Darkness Descending

Seventeen

Home?” Vanai shook her head. “This isn’t home, Ealstan. It’s halfway between a trap and a cage.”

She watched in dismay as Ealstan’s face closed. She was sick and tired of being cooped up, and he was getting sick and tired of listening to her complain about it. He said, “You didn’t have to come with me, you know.”

“Oh, but I did,” she answered. “My grandfather’s house was a cage. Oyngestun was a trap. I still do feel trapped”--she was too proud to pretend not to have the feelings she had--”but at least the company is better when you’re here with me.”

That won a smile from her Forthwegian lover. “Only reason I’m not here more is because I’m working all the cursed time,” he answered. “My father would always say the best bookkeepers were mostly here in Eoforwic, because the capital is where the money is. He usually knows what he’s talking about, but I think he was wrong this time. If the bookkeepers here were so fine, there wouldn’t be so many people who wanted to hire me.”

“I don’t know about that,” Vanai said. “Maybe you’re better than you think.”

He looked very young then, and very confused, as if he wanted to believe that but didn’t quite dare. “My father is that good,” he said. “Me?” He shrugged and shook his head. “I know how much I don’t know.”

Vanai laughed at him. “But do you know how much the other bookkeepers in Eoforwic don’t know?”

She watched him work his way through that. “It would be nice to believe that, but I really don’t,” he said.

“Then why does Ethelhelm want you to keep his books for him?” Vanai countered, using the singer’s name because Ealstan set such stock in him. She set more stock in Ethelhelm than she’d expected, not because of the Kaunian blood he might have, but for the Forthwegian songs he wrote and sang.

But her question didn’t have quite the impact for which she’d hoped. “Why? I’ll tell you why,” Ealstan answered. “Because the fellow who used to cast accounts for him walked in front of a ley-line caravan and got himself squashed, that’s why. That’s why Ethelhelm was doing his own bookkeeping for a bit, too, but he just didn’t have the time to keep on.” He got up from the table and stretched; something crackled in his back. “Ahh, that’s better,” he said. “I spend all my time on a stool, bending over ledgers.”

Vanai was about to offer him the chance to spend some time in an altogether different position when she saw movement down on the street. She went to the window for a better look. “Algarvian constables,” she said over her shoulder to Ealstan.

“What are they doing?” he asked, and then, coming up behind her, set a hand on her shoulder and drew her away from the grimy panes of glass. “Let me look--it won’t matter if they see me here.”

She nodded and stepped back. Ealstan did his best to take care of her. He stood there, his wide back to her, looking down. “Well?” she asked at last.

“They’re putting up broadsheets,” he said. “I can’t make out what the sheets say, not from up here. Once they’ve gone on, I’ll go downstairs and have a look.”

“All right.” Vanai nodded. All at once, with the constables passing through, the flat was a refuge once more. “Maybe they’re just more recruiting sheets for Plegmund’s Brigade.” Those, at least, didn’t have anything directly to do with her.

But Ealstan shook his head. “They don’t look like them,” he said. “The sheets for Plegmund’s Brigade always have pictures on them, so the people who are too stupid to read can figure out what they’re about. These are nothing but words. I can see that much.” He turned away from the window toward her. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Everything will be fine.”

He didn’t really believe that. She could see as much by the lines, deep past his years, that were carved into the skin by the corners of his mouth. She could also see he didn’t really expect her to believe it, either. But he said it anyhow, in the hope, however forlorn, it would make her feel better. And his caring for her feelings did make her feel better, even if she didn’t think everything would be all right.

She stepped up and gave him a hug. He hugged her, too, and kissed her. One of his hands closed on her breast. When Major Spinello had done that, all Vanai had wanted to do was tear herself away. Now, though Ealstan was doing the same thing, her heart beat fast and she molded herself against him. It was, if you looked at it the right way, pretty funny.

Warmth flowed through her. But when she started to go back toward the bedchamber, Ealstan didn’t come along. Instead, he returned to the window. “They’ve gone down the street,” he said. “I can go down and look at the broadsheets without drawing any notice--plenty of people coming out to see what the latest nonsense is.”

“Go on, then,” Vanai answered. Putting business ahead of pleasure was like Ealstan. Right at the moment, she wasn’t sure she liked that so well.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “And then--” Something sparked in his eyes. He hadn’t forgotten her, not at all. Good ... well, better. She waved toward the door.

But when he did come back, his face was as grim as Vanai had ever seen it. Any thoughts of making love right then flew out of her head. “What have the Algarvians gone and done?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“They’re ordering all Kaunians to report to the Kaunian quarter here in Eoforwic,” Ealstan answered. “They’re all supposed to live there and nowhere else in town. Anybody who brings in word of one who hasn’t reported to the Kaunian quarter gets a reward--the broadsheet doesn’t say how much.”

Vanai’s voice went shrill with alarm: “You know why they’re doing that.”

“Of course I do,” Ealstan replied. “With all the Kaunians in one place, the redheads won’t have to work so hard to round your people up and ship you west whenever they need some more.”

“Some more to kill,” Vanai said, and Ealstan nodded. She turned away from him. “What am I going to do?” She wasn’t asking Ealstan. She was asking the world at large, and the world had long since shown that it didn’t care.

Whether she’d asked him or not, Ealstan answered: “Well, you’re not going into the Kaunian quarter and that’s flat. Out here, you’ve got a chance. In there? Forget it.”

“A price on my head,” Vanai said wonderingly. She giggled, though it wasn’t funny--perhaps because it wasn’t funny. “What am I, a famous highwayman?”

“You’re an enemy of the Kingdom of Forthweg,” Ealstan told her. “That’s what the broadsheet says, anyhow.”

Vanai laughed louder, because that was even less funny than the other. “I’m an enemy of the kingdom?” she exclaimed. “I am? Who beat the Forthwegian army? Last I looked, it was the Algarvians, not us Kaunians.”

“A lot of Forthwegians will forget all about that, though,” Ealstan said bleakly. “Cousin Sidroc would, I think; maybe Uncle Hengist, too. Kaunians have always been easy to blame.”

“Of course we are.” Vanai didn’t try to hide her bitterness. She might almost have been speaking to another Kaunian as she went on, “There are ten times as many Forthwegians as there are of us. That makes us pretty easy to blame all by itself.”

“Aye, it does, though not all of us”--Ealstan didn’t forget he was a Forthwegian--”feel that way about Kaunians.”

Slowly, Vanai nodded. She knew how Ealstan felt about her. But from everything he’d said, his father and brother would never have done anything to harm Kaunians--and neither of them had fallen in love with one. Following that thought along its ley line brought fresh alarm to Vanai. “What will the redheads do to anyone who helps hide Kaunians outside the quarter?”

Ealstan looked unhappy. Maybe he’d hoped that wouldn’t occur to her. The hope was foolish; the Algarvian edict would surely be plastered all over the news sheets, too. Reluctantly, he answered, “There is a penalty for harboring fugitives--that’s what they call it. The broadsheet doesn’t say what it is.”

“Whatever the Algarvians want it to be, that’s what,” Vanai predicted, and Ealstan had to nod. She pointed at him, as if the broadsheet were his fault. “And now you’re going to be in danger on account of me.” That seemed even worse than her being in danger herself.

Ealstan shrugged. “Not many people know you’re here. I’m not sure the landlord does, and that’s a good thing--landlords are a pack of conniving, double-dealing whoresons, and they’d do anything to put another three coppers in their belt pouches.”

In their pockets, Vanai would have said, but the long tunics Forthwegians wore didn’t come with pockets. She wondered how he spoke with such assurance about landlords, having lived at home all his life till fleeing after the fight with his cousin. She was about to twit him on that when she remembered he was a bookkeeper, and the son of a bookkeeper for good measure. He would know more about landlords and their habits than she might have guessed.

He went on, “I don’t know if we’ll be able to get you to any more of Ethelhelm’s performances, or anything like that.”

When he said he didn’t know if she’d be able to go out, he meant he knew perfectly well she wouldn’t. Vanai could see that. Even so, she was grateful for the way he phrased it. It left her hope, and she had little else. She looked around at the imperfectly plastered walls of the dingy flat. Aye, they might have been the bars of a cage in the zoological garden.

“You’ll have to bring me more books,” she said. “A lot more books.” Brivibas had given her one thing for which to remember him kindly, at any rate: as long as her eyes were going back and forth across a printed page, she could forget where she was. That was not the smallest of sorceries, not when this was the place she had to try to forget.

“I will,” Ealstan said. “I’d already thought of that. I’ll scour the secondhand stores. I can get more for the same money in places like that.”

She nodded and looked around again. Aye, this would be a cage, sure enough. She wouldn’t even dare look out on the street so much as she had been doing, lest someone looking up spy her golden hair. “Get me some cookbooks,” she said. “If I’m going to spend all my time cooped up in here, cooking will help make the days go by.” She pointed at Ealstan. “You’ll get fat, you wait and see.”

“I don’t mind trying,” he said. “Fattening me up won’t be easy, though, not on what passes for rations these days.”

Something unspoken hung in the air between them. IfAlgarve wins the war, none of this matters. Mezentio’s men wouldn’t need their savage sorceries anymore after that, but by then they would have got into the habit of killing Kaunians. And that, as the history of her people in Forthweg attested, was a habit easier to acquire than to break.

There was one other thing she could think of to make time go by here in this little flat. She went over to Ealstan and put her arms around him. “Come on,” she said, doing her best to recapture the excitement that had been growing in her before the redheads ran up their broadsheets. “Let’s go back to the bedchamber. . . .”

Trasone tramped through the battered streets of Aspang. The burly Algarvian soldier looked on the devastation around him with a certain amount of satisfaction. The Unkerlanters had done everything they could to throw his comrades and him out of the place, but they’d failed. Algarve’s banner of red and green and white still flew from flagpoles all over Aspang.

So did another flag, the gold and green of the revived Kingdom of Grelz. Trasone rumbled laughter deep in his chest when he saw a Grelzer flag. He knew the kingdom was a joke. Every Algarvian soldier in Aspang knew the same thing. And if the Grelzers didn’t, they were even stupider than he thought.

He snorted. As far as he was concerned, Grelzers were just another bunch of stinking Unkerlanters. If you turned your back on them, they’d stab you. Every couple of paces, he looked around. No, you couldn’t trust these whoresons, not even in a town full of Algarvian soldiers.

He strode out into the market square. Along with the rest of Aspang, it had taken a beating. Still, merchants from the town and peasants in from the countryside had set up tables on which to display their wares. If they didn’t sell, they’d starve. And, no doubt, some of them took word of what they saw back to the Unkerlanter raiders who never stopped harassing the Algarvians behind their lines.

“Sausage?” a woman called to Trasone, holding up several grayish brown links. “Good sausage!” He would have bet every copper he owned that she hadn’t known a word of Algarvian before the war.

“How much?” he asked. Algarvian soldiers were under orders not to plunder in the market square, though the rest of Aspang was fair game. The links looked better than what he was likely to get back at the barracks.

“One silver, four links,” the sausage seller answered.

“Thief,” Trasone growled, to start the haggling off on the right note. He got his four links of sausage, and paid less than half what the Grelzer peasant woman had first demanded. He strolled away happy. That the woman hadn’t dared dicker hard against an occupying soldier with a stick slung on his back didn’t cross his mind. Had it, he wouldn’t have cared. The bargain was all that mattered.

He hadn’t gone far before he saw Major Spinello heading his way. As best he could with sausages in his free hand, he came to attention and saluted. “As you were,” Spinello said. The battalion commander eyed his purchase. “You’re supposed to give these Unkerlanter wenches your sausage, soldier. You’re not supposed to take theirs.”

“Heh,” Trasone said, and nodded. “That’s funny, sir.” Even if the officer did go on and on about the Kaunian girl he’d been screwing before he got sent west, he’d done a good job with the battalion.

Now he took off his hat, waved it around to emphasize what he was about to say, and then set it back on his head at a jaunty angle. “You ask me, though, these broads are too ugly to deserve any Algarvian’s sausage.”

That just made Trasone shrug. “Even ugly broads are better than no broads at all,” he said. He’d lined up for a go at a soldiers’ brothel a few times. That wasn’t the best sport in the world--far from it--but it was better than nothing.

Spinello didn’t have to worry about standing in line. Officers’ brothels were a cut above what the regular troopers got. Even so, he rolled his eyes. “Ugly,” he repeated. “Every cursed one of ‘em is ugly. When I was doing garrison duty back in that Forthwegian town, now ...” And he was off on another story about the blond girl back in Oyngestun.

Trasone grinned as he listened. Spinello did spin a pretty good yarn. If half what he said was true, he’d trained that Kaunian bitch the way a hunter trained his hound. Of course, everybody lied about women except women, and they lied about men instead.

A few eggs started landing on the outskirts of Aspang, none of them very close to the market square. “Swemmel’s boys are right on time,” Spinello remarked. Other than that, he didn’t react to the eggs at all. He had nerve.

“Think the Unkerlanters are going to have another try at running us out of here, sir?” Trasone asked.

“They’re welcome to try, as far as I’m concerned,” Spinello answered. “The way we’ve fortified Aspang since we got driven back here, they could send every soldier they have against us, and we’d kill ‘em all before they broke in.”

Maybe that was true. Aspang had held out against everything King Swemmel’s men had thrown at it so far. But an awful lot of Algarvian soldiers had died holding the Unkerlanters out.

“Besides,” Spinello went on, waving an arm, “the snow is starting to melt. For the next few weeks, nobody’s going to move very far very fast--except to sink into the mud, I mean.”

“Aye, something to that,” Trasone agreed. “If Unkerlant doesn’t hold the record for mud, I’m buggered if I know what does. Saw that last fall. Powers above, if it hadn’t been for the mud, we’d have made it into Cottbus without even breathing hard.”

Spinello waggled a finger under Trasone’s nose. Trasone scowled. What did the officer know that would make him contradict? He hadn’t been in Unkerlant then. He’d been back in Forthweg, happily boffing that Kaunian slut. But Spinello turned out to know more than Trasone expected. Lecturing like a professor, the major said, “Consider, my friend. The fall mud comes from the fall rains alone. The spring mud comes not only from the rain but also from the melting of all the snow on the ground. Which do you expect to be worse?”

As ordered, Trasone considered. His lips shaped a soundless whistle. “We’ll be in mud up to our ballocks!” he exclaimed.

“Deeper,” Major Spinello said. “But so will the Unkerlanters. Till that mud dries out, nobody will do much. When it does, we’ll see who moves first, and where. And won’t that be interesting?”

Again, he sounded more like a professor than a soldier. All Trasone said was, “I’m bloody well sick of going backwards. I want to be heading west again.” He cared little for the big picture, much more for his own small piece of it. If he was retreating, Algarve was losing. If he was advancing, his kingdom was winning.

“Head west we shall.” Spinello didn’t lack for confidence. And he had his reasons, too: “If you don’t think our mages are more clever than the Unkerlanters’, you need to think again.”

“Aye.” Trasone nodded, then chuckled. “By the time this fornicating war is done, there won’t be a Kaunian left alive.” And if that included the wench with whom the major had been fornicating, Trasone wouldn’t shed a tear.

“Or an Unkerlanter, either,” Spinello said. “The ones we don’t slay, King Swemmel’s mages will. I, for one, won’t miss them. Nasty people. Homely people, too, when you get right down to it.” He drew himself up very straight. “We deserve to win, for we are better looking.”

Did he mean that, or was it one of the absurd conceits he liked to come out with every now and then? Trasone couldn’t tell. He didn’t much care, either. Spinello had proved he knew what he was doing on the battlefield. So long as that held true, he could be as crazy as he liked away from it.

He thumped Trasone on the back. “Go on. Enjoy your sausages.” Off he strutted across the market square, a cocky little rooster of a man. Trasone stared after him with almost paternal affection.

Then, with a shrug, the veteran headed back toward the theater where his company was quartered these days. The name of the play it had been showing before the Algarvians overran Aspang was still up on the marquee. That was what somebody had told Trasone the words were, anyhow. He couldn’t speak Unkerlanter, and he couldn’t read it, either; the characters were different from the ones Algarvians used.

Sergeant Panfilo had some onions. Even more to the point, he had a frying pan. The company had stolen a little iron stove from a house near the theater. Issued rations had often got erratic during the winter. When the soldiers came on food, they wanted to be able to cook it. Before long, a savory aroma rose from the pan.

One of the other troopers in Trasone’s squad, a skinny fellow named Clovisio, came over and stood by the stove, watching with spaniel eyes as the sausages sizzled. Trasone’s rumbling stomach made him less than polite. “You think you’re going to scrounge scraps off us, you can bloody well think again,” he growled.

Clovisio looked affronted as readily as he’d looked cuddly and endearing a moment before. “My dear fellow, I can pay my way,” he said. He took a flask from his belt and gently shook it. Its suggestive gurgle brought a smile to Trasone’s face--and to Sergeant Panfilo’s.

“Now you’re talking,” the sergeant said. He turned the sausages with his knife, eyed them, and lifted the pan off the stove. “I think we’re in business here.” The three of them ate sausage and onions and shared nips of the fiery Unkerlanter spirits in Clovisio’s flask.

“That’s not so bad,” Trasone said, chasing a couple of strings of fried onion around the pan with his own knife. He slapped his belly. “Blazes the stuffing out of meat hacked off the carcass of a behemoth that froze to death.”

“Or meat hacked off the carcass of a behemoth that didn’t freeze right away, but had time to start going bad first,” Clovisio said. Trasone grimaced and nodded; he knew the sickly sweet taste of spoiled meat as well as any other Algarvian soldier in Unkerlant.

Not to be outdone by his companions, Sergeant Panfilo added, “And it sure blazes the stuffing out of going empty.”

“Aye,” Trasone said. All three soldiers solemnly nodded. Like so many Algarvians in Unkerlant, they’d known emptiness, too. Trasone turned to Clovisio. “Anything left in that flask?”

Clovisio shook it again. It still gurgled. He passed it to Trasone. Trasone sipped, but didn’t empty it. Instead, he handed it to Panfilo. The sergeant took a sergeant’s privilege and tilted it up to get the last few drops.

For a moment, the three men squatted there, looking at the now empty frying pan. Trasone nodded, as if in agreement to something nobody had actually come out and said. “That’s not so bad,” he repeated. “A full belly, a little something to drink--”

“Nobody trying to kill us right this minute,” Clovisio put in.

“Aye, it could be worse,” Panfilo agreed. “We’ve all seen that.” Trasone and Clovisio nodded. They had indeed seen that.

“Even when it’s been as bad as it can be, we get to fight back,” Trasone said. “I’d rather be us than a pack of stinking Kaunians in what they call a special camp waiting to be turned into fuel for magecraft.”

“I’d rather be us than a pack of stinking Kaunians any which way,” Clovisio declared. “The more of ‘em we get rid of, the sooner we lick the Unkerlanters and the sooner we can go home.”

“Home.” Trasone spoke the word with dreamy longing. He shook himself like a man reluctantly awakening. “I don’t even remember what it’s like anymore, or only just barely. I’ve been doing this too long. I know it’s real. Everything else--” He shook his head. After a moment, so did Panfilo and Clovisio.

Leofsig didn’t like the way his father was looking at him. Hestan drew in a long breath and then slowly let it out: a patient exhalation that wasn’t quite a sigh. “But why, son?” he asked. “Our family and Felgilde’s have been talking about this match for quite a while now, as you know full well. Her father is a merchant who’s done well even in these sorry times. Joining Elfsig’s house to ours would benefit both.” He raised an eyebrow. “And Felgilde dotes on you. You must know that, too.”

“Oh, I do, Father,” Leofsig answered. That sat alone together in the dining room. Leofsig kept glancing at the doorways and the courtyard to make sure Sidroc and Uncle Hengist weren’t snooping. For that matter, he didn’t want his mother or sister listening, either. He didn’t want to be having this conversation at all.

His father, though, had put his foot down. Hestan seldom did that; when he did, he usually got what he wanted. He said, “And I thought you were fond of the girl, too.”

“Oh, I was, Father. I am,” Leofsig said. Fond was’t exactly the word he would have used, but it served about as well as the cruder equivalents that sprang into his mind.

“Well, then?” Hestan asked in what was for him a considerable show of annoyance. “Why won’t you wed the girl? Then you could--” He broke off, but Leofsig had a good notion of what he’d been about to say. Then you could do whatever you want with her.

“No,” Leofsig said, though he knew just what he wanted to do with Felgilde, and knew she wanted to do it, too.

“Why not?” His father raised his voice, something he did even more rarely than putting his foot down.

“Because I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to marry anybody I can’t trust not to go to the Algarvians with word of where Ealstan is and who he’s with,” Leofsig answered. “That’s why. And I can’t, curse it.”

Hestan didn’t show surprise very often, either. “Oh,” he said now, and then, a breath later, “Oh,” again. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Aye, it is.” Leofsig’s nod was somber. “She’s got no use for Kaunians, and she’s got no use for anybody who has a use for them. She’s a sweet girl a lot of ways, powers above know”--he remembered the wonderful feel of her hand on him-- “but we already have too many in our family we don’t trust with our secrets.”

“Not everyone would put his brother ahead of the girl who might become his wife.” Hestan inclined his head. “You pay me a compliment by making me think I may possibly have done something right in raising you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Leofsig answered with a shrug. “I do know there are plenty of girls out there, and I’ve only got one brother.” He wondered where the girls he talked about were. Forthwegian girls of good family in Gromheort were mostly spoken for, as Felgilde had been for all practical purposes. Some Kaunian girls of good family were selling themselves on the streets these days, the Algarvians having prevented them from feeding themselves any other way. Leofsig sometimes found himself horrified and tempted at the same time.

His father sighed. “Now I’m going to have to tell Elfsig we can’t proclaim a formal engagement, and I’m going to have to make up some kind of reason to explain why we can’t.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” Leofsig said. “Believe me, I didn’t want things to turn out this way.” If he could have married Felgilde, he could have taken her to bed with no scandal attaching to either one of them. He envied his younger brother, who hadn’t let scandal--double scandal, since his lover was a Kaunian--get in his way.

“I do believe you. I remember what I was like when I was your age,” Hestan said with a reminiscent chuckle. Leofsig tried to imagine his father as a randy young man. He had little luck. Hestan went on, “But you have nothing to be sorry for--nothing that has anything to do with me, anyhow. I already told you, I’m proud of you.”

He stroked his beard, his eyes far away as he thought. Leofsig noted with a small start how gray his father’s beard was getting, even if Hestan’s hair stayed mostly dark. That graying had all come since the war: one more evil to blame on it.

“Well, what will we do?” Hestan murmured.

“I’ll come up with something,” Leofsig said.

His father shook his head. “No, don’t you worry about a thing. Your mother and I will take care of it, one way or another. We’ll keep Elfsig sweet, or not too sour, one way or another, too.”

“Tell him I picked up a disease in a soldiers’ brothel,” Leofsig suggested.

“That’s what the Algarvians spend a lot of time complaining about,” Hestan replied with a snort. “Of course, since they’re the only ones who use their brothels, they never ask who gave the girls the diseases in the first place.” With another snort, he added, “No, I think we’ll find something else to say to the man who won’t end up being your father-in-law.”

“But what?” Leofsig was less inclined to worry or brood than his father or his brother, but saying good-bye to the girl he’d thought himself likely to marry wasn’t going to be easy.

“Your mother and I will come up with something that will serve,” his father said firmly, “so don’t you trouble yourself about it. If you see Felgilde on the street, don’t let on that anything is wrong.”

“All right.” Leofsig didn’t know how good an actor he was, either. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. Then he yawned. He wouldn’t worry about it, not till he got up in the morning. “Thank you, Father,” he said as he pushed back his chair and got up from the table.

“Don’t thank me yet, not when I haven’t done anything,” Hestan answered. “But I do think we’ll be able to take care of this without too much trouble.”

When Hestan stumbled out to the kitchen the next morning to eat porridge for breakfast and take along the bread and oil and onions and cheese his mother and sister had packed for his midday meal, he found his mother kneading dough for the day’s baking. Making bread from scratch was cheaper than buying it ready-baked; Elfryth and Conberge had been doing more and more of it since the redheads occupied Gromheort. The dough wasn’t quite the right color--it would have barley flour in it as well as wheat. At least it didn’t have peas or lentils ground up with it, as it would have when things were hungriest the winter before.

“I think your father and I have found something to keep Felgilde’s family from being too disappointed when we break off our arrangement,” Elfryth said. “It will probably cost a little cash, but what is cash for except greasing the wheels every now and then?”

“You’ve already spent a lot on me,” Leofsig said around a mouthful of barley porridge. He gulped the rough wine his mother had poured for him. “How many palms did you have to grease after I broke out of the captives’ camp?”

“That doesn’t matter,” his mother said. “Besides, almost all the people we paid off then are gone now. As far as the Algarvian constables here these days know, you’re right as rain.”

He didn’t argue; he didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed the cloth sack that held his lunch and a tin flask with more cheap wine in it, then hurried out the door. In the early morning light, Gromheort seemed almost as sleepy as he felt. Only a handful of people were out and about to hear the great burst of song with which the birds greeted the sun in springtime.

Hardly any of that handful were Kaunians. Except for a few skulkers, the blonds were all packed into a neighborhood about a quarter the size of that in which they’d formerly lived. Algarvian constables patrolled the edges of that neighborhood and let out only the few Kaunians who had leave to labor elsewhere. Road workers fell into that group (so did streetwalkers).

Leofsig waved to Peitavas, who was arguing his way past the constables. The blond laborer waved back. After the constables finally let him go, he walked with Leofsig toward the west gate. “You shouldn’t treat me as if I were a human being,” Peitavas said in his own language. “It will give you a bad character among your own people and with the redheads.”

As if I were a human being. Kaunian could be a remorselessly precise tongue; it was certainly better than Forthwegian for putting across fine shades of meaning. “I do not call that contrary to fact,” Leofsig said, also in Kaunian.

“I know you don’t,” Peitavas answered. “That proves my point.” He said very little after that, no matter how hard Leofsig tried to draw him out. And he made a point of climbing into a wagon different from the one Leofsig chose. Leofsig muttered to himself. What was he supposed to do if Peitavas didn’t want to be treated like a human being? That the Kaunian might have been trying to protect him never entered his mind.

By the time he got out to the work, and especially by the time he’d put in a full day breaking rocks and making a roadbed, he was too worn to care. He didn’t go back to Gromheort in a wagon with Peitavas or any other Kaunian, and he was too worn to care about that, either. He came as close to falling asleep on the way home as he’d ever done.

Not only because he wanted to be clean but also in the hope that a warm plunge followed by cold water would revive him, he did pay a copper and stop at the public baths not far from the count’s castle. He knew how tired he truly was when he realized he was standing under a showerbath from a perforated bucket without imagining the naked women doing the same thing on the other side of the brick wall dividing the building in two.

But one of those women, he discovered when he left the baths, was Felgilde: she was coming out of the women’s exit, still running a comb through her damp hair, at the same time as he was going out through the men’s door. He pretended he didn’t notice her. That gave him a couple of heartbeats’ worth of relief, no more, for she called out, “Leofsig!” as soon as she saw him.

“Oh. Hello, Felgilde,” he said, doing his best to sound surprised. He hadn’t been so frightened since the battle when the Algarvians smashed the army of which he’d been a part not long after it began its invasion of Mezentio’s kingdom. “Uh, how are you?” He had the bad feeling he would find out in great detail.

And he did. “I never want to see you again,” Felgilde said. “I never want to talk to you again. I never want to have anything to do with you again. After all we did. ...” Had she had a knife, she might have pulled it out and used it on him. “The nerve of your father!”

Since Leofsig didn’t know just what his father had done, he kept quiet. Whatever it was, it seemed to have broken the not-quite-engagement. He stood there doing his best to look innocent, hoping Felgilde would tell him why he ought to look that way and why she thought he wasn’t.

She didn’t disappoint him. “The nerve of your father!” she repeated. “The dowry he asked for, a duchess’ father couldn’t afford to pay. And your family has more money than mine, anyhow.” she sniffed. “I can certainly see why; your father would dive into a dung heap to bring out a copper in his teeth.”

That should have infuriated Leofsig. It did infuriate him, in fact, but he wanted to seem contrite. “I’m sorry, Felgilde,” he said, and some small part of him was: by most Forthwegian standards, her views were normal and his strange. “When it comes to money, no one else in the family can argue with him.”

Felgilde tossed her head. “Well, you can’t have tried very hard. Since you didn’t, good-bye.” Nose in the air, she stalked off. Leofsig felt a pang, watching her go. But he also felt he’d just had a narrow escape. Trying to hold that feeling uppermost in his mind, he headed for home himself.

Leave. The word sang within Istvan. He’d spent far too long either at the front or on garrison duty, with never the chance to go back to his home valley and spend a little time there. Now, at last, he had it. He vowed to the stars to make the most of it, too.

He’d been walking for hours, at the ground-eating pace he’d acquired in the Gyongyosian army, from the depot at which the ley-line caravan had left him. No ley line came any closer to his valley than that. Now, looking down from the pass, he could see spread out before him the place where he’d spent his whole life till Gyongyos’ wars pulled him away.

He stopped, more in surprise than from weariness. How small and cramped it looks, he thought. The valley had seemed plenty big enough while he was growing to manhood in it. He shrugged broad shoulders and started walking again. His village lay closest to the mouth of the pass. He’d be there well before nightfall.

The mountains that ringed the valley still wore snow halfway down from their peaks. That snow would retreat up the slopes as summer advanced on spring, but not too far, not too far. Even now, Istvan’s breath smoked as he trudged along.

Snow still lay on the ground here and there in the valley, too, in places shaded from the northern sky. Elsewhere, mud replaced it, mud streaked with last year’s dead, yellow grass and just beginning to be speckled with the green of new growth.

An old man, his tawny beard gone gray, was setting stones in a wall that marked the boundary between two fields: a boundary no doubt also marked in spilled blood a few generations before. He looked up from his work and eyed Istvan, then called, “Who are you, lad?”--a natural enough question, when Istvan’s green-brown uniform tunic and leggings hid his clan affiliation and made him look different, too.

“I am Istvan son of Alpri,” Istvan answered. “Kunhegyes is my village.”

“Ah,” the old man said, and nodded. “Be welcome, then, clansmate. May the stars always shine on you.”

Istvan bowed. “May you always know their light, kinsman.” He walked on.

But even as he walked, he realized he spoke differently from the old man. The accent of the valley--which had been his accent till he joined the army--now struck his ear as rustic and uncouth. His own way of speaking, these days was smoother and softer. In the army, he still sounded like someone from the back country. Here in his old home, though, he would seem almost like a city man whenever he opened his mouth.

Like any village in Gyongyos, Kunhegyes sheltered behind a stout palisade. So far as Istvan knew, his hometown remained at peace with the other two villages in the valley, nor was the valley as a whole at feud with any of its neighbors. Still, such things could change in the blink of an eye. The lookout up on the palisade was in grim earnest when he demanded Istvan’s name.

He gave it again and added, “You let me in this instant, Csokonai, or I’ll thrash you till you can’t even see.”

The lookout, who was also Istvan’s cousin, laughed and said, “You and what army?” But he didn’t try to keep Istvan out; instead, he ran down off the palisade and opened the gate so his kinsman could enter. As soon as Istvan came inside, the two young men embraced. “By the stars, it’s good to see you,” Csokonai exclaimed.

“By the stars, it’s good to be seen,” Istvan answered, which made Csokonai laugh. Istvan laughed, too, but he hadn’t been joking; plenty of times, he’d thought he would never be seen again, not in his home village.

Inside the palisade, Kunhegyes’ houses were as he remembered them: solid structures of stone and brick, with steep slate roofs to shed rain and snow and to make sure no stick could set them afire. The houses stood well apart from one another, too, to make each more defensible. Despite that, the place seemed crowded to Istvan in a way it hadn’t before he saw the wider world. First the valley felt crowded, and now the village looks too small, he thought. What’s wrong with me?

“You must be glad to be back,” Csokonai said.

“Oh, aye, so I must,” Istvan agreed vaguely, though that had been the furthest thing from his mind.

“Well, don’t just stand there, then,” his cousin said. “I’ll take you along to your house--not likely anybody else’U come along till I get back up on the palisade. We don’t get one traveler most days, let alone two.” His laugh said he was happy to dwell in such perfect isolation.

Istvan had been, too. He kept looking into shops and taverns. Was everything here really on such a small scale? Had it always been this way? If it had, why hadn’t he noticed before? It had been air under the wings of a bird--that was why. He’d never imagined things could be any different. Now that he knew better, Kunhegyes shrank in his mind like a wool tunic washed in hot water.

Up the street toward him came a fellow ten years older than he, a bruiser named Korosi. Every so often, he’d made Istvan’s life in Kunhegyes miserable. He still walked with a swagger. But, like everything else in the village, he seemed to have shrunk. Istvan walked straight toward him, not looking for trouble, but not about to give way, either. In days gone by, he would have yielded. Now Korosi was the one who stepped aside.

He didn’t even growl about it. Instead, he said, “Welcome home, Istvan. May the stars shine on you.”

“And on you,” Istvan answered, half a heartbeat slower than he should have. He glanced over toward Csokonai. His cousin seemed as surprised that he’d got a friendly greeting from Korosi as he was. It must be the uniform, Istvan thought, not realizing that he looked like what he was: a combat veteran who’d seen a lot of fights and wouldn’t shy from one more.

Csokonai pointed. “There’s the house, in case you’ve forgotten where you live. Now I am going to get back up on the palisade, before somebody notices I’m not where I’m supposed to be and pitches a fit.”

“Not know my own house? Not likely,” Istvan said. “If you think I’m that stupid, maybe I ought to knock some sense into your head.” Csokonai beat a hasty retreat.

Istvan’s own house, strangely, seemed as it should have to him. After a moment, he realized it had been shrinking for him as long as he could remember. What had seemed immense to a toddler was just the right size once he had some size of his own. Being away hadn’t pushed that process any further; it had already gone as far as it could.

As with most houses in Kunhegyes, his had only little slits for windows, but out of them floated the delicious smell of his mother’s pepper stew. Spit poured into his mouth. Where so much seemed less than it once had, the stew smelled even better than he’d expected. He hadn’t had anything like it in a long time. He hurried forward to knock on the door.

He heard shouts within. A moment later, he found himself staring at an older, shorter version of himself. “Father!” he exclaimed.

His father had been holding a boot and a length of leather lacing with which he’d been repairing it. Now he dropped them both. “Istvan!” he said joyfully. Istvan’s name produced more shouts farther back inside the house. His father embraced him. “Ah, by the stars, they’ve gone and made a man of you.”

“Have they?” Istvan shrugged as he came inside. “I’m just me.” Alpri, his father, had the same backwoods accent as everyone else in the valley. Istvan didn’t know why that surprised him so much, but it did.

People boiled forward to hug him and pound him on the back and tell him what a wonderful fellow he was: his mother, uncles and aunts, his sisters, cousins of both sexes, a great-uncle leaning on a stick. Somebody--he didn’t know who-- pressed a beaker of mead into his hand. He poured it down. As soon as he did, somebody else took it away and gave him another one. He drank that one straightaway, too. Mead wasn’t the raw spirit for which he’d acquired a taste in the army, but it wasn’t milk, either. After two beakers, sweat broke out on his face. He stopped worrying about people’s accents. Everything anyone said seemed funny.

But not even a couple of beakers of mead could keep him from noticing how dark the inside of the house was after his father shut the door against the chilly drafts outside. And, with so many men just in from long days on the farms around Kunhegyes, the air got thick fast. But that didn’t bother Istvan so much. Barracks weren’t much better, and the field was commonly worse.

As if conjured up, yet another horn of mead appeared in his hand. “Come on.” His mother took him by the arm. “I was about to put supper on the table.”

“Let him stand awhile and talk, Gizella,” his father said. “He’s just got back, after all, and he hasn’t even said how long he can stay. Of course he’ll want to hear everything that’s happened since he’s been gone.”

“As a matter of fact, I am pretty hungry--and I haven’t had proper pepper stew in a long time,” Istvan said. Gizella beamed. Alpri looked surprised and disappointed, but put the best face on it he could. Istvan hurried to the table. To his large and noisy family, things that had happened in this end of their little valley were more important than the Derlavaian War that raged across the continent. The war wasn’t real to them. And the valley hardly seemed real to Istvan any more.

The pepper stew tasted as good as it smelled, as good as he remembered. Istvan said so, over and over, which made his mother flush with pleasure. But sitting down to supper didn’t keep--never had kept--his close kin from going on and on about weather and livestock and the local scandals and the iniquities of the folk who lived in Szombathely, the nearer village down the valley, and the even greater iniquities of the barely human wretches who lived in the next valley over. He wanted to make them quiet down, and he couldn’t.

After what seemed a very long time, Istvan’s great-uncle, whose name was Batthyany, asked, “What’s it like out there, lad? Do the stars still remember you by your right name when you’re so far from home?”

It was, at last, the right question. An expectant hush fell over the table as Istvan’s clanfolk waited to hear what he would say. He looked around. A few of the men, he knew, had been out of the valley, but none had gone too far. They hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t done what he’d done.

“Answer your grandfather’s brother, boy,” Alpri said, as peremptory as if Istvan were a child often or so.

“Aye, Father,” Istvan said, and turned to Betthyany. “There’s more world out there than I ever imagined, and it’s a harder world, too. But the stars. . . the stars look down on all of it, Great-uncle. I’m sure of that.”

“Well said,” his father boomed, and everybody else nodded. “And before long we’ll win this war, and everything will be fine.”

Another expectant hush. “Of course we will,” Istvan said. Then he went and got very drunk indeed. Everyone said what a hero he surely had to be.

Springtime in Jelgava carried with it the promise of summer--not the threat of summer, as was so in desert Zuwayza, but a definite assurance that, where the weather was warm now, it would be warmer later. Talsu reveled in the clear skies and the lengthening days. So did some of the Algarvian occupiers in Skrunda; northern Algarve’s climate wasn’t much different from this.

But more of the redheads in his hometown sweated and fumed and fussed as winter ebbed away. The Algarvian heartland lay in the forests of the distant south, where it was always cool and damp. Talsu didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in such weather, but a lot of King Mezentio’s men pined for it. He listened to them grumbling whenever they came into die family shop to have Traku sew their tunics and kilts.

“If they don’t care for the way things are here, they can go back where they came from,” Traku said one evening at supper, spitting an olive pit down into his plate.

Talsu paused with a spoonful of barley mush dusted with powdered cheese halfway to his mouth. “They may not like it here, Father, but they like it a lot less in Unkerlant.” His chuckle was deliberately nasty.

“I wouldn’t want to go to Unkerlant, either,” his younger sister Ausra said, and shivered. “It’s probably still snowing there, and it hasn’t snowed in Skrunda at all for years and years.”

“There’s a difference, though,” Talsu said. “If you did go to Unkerlant, King Swemmel’s men wouldn’t want to blaze you on sight.”

“Let’s not talk about any of us going to Unkerlant,” his mother said in a firmer tone than she usually used. “When folk of Kaunian blood go to Unkerlant these days, it’s not of their own free will. And they don’t come back.”

“Now, Laitsina, let’s not borrow trouble, either,” Traku said. “Nobody knows for sure whether those rumors are true or not.” His words fell flat; he didn’t sound as if he believed them himself.

“The news sheets say they’re all a pack of lies,” Talsu observed. “But everything in the news sheets is a lie, because the redheads won’t let them tell the truth. If a liar says something is a lie, doesn’t that mean it really isn’t?”

“Well, the news sheets say we all love King Mainardo, and that’s not true,” Ausra said. “After you read that, you know you can’t trust anything else you read.” She got up from the table. “May I be excused?”

“Aye,” Laitsina said, “but aren’t you going to finish?” She pointed to Ausra’s bowl, which was still almost half full.

“No, I’ve had enough,” Ausra answered. “You can put it in the rest crate. Maybe I’ll eat it for dinner tomorrow at noontime.”

“I’ll put it away,” Talsu said, rising, too. His bowl of mush was empty; the only things on his plate were the rind from a slab of white cheese and a dozen olive pits. He could easily have finished Ausra’s portion, too, but, while he might have wanted it, he knew he didn’t need it.

“Thank you,” Laitsina said, and, in an aside to Traku, “He really has grown up.”

“It’s the time he spent in the army,” Talsu’s father answered, also in a low voice.

Traku had more faith in the Jelgavan army than Talsu did, no doubt because he’d never served in it. Talsu was convinced he would have become reasonably neat without sergeants screaming at him whenever they felt like it. He plucked Ausra’s bowl off the table and carried it into the kitchen, where the rest crate lay beside the door to the pantry.

The sorcery that made the crate work was based on a charm from the days of the Kaunian Empire: a paralysis spell the imperial armies had used against their foes with great success till those foes found counterspells that rendered it useless. Then, for more than a thousand years, it had been only a curiosity . . . till, with the advent of systematic magecraft, wizards discovered it worked by drastically slowing the rate at which life went on. That made variations on it handy not only in keeping food fresh but also in medicine.

As soon as Talsu undid the latch and took the lid off the rest crate, he put the spell out of action. The food his mother had stored inside began to age at its normal rate once more. He set the half full bowl of barley mush on top of a coil of sausage links, then returned the lid to its proper place, reactivating the crate. He was just snapping the latch again when Laitsina called, “Make sure you put the cover on good and tight.”

“Aye, Mother,” Talsu said patiently. She might make noises about his having grown up, but she didn’t believe it, not down deep inside. She probably never would.

Afterwards, he played robbers with his father till they were both yawning. He won three games, Traku two. As the tailor put away the board, the men, and the dice, he said, “You’re better at the game than you were before you went into King Donalitu’s service.”

“I don’t know why,” Talsu answered. “I don’t think I played it more than a couple of times. Mostly, we just rolled dice when we felt like swapping money around.”

The next morning, after Talsu finished cutting the pieces for an Algarvian’s summer-weight linen tunic, his mother came downstairs and pressed some coins into his hand. “Go over to the grocer’s and bring me back half a dozen apples,” she said. “I want to make tarts tonight.”

“All right, Mother,” Talsu said, and set down the shears with alacrity.

Laitsina smiled. “And don’t take too long passing the time of day with Gailisa, either.”

“Who, me?” Talsu said. His mother laughed at him. In some ways, she was ready to believe him grown up after all.

Whistling, he hurried over to the grocer’s shop. Sure enough, Gailisa was taking care of the place: she was artistically arranging onions in a crate when he walked inside. “Hello, Talsu,” she said. “What do you want today?”

“You don’t sell that,” he said with a grin, and she made a face at him. “But my mother sent me over here for some apples.”

“Well, we’ve got some,” Gailisa answered, pointing to a basket on the counter. “If they’re for eating, though, I’ve got to tell you they’re on the mushy side. The winter was just too mild for them to get as firm as they might.”

“No, she wants them for tarts,” Talsu said.

“They’ll be fine for that.” Gailisa went over to the basket. Talsu watched her hips work inside her trousers. “How many does she want?”

“About half a dozen, she said.”

“All right.” Gailisa bent over the basket and started picking them up one by one. “I’ll give you the best ones we’ve got.”

She was still going through them when a couple of Algarvian troopers in kilts strode into the shop. One of them pointed at her and said something in his own language. Laughing, the other one nodded and rocked his hips forward and back. Talsu didn’t understand a word of what they said, but that didn’t stop him from getting angry.

He turned toward them, not saying anything himself but not trying to hide what he thought of them, either. He wasn’t afraid of Algarvians because they were Algarvians, not when he’d faced them over the sights of a stick. True, his army had lost to theirs, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt and bleed just like Jelgavans.

They noticed his expression, too, noticed it and didn’t like it. One of them jerked a thumb back toward the door through which they’d come and spoke in bad Jelgavan: “You--going out. Getting lost.”

“No,” Talsu answered evenly. “I’m waiting for the lady to choose some apples for me.”

“Futtering apples,” the Algarvian said. “Going out now. Going out now and--uh, or--being sorry.”

“No,” Talsu repeated.

“Talsu, maybe you’d better . . .” Gailisa began.

But it was already too late. The redheads understood what no meant. They were as young and headstrong as he was, and they were the conquerors, and there were two of them. Smiling most unpleasantly, they advanced on him. Gailisa darted around the counter and into the back of the shop, loudly calling for her father. Talsu noticed only out of the corner of his eye; almost all of his attention stayed on the Algarvians.

The fight, such as it was, didn’t last long. One of the redheads swung at him, a looping haymaker that would have knocked him sprawling had it landed. It didn’t. He blocked it with his left forearm and delivered a sharp, straight right. The Algarvian’s nose flattened under his fist. With a howl, the soldier staggered back into shelves piled high with produce. He knocked them over. Vegetables spilled across the floor.

Talsu spun toward the other Algarvian. This fellow didn’t waste time on fisticuffs. He yanked a knife from his belt, stabbed Talsu in the side, and then helped his friend get up. They both ran out of the grocer’s shop.

When Talsu started to run after them, he got only a couple of paces before crumpling to his knees and then to his belly. He stared in dull surprise at the blood that darkened his tunic and spread over the floor. He heard Gailisa’s shriek as if from very far away. The inside of the shop went gray and then black.

He woke puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t seeing the grocer’s shop. Instead, his eyes took in the iron rails of a bed, and a whitewashed wall beyond it. A man in a pale gray tunic peered down at him. “How do you feel?” the fellow asked.

Before Talsu could answer, he became aware of a snarling pain in his flank. He bit back a scream, as he might have done were he wounded in battle. “Hurts,” he got out through clenched teeth.

“I believe it,” said the man in the gray tunic--a healing mage, Talsu realized. “We had to do a lot of work on you while your body was slowed down. Even with the sorcery, it was touch and go for a while there. You lost a lot of blood. But I think you’ll come through pretty well, if fever doesn’t take you.”

“Hurts,” Talsu repeated. He was going to start screaming in a minute, whether he wanted to or not. The pain felt as big as the world.

“Here,” the mage said. “Drink this.” Talsu didn’t ask what it was. He seized the cup and gulped it down. It tasted overpoweringly of poppies. He panted like a dog, waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t, not really. He did: he seemed to be floating to one side of his body, so that, while he still felt everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It might almost have been happening to someone else.

The mage lifted his tunic and examined the stitched-up wound in his side. Talsu looked at it, too, with curiosity far more abstract than he could have managed undrugged. “He put quite a hole in me,” he remarked, and the mage nodded. “Did they catch him?” Talsu asked, and this time the healer shook his head. Talsu shrugged. The drug didn’t let him get excited about anything. “I might have known.”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” the healer said. “You’ve got more stitches holding you together inside. If we’d come a little later ...” He shook his head again. “But your lady friend made sure we didn’t.”

“My lady friend?” Talsu said vaguely, and then, “Oh. Gailisa.” He knew he ought to be feeling something more than he was, but the drug blocked and blurred it. Too bad, he thought, still vague.

Having been nearly idle through the winter, Garivald was making up for it now that the ground had finally got firm enough to hold a furrow. Along with the rest of the peasants of Zossen, he plowed and sowed as fast as he could, to give the crops as long to grow as possible. He rose before sunset and went to bed after nightfall; only harvest time was more wearing than the planting season.

Along with everything else he had to do, he still had to go into the forest to cut wood for Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers. How he’d hoped the Unkerlanter advance would sweep them out of his village! But it hadn’t happened, and it didn’t look as if it would, either.

He hacked at a tree trunk, wishing it were a redhead’s body. When the Unkerlanters in grimy rock-gray tunics let him see them, he kept right on chopping wood. One of his countrymen said, “You’re the singer, aren’t you?”

“What if I am?” Garivald asked, pausing at last. “What difference does it make?”

“If you aren’t, we might decide not to let you live,” the ragged soldier answered and made as if to turn his stick in Garivald’s direction.

“You’ve already spent awhile killing my hopes,” Garivald said. “I thought the Algarvians would be gone from here by now.” Thought probably took it too far; hoped came closer. But the men who skulked through the woods had taken his songs, had promised great victories, and then hadn’t delivered. If they were unhappy with him, he was unhappy with them, too.

“Soon,” said the soldier who hadn’t surrendered to the redheads. “Very soon. The fight still goes on. It does not always go just as we would have it. But the king will strike another blow against the invaders soon. And when he does, we need you.” Now he pointed at Garivald with his finger, not his stick.

“Need me for what?” Garivald asked in some alarm. If they wanted him to raise the village against the Algarvian occupiers, he was going to tell them they were out of their minds. As far as he could see, that would only get his friends and relatives--and maybe him, too--killed without accomplishing much. Zossen wasn’t on a ley line; a rising here wouldn’t keep the redheads from moving reinforcements wherever they pleased. Zossen, in fact, wasn’t even near a power point, which was why Bang Swemmel’s men had had to keep sacrificing condemned criminals to gain sorcerous energy to make their crystal function.

The crystal. . . Garivald’s hand tightened on the handle of his axe. Even before the ragged soldier spoke, Garivald guessed what he would say. And say it he did: “You have something we want, something buried in the ground.”

Garivald had thought about digging up the crystal and passing it on to the Unkerlanters who kept resisting behind Algarvian lines. He’d thought about it, but he hadn’t done it yet in spite of “Waddo’s urgings. Even trying to do it was risky. But having so many people know about it was also risky. He hadn’t said a word to anyone. Somebody else in the village must have. And what got to the irregulars’ ears also got to the Algarvians’.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said quickly. The irregulars could probably arrange to whisper into the redheads’ ears if he proved recalcitrant.

“Good.” All the ragged soldiers nodded. The fellow who was doing the talking for them went on, “When will you get it for us?”

“When I find it,” Garivald snarled. “Powers above, dogs can’t find the bones they bury half the time. I didn’t leave any special marks to point the way to the cursed thing. If I would have, the Algarvians’d have it by now. I’m going to have to find it.”

“Don’t waste too much time,” one of the other Unkerlanters warned him. “We need it, and no mistake.”

“If you think you can get it faster than I can, go ahead and dig for yourselves,” Garivald said. “Good luck go with you.”

“Don’t play games with us,” the irregulars’ leader said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Garivald retorted.

He wondered if he’d pushed his countrymen too far. He tensed, ready to rush them with his axe if they tried to blaze him. He might be able to take one of them with him before he fell. But after glancing back and forth among themselves, they slipped away deeper into the protecting woods without another word.

Garivald lugged his load of firewood back to the Algarvians. The only thanks he got were a grunt and a tick against his name so he wouldn’t have to do it again for a while. Had the redheads worked to make people like them, they would have had no small following in the Duchy of Grelz. Garivald knew as much; the peasants hadn’t had an easy time of it during Swemmel’s reign. Some folk clove to the Algarvians because of that, regardless of how they were treated. Most, like Garivald, saw they were getting no better bargain and stayed aloof.

“Took you long enough,” Annore said when he came into their hut.

“Don’t you start on me,” Garivald growled. He looked around. Syrivald was outside doing something or other, while Leuba was occupied with a cloth doll stuffed with buckwheat husks. Lowering his voice, Garivald went on, “They want it.”

His wife’s eyes widened. “Can you get it?”

“I’m going to have to try.”

“Can you get it without getting caught?” Annore persisted. “Do you even know exactly where it is?”

“I’m going to have to try,” Garivald repeated. “I think I can, and maybe I’ll be able to find out where it is.”

“How?” Annore asked. “You’re no mage.”

“And I don’t need to be one, either,” Garivald said. “Everybody knows a lode-stone will draw iron, and rubbed amber will draw feathers or straw. Haven’t you ever heard that limestone will draw glass the same way?”

His wife snapped her fingers in annoyance at herself. “I have, by the powers above, but it slipped my mind. Lodestone and amber are toys to make children laugh, but how often does anyone need to draw glass to him?”

“Not very,” Garivald replied. “And there’s not much glass in Zossen to draw-- the stuff’s too expensive for the likes of us. But if that crystal isn’t glass, I don’t know what it is.” If that crystal wasn’t glass, the limestone wouldn’t work. In that case, he’d have to start probing the plot where the crystal lay buried. He’d have to be lucky to find it so, and it would surely take a long time. Somebody was bound to find him first, to find him and to ask a great many questions he couldn’t answer.

“All right,” Annore said. “Limestone won’t be hard to find, not when we spread it crushed on the fields to mellow the soil.”

Garivald nodded. “I’ll just need a chunk a little bigger than most, and a string to tie around it so it swings free--oh, and aye, a dark night.”

“You’ll have those the next few nights,” Annore said. “After that, the moon will be getting bigger and setting later.”

“I need one other thing,” Garivald said, after a moment’s thought. His wife raised a questioning eyebrow. He explained: “I can’t find the cursed crystal if it isn’t there. If Waddo’s already gone and dug it up, I’m wasting my time.”

Waddo had talked about the two of them digging it up together, but who could tell what all went through the firstman’s mind? Garivald wondered what he’d tell the Unkerlanter irregulars if Waddo had decided to take it on his own. Whatever he told them, they wouldn’t want to listen. He didn’t think Waddo had told the Algarvians about the crystal; had the firstman blabbed to the redheads, they would have come down on Garivald and his family like a falling tree. But Waddo might well have taken the crystal out of the ground himself and hidden it somewhere else to keep Garivald, or one of the villagers who’d seen Garivald and him burying it, from betraying him.

“Have to hope,” Garivald muttered, and tramped back out to the fields. Finding a chunk of limestone the size of a finger joint didn’t take long. He unraveled some of the hem of his tunic, using the thread for a string. Annore wouldn’t be happy with him for that, but he had bigger things to worry about.

With the stone and the string in his belt pouch, he took care of endless chores till sundown. Supper was blood sausage and pickled cabbage, washed down with a mug of ale. After supper, Annore let the fire die to embers that shed only a faint red glow over the inside of the hut. She spread out blankets and quilts on the benches that lined the walls. Syrivald and Leuba curled up in them and went to sleep. Before long, Annore was snoring, too.

Garivald had to stay awake, though exhaustion tugged at him. He watched a stripe of moonlight crawl across the floor and up the wall. After the moonlight disappeared, after the inside of the house got darker than ever, he sat up, swallowing yet another yawn, and put back on the boots that were all he’d taken off.

Did Annore’s breathing change as he went out the door? Had she only been pretending to be asleep? He’d find out later. He couldn’t worry about it now.

Most of the village lay quiet. Farm work bludgeoned people into slumber when night came. That made the raucous singing from the house the Algarvians had taken as their own all the more irksome. But if they were in there carousing, they weren’t out patrolling. Beyond wishing them ugly hangovers in the morning, Garivald had no fault to find with their way of whiling away the hours, not tonight.

He stepped as quietly as he could. If anyone did spy him, he’d say he was out to ease himself. That wouldn’t work in the middle of the garden, though. Once he got there, he couldn’t afford to waste a moment.

The two-story bulk of Waddo’s house, looming dark against the sky, helped guide him to the plot he needed: Waddo’s was the only two-story house in Zossen. As far as Garivald was concerned, it was also a monument to wretched excess. But that, like the redheads’ racket, was beside the point right now.

Garivald took out the little chunk of limestone and swung it gently at the end of the length of thread tied to it. “Show me where the crystal went,” he whispered as it swung back and forth. “Show me, as was truly meant.” He didn’t know if it was truly meant or not, but figured the assumption would do no harm.

And the limestone began gliding back and forth, as if he were swinging it. But he wasn’t, not now; his hand and wrist were still. He went in the direction it led him, and it swung faster and faster, higher and higher. Then, after he’d gone on for a while, it began to slow. He stopped and reversed his field. The swings grew stronger and higher once more.

He stopped where the limestone swung most vigorously: stopped and squatted. That was where he began to dig with his belt knife. He didn’t know how deep he’d have to dig or how big a hole he’d have to make. The only way to find out was to do it.

The tip of the knife grated off something hard and smooth. “Powers above!” Garivald whispered, and reached down into the hole. After guddling about for a moment, his hands closed on the cool sphere of the crystal. With a soft exclamation of triumph, he drew it out.

Then, as best he could, he filled in the hole, trying to make it seem as if no one had ever been there. He hurried away, back toward his own house. Clouds slid across the stars, swallowing them one after another. The air smelled damp. Maybe it would rain before morning. That would help hide what he’d been doing, and hide his tracks, too. It would also be good for the newly planted crops.

“Rain,” he murmured, clutching the crystal tight.