Darkness Descending

Nineteen

Hajjaj’s secretary--his new secretary, his loyal secretary, his secretary who was not an Unkerlanter spy--stuck his head into the Zuwayzi foreign minister’s office and said, “Your Excellency, Marquis Balastro has arrived.”

“Very well, Qutuz. I am ready to receive him.” Hajjaj rose to display the Algarvian-style tunic and kilt he had donned for the occasion. They were making him sweat unreasonably, but that was one of the prices he had to pay for conforming to the diplomatic usages of the rest of Derlavai. “You may bring him in.”

“Aye, your Excellency,” Qutuz said, and went off to get the Algarvian minister.

A moment later, Hajjaj and Balastro were clasping hands. “Good day, good day,” Balastro said. He was stocky, middle-aged, vigorous, and much smarter than he looked. Reaching out to pat Hajjaj’s tunic, he said, “If you were a pretty young wench, I’d be disappointed you were wearing this. As is”--he shrugged a grandiloquent Algarvian shrug--”I can live with it.”

“Your reassurances do so ease my mind,” Hajjaj said dryly, and the redheaded Algarvian noble threw back his head and laughed out loud. Balastro would have laughed out of the other side of his mouth had Hajjaj told him Ansovald of Unkerlant had said something similar not so long before. Foreigners always thought of Zuwayzi nudity in terms of pretty young wenches. In one sense, Hajjaj understood that. In another, the ways it missed the point never failed to amuse him.

Balastro made himself comfortable with the cushions that did duty for chairs in Hajjaj’s office. So did the Zuwayzi foreign minister. Unlike most of his countrymen, he had a desk, but a low, wide one, one he could use while sitting on the carpet: another compromise between Zuwayzi usages and those of the rest of Derlavai.

The secretary came in with a silver tray that held the ritual tea and cakes and wine. Unlike Ansovald, Balastro appreciated the ritual. As long as he and Hajjaj nibbled and sipped, he stuck to small talk. He had an abundant store of it; Hajjaj enjoyed listening to him and fencing with him. He said as much--tea and cakes and wine were also a time for frank praise.

Balastro gave back a seated bow. “I rejoice at pleasing you, your Excellency,” he replied. “I do my best to ‘treat my friend as if he might become an enemy,’ and I hope that precludes inflicting boredom.”

When he quoted the proverb, he did so in the original classical Kaunian. Hajjaj sipped at his cup of wine to keep from showing what he thought of that. Balastro was, and was proud to be, a man of culture. But he was also a man of Algarve, a man whose kingdom was tormenting the Kaunians who had shaped so much of the culture he displayed. Somehow, Balastro and his countrymen saw no contradiction there. Algarvians always wanted everything at once.

While partaking of tea and cakes and wine, Hajjaj could not say anything so serious without, by his own lights, becoming a boor. That he would not do. Presently, Qutuz took the tray away. Balastro smiled and said, “Well, shall we get on with it?”

“I am at your service, my lord Marquis,” Hajjaj replied. “As you must know, I am always pleased to see you, and I am always curious to learn what is in your mind.”

“Even when you don’t like it,” Balastro said, without much malice.

Hajjaj gravely inclined his head. “Just so, your Excellency. Even when I don’t care for what you say, how you say it never fails to fascinate me.” The Kaunian proverb crossed his mind again.

He won a chuckle from Balastro, but the Algarvian minister quickly sobered. “I can only speak simply here, for my message is of the plainest--Algarve needs your help.”

“My help?” The Zuwayzi foreign minister raised an eyebrow. “Truly your kingdom is in desperate straits if you expect a skinny old man to shoulder a stick for you.

“Heh,” Balastro said. “I thought we were coming to grips with things. I mean Zuwayza’s help, of course.”

“Very well, though my reply changes little,” Hajjaj said. “Your realm is also in difficulties if you expect a skinny young kingdom to shoulder many sticks for you.”

“Of course we are in difficulties,” Balastro said--he could, sometimes, be refreshingly frank. “If we weren’t, we would have taken Cottbus before winter froze us in our tracks.”

He could, sometimes, also be disingenuous. “Winter did rather more than freeze you in your tracks,” Hajjaj pointed out.

“Well, so it did,” Balastro said. “We had misfortunes; I can hardly deny it. But we have the Unkerlanters checked now, all along the line. And this year . . . this year, by the powers above, we’ll beat them once for all.” He sat up very straight, as if making his bearing serve as proof for his claims.

From what the Zuwayzi generals said to Hajjaj, and from what he could gather for himself, Balastro was telling the truth about what had happened: the Unkerlanters were no longer advancing against Mezentio’s men. How much the spring thaw had to do with that, Hajjaj wasn’t sure. He suspected no one else was, either. As for the future . . . “You said last summer that you would beat Unkerlant then. Since you were wrong once, why should I not think you’re wrong twice?”

“Because of everything we did to Unkerlant last year,” Balastro answered--he had answers for everything, as most Algarvians did. “If you hit a man once, he may not fall right away. But if you hit him again and keep hitting him one blow after another, he will go down.”

Unkerlant had hit Algarve one blow after another, too. Who would fall, as far as Hajjaj could see, remained anyone’s guess. But Balastro would doubtless have some compelling explanations as to why it wouldn’t be Algarve. Mentally stipulating as much, Hajjaj asked what he judged the more important question: “What sort of help do you need from us?”

“Our main effort this year will fall in the south,” Balastro replied. “We aim to finish taking away Unkerlant’s breadbasket; to lay our hands on the herds of horses and unicorns and behemoths she raises there and to seize the cinnabar mines in the far southwest. With all that gone, King Swemmel can hardly hope to keep standing.”

He was, Hajjaj judged, likely to be right; if Algarve could seize so much, Unkerlant would fall. Whether King Mezentio’s men could do what they had in mind to do, though, was another question. Hajjaj said, “I will not ask my sovereign to send Zuwayzi warriors to the far south. He would say no, and I would agree with him. If you need more men than Algarve can provide, you have Yaninan allies there.”

“So we do, and we’ll use them.” Balastro’s expression said exactly what he thought of Algarve’s Yaninan allies, but Hajjaj already knew that. The Algarvian minister went on, “Nor would I ask King Shazli to send brave Zuwayzin to a land in which bare skin is hardly a fitting uniform, however well it may fit.” He laughed.

“What then?” Hajjaj asked, though by now he thought he knew. Balastro had glided down this ley line before.

Sure enough, the Algarvian marquis said, “King Mezentio would have you strike hard at the Unkerlanters here in the north, to tie down as many of their men as you can and to keep them from sending reinforcements to put in the line against us.”

“I understand why you say this,” Hajjaj answered slowly. “But I would remind you, your Excellency, that Zuwayza has already done everything in this war that she set out to do. We have taken back the line set up in the Treaty of Bludenz, and more land beyond it. That suffices. The clanfathers would not rejoice to hear that they needed to send their men into new battles.”

“Would they rejoice to hear that everything they’ve won might be lost again through dithering?” Balastro returned.

Hajjaj had to work to hold his face impassive. Balastro had unerringly found the best argument he could use. But Hajjaj said, “I think we understand the notion of ‘enough’ better than you Algarvians. Some of the things you’ve done in your fight against Unkerlant--” He broke off. He’d long since made his feelings about massacring Kaunians plain to Balastro.

The Algarvian minister quoted another proverb in the original Kaunian: “ ‘For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.’ “

Hajjaj didn’t know whether to admire Balastro’s gall or to be horrified by it. After a moment’s struggle, horror won. “Your Excellency, considering what your kingdom is doing, how can you in good conscience let that language flow from your lips?”

“They would have done it to us if only they’d thought of it,” Balastro said. Hajjaj shook his head. The Kaunian kingdoms had had a good many Algarvians under their rule when the Derlavaian War began. They hadn’t slaughtered them. Maybe, as Balastro said, they hadn’t thought of it. Hajjaj s guess was that they never would have thought of such an appalling thing.

He poured himself another cup of wine and tossed it down. That showed more of what he thought than he was in the habit of doing, but he couldn’t help it. “We are your cobelligerents, your Excellency, not your servants,” he said at last.

Balastro said, “This will serve your own interest as well as Algarve’s. If we are beaten, will you be better for it?”

That would depend on how badly you hurt Unkerlant before Swemmel’s men took you down, Hajjaj thought. Saying as much aloud struck him as undiplomatic. What he did say was, “This is a proposition I can take to his Majesty. The final choice lies in his hands.”

“Oh, aye, likely tell,” Balastro said. “Anyone who’s neither blind nor deaf knows where Zuwayza comes by her dealings with other kingdoms.” He pointed straight at Hajjaj.

“You are mistaken,” said the foreign minister, who knew perfectly well Balastro wasn’t. “King Shazli is his own man. Mine is but the privilege of advising him.”

Balastro’s laugh was loud and long and merry. “I haven’t heard anything so funny since the story about the girl who trapped the eel, and I was only twelve years old then, so I doubt that one would hold up. Yours will.”

“You do me too much credit,” Hajjaj said.

“In a pig’s arse,” Balastro said cheerfully. “But all right: we’ll play it your way. Since you know King Shazli so well, what do you suppose he’s likely to say about what you’ll ask of him?”

“I think he would be likely to ask the generals and the clanfathers for their views,” Hajjaj replied.

Balastro sighed. “I was hoping you--ah, that is, of course, King Shazli-- might make up ... his mind more quickly, but I suppose it can’t be helped. All right, your Excellency, I don’t suppose I can complain. But tell your generals and clanfathers not to take too long deciding, because this dragon is going to fly with you or without you . . . and Algarve will remember which.”

“I understand,” Hajjaj said. Unkerlant would not let Zuwayza out of the war; Algarve insisted Zuwayza go in deeper. Trapped, Hajjaj thought, not for the first time. Like all the rest of the world, we’re trapped.

Bembo and Oraste walked warily along the paths that meandered through the biggest park in Gromheort. The moon had set an hour before; they had nothing but starlight by which to see. No braver than he had to be, Bembo carried his stick in his hand, not on his belt. “Anything could be lurking in here,” the Algarvian constable complained. “Anything at all.”

“I’m not worried about anything” Oraste answered. “Anybody, now--that’s a different business.” His head kept turning now this way, now that.

So did Bembo’s. The bushes by the edges of the paths were shaggy and untrimmed; dead grass from the winter before remained tall enough for people to hide in it. “You’d think they’d do a better job of keeping this place up,” Bembo said.

Oraste laughed. “If they haven’t got the silver to repair most of their miserable buildings, what are the odds they’re going to cut the grass?”

That made an unpleasant amount of sense to Bembo. Even so, he said, “How are we supposed to catch anybody in this miserable place if they don’t?”

With a shrug, Oraste answered, “As if anybody cares whether we catch these worthless buggers, unless they bother Algarvians. But if the bad actors know we walk through the park, they won’t be so likely to roost in it.”

“Huzzah,” Bembo said petulantly, and then, as he heard a rustle from the dead grass, “What’s that?” Startlement made his voice go high and shrill.

“I don’t know.” Oraste, by contrast, sounded quiet and determined. He didn’t have a lot of brains, he had no imagination at all, but he was a terrific fellow to have at your back in a brawl. He stepped off the path and moved purposefully toward the sound. “But we’d better find out, eh?”

“Aye,” Bembo agreed in hollow tones. As much to keep up his own courage as for any other reason, he went on, “Any whoreson out to ambush us wouldn’t make so much noise, would he?”

“Here’s hoping,” Oraste answered, which did little to reassure Bembo. The other constable added, “Now shut up.”

However rude that was, it was good advice. Like Oraste, Bembo tried to step as lightly as he could, though he could hardly help making some noise while walking through thick, dry grass. The rustling ahead grew louder as the constables drew nearer. The breeze picked up. It made the grass rustle, too. With luck, it helped mask the sounds Bembo and Oraste were making.

Bembo sniffed. He was no bloodhound, but any constable would have recognized that smell. Fear ebbed. “Just some cursed drunkard who’s gone and puked himself,” he said.

“Aye.” Almost invisible in the darkness, Oraste nodded. “Ought to beat the son of a whore to within an inch of his life for the turn he gave us. Stinking old Forthwegian bum.”

After another couple of steps, Bembo smelled spilled wine as well as puke. He thought about putting away his stick and taking his bludgeon off his belt instead. Sergeant Pesaro wouldn’t mind if he and Oraste did work out their alarm on a noisy drunk. Pesaro would just regret not being here to share the fun. Bembo pointed. “There he is.”

“I see him,” Oraste said. “Miserable white-haired bugger--why didn’t he die twenty years ago?”

Along with Oraste, Bembo stood over the drunk. He sniffed again, then let out a theatrical sigh of relief. “Powers above be praised, at least he hasn’t gone and shit his trousers.” He had to listen to his own words to realize what he was seeing. “He’s not a white-haired old Forthwegian. He’s a blond!”

“Well, curse me if you aren’t right,” Oraste exclaimed. He laughed out loud, the most joyous sound Bembo had ever heard from him. “Now nobody’ll care at all if we kick him to death. Let’s do it.”

“I don’t know . . .” Bembo had no great appetite for mayhem. All he wanted to do was get out of the park, finish his beat, and go back to the barracks so he could climb onto his cot again. “Let’s just leave him here. He’s so far gone, he won’t even know we’re stomping him, and the head he’ll have in the morning’ll hurt worse than a boot in the ribs.”

“No,” Oraste growled. “He’s not where he’s supposed to be, is he? You bet your arse he’s not--all these Kaunians are supposed to be in their own district. And if we catch ‘em outside when they aren’t working, they’re fair game, right? He looks like he’s working hard, don’t he?” He laughed.

But the Kaunian, however unsanitary he was, wasn’t so far gone as Bembo had thought. As Oraste drew back his foot for the first kick, the blond opened his eyes and sat up. He spoke in Kaunian, a line of poetry Bembo recognized and understood because he’d had to memorize it: “ ‘The barbarians are at the gates.’ “

“Shut up, fool,” Oraste said, and did kick him. An instant later--Bembo didn’t see how--his partner was lying in the grass. With a curse, Oraste scrambled to his feet. He hauled off and kicked the Kaunian again. Again, he went sprawling, too, this time with a howl of pain.

The Kaunian, who was having trouble staying in a seated position, spoke again, this time in understandable if slurred Algarvian: “Leave me alone and I will extend you the same privilege.”

“Leave you alone?” Oraste got up once more. “Powers below eat me if I will, you louse-ridden ...”

“Wait!” Bembo grabbed Oraste before his partner could try to kick the drunk again. A light had gone on in his mind, however dark his surroundings remained. “I think he’s a mage.”

“A mage, a stage, an age, an outrage,” the drunken Kaunian said, still in Algarvian. “If I were sober, I could do great things. If I were sober, I could . . . could . . .” He brought his hands up to his face and began to weep. Through his sobs, he went on, “But it is not enough. It could not be enough. Nothing could be enough.” He looked up at the constables. “For you, nothing is enough. Do you wonder that I am not sober?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Bembo whispered urgently. “I don’t want to tangle with a mage, even a drunk one, even a lousy one. Tangling with mages uses up a lot of constables.”

Oraste let Bembo lead him a few paces away, but then shrugged off his comrade. “That Kaunian sorcerously assaulted me,” he declared, as if before a panel of judges. “He has to pay the price.” He whirled around and pointed his stick at the drunken blond sorcerer.

But the Kaunian wasn’t there. Bembo stared. It wasn’t as if the fellow were hiding in the dead grass; it was as if he’d never been there. Only the lingering stink of vomit and Bembo’s memory said anything different.

Oraste said, “Nothing’s enough for us Algarvians, eh? I’ll show that blond what nothing’s all about.” And he blazed at the place where the Kaunian had been--the place where, Bembo realized, the Kaunian still had to be.

A shriek said his beam had found the mark. An instant later, the Kaunian reappeared--wounded, he couldn’t keep holding the masking spell. Oraste blazed him again. The blond jerked as if struck by lightning when the beam bit him.

With what was plainly dying effort, the mage pointed toward the two constables and began intoning a spell in Kaunian. Bembo understood only a couple of words of it, but knew it had to be a curse. Now he blazed at the drunken mage, too, and his beam caught the Kaunian in the face. With a last groan, the mage sank back and lay very still.

“That’s the way,” Oraste said, and thumped him on the back. “See? You are good for something after all.”

“Oh, shut up,” Bembo answered. “You think I want to go around with a wizard’s last curse on me, you’re daft. But it never would have happened if you’d let him alone in the first place.”

“He deserved what he got,” Oraste said. “Powers above, he deserved more than he got.”

“We’ll have to tell Pesaro about it when we get back to the barracks,” Bembo said. His stomach was lurching unpleasantly. He’d never killed a man before.

Oraste let out a couple of grunts probably meant for laughter. “Pesaro’ll give us each a shot of brandy, tell us we did good, and put us to bed--and you know it as well as I do, too.”

He was probably right. But Bembo’s stomach did another few lurches. Now that he thought about it--something he tried not to do--he’d sent plenty of Kaunians off to certain death. Blazing the drunken mage still felt different. He couldn’t pretend here, as he did there, that he really hadn’t had anything to do with their deaths. Blazing a man in the face left no room for doubt about what happened.

On the other hand, the Kaunian mage might--would--have harmed Bembo and Oraste if Bembo hadn’t blazed him. The Kaunians he hauled out of villages or off the streets of Gromheort hadn’t done anything to him or to anybody else.

Bembo shook his head. Thinking about it was much too complicated--and too unpleasant, too. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll get out of here, we’ll finish our beat, and then we’ll go back to the barracks. The carrion there won’t be going anywhere till somebody comes and picks it up after we report in.”

“Now you’re talking sense,” Oraste said. “Come on. Shake a leg.”

The rest of the park was quiet. Even so, Bembo was glad to escape it. He didn’t know whether he’d been been talking sense or not. Like any constable with an ounce of brains or more than two weeks’ experience, he craved quiet shifts. He’d hoped for one tonight, hoped and been disappointed.

Other constables patrolled the perimeter of the quarter where Gromheort’s Kaunians had to live, but Bembo and Oraste came near that perimeter as they neared the end of their beat. “Won’t be long,” Oraste said. “I aim to do some serious sleeping once we get in.”

Yawning, Bembo nodded. Morning twilight was beginning to paint the eastern sky gray and pink. He yawned again. He didn’t like the late-night shift. And then he grew alert once more. “Powers above,” he said softly. “Here comes another Kaunian--a woman, looks like.” Even in twilight, thiat pale gold hair was hard to miss.

“Aye,” Oraste said, and then, raising his voice: “What are you doing out of your district, sister?”

As the woman got closer, Bembo saw that her trousers were very tight indeed, her tunic of transparent silk. She was on the skinny side, but worth looking at. In slow, clear Algarvian, she answered, “I am going home. My name is Doldasai. I have leave to be out: I was sent for to screw one of your officers. You may check this. It is true.”

Oraste and Bembo looked at each other. Unlike almost any other Kaunian, an officer’s whore might be able to make trouble for them if they bothered her. Bembo said, “Well, go on, then.” Doldasai strode past him as if he didn’t exist. He turned to watch her backside, but she wasn’t working now and put nothing extra into her walk. He shrugged and sighed. You couldn’t have everything.

As soon as the ley-line caravan stopped moving, Sergeant Leudast stood up in the straw of the car in which part of his company had traveled. The car was better suited to hauling livestock than soldiers; by the lingering stench that filled it, it had carried a lot of livestock. But Unkerlant, these days, used anything it could.

Leudast undogged the door and slid it open. The fresh air that poured into the car made him notice the livestock smell more than he had for a while; he’d got used to it as the caravan came down into the Duchy of Grelz. “Come on, boys-- out we go,” he said. “Now we’re here, and we’ll have work to do.”

His men held in their enthusiasm, if they’d ever known any. After the botched attack on Lautertal, they had to be wondering again about the orders they were getting. But, wondering or not, they had to obey. So did Leudast. He knew that, too.

He jumped down out of the car and waved to Captain Hawart, who waved back and came up to him with a grin. “Well, what did you think of Cottbus when we went through it?” Hawart asked.

“If you hadn’t told me we were going that way, sir, I never would have known it,” Leudast answered. “And in a closed car like that one, I didn’t get a chance to see it at all. As far as I’m concerned, Cottbus smells like cows.”

“As far as you’re concerned, everything smells like cows right now,” the regimental commander said, and Leudast could hardly disagree. Hawart went on, “But you should have known we’d be going through Cottbus even if I hadn’t told you. It’s the biggest ley-line center in the kingdom; that’s one of the reasons we had to hold onto it no matter what.”

Hawart was a man not just of wit but also of education. He paid Leudast a compliment by assuming the sergeant shared his background. Leudast knew only too well that he didn’t. Trying to hold his own, he said, “You mean hanging onto Cottbus makes us more efficient.” King Swemmel was wild for efficiency, which meant his subjects had to be, too.

To Leudast’s relief and pride, Captain Hawart nodded. “That’s right. If we’d lost Cottbus, we’d be going around three sides of a rectangle to get soldiers from the north down here to Grelz.”

If they’d lost Cottbus, they would have lost the war. Hawart didn’t dwell on that. Neither did Leudast. He said, “Well, we’re here now, and we got here the short way. As long as we are here, we’d better make the redheads sorry about it.”

“Aye, that’d be efficient, sure enough,” Hawart agreed. He didn’t dare sound anything but serious about King Swemmel’s favorite word, either. He slapped Leudast on the shoulder. “Get ‘em moving. Head ‘em east.” He might have been talking about cattle himself. “As soon as the whole army’s in place, we’ll show the Algarvians what we can do.”

With shouts and waves and occasional curses, Leudast did get his men moving. The encampment into which Hawart’s regiment went was one of the biggest ones he’d ever seen: rock-gray tents that stretched and clumped for a couple of miles. Here and there, heavy sticks thrust their noses up into the air.

Pointing to one of them, Leudast said, “Almost makes me hope the cursed Algarvians do send some dragons over. Those little toys will blaze them right out of the sky.”

“So they will--if the weather stays clear so their crews can see where to aim, and so clouds don’t make the beams spread too much to do any good,” Captain Hawart told him. “Don’t go wishing for any more trouble than you’ve got, Leudast. You’ll generally have plenty.”

Leudast knew good advice when he heard it. He saluted. “Aye, sir.” After he made sure the soldiers in his charge were settled, he paced here and there through the encampment, trying to figure out what sort of orders the regiment would get when it went into action.

He returned to his company’s tents certain of but one thing: whatever was coming would be big. The encampment held not only footsoldiers beyond counting but also units of horse and unicorn cavalry--Leudast liked the bugling cries unicorns let out--and a good many behemoths, though he would have liked to see even more of the great beasts. There was also a large dragon farm.

“Oh, aye, Sergeant, we’re as ready as can be for the stinking Algarvians,” one of his troopers said. “What we get to find out next is how ready the redheads are for us.”

Leudast wished he hadn’t put it like that. The Algarvians were rarely anything but ready. They could be beaten--Leudast knew that now, where he hadn’t been so sure the summer before--but they always put up every ounce of fight they had. Anybody who thought that would be different this time had to be drunk, either on spirits or, perhaps more dangerous, on hope.

Two days later, Hawart’s regiment, along with a great many others, was ordered to the front. Leudast had got used to marching through land over which the Algarvians and Unkerlanters had already fought. This was another such battered landscape, one that looked as if a couple of petulant giants had vented their wrath on it: not so far wrong, if you looked at things the right way.

“All the egg-tossers!” said one of Leudast’s troopers, a big-nosed kid named Alboin. “We’re going to be dropping plenty on the redheads, we are.”

“Aye,” Leudast agreed. “We’ll hit ‘em a good first lick, that’s for sure.” What would happen after the first lick was anything but sure, as he knew too well. Egg-tossers had trouble keeping up with the rest of the army when that army was moving fast. He’d seen as much. He’d also seen that Unkerlanter egg-tossers had more trouble keeping up than their Algarvian counterparts.

Alboin had seen no such thing. He was one of the reinforcements who’d joined the company during the winter. By now, he’d had enough action to be well on the way toward making a veteran, but it had all been since the Unkerlanter counterattack began. “We’ll lick ‘em,” he said, sounding absurdly confident.

“Aye, I think we will,” Leudast said, more from policy than from conviction. From conviction, he went on, “Remember how they handled us at Lautertal. They can do worse than that. I’m not saying they will, but they can.”

“Sure, Sergeant.” But Alboin sounded as if he was talking from policy, too. He hadn’t seen the Algarvians at their best, when the footing was good and they had the chance to maneuver.

Leudast said, “Listen to me. If the redheads weren’t tough, nasty buggers, would we be fighting them in the middle of the Duchy of Grelz?”

Maybe that got through, maybe it didn’t. Either which way, Alboin shut up and kept marching. That suited Leudast well enough.

Here and there up at the front, the Algarvians lobbed eggs at the Unkerlanters’ positions. Leudast was glad when soldiers waved his company into the shallow trenches from which they would soon attack. The earthworks shielded his men and him from bursting eggs. Then, once in the trenches, he wasn’t so glad any more. If the redheads started slaughtering Kaunians and making magic, the holes grubbed in the ground could turn into death traps.

He wondered if King Swemmel’s mages would start slaughtering Unkerlanter peasants or old women or whomever it was they killed. On the one hand, he wanted magecraft to help the army move forward--and, more urgently, to help him stay alive. On the other, he couldn’t help but think about the price his kingdom was paying to try to beat back the Algarvians.

Captain Hawart came along the line. “The attack goes in tomorrow morning before sunrise,” he said, and walked on to keep spreading the word.

Leudast spread it, too. His troopers talked among themselves in low voices.

They were ready. They were more than ready--they were eager. Leudast wondered how many of them would be eager after the attack, even if it succeeded. Not many, if his own experience was any guide.

Well before sunrise, the Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding at the Algarvian positions farther east. Leudast hoped they did lots of damage, because they were surely alerting King Mezentio’s men to the coming assault. And the Algarvians responded, flinging eggs of their own at the Unkerlanters. But, as best Leudast could judge, his side had the better of the exchange. He huddled in his blanket and tried to sleep.

As black night gave way to gray twilight, the ground shook beneath him. He leaped up, ready to scramble out of the trench for his life if the shaking got worse. It didn’t. Peering over the lip of the trench, he saw purplish flames spurting up from the ground he and his comrades would have to cross. These were Unkerlanter mages plying their trade, not Algarvians. Leudast muttered under his breath, hoping the sacrifice from his countrymen would help the army win victory.

Whistles shrilled, all along the line. Still not officially an officer, Leudast couldn’t add another strident note. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you buggers! They wanted to quarrel with us, and now they’re going to pay the price.”

“Urra!” his troopers roared as they burst from the sheltering trenches. “Urra! King Swemmel! Swemmel! Urra!”

Yelling himself, Leudast ran forward, too, one tiny drop in a rock-gray wave. However many of their own they’d killed to make the magic against Mezentio’s men, the Unkerlanter mages hadn’t got rid of all Algarvian resistance. Eggs fell among the advancing Unkerlanter troopers, making holes in their lines that reserves had to fill. Redheaded soldiers blazed down Unkerlanters, too.

But, try as they would, they couldn’t stop or even seriously slow King Swemmel’s men. Here and there along the shattered line, an Algarvian trooper would throw up his hands and try to surrender. Sometimes, the redheads managed to do it. Rather more often, they got blazed down.

“Forward!” Leudast shouted to his men, echoing Captain Hawart, who was doing his best to be everywhere at once for his regiment.

Unkerlanter magic had done dreadful things to the Algarvian trenches, so dreadful that Leudast and his countrymen had trouble pushing across the shattered ground. Flames still sullenly flickered every few feet. Resistance from the redheads stayed light.

“This is almost too easy,” Leudast called to Hawart the next time he saw him.

“I like it,” said Alboin, who chanced to be close by.

But Hawart looked worried. “Aye, it is,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough dead Algarvians to satisfy me, nor anything close. Where are they, curse them?”

“Buried when their trenches all caved in?” Leudast suggested.

“I hope so,” the officer answered. “If they aren’t, we’re going to run into them pretty soon, and they won’t be glad to see us.”

“Powers below eat them, we weren’t glad to see them, either,” Leudast said. He ran and scrambled on, wondering how deeply the Algarvians had fortified their positions: there seemed to be no end to trenches and foxholes and barricades.

And then, as Hawart had worried about, the Algarvians started popping up out of holes beyond the reach of the Unkerlanters’ magecraft. After that, nothing was easy anymore.

Along with the rest of his company, Trasone stood at stiff attention in front of the barracks in Aspang. Major Spinello strode down the line with a box of medals. He paused in front of each man to pin one onto him, kiss him on the cheek, and murmur a few words before moving on.

When he got to Trasone, he said, “For making it through this cursed winter,” and presented the decoration. After the ritual kiss that accompanied it, he pinned an identical decoration on Clovisio.

At last, everybody had his medal. Spinello strutted away. Trasone looked down at the decoration. It was stamped with a map of eastern Unkerlant and two words: WINTER WAR. He tapped Sergeant Panfilo on the shoulder. “Isn’t that grand? We’ve all got frozen-meat medals to call our own.”

Panfilo laughed, but not for long. “There’re a lot of dead men only thawing out now,” he said. “If you want to trade places with one of’em, I doubt he’d complain.”

“I like being alive just fine, thanks, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “But twenty years from now I’m going to look at this cursed chunk of polished brass, and my feet’ll start to freeze, and I’ll taste behemoth that’s starting to go bad. Once I get home, that’s the stuff I want to forget, not remember.”

“Now you do, aye,” Panfilo agreed. “But how many times have you listened to veterans of the Six Years’ War going on and on about everything they went through?”

Trasone grunted. That had the unpleasant feel of probability to it. “Good,” he said. “My old man always bored me. Now I’ll have an excuse to bore my kids, if I ever have any.” He glanced west, in the direction of the Unkerlanters who still tossed eggs at Aspang. They wanted to make sure he wouldn’t. So far, they’d had no luck.

When he woke up before dawn the next morning, he thought they’d smuggled more egg-tossers up close enough to strike at Aspang. But the rumbling roar, he discovered, came from the south, not from the west, and, while there were a great many bursts, none seemed close to the city.

“What’s going on?” he asked around a yawn as he got up from his cot. “Are the Unkerlanters kicking up their heels, or have we got something laid on down south?”

“Nobody told me anything about an attack down south,” Sergeant Panfilo said, “not yet, anyhow. I know we’re shifting men down there, but we aren’t set to move this soon.”

“It’s the Unkerlanters, then,” Trasone said. “If they can’t get us out of Aspang from the front, they’re going to try and do it from the back. Fits the buggers, doesn’t it?”

Panfilo laughed. “So it does. Now we have to find out if they get anywhere. If they don’t, we can sit tight here. But if they do, we’re liable to have to go out and work for a living again.”

“Oh, aye, this is a rest cure, this is.” Trasone snorted. “Come to beautiful Aspang for your health. The garden spot of southern Unkerlant, only eight months of winter a year. Don’t fancy the weather? Wait a bit. It’ll get worse.”

“If you got any worse, they’d fling you in the bloody guardhouse,” Panfilo said. “Too cursed early to be carrying on like that.”

All the rest of the day, Trasone kept an ear on the racket from the south. It didn’t fade; if anything, it got louder. He drew his own conclusions. Quietly and without any fuss, he made sure his kit was ready to sling onto his back at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t the only veteran doing the same thing, either.

Major Spinello burst into the barracks the next morning. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted, full of energy as usual. “Swemmel’s boys are getting rowdy, and it’s up to us to show ‘em that’s our job.”

He screamed at the men who weren’t ready to move on the instant, and cursed the ones who were because they hadn’t made sure their comrades were, too. That meant all the other officers and sergeants started screaming, too. If they’d wanted the battalion ready to move at a moment’s notice, they could have started screaming earlier. For one thing, they weren’t screaming at him, because he was ready. For another, he’d heard a lot of screaming in his time. It didn’t faze him.

Under the lash of Spinello’s tongue, the soldiers in the battalion tramped to the ley-line caravan depot and filed aboard cars that looked to have had better lifetimes. “We’re going down to hit the Unkerlanters in the flank,” Spinello said as they boarded. “Swemmel’s boys are as nervous about their flanks as so many virgins, and we’re going to screw ‘em.”

As they glided south out of Aspang, they passed the wreckage of several caravans lying by the side of the ley line. “Cursed Unkerlanters are a pack of nervous virgins,” Trasone remarked, and got a laugh. If the Unkerlanters had managed to plant one more egg along the ley line, he and his comrades wouldn’t have the chance to do much in the way of seduction.

But the ley-line caravan stopped where its operator wanted it to, not at the whim of some Unkerlanter irregulars. Trasone and his fellow troopers tumbled out. Again, Major Spinello was shouting, “Let’s go! What are you waiting for? We have to move, curse it.”

Maybe the major had been talking by crystal while on the caravan because he seemed to know just where he was going. After Spinello led the battalion out of a stretch of woods, Trasone exclaimed in delight: “Behemoths!”

“Our behemoths,” Clovisio said. “Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Trasone said. “They’re here, and the ground is nice and solid, so they can move. And when we’ve got behemoths than can do what they’re supposed to do, the Unkerlanters had better watch out.”

As if to underscore that, the behemoths trotted forward. Spinello shouted, “Come on, you lazy buggers, give ‘em a hand. You know what to do.” Not that many months off garrison duty, he didn’t have any experience of what to do himself. But he was right, not only in his tactics, but in being sure the veterans he commanded knew what to do. They hurried along with and behind the behemoths, ready both to protect them and to swarm through any holes they punched in the enemy’s lines.

Unkerlanter egg-tossers kept pounding away at the Algarvian positions to the south and now to the southeast; by the sound of the fighting, King Swemmel’s men had pushed the Algarvians back. That worried Trasone. But Sergeant Panfilo heard the same thing and grinned from ear to ear. “Those whoresons’ll be so busy looking straight ahead of’em, they won’t even think about peering sideways till it’s too late.”

Trasone thought about that. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Sergeant.”

By the affronted pose he struck, Panfilo might have been standing on the street of some Algarvian town rather than trotting across a wheatfield that was coming up rank with weeds. “Of course I’m right. Have you ever heard me wrong?”

“Only when you talk,” Trasone assured him. Panfilo’s glare deserved to go up on the stage. After a moment, though, the sergeant chuckled and got going again.

And Panfilo did turn out to be right. Half an hour later, the crews on the backs of the behemoths started lobbing eggs at swarthy soldiers in rock-gray. “Mezentio!” Major Spinello shouted, and all the troops echoed him: “Mezentio!”

The Unkerlanters had been moving forward against the Algarvians to the east of them. When doing what they were ordered to do, whether that was making an attack or defending a position, they were among the stubbornest warriors in the world; along with so many other Algarvian soldiers, Trasone had found that out the hard way. When taken by surprise . . .

Taken by surprise, the Unkerlanters broke and fled in wild disorder. Some of them threw away their sticks so they could run faster. To complete their demoralization, a squadron of Algarvian dragons swooped out of the sky to drop eggs on some of them, flame down others, and start fires even in the green, damp fields.

After that, some of the Unkerlanters stopped running and threw up their hands in surrender. The Algarvians blazed down a few of them in the heat of the moment, but only a few. Most got relieved of whatever they had worth stealing and sent up in the direction of Aspang.

“Keep moving!” Major Spinello shouted, not just to his own troopers but also to the behemoths’ crews and to anyone else who would listen. “If we just keep moving, by the powers above, maybe we can get ‘em all in a sack, cut ‘em off from their pals, and pound ‘em to pieces. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good to me,” Trasone said, more to himself than to anyone else. He wondered how many other Algarvian officers were shouting the same thing on every stretch of this counterattack. Ruthless speed and drive had taken Algarve deep into Unkerlant. Now the Algarvians could use them again--and the Unkerlanters, Trasone vowed, were going to be sorry.

He also wondered what the Unkerlanter officers were shouting right now. The ones whose orders mattered, the ones with the higher ranks, wouldn’t even know things had gone wrong yet. The Unkerlanters were too cheap or too lazy or too ignorant to give their soldiers as many crystals as they needed. That had cost them before. He hoped it would cost them again.

Because Swemmel’s men didn’t have a lot of crystals, they made elaborate plans ahead of time. Junior officers who changed plans without orders got into trouble. Here, that meant the Unkerlanters kept trying to go east even after the Algarvian counterattack against their northern flank. It also meant the counterattack got a lot farther than it would have otherwise. Not until midaftemoon did Swemmel’s soldiers realize the Algarvians had thrown a lot of men into the fight and really needed to be stopped.

By then, it was too late. Behemoths crushed the first few Unkerlanter regiments that turned from east to north. The Unkerlanters’ strokes came in one after another instead of all at once, which made them easier to break up. The enemy even flung unicorn cavalry into the fight.

Trasone enjoyed blazing down cavalrymen. He enjoyed it even more when they rode unicorns than when they were on horseback. For centuries, unicorns with iron-shod horns had been the dreadful queens of the battlefield, terrorizing footsoldiers with their unstoppable charges. Memories of them lingered in soldiers’ minds to this day, even if sticks had made cavalry charges more dangerous to riders than to the men they attacked.

These days, behemoths ruled the field. They were ugly but strong enough to carry not just soldiers but also egg-tossers and armor. The eggs they flung at the charging unicorns knocked down the splendid, beautiful beasts, sometimes three and four at a time. Wounded unicorns screamed like women in torment. Wounded riders screamed, too. Trasone blazed them once they were off their unicorns with as much relish as while they still rode.

The Unkerlanters were brave. Trasone had seen that ever since the fighting started. Here and now, it did them little good. A scratch force of cavalry couldn’t hope to stop superior numbers of footsoldiers supported by behemoths. King Swemmel’s men fell back in confusion. Trasone slogged after them. He and his fellow Algarvians were going forward again. All was right with the world.

Pekka went down on one knee, first to Siuntio, then to Ilmarinen, as if they were two of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. Ilmarinen’s chuckle and the leer that went with it said he knew the ancient significance of that particular gesture of obeisance from a woman to a man. Siuntio surely knew it, too, but was too much a gentleman to show he knew.

And Pekka, by this time, was used to ignoring Ilmarinen at need. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “Without you, I don’t think I could have persuaded the illustrious Professor Heikki”--she laced the words with as much sardonic venom as she could; Heikki was a nobody even in veterinary sorcery--”to release the funds to go on with the experiment.”

“Always a pleasure to make a fool look foolish,” Ilmarinen said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, and she is, too.”

Siuntio said, “My dear, I only wish our intervention had been unnecessary.

Were Prince Joroinen among the living, you would have had everything you needed in this laboratory here at the crook of a finger.”

“Aye,” Ilmarinen said. “You ask me, it’s amazing you could get any work done at all in this miserable little hole of a laboratory.”

Before she’d seen the elegant facilities at the university up in Yliharma, Pekka would have bristled at that. Till then, she hadn’t thought Kajaani City College was a bad place to do research. She knew better now, even if the Algarvian attack that had killed Joroinen had also kept her from performing her long-planned experiment.

“We do most of our work inside our heads and can do it anywhere,” Siuntio said with a chuckle: “the advantage of theory over practice. We only need the laboratory to see that we’ve done our sums correctly.”

“Or, more often, that we’ve done ‘em wrong,” Ilmarinen put in. Siuntio chuckled again, this time on a note of wry agreement.

Pekka was too nervous to chuckle. Like any theoretical sorcerer, she knew her limits in the laboratory, and knew she was going to have to transcend them. “Let’s see what happens when we use the divergent series,” she said, her voice harsh. Bowing to her senior colleagues, she went on, “You both know what I’m going to do--and you both know what you’ll have to do if things go wrong.”

“We do,” Siuntio said firmly.

“Oh, aye, indeed we do.” Ilmarinen nodded. “The only thing we don’t know is whether we’ll be able to do it before things get too far out of control for anybody to do anything.” His smile showed stained, snaggly teeth. “Of course, like I said, we do the experiment to find out what else we’ve done wrong.”

“That isn’t the only reason,” Siuntio said with a touch of reproof.

Before the two distinguished old men could start snapping and barking again, Pekka repeated, “Let’s see what happens. Take your places, if you please. And no more talking unless it’s life or death. If you distract me, that’s just what it’s liable to be.”

She wished Leino were down here with her instead of working on his own projects somewhere else in this rambling, sprawling building. Her husband was all business when he went into the laboratory. But, being all business, he cared little for theory, and theory was what counted here. One more thing to worry about: if the theory was wrong and the experiment went disastrously awry, she might take him with her in her own failure.

If she did, though, she’d never know it.

Looking from Siuntio to Ilmarinen, she asked, “Are you ready?” It was an oddly formal question: she knew they were, but until they acknowledged as much, she would do nothing. Siuntio’s response was also formal; he dipped his head, a gesture halfway between a nod and a bow. Ilmarinen simply nodded, but his expression held no mockery now. He was as alive with curiosity as either of his colleagues.

Pekka went to the cage of one of the rats she’d selected. She carried the cage over to one of the white tables in the laboratory. After she stepped away, Siuntio came up and, peering through his spectacles, read the rat’s name and identification number. Pekka solemnly repeated them and wrote them down, then pulled another cage off the shelf. She carried this one to an identical table and set it there. Now Ilmarinen stepped forward to read the beast’s name and number.

Again Pekka repeated them and set them in her journal. She said, “For the record, be it noted that the specimens are grandfather and grandson.” She wrote that down, too.

Siuntio said, “Be it also noted that this experiment, unlike others we have attempted before, uses a spell with divergent elements to explore the inverse relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.” Pekka also set that down in the journal.

Ilmarinen said, “Be it further noted that we don’t know what in blazes we’re doing, that we’re liable to find out the hard way, and that, if we do, they won’t find enough pieces of us to put on the pyre, let alone the precious experimental diary Mistress Pekka is keeping there.”

“And be it noted that I’m not writing a word of that,” Pekka said. Ilmarinen blazed her an impudent grin. She felt like blazing him, too, with the heaviest stick she could find.

“Enough,” Siuntio said. Sometimes--not always--he was able to abash Ilmarinen, not the least of his sorcerous abilities. The other senior theoretical sorcerer quieted down now, even if Pekka doubted he was abashed.

“I begin,” Pekka said. Then she spoke the ritual words any Kuusaman mage used before commencing a spell. They helped calm her. Kuusamo would go on even if she didn’t, just as it had gone on for the millennia before she was born. Reminding herself helped take the edge off her nerves.

She started to incant, her voice rising and falling, speeding and slowing, in the intricate rhythms of the spell she and her fellow theoreticians had crafted. It wasn’t the same version of the spell as she had begun to use in Yliharma when the Algarvians struck. Since then, she and Ilmarinen and Siuntio had gone over it line by line, pruning here, strengthening there, doing their best to see that no error remained in either the words of the spell or the passes she made while chanting.

Spring in Kajaani was none too warm, but sweat sprang out on Pekka’s face. She could feel the energies she was trying to summon and control. They were strong, strong. Every calculation had said they would be, but the distance between knowing and understanding had never felt greater.

“Powers above, aid us.” Siuntio’s voice was soft but very clear. He sensed it, too, then. Ilmarinen muttered something. Pekka didn’t think it was anything like a prayer.

Even the rats started scurrying around in their cages. They worked at the doors with clever paws: clever, but not clever enough. The older one squeaked in fright. The younger one burrowed down into the straw at the bottom of his cage and tried to hide.

Pekka didn’t blame him. She wanted to hide, too. The conjuration she’d made before, the one that had started her down this ley line, had been nothing like this. She wondered if some mage in the Kaunian Empire, or during the long, confused time after its fall, had tried a conjuration like this. If so, he hadn’t lived through it--which the ancients would no doubt have termed summoning up a demon too strong to control. That old-fashioned terminology had always made Pekka smile . . . till now. What went through her mind now was, I must be mad even for attempting this. But she shook her head. The world around her had gone mad. She hadn’t. She hoped she hadn’t, anyhow.

She kept on with the spell. She had, by now, gone much too far into it to back out without consequences almost as bad as the ones she was trying to create--and with none of the safeguards her two colleagues could (she hoped) provide if everything went according to plan.

Don’t do anything foolish. She always told herself that when she went to work magic instead of just working on it. She knew her limits as a practical mage. Because she knew them, and because she knew she was so close to them, she was doubly careful. She could afford a mistake no more than she could afford to try to abandon the conjuration.

“Ahh,” Ilmarinen murmured. For a moment, Pekka, intent on spell and passes, didn’t understand what had pulled that low-voiced exclamation from him. Then she too saw the thin, pale line of light running between the cages that held the two rats. She didn’t smile--she was too busy to smile--but inside she exulted. Theory had predicted that discharge of energies, and theory, so far, was proved right.

As theory had also predicted, the line of light grew brighter with startling speed. Pekka had to squint through narrowed eyes to tolerate the glare. One of the rats--she never knew which one--squeaked in alarm.

If the conjuration didn’t end soon, that light itself might prove enough to wreck the laboratory. Now Pekka worked with her eyes squeezed shut as tight as she could force them, but the brilliance swelled and swelled. She couldn’t turn away, not unless she wanted to turn straight toward ruin. She smelled thunderstorms, as she might have if the beam from a stick passed close to her head. She wished the forces she was challenging were as trivial as that.

For a terrifying instant, she felt heat, heat that made the inside of a furnace seem like the land of the Ice People. The thunderclap that followed almost knocked her off her feet. All the windows in the laboratory broke, spraying shards of glass out onto the lawns.

Silence. Stillness. I’m alive, Pekka thought. I hope the glass didn’t hurt anyone. And then, Professor Heikki will be angry at me for putting all those windows on the department’s budget. The absurdity of that last thought made her snicker, but didn’t make it any less likely to be true.

The odors of growing grass and of flowers bursting into bloom wafted into the laboratory chamber through the newly unglazed windows. Along with them, Pekka’s nose caught a harsh reek of corruption. One way or another, the experiment had come to completion.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Ilmarinen said, echoing her thoughts.

Pekka went to the cage that had housed the older rat. He was still there--after a fashion. She nodded at seeing his moldering remains. Then she walked over to the other cage, the one that held--or rather, had held--his grandson. But for straw and a few seeds, it was empty now.

“Congratulations, my dear,” Siuntio said. “This confirms your experiment with the two acorns, confirms and amplifies it. And, thanks to the refined conjuration and the life energy of the rats, it also confirms we can use this means to release sorcerous energy. And more will come.”

Ilmarinen grunted. “Divergent series. They diverged, all right.”

“Aye,” Pekka said, still looking from one cage to another. “The one went on past the end of his span, the other back before the beginning of his time.” She pointed to the empty cage. “Where is he now? Was he ever truly here? Did he ever truly exist? What would it be like, to be pushed out of the continuum so?”

“Do you want to find out?” Ilmarinen asked. “Experimentally, I mean?”

Pekka shuddered. “Powers above, no!”

One more long day like so many long days. Climbing down from the wagon that had brought him back to Gromheort from labor on the roads, Leofsig wondered if he shouldn’t have picked a different line of work after all. He thought about going to the baths to revive himself, but lacked the energy to walk the couple of blocks out of his way he would have needed to get there.

“Home,” he muttered. “Food. Sleep.” As far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered tonight. Sleep loomed largest of all. If he hadn’t known the Algarvian constables were liable to take him for a drunk and beat him up, he could easily have lain down on the sidewalk and fallen asleep there.

He put one foot in front of the other till he made it to his own front door. But even as he knocked, he heard a commotion inside. He came to alertness. Commotion was liable to mean danger for him or his whole family. If, for instance, Sidroc had got his memory back . . .

Someone in there heard his knock and lifted the bar off its brackets. Leofsig worked the latch and opened the door. And there stood Sidroc, a large, uncharacteristic grin spread over his heavy features. “I’ve finally gone and done it,” he declared.

“Well, good for you,” Leofsig answered. “Done what, now? If it’s what it sounds like, I hope she was pretty.”

His cousin guffawed, but then shook his head. “No, not that, though I won’t have any trouble getting that, too, whenever I want it. I’ve gone and signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade, that’s what I’ve done.”

“Oh,” Leofsig said. “No wonder everybody in there is screaming his head off, then. You can hear the racket out here. Powers above, you can probably hear the racket over in the count’s castle.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Sidroc said. “I don’t care. I made up my mind, and I’m going to do it. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters, and the cursed Kaunians, too.”

“But fighting for Algarve?” Leofsig shook his head. He was too tired to argue as hard as he would have at another time. “Let me by, would you? I want to get some wine and I want to get some supper.”

Now Sidroc said, “Oh,” and stood aside. As Leofsig went past him, he continued, “Not so much fighting for Algarve as fighting for me. I want to go do this. I want to go see what the war is all about.”

“That’s only because you haven’t done it,” Leofsig said, remembering the smell of entrails laid open--and remembering the smell of fear, too.

“You sound like my father,” Sidroc said scornfully.

“He hasn’t done it, either, so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Leofsig answered, relishing the chance to say that about Uncle Hengist. “But I have, and I do, and I’m telling you you’re crazy, too.”

“You can tell me whatever you want. It doesn’t matter worth a sack of beans because I signed the papers this afternoon,” Sidroc said. “Anybody who doesn’t like it can cursed well lump it.”

Leofsig wanted to lump Sidroc. But he also still wanted supper and sleep. And a house without Sidroc in it was liable to be a more peaceable place. So all he said was, “Have it your way,” and walked down the entry hall and turned left into the kitchen.

His mother and sister were in there. “I heard you talking with him,” Elfryth said in a stage whisper. “Fighting for Mezentio after what the redheads have done to our kingdom! The very idea! Did you persuade him not to?”

“No, Mother,” Leofsig answered, and poured himself some wine. “And do you know what else? I didn’t try very hard.”

“Good.” Conberge didn’t bother holding her voice down. “I won’t be sorry to see him out of this house, and nobody can make me say I will. Having him here has been nothing but trouble. If the Algarvians want him, they’re welcome to him, as far as I’m concerned.”

Sidroc must have gone back into the dining room after letting Leofsig in, for more shouts erupted from there: he and Uncle Hengist were going at each other hammer and tongs. Leofsig cocked his head to one side, wanting to catch some of the choicer names they were throwing back and forth. He almost missed his mother saying, “Here--I had a kettle of hot water over the fire waiting for you. You can wash now.”

Reluctantly, he came back to the real world. “Oh. Thank you,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound too vague.

Conberge set a basin on the floor for him. She and Elfryth headed out of the kitchen to give him privacy in which to wash. Over her shoulder, Conberge said, “Take the pork stew off the fire if it starts to smell like it’s burning.”

“All right.” Leofsig worked the pump handle in the sink to get cold water to mix with what his mother had heated for him. Then he scrubbed away at the dirt and sweat that clung to him. A washrag and a basin didn’t let him do the job he could have at the baths, but he hadn’t had to go out of his way to get here.

His father came into the kitchen while he was drying off. Leofsig didn’t know whether Hestan had been home for a while or just stepped in. His father quickly made that plain: “You’ll have heard the news, I expect.”

“Oh, aye,” Leofsig answered with a nod. “The whole neighborhood will have heard it by now, except for that old deaf man three doors down.”

Hestan chuckled, then sighed. “That would be funny, if only it were funny, if you know what I mean. Sidroc doesn’t want to listen to anybody, though I wish he would.”

“You and Uncle Hengist are the only ones who do,” Leofsig said as another blast of shouts came out of the dining room. “And I thought you’d be glad to see Sidroc gone, from most of the things you’ve said.”

His father sighed again. “I would have been. Powers above, I was, till he said he was really going. After that. . . it’s hard to watch your own kin walk into what can’t be anything but a big mistake.”

“If he goes, Ealstan’s safer,” Leofsig pointed out.

“That’s so,” Hestan said, “but Sidroc hasn’t shown any sign of recalling just what happened there. I never felt safe enough about it to tell Ealstan he could come home, and he probably wouldn’t want to now, not when he’d have to try to bring that girl with him.”

“Vanai,” Leofsig said, remembering how startled he’d been when Ealstan told him her name. “Aye. Now that the redheads are shutting so many of the Kaunians away, how could he bring her back to Gromheort?”

Before Hestan could answer, Sidroc shouted. “Curse you, you old shitter! Powers below eat you! I’m going where I am wanted!” A moment later, the door opened and then slammed shut. The whole house shook.

“That seems to settle that,” Leofsig said, and his father nodded. He continued, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry, if that makes any sense. I won’t miss him very much, and I’m safer with him gone, too, even if he hasn’t made little sly cracks about turning me in to the Algarvians for a while.”

“I don’t think he ever meant them,” Hestan said. “I hope he never did, I’ll tell you that.”

Leofsig was convinced his cousin had thought hard about betraying him to the Algarvian authorities, but held his tongue. Sidroc hadn’t actually done it, and pretty soon he’d get shipped off to Unkerlant. He’d have plenty of more urgent things to worry about there.

Uncle Hengist came into the kitchen. He was Hestan’s younger brother, and the more dapper of the two. Now he looked older than Leofsig’s father, and worn to a nub. “He’s gone,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “He walked out of here. He’s gone.”

“Aye,” Hestan said. Leofsig busied himself with putting away the basin. That way, Uncle Hengist wouldn’t be able to see the look on his face. As he’d said to his father, the whole block knew Sidroc was gone.

“Who would have thought he’d want to go fight for the Algarvians?” Hengist said, though Sidroc had been talking about doing that for months.

And Hengist had had some things to say about the redheads that didn’t sit well with Leofsig, either. “Don’t you think they’re the coming thing anymore, Uncle?” he asked.

His father gave him a look that told him to keep his mouth shut. Uncle Hengist scowled, but answered, “Even if they are, that’s no reason to take up arms for them. They’ve got plenty of soldiers of their own.”

You can’t have it both ways, was what Leofsig wanted to say. One thing that stopped him was his father’s warning glance, which had got more urgent than ever. The other was remembering that Hengist, like Sidroc, knew he’d escaped from an Algarvian captives’ camp. He didn’t dare push his uncle too far, not when he couldn’t fully trust him.

Hestan said, “Powers above keep the boy safe, Hengist.”

“Boy is right!” Hengist burst out. “But he’s so cursed sure he’s a man, and how can anyone tell him anything different?”

“He’ll learn,” Hestan said. “You did. I did. Leofsig has. We just hope he doesn’t pay too high a price for his lessons.”

“Easy for you to say,” Uncle Hengist said.

“No, it’s not,” Leofsig’s father answered. “I had a son in the army, the Forthwegian army”--he couldn’t resist the dig, and Hengist’s mouth tightened--”and my other boy’s gone, and who can say what happened to him? No one in Gromheort knows where Ealstan is. He might have fallen off the face of the earth.”

“I never have understood what happened the day he disappeared, Hestan, the day Sidroc got hurt,” Hengist said. “If I did understand it, I think I might have something more to say to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

“He’s liable to be more dangerous than Sidroc,” Leofsig said in dismay after his uncle had gone.

“I don’t think so,” Hestan answered, and then, with one more sigh, “I hope not. He has other things than us on his mind right now, anyhow.”

“Now that he won’t have Sidroc staying with him, he ought to move out of here and find a place of his own,” Leofsig said.

“Do you think so?” His father sounded genuinely curious. “My notion has always been that it’s better to have him where we can keep an eye on him than to let him go off on his own and brood. Am I wrong?”

Leofsig considered. “No, I don’t suppose you are. I wish you were, but I don’t think you are.”

From the hallway, Conberge called, “Are you decent in there? If you are, Mother and I would like to finish cooking.”

“Come ahead,” Leofsig said. “I have a better appetite for pork stew than I do for quarreling right now.” His father raised an eyebrow, then solemnly nodded.