do a better job than I would.”

“I knew that,” Gailisa said. “I wondered if you did.” She pulled a good-sized head off a string and handed it to him, then said something in classical Kaunian.

Talsu hadn’t spent enough time in school to learn much of the old language, and modern Jelgavan had drifted too far from it to let him understand the phrase. He had to ask, “What was that?”

“The stinking rose,” Gailisa translated. “I don’t know why they called it that back in the days of the Empire--it doesn’t look anything like a rose--but they did.”

“It doesn’t stink, either,” Talsu said. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like garlic. Powers above, even the redheads eat it.”

“They eat everything,” Gailisa said with a fine curl of the lip. “They’re eating my father out of food, and they only pay half what it’s worth. If he complained, they wouldn’t pay anything at all--they’d just take. They’re the occupiers, so they can do as they please.”

“They’ve always paid my father--so far, anyhow,” Talsu said. “I don’t know what he’d do if one of them didn’t; he gets a lot of his business from them these days.”

“They’re thieves.” Gailisa’s voice was flat. “They’re worse thieves than our own nobles, and they give us back less. I never thought I’d say that about anybody, but it’s true.”

“Aye.” Talsu nodded. “They could have made a lot of people like them if they’d put down the nobles and walked small themselves, but they haven’t bothered. King Mainardo! As if an Algarvian has any business being king here!”

“We lost the war. That means they can do whatever they want, like I said,” Gailisa answered. “They beat us, and now they’re beating us.”

Talsu paid her for the garlic and the oil and left the grocers shop in a hurry. Gailisa sounded almost like his father, blaming him for losing the fight. Maybe she didn’t mean it that way, but that was how it sounded. If I’d been in charge of things.. . , Talsu thought, and then laughed at himself. If he’d been in charge of things, the Jelgavan army would still have lost. He didn’t know how to run an army or a war. But the nobles who’d run the army were supposed to.

He stopped in a tavern and bought a glass of red wine flavored with orange and lime juice. The wine was rough and raw and cheap, but better than the thin, sour beer army rations had served up with breakfast every morning. Somebody’d probably promised better, then pocketed half of what he should have spent. That was how things had gone during the war.

As Talsu was leaving the tavern, a couple of Algarvian soldiers strode in. If he hadn’t stepped back in a hurry, they would have walked right over him. He wanted to smash them for their arrogance, but didn’t dare. Two against one was bad odds, and all the occupiers in Skrunda would come after him even if he won.

Hating the Algarvians, hating himself, he went home. His father, having sewn one half of the Algarvian officer’s tunic, was muttering the charm that would finish the stitching. It wasn’t quite a straight application of the law of similarity, because the left half was a mirror image of the right. Talsu wouldn’t have wanted to try it himself; he knew he didn’t have the skill. But his father was the best tailor in Skrunda and for several towns around, not only for his handwork but also for the craft spells that meant he didn’t have to do everything by hand.

As soon as Traku spoke the final word of command, the thread he’d laid on the left side of the tunic writhed as if alive, then stitched itself through the fabric, duplicating his careful sewing on the right side. He watched anxiously, trusting even long-familiar magic less than his needlework. But everything turned out as it should have.

“That’s a nice piece of work, Father,” Talsu said, setting the oil and the garlic on the counter by the newly finished tunic.

“Aye, it is, if I say so myself,” Traku agreed. “Cursed pity I’m wasting it on the redheads.” Talsu grimaced and had to nod.

Eoforwic was like no place Vanai had ever known. Of course, she hadn’t known many places in her young life: only Oyngestun and a few visits to Gromheort. She’d thought Gromheort a great city. Next to Oyngestun, it surely was. But measured against the capital of Forthweg--the former capital of former Forthweg, she thought--Gromheort sank down to what it was: a provincial town like two dozen others in the kingdom.

Gromheort had at its heart the local count’s palace. Eoforwic had at its heart the royal palace. The palace was badly battered. Forthwegian soldiers had defended it against invading Unkerlanters, and then, less than two years later, the Unkerlanters had defended it against invading Algarvians. Even battered, though, it was far larger, far grander, and far more elegant than the count of Gromheort’s residence. And the rest of Eoforwic was in proportion to its heart.

“Aye, it’s a big place,” Ealstan said one morning, doing his resolute best not to show how impressed he was. “More chances for us not to get noticed.” His wave took in the cramped little flat they were sharing. “Like this, for instance.”

Vanai nodded. “Aye. Like this.” After the comfortable house in which she’d lived with her grandfather, the flat, in a rundown part of town, seemed especially small and especially dingy.

But living with Ealstan rather than Brivibas made a lot of difference. Her grandfather had neither known nor much cared about what she was thinking. Ealstan, by contrast, thought along with her: “I know it’s not much. I’m used to better, too. But nobody who’s not really looking hard for us would ever find us here. And the company’s good.”

She went around the rickety kitchen table and gave him a hug. After serving as an Algarvian officer’s plaything, she’d thought she would never want another man to touch her, let alone that she would want to touch a man herself. Finding she’d been wrong was a wonder and a delight.

Ealstan pulled her down onto his lap--which made his chair, as decrepit as the table, creak--and kissed her. Then he let her go, something Major Spinello hadn’t been in the habit of doing. “I’m off,” he said matter-of-factly. “The last fellow I worked for has a friend who’s also glad to find a bookkeeper who can count past ten without taking off his shoes.”

“He couldn’t possibly pay you what you’re worth,” Vanai said. This time, she kissed him. Why not? The door was closed, the window shuttered against late-winter chill. No one would know. No one would care.

“He’ll pay me enough to keep us eating a while longer and keep a roof over our heads,” Ealstan answered with a bleak pragmatism she found very appealing. He headed out the door as if he’d been going off to work every day for the past twenty years.

Vanai washed the breakfast dishes. She’d been doing that ever since she was able to handle plates without dropping them; her grandfather, while a splendid historical scholar, was not made for the real world. Then she went back into the bedroom and sprawled across the bed she and Ealstan shared at night.

Looking at the bare, roughly plastered wall only a couple of feet from her face made her sigh. She missed the books she’d left behind in Oyngestun. Until she met Ealstan, books were almost the only friends she’d had. She missed the books more than she missed Brivibas. That should have shamed her, but it didn’t. Her grandfather had been perfectly hateful toward her since she started giving herself to the Algarvian to get him out of the labor gang.

The only book in the flat was a cheap, badly printed volume the previous tenant had forgotten when he moved out. At the moment, it lay on the nightstand. Vanai picked it up, sighed, and shook her head. It was a Forthwegian translation of an Algarvian historical romance called The Wicked Empire Aflame.

Because it was the only book she had, she’d read it. It was laughably bad in any number of different ways. She had trouble deciding whether it took liberties with history or simply ignored it. All the Algarvian mercenaries were virile heroes. The men of the Kaunian Empire were cowards and villains. Their wives and daughters fairly panted to find out what the Algarvians had under their kilts--and find out they did, in great detail.

But Vanai didn’t laugh at the romance, not any more, though she had when she first started reading. Being her grandfathers granddaughter, she saw through all the lies the writer was telling. But what would some ignorant Algarvian or Forthwegian think after reading The Wicked Empire Aflame} He’d think Kaunians were cowards and villains, that’s what, and their women sluts. He’d think they deserved the massacre so lovingly described in the last chapter.

And if he thought that about the ancient Kaunians, what would he think about their modern descendants? Wouldn’t he be more likely to think they deserved whatever happened to them, too, than if he hadn’t read the romance?

Vanai wondered how many copies of The Wicked Empire Aflame were floating around in Algarve and, now, in Forthweg. She wondered how many similar romances Algarvian writers had churned out and how many copies of them were floating around. She wondered what else the redheads had done to convince their own people and those they’d subjected that Kaunians weren’t quite human.

Her mouth twisted. A lot of Forthwegians wouldn’t need much convincing about that. A lot of Algarvians probably didn’t need much convincing, either. Were things otherwise, how could they put Kaunians on caravan cars heading toward the miserable end awaiting them in the west?

She shivered. That had nothing to do with the weather; the flat, whatever its other shortcomings, was warm enough. But she and her grandfather had come within a hair’s breadth of being herded aboard one of those caravan cars themselves. One Algarvian constable had persuaded another to pick a couple of different Kaunians from Oyngestun. They were surely dead now, while Vanai and Brivibas lived.

“If you call this living,” Vanai muttered. She went out of the flat as seldom as she could. If the Algarvians saw her on the street, they were liable to seize her. She knew that. But staying cooped up with nothing to do had no appeal, either. The flat probably hadn’t been so clean since the week after it was built.

Opening the shutters and looking out the window gave her some relief. It would have given her more had she been able to see anything but a narrow, winding street and, across from it, another block of flats as grimy and neglected as the one in which she was living.

Almost all the people on the street were Forthwegian. From everything she’d heard, Eoforwic was home to a large number of Kaunians. Either most of them were hiding as she was or a lot had already been shipped away. One of those prospects was bad, the other worse.

Three Algarvian constables strode up the street, sticks in hand. Vanai shrank back from the window. She didn’t know they were trolling for Kaunians, but she didn’t know they weren’t, either. She didn’t want to find out. The constables kept walking. Everyone who saw them scrambled out of their way. That no doubt appealed to their vanity. But if they were such heroes as their strides made them out to be, why did they always travel in groups of at least three?

Time crawled on. A pigeon landed on the windowsill and peered in at Vanai with its beady little red eyes. She knew several recipes that dated back to the days of the Kaunian Empire for roast squab, squab seethed in honey, baked squab stuffed with mushrooms and figs. . . . Thinking about them made her hungry enough to start to open the window. At the noise and the motion, the pigeon flew off.

Darkness had already fallen before Ealstan came upstairs with a couple of days’ worth of groceries. The flat had no rest crate with spells to keep food from going bad, so he couldn’t shop very far ahead. “I’ve got a nice soup bone here,” he said. “A good bit of meat on it, and plenty of marrow inside. And I bought some ham. That’ll keep till tomorrow.”

“I’ll get the fire going in the stove and chop some vegetables for the soup,” Vanai said. “That does look like a good bone.”

“Don’t go yet.” Ealstan was rummaging at the bottom of the cloth sack in which he’d brought home the food. “Here--I found these for you.” He held up three Forthwegian romances--one, The Deaf Mute’s Song, a great classic. Apologetically, he went on, “I couldn’t find you anything in Kaunian. I looked, I really did, but the redheads have made it against the law to print anything in your language, and I didn’t dare ask too many questions.”

“I know they’ve done that,” Vanai answered. “I remember how furious my grandfather was when he had to try to compose in Forthwegian. Thank you so much! I was just thinking earlier today that I needed something to do, and now you’ve given me something.”

“I was thinking the same thing--about you, I mean,” Ealstan said. “Sitting up here by yourself all the time can’t be easy.”

Vanai’s eyes opened very wide. Tears stung them, and she had to turn away. As best he could, Ealstan did look out for her and try to make her happy. That still astonished her; she was altogether unused to it. She’d gone away with him partly for his own sake, true, but also because she’d thought he couldn’t be worse than her grandfather and because she’d felt guilty that he’d got into trouble in Gromheort on account of her.

She hadn’t really expected she’d be so much happier in spite of everything. But she was.

Ealstan said, “And this fellow pays pretty well. We’ll be able to salt plenty away. If things were different, we could think about moving to a nicer place, but they aren’t--I think we’re better off with ready cash.”

Meeting Ealstan gathering mushrooms hadn’t shown Vanai his solid core of good sense. Neither had lying with him, however much she’d enjoyed that--and however astonished she’d been that she could enjoy such things after Major Spinello. She quoted an adage in classical Kaunian: “Passion fades; wisdom endures.”

“I hope passion does not fade so soon as that,” Ealstan said in his slow, careful Kaunian. Hearing him speak the language with which she was most familiar always pleased her. Though she was more fluent in Forthwegian than he was in Kaunian, he made the effort for her. She wasn’t used to that, either. Still in Kaunian, he went on, “And do you know what else?”

“No,” she said. “Tell me.”

“The man whose accounts I cast today knows Ethelhelm the band leader and singer, and he says Ethelhelm needs someone to keep books for him, too.” Ealstan spoke as if a star were shining in broad daylight.

But the name meant little to Vanai. “Is that good?” she asked. Forthwegians and Kaunians had different tastes in music; what pleased one group seldom delighted the other.

“It’s the best!” Ealstan exclaimed, irked back into Forthwegian.

“All right.” Vanai was willing to believe him even if she didn’t share his enthusiasm. As she started into the kitchen to make soup, she realized that was at least a good start on love.

Night and fog. In winter--and, for that matter, at other seasons of the year, too--fog rolled off the ocean into Tirgoviste town, as it did into every other seaside city on the five major islands of Sibiu. Cornelu was out long after the curfew the Algarvian occupiers had imposed on his kingdom. He hoped, and had reason to hope, the Algarvian patrols that prowled his hometown would never set eyes on him. He didn’t want them to; they’d been looking for him up in the hills of central Tirgoviste, and no doubt they were looking for him down here, too.

But even if they did, he was pretty sure he could get away from them. He’d lived in Tirgoviste almost all his life; he knew its neighborhoods and alleys without having to see them. Mezentio’s men might get lucky and blaze him before he could slide round a corner or into a doorway, but he didn’t think so.

He exhaled, breathing out still more fog. He could hardly see that fog: no streetlights burned, lest they guide Lagoan dragons to their targets. Cornelu knew the houses and shop fronts past which he walked were made from mortared blocks of the rough gray local limestone. He knew they had steep roofs of red slate slabs to shed rain and snow. He knew all that because he’d seen it. He couldn’t see it now.

Shivering, he drew his ragged sheepskin jacket more tightly around him. He’d been a commander in the Sibian navy, as good a leviathan-rider as any officer who served King Burebistu. He’d had a fine wardrobe of tunics and kilts and cloaks of all weights. Now, as a woodcutter down from the hills, he wore the same clothes day in and day out, and counted himself lucky not to be colder than he was.

Carefully, he stepped forward. Aye, there was the curb. He started to step off the cobbles when he heard several men in heavy boots coming up the street toward him. He drew back. Somebody among those booted men stumbled and let out a couple of loud, vile curses. They were in Algarvian. He was fluent in the language, but likely would have understood most of them even if he hadn’t been: Sibian and Algarvian were as close as brothers to each other.

He did understand those curses could mean trouble. Moving as quietly as he could, he drew back again, ready to flee if the Algarvians heard him. They didn’t. They passed him by with no notion he was there. The fellow who’d stumbled was still grumbling: “--aren’t going to be any stinking Sibs out on a night like this. It’s a waste of time, that’s what it is. Anybody who’d come out tonight would break his fool neck five minutes later, and serve him right, too.”

“You almost broke yours, that’s cursed sure,” one of his comrades said. The others laughed. The grumbler cursed some more and kept cursing till the patrol passed out of earshot.

By then, Cornelu had already crossed the street--quite safely. Had the Algarvians been able to see his smile through the darkness and murk, they would not have enjoyed it. The streets got steep in the direction they were going. Maybe one of them really would break his neck. Cornelu hoped so.

He went on another couple of blocks, then turned left onto his own street and hurried toward his own house, the house in which he hadn’t lived, in which he hadn’t even set foot, since the Algarvian invasion. Costache and Brindza lived there still. So did the three Algarvian officers quartered on them.

All the houses on his block, like the houses and shops and taverns in the rest of Tirgoviste, were dark, for the same reason street lamps were: dragons from Lagoas could reach Sibiu. Cornelu understood why the Algarvians wanted to make it hard for them to drop their eggs accurately. Here as elsewhere, understanding failed to bring sympathy.

Here was his walk, leading up to his front porch. As he strode along the walk, he reached under his jacket and pulled out a short stick, one of the sort a constable might carry. The stick had cost him most of the silver he’d brought down from the hills, but he didn’t care. Even if it wasn’t such a powerful weapon as a foot-soldier’s stick, it ought to be good enough to dispose of the officers who’d settled down here. Then Cornelu could take Costache and Brindza away to the southern side of the island or maybe back up into the hills.

“And then,” Cornelu muttered under his breath, “then, by the powers above, I can be alone with my wife.” He ached for her, sometimes literally.

As quietly as he could, he stepped up onto the porch. He must have been quiet enough; no one inside called out in alarm. Once up there, he could tell lamps were lit within, though black curtains--new since he’d last seen the house--swallowed almost all the glare.

Cornelu paused a moment, pondering his next step. Did he knock? Would he do better to sneak in through a window? Could he break down the door, slay all of Mezentio’s men, and get Costache and Brindza away before the commotion drew neighbors or more Algarvians? That was what he most wanted to do, but he knew the risks.

While he pondered, Costache’s voice, bright and cheerful, came out through the window undimmed by the curtains: “Wait there, darling. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Rather than Brindza’s childish prattle, which Cornelu had expected, an Algarvian doing his best to speak Sibian answered, “All right, sweetheart, but you’d better not keep me waiting long.”

“Don’t worry,” Costache said archly. “I won’t be long, I promise. And you’ll be glad when I get there.” The Algarvian laughed.

Sick at heart, Cornelu turned away. He looked at his stick. If he blazed himself through the head, if he left his body lying on the walk, would Costache shed a tear? Or would she just laugh?

“I should have known,” Cornelu said to himself in a sort of whispered groan. “Oh, by the powers above, I should have known.” She hadn’t wanted to see him, not really; she hadn’t wanted to be alone with him. He’d wondered, he’d worried, but he hadn’t believed, not deep in his heart. He hadn’t wanted to believe.

He stared back toward his house--no, toward the house that had been his. He stared back toward the life that had been his, too. Things would never be the same now.

Looking at the stick, he shook his head. Costache had betrayed him. Why should he give her the satisfaction of finding him dead? What he really wanted was revenge. He started to swing back toward the house. If he killed not only the Algarvians but his wife, his faithless wife, as well. . .

What would he do with Brindza then? Kill her, too? She hadn’t done anything to him. She hadn’t even kept him from sleeping with Costache, as he’d thought before--Costache hadn’t wanted to sleep with him anyhow. Take Brindza with him? He had no idea how to care for a toddler; he’d never had a chance to learn.

He slammed his forehead, hard, with the heel of his hand. He’d just found the last thing he wanted: a reason to let his wife live.

With a muffled curse, he hurried down the street, running as much from his fury as from his former home. He let his feet carry him; his mind was empty of anything even resembling thought. He’d gone several blocks before realizing he was heading down toward the harbor, not back up into the hills. He’d worked as a woodcutter in the hope of rejoining Costache and Brindza. His feet had realized before his head that that wouldn’t happen, now. And if it wouldn’t, what point to going back to the hills and to work he despised anyhow? Mezentio’s men would still be looking for him there, too.

The smell of the sea was always strong in Tirgoviste town. But once Cornelu drew near the piers, he caught the reek of old fish from the boats the Algarvians still permitted to sail, an odor that didn’t travel so far inland as the salt tang pervading all the Sibian islands, the main five and their smaller outliers. Through the damp, deadening fog, he caught the familiar slap of waves against the wooden pilings that supported the harbor piers.

He knew exactly where he was by the way the waves sounded. Discovering where his feet had brought him, he also discovered they’d had a better notion of where they were going than he’d imagined: he was within a stone’s throw of the great wire pens where the Sibian navy had held its leviathans--and where the Algarvian occupiers held theirs these days.

Cornelu had come to look at the leviathans in an earlier visit to Tirgoviste. An Algarvian guard had cursed him and sent him away in a hurry. He snorted. What would the guard have done if he’d come up in his sea-green Sibian commander’s uniform? Nothing so pleasant as cursing and running him off--of that Cornelu was sure.

Somewhere not far away, an Algarvian guard--maybe even the same Algarvian guard--was pacing through the fog. If he was like every other guard Cornelu had ever known, he would be cursing his luck at drawing duty on a night when the only way he could find a foe would be to trip over his feet.

As if thinking of the guard had conjured him into being, his footsteps sounded on the walk not far away. Like frost forming on a window, decision crystallized within Cornelu. The Algarvian didn’t even bother trying to move quietly. He seemed sure he was the only man up and walking for miles around. Had the fellow been a Sibian, Cornelu would have reported him to his superior officer. As things were, he killed him instead.

It was almost absurdly easy. All he had to do was keep from stomping his feet on the stone of the walkway as he followed the Algarvian’s footfalls. Mezentio’s man hadn’t the faintest notion Cornelu was coming up behind him. As soon as the guard became something more than the sound of booted feet, as soon as he became a dim shape ahead, Cornelu raised his stick and blazed him down.

His beam was a brief, bright line of light in the mist. That mist attenuated the beam, which was not all that strong to begin with. But, at a range of three or four feet, it was strong enough. It caught the Algarvian in the back of the head. He let out a startled grunt, as if Cornelu had tapped him on the shoulder. Then he quietly toppled. His own stick clattered as it slipped from his nerveless fingers.

Cornelu dragged his body off the walk, so it wouldn’t be found at once. He picked up the stick and dropped it into the water in one of the leviathan pens. It made only a tiny splash.

But that splash, as he’d hoped, was enough to draw the leviathan to the surface to find out what had made it. Leviathans were even more curious than their squat cousins, the whales. Because of the fog, Cornelu couldn’t see this one, but it was plain in his mind’s eye: lean and long, about six times a man’s length, with a beaky mouth full of sharp teeth. Wild leviathans were wolves of the sea. Tamed and trained, they turned into hunting dogs.

Moving quickly, Cornelu got out of his jacket and tunic, his kilt and his shoes. Naked, he jumped into the water of the leviathan pen. It was cold, but the chill did not pierce him to the core. He let out a long exhalation of relief: his sorcerous protection against the ice waters of the southern seas still held good. Had that not been so, he would have frozen to death before long.

He swam toward the leviathan. By everything Sibian spies knew, Mezentio’s men guided their leviathans with pokes and prods almost identical to those Sibian riders used. He was betting his life the spies had it right. A man made a good mouthful for a leviathan, no more.

The great beast let him climb onto its back. His hand found the harness secured by its fins. The leviathan quivered expectantly, as if waiting for him to show what he was. He tapped it with the signal that, in the Sibian navy, would have ordered it to leap out of the pen. If the spies were wrong, he wouldn’t last long and would pass his final moments most unpleasantly.

The leviathan gathered itself. After a dizzying rush, it hurled itself through the air, then splashed down again. Cornelu let out a whoop of joy drowned in that titanic splash. He could go to Lagoas, which, while not home--he had no home, not anymore--was not Mezentio’s to do with as he would.

And, if he decided to drown himself halfway there, Costache would never know.

“We are a warrior race,” Sergeant Istvan declared, and all the Gyongyosians in his squad solemnly nodded.

“Aye, indeed we are a warrior race,” said Kun, who was less inclined to argue with his sergeant now that he had reached the exalted rank of corporal.

Istvan kept his face straight, though it wasn’t easy. Kun looked about as little like a warrior as anything under the stars. He was skinny--weedy, when you got down to it--bespectacled, and had been a mage’s apprentice before finding himself joined to the host of Ekrekek Arpad, the sovereign of Gyongyos. Even his tawny beard came in by clumps and patches, as if he needed some nostrum for mange.

Being thick-shouldered and furry himself, Istvan tended to look down his beaky nose at anyone who wasn’t. But Kun, even if he did complain and split hairs whenever he got the chance, had fought well on Obuda out in the Bothnian Ocean, and he’d fought well here in the frozen, mountainous wasteland of western Unkerlant, too. And the little bits of magic he’d learned from his master had served his squad mates well.

“There is a village up ahead,” Istvan said. “It is supposed to have Unkerlanter soldiers in it. Captain Tivadar says there aren’t supposed to be too many of the goat-eating buggers in there. Stars grant he’s right. However many there are, though, the company is going to clean them out.”

“Unless we don’t,” Szonyi said. Istvan remembered when the hulking private had been as raw a recruit as Kun. It hadn’t been so long before. Now Szonyi might have been an old veteran. He wasn’t old, but he certainly was a veteran.

“We are a warrior race,” Istvan repeated. “If the captain orders us to take this village, take it we shall, and he will lead us while we do it.” Szonyi’s big head bobbed up and down in agreement. Tivadar was an officer fit to command warriors, for he never asked his men to do anything he would not do and did not do himself.

“Onward!” Kun said. As a private, he would have been better pleased to hang back. Rank made hanging back embarrassing for him. It worked the same magic on Istvan. He wondered if it worked the same magic on Tivadar, too.

That didn’t matter, and he had no time to worry about it, anyhow. Other sergeants were haranguing their squads. Back when Istvan had been a simple soldier, he’d listened to sergeants as little as he could get away with. His own men listened to him that way, except when they listened closely so they could argue afterwards. But he heard his fellow sergeants, and even officers, with new ears these days. He had to get the troopers in his squad to do as he said. Any tricks he could pick up, he would.

Here came Captain Tivadar, who was only a few years older than Istvan. “Is your squad ready?” the company commander asked, glaring as if he intended to tear Istvan limb from limb if the answer was no.

But Istvan nodded and said, “Aye, sir.”

“The Unkerlanters aren’t supposed to have more than a section holding this miserable little place,” Tivadar said. “They can’t afford to fight out here in the middle of nowhere any better than we can--worse, in fact, because they’re fighting the Algarvians, too, a quarter of the way around the world east of here.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan repeated, and then added, “A quarter of the way around the world is too far for me to think about. All I know is, I’m too cursed far from my home valley.”

Tivadar nodded. “A man can’t be farther away than too far from home. But I’m glad we’ve got you with us, Sergeant. Even if the Unkerlanters have a regiment in there, you’ll make ‘em think we’ve got a brigade, and out they’ll come with their hands up high.”

Despite the flaps on his fur cap, Istvan’s ears had been chilly. Now they heated in embarrassment; he wasn’t used to praise from officers. “Sir,” he said, “if my bluff--and Kun’s little magic--hadn’t worked back there, we’d have had to yield ourselves to the Unkerlanters instead of the other way round. The stars shone kindly on me that day.”

“They shine on those who deserve it.” Tivadar slapped him on the back with a mittened hand. “Kun got promoted. Can’t very well promote you--you haven’t the blood for it, of course--but the bravery bonus will be added to your pay once all the clerks are done playing with their counting boards.”

“Unless I die of old age first,” Istvan said with a wry chuckle he quickly choked off. He could die of a lot of other things besides old age. The Unkerlanters were going to get the chance to find some of them, too.

Reading his thoughts, Captain Tivadar said, “If the stars wink, your clan still gets the bonus; it won’t be lost. And remember, your squad is on the left flank. If you can, lead them around behind the village while the main attack goes in from the front. Then, when the cursed Unkerlanters are all hot and bothered, you can hit ‘em from the rear--easy as buggering a goat.”

Istvan’s lip curled. “Sir, that’s disgusting.” After a moment, though, he laughed. “It’s pretty funny, too, isn’t it?”

“Of all my sergeants, you’re the one I want in back of the Unkerlanters.” Tivadar slapped him again, a good, solid blow. “Let’s get going.”

“Did you hear that, boys?” Istvan said to his squad. He felt about to burst with pride. “We’re the best, and the captain knows it. We’ll wreck the Unkerlanters good and proper, won’t we?”

“Aye,” the soldiers chorused. They took their places on the left of Captain Tivadar’s little line of battle and started east with the rest of the company. The wind blew snow from the ground and lashed their backs. It blew snow through the bare branches of stunted birch trees that clung to the sides of the valley in which the village lay. Istvan and his squad scurried through the trees. They were the only cover the freezing landscape offered.

Eggs began bursting farther south. “May the stars go dark for the Unkerlanters!” Istvan said angrily. “They weren’t supposed to have a tosser in there.” What that meant was, Captain Tivadar hadn’t warned him to expect one.

Kun said, “Their officers are probably saying we aren’t supposed to be coming after them. We need to be more like mages and deal with what is, not with what’s supposed to be.” He went into a snow-covered hole in the ground that was where it wasn’t supposed to be, and rose coated with white. Istvan was unkind enough to laugh.

Not three minutes later, he spied movement ahead, the distinctive movement only a human body can make. All the Gyongyosians in this part of the world were with him. That made the stooped figure ahead an enemy. Istvan threw his stick up to his shoulder and blazed.

The Unkerlanter shrieked and fell. “It’s a woman!” Szonyi exclaimed as she kept on shrieking. “What’s a woman doing out here?”

“We’ll never know,” Istvan said as he ran toward her through the snow. He pulled a knife from its sheath. “Wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. Have to shut her up.” Nervously, he glanced south, hoping the noise of combat there would keep anyone in the village from hearing her cries.

She found a rock in the snow and threw it at him as he drew near. It missed. She was groping for another one when he cut her throat. Her blood splashed red across the winter white.

“That was a waste, Sergeant,” one of his troopers said from behind him.

“We haven’t got time for fun,” Istvan answered with another shrug. “Too cursed cold to go whipping it out, anyhow. Come on. Keep moving.”

He tried to gauge how the fighting was going by where the Unkerlanters’ eggs were bursting. The rest of the company wasn’t moving as fast as Captain Tivadar had hoped. Istvan scowled. Instead of just following orders, he’d have to start thinking for himself. He didn’t care for that. It was, properly, an officer’s job.

As if to reassure him, Szonyi pointed down in the direction of the village and said, “We’ve set it afire.”

“Aye.” Istvan considered that, then slowly nodded. “That’ll help. The Unkerlanters will have a harder time aiming their tosser.” He thought a little more. His mind didn’t move very fast but had a way of getting where it was going. “And with the wind blowing at our backs, the smoke’ll help hide us when we get into place to come at ‘em from behind. We’d better do that. The rest of the company is going to need us even more than the captain thought they would.”

But for that luckless woman (what had she been doing?--gathering firewood, most likely), no one in the village had any notion his squad was moving around it toward the rear. Once in position, Istvan peered toward the place from behind a rock. Through blowing smoke, he saw Unkerlanter soldiers running here and there. The wind carried their guttural shouts to his ears.

One of them set an egg on the tosser’s hurling arm. Another launched the egg toward Istvan’s countrymen. Catching sight of the egg-tosser told him what he had to do next. He pointed toward it. “We’re going to take that miserable thing. The rest of the boys will have an easier time then. Forward--and don’t shout till you’re sure they’ve spied us.”

He was the first one to break cover and run toward the village. His men followed. If he went, they would go. The crunch of their boots on crusted snow seemed dreadfully loud in his ears. So did his own coughing after he sucked in too thick a lungful of smoky air.

But the tunic-clad Unkerlanters, intent on serving their egg-tosser and beating back the threat from the west, paid no attention to their rear till too late. Because of the smoke in the air, Istvan had to get closer than usual to them before he started blazing. First one of the enemy soldiers fell, then the other. The second Unkerlanter was grabbing for his own stick to blaze back when another Gyongyosian’s beam finished him.

“Gyongyos!” Istvan did shout then, as loud as he could. “Ekrekek Arpad! Gyongyos!” The rest of the squad echoed the cry. To the Unkerlanters’ frightened ears, they must have sounded like a regiment. They fought almost like a regiment, too, for the Unkerlanters, well concealed against Tivadar’s attackers, were hardly hidden at all from men coming the other way.

King Swemmel’s soldiers howled in dismay. Some tried to turn and face Istvan’s squad, but they couldn’t do that and hold off the rest of the attackers, too--they lacked the numbers. Some of them died in place. Others began throwing down their sticks, throwing up their hands, and surrendering.

Before long, the only Unkerlanters left in the ruined village were captives and a handful of the trappers and hunters and their womenfolk and children who’d lived there and hadn’t fled east. Captain Tivadar sent them all back toward land Gyongyos held more securely. Then, in front of the whole company, he spoke loudly to Istvan: “Well done, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir,” Istvan said. Another few years of tiny victories like this, and the armies of Gyongyos might be in position for something larger. Istvan wondered if he’d live to see it.

As the sun sank below the western horizon, the Algarvian strawboss shouted, “Going home!” Along with the rest of his labor gang, Leofsig laid down his sledgehammer with a weary sigh of relief. The Algarvian strode through the gang handing out the day’s pay: a small silver bit for Forthwegian laborers, half that much in copper for the handful of Kaunians.

A wagon came rattling up to take the gang back to Gromheort over the road they’d been paving; they were too far from the city to walk without adding unduly to their exhaustion. The blonds got the job of rounding up all the tools before the gang boss let them climb into the wagon, too. Like the Forthwegians, they sprawled limply over the wagon bed.

“Here, get off me,” a Forthwegian growled at one of them. “Ought to send the whole lot of you whoresons west. Then we’d be rid of you.”

“Oh, don’t go unbuttoning your tunic, Oslac,” Leofsig said. “We’re all too tired to see straight.”

Oslac glared at him, eyes glittering in the twilight. But Leofsig was bigger, stronger, and younger than the other laborer, whose dark beard was streaked with gray. Leofsig had been conscripted into King Penda’s levy not long before Forthweg began her disastrous war against Algarve and still thought of a man of thirty as one bearing respectable years. Knowing himself outmatched, Oslac did no more than mutter, “Stinking Kaunians.”

“We all stink, too,” Leofsig said, and Oslac could hardly argue with him there. He went on, “Let it alone, why don’t you?”

Had some of Oslac’s comrades backed him, he might have taken it further. Even the laborers who hated Kaunians worse than he did, though, seemed too worn to care. A couple of men had already started snoring. Leofsig rather envied them; no matter how much he’d done during the day, he couldn’t hope to sleep on bare boards in an unsprung wagon jouncing over cobblestones.

An hour or so later--just enough time for him to start to go stiff--the wagon clattered into Gromheort. He helped shake the sleepers awake, then creakily descended from the wagon and started home.

The Kaunian he’d defended, a fellow named Peitavas, fell into step beside him. “My thanks,” he said in his own language, which Leofsig spoke fairly well.

“It’s all right,” Leofsig answered in Forthwegian; he was too spent to look for words in another tongue. “Go home. Stay there. Stay safe.”

“I’m as safe as any Kaunian in Forthweg,” Peitavas said. “As long as I build roads for the Algarvians, I’m more useful to them alive than dead. With most of my people, it’s the other way round.” He turned down a side street before Leofsig could answer.

Leofsig cast a longing look toward the public baths. He sighed, shook his head, and walked on toward his home. His mother or sister would have a basin of water and some rags waiting for him. That wasn’t as good as a warm plunge and a showerbath, but it would have to do. Anyway, with fuel scarce and expensive in Gromheort these days, the plunge more often than not wasn’t warm. And getting into the baths cost a copper, a good part of what he’d spent the day slaving to earn.

Home, then, through the dark streets of the city. Curfew hadn’t come yet but wasn’t far away. Once, an Algarvian constable stopped him and started asking questions in bad Kaunian and worse Forthwegian. He wondered if he’d land in trouble and whether he ought to kick the chubby fellow in the balls and run. But then they recognized each other. Leofsig had helped the constable find his way back to his barracks when he got lost just after arriving in Gromheort. “Going on,” the Algarvian said, tipping his hat, and went on himself.

And so, instead of returning to the captives’ camp from which he’d escaped or having something worse happen to him, Leofsig knocked on his own front door a few minutes later. He waited for the bar to be lifted, then worked the latch and went inside. Conberge waited in the short entry hall. “You’re late tonight,” she said.

“Redheads worked us hard, curse ‘em,” he answered.

His sister wrinkled her nose. “I believe that.” To leave no possible doubt about what she believed, she added, “The basin’s waiting for you in the kitchen. It’ll be mostly cold by now, but I can put in some more hot water from the kettle over the fire.”

“Would you?” Leofsig said. “It’s chilly out there, and I don’t want to end up with chest fever.”

“Come along, then,” Conberge said briskly. She was between him and Ealstan in age, but insisted on mothering him in much the same style as their true mother. As Leofsig went past her and turned left toward the kitchen, she lowered her voice, murmuring, “We’ve heard from him.”

Leofsig stopped. “Have you?” he said, also softly. “Where is he? Is he all right?”

His sister nodded. “Aye, he is,” she whispered. “He’s in Eoforwic.”

“Not in Oyngestun?” Leofsig asked, and Conberge shook her head. “Is the Kaunian girl with him?”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t say. He says he’s happy though, so I think she is. Now come on. People will have heard you come in, and they’ll be wondering why you’re dawdling in the hallway.”

Fondly, Leofsig patted her on the shoulder. “You’d have made a terrific spy.” Conberge snorted and stopped acting motherly; she elbowed him harder than Oslac could have done. Thus propelled, into the kitchen he went. His mother was stirring a pot hanging over the fire next to the kettle. By the way Elfryth nodded, by the secretly delighted look in her eye, he knew she knew the news. All she said was, “Clean yourself off, son. Supper will be ready soon.”

“I’m going to give him some fresh hot water,” Conberge said, and used a dipper to draw some from the kettle. As Leofsig scrubbed dirt and sweat from his arms and legs and face, she went on, “I think he ought to put on a clean tunic, too, before he comes to the supper table.” That was also motherly: she didn’t seem to think he had sense enough to change clothes unless she told him to.

“Let me have a cup of wine first,” Leofsig said. Conberge poured him one. Before he drank, he raised the cup in salute. His sister and mother both smiled; they understood what he meant.

After putting on a fresh wool tunic and fresh drawers, he went across the courtyard to the dining room, which lay just to the right of the entry hall so as to make it convenient to the kitchen. As he’d expected, he found his father and uncle already there. Uncle Hengist was reading the news sheet: reading it aloud, and loudly. “ ‘No Unkerlanter gains reported on any front,’ “ he said. “What do you think of that, Hestan?”

Leofsig’s father shrugged. “The Unkerlanters have already gained a lot of ground,” he said in mild tones; his brother enjoyed hearing himself talk more than he did.

“But the Algarvians haven’t fallen to pieces, the way you said they would a few weeks ago,” Hengist insisted.

“I didn’t say they would. I said they might,” Hestan answered with a bookkeeper’s precision. “Pretty plainly, they haven’t. You’re right about that.” He nodded to Leofsig, looking to change the subject. “Hello, son. How did it go today?”

“I’m tired,” Leofsig answered. He could have said that any day and been telling the truth. He raised an eyebrow at his father. Hestan nodded, ever so slightly. He knew about Ealstan, too, then. Neither of them said anything where Uncle Hengist could hear. After what had happened to Sidroc, if he knew where Ealstan was, he might let the Algarvians know, too. Nobody wanted to find out whether he would.

“If you want to work with me, you may,” Hestan said. “Numbers are as stubborn as cobblestones, but not so backbreaking to wallop into place.”

“You’d make more money, too,” Uncle Hengist pointed out. His mind always ran in that direction.

“I still don’t think it’s safe,” Leofsig said. “Nobody pays attention to one laborer in a gang. But the fellow who casts accounts for you, you notice him. You want to be sure he knows what he’s doing. If he saves you money, you tell people about him. After a while, talk goes to the wrong ears.”

“I suppose that’s wise,” his father said. “Still, when I see you come dragging in the way you do sometimes, I wouldn’t mind throwing wisdom out the window.”

“I’ll get by,” Leofsig said. Hestan grimaced, but nodded.

Conberge came in and set stoneware bowls and bone-handled spoons on the table. “Supper in a minute,” she said.

“It smells good,” Leofsig said. His stomach growled agreement. The bread and olive oil he’d eaten at noon seemed a million miles away. Any sort of food would have smelled wonderful just then.

“Same old stew: barley and lentils and turnips and cabbage,” Conberge said. “Mother chopped a little smoked sausage into it, but only a little. You’ll taste it more than it will do you any good, if you know what I mean. It’s probably what you smell.”

Elfryth brought in the pot and ladled the bowls full. As she was sitting down, she asked, “Where’s Sidroc?” Uncle Hengist called his son, loudly. After another couple of minutes, Sidroc came in, sat down, and silently began to eat.

He was burly as Leofsig had become despite not doing hard physical labor. He looked like Leofsig, too, though his nose was blobbier than Leofsig’s sharply hooked one. It took after that of his mother; she’d been killed when an Algarvian egg wrecked their house, and he and Uncle Hengist had lived, not always comfortably, with Leofsig’s family ever since.

After finishing his first bowl of stew, Sidroc helped himself to another, which he also devoured. Only then did he speak: “That. . . wasn’t so bad.” He rubbed his temples. “My head hurts.”

He’d had headaches ever since he’d hit his head in the brawl with Ealstan. He still didn’t remember what the brawl had been about, for which Leofsig and his father and mother and sister thanked the powers above. Ealstan’s disappearance afterwards, though, had left both him and Uncle Hengist suspicious, most suspicious indeed. Leofsig wished his brother hadn’t had to run off. But Ealstan couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up without remembering. He couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up at all.

“Have you finished your schoolwork?” Hengist asked Sidroc.

“Oh, aye--as much of it as I could do,” Sidroc replied. He’d been an indifferent scholar before the knock on the head and hadn’t got better since. After taking a big swig from his wine cup, he went on, “Maybe I’ll sign up for Plegmunds Brigade after all. I wouldn’t have to worry about poems and irregular verbs there.”

Everyone else at the table, even Uncle Hengist, winced. The Algarvians had set up Plegmund’s Brigade to get Forthwegians to fight for them in Unkerlant. Leofsig had fought the Algarvians. He would sooner have jumped off a tall building than fought for them. But Sidroc had been talking about the Brigade even before the fight with Ealstan. Maybe he needs another shot to the head, Leofsig thought, and a harder one this time.