Darkness Descending

Twenty

For the first time since an egg from an Algarvian dragon killed Eforiel, Cornelu was back in his element: riding a leviathan in search of the most harm he could do to King Mezentio’s followers. The leviathan, a Lagoan beast, wasn’t trained up to the standards of the Sibian navy, but she was still young, and she could learn. He’d already seen as much.

True, these days Cornelu patrolled the Strait of Valmiera, not the narrower channel that separated Sibiu from the mainland of Derlavai. His own kingdom remained under Algarvian occupation. Powers above, his own wife remained under Algarvian occupation. But he was fighting back again.

He tapped the leviathan in a pattern the same in the Lagoan service as it had been in that of Sibiu. Obediently, the great beast raised the front part of her body out of the water, lifting Cornelu with it so he could see farther. If an Algarvian ship glided down a ley line without his seeing it, he could hardly try to sink it.

Even with the added range to his vision, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He tapped the leviathan again, and it sank back down into the water. By the way the beast quivered under him, he knew it thought rearing was part of an enjoyable game. That was all right with him. He would enjoy the game if it led him to Algarvians. King Mezentio’s men wouldn’t, but sending them to the bottom would only make Cornelu happier.

“Now,” he muttered, “I think we’ve been traveling along a ley line, but I’d better make sure.”

Like the skintight suit he wore, his belt was made of rubber. He took from one of the pouches on the belt an instrument of bronze and glass. Inside the hollow glass sphere that made up the bulk of it were two vanes of thinnest gold leaf. They stood well apart from each other.

Cornelu let out a satisfied grunt. That the vanes repelled each other showed they were in the presence of sorcerous energy--and the only sources of sorcerous energy out on the ocean were the ley lines that formed a grid on sea and land alike. If Cornelu waited here long enough, a ship was sure to pass close by.

But he had no idea how long long enough might be. And, loathing the Algarvians as he did, he was not in the mood to wait. He wanted to hunt. He was a coursing wolf, not a spider sitting in a web waiting for a butterfly to blunder along and give him a meal.

He turned his instrument this way and that in his hands, watching the gold-leaf vanes flutter as he did. He knew they spread wider when parallel to a ley line than when perpendicular to it. As he’d thought, the line on which he’d positioned himself and his leviathan ran from northeast to southwest. Without hesitation, he urged the leviathan in the latter direction, toward the coast of Algarvian-occupied Valmiera and of Algarve itself.

“If you don’t go where the bees are, you won’t get any honey,” he told the leviathan. Talking to this new beast wasn’t like talking with Eforiel. He’d told his old leviathan everything. With this one, he still felt a certain reserve. He wasn’t sure how much it understood, either--after all, it spoke Lagoan, not Sibian. Cornelu knew that was an absurd conceit, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

The leviathan swam along happily enough. It was doing what it would have done had it never made the acquaintance of mankind: foraging. When it got into a school of mackerel, its long toothy jaws opened and closed, snapping up fish after fish. The only notice it took of Cornelu on its back and of the eggs strapped beneath its belly was that they made it swim a little slower and more awkwardly than it would have otherwise. That let a couple of mackerel it should have caught get away. But it still caught plenty and didn’t seem aggrieved.

“Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu urged it. “Come on. Bring me to a ship. It doesn’t have to be a great big ship. Just bring me to a ship.”

He was lying. He knew the kind of ship to which he wanted the leviathan to bring him: to a great Algarvian floating fortress, all bristling with heavy sticks and with egg-tossers. Sending a vessel like that to the bottom would be the beginning of revenge for everything Algarve had done to his kingdom and to his life.

But sending a vessel like that to the bottom wouldn’t be easy. He knew as much. He would have to be sly. He would have to be sneaky. He would have to be lucky. The sailors aboard a floating fortress would always be alert against attack by leviathans. So would the mages aboard such a ship, though he didn’t worry so much about them as he would have on land. He had his instrument for detecting sorcerous energy, but wasn’t using any to speak of. That made his own sorcerous footprint very small and hard to note.

Sea . . . sky . . . sea . . . sky. Still nothing but sea and sky, as far as he could see. He muttered in frustration. And then he spied something neither sky nor sea, but not something to delight him as a hunter. Instead, he cursed and ordered his leviathan to dive. He hoped the dragon gliding through the air far above had not spied him.

His rubber suit and sorcery kept the cold of the southern seas from slaying him by stealth. Another sorcery let him get air from the water around him, so that he could stay down as long as the leviathan could. No mage had ever successfully applied that latter spell to a leviathan, to let it stay submerged without ever needing to come up and breathe. Nor had any mage ever made a spell to let a man dive as deep as a leviathan could without the weight of the water above him crushing out his life.

He had the leviathan stay submerged as long as it could. When it finally had to rise to spout, he anxiously scanned the heavens. If that dragonflier had spotted him before he took cover below the surface of the sea, an egg might fall out of the sky at any moment, or the dragon might come skimming low over the waves to flame him off his leviathan. He hated dragons and dragonfliers not least because they could hurt him and he couldn’t hit back.

But, once more, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He breathed a sigh of relief at what had annoyed him only minutes before. He hated ley-line warships, too, but he hated them because they belonged to Algarve. Aye, they could hurt him. He could hurt them, too, though, if only he got the chance.

Patting the leviathan, Cornelu asked, “Now, which way did you swim when you went under?” The leviathan couldn’t answer--and, by his own silly logic, wouldn’t even have understood the question, being a Lagoan beast.

He pulled out the instrument he used to detect sorcerous energy. Both gold-leaf vanes hung limp, which meant the leviathan had swum away from the ley line. Cornelu turned the instrument in his hands. The vanes stayed limp. Cornelu cursed, loudly and foully. Why not? No one was around to hear him.

With a couple of taps, he ordered the beast to swim south. After what he judged to be about half a mile, he stopped the leviathan and examined the instrument again. If anything, the vanes hung closer together than they had before.

Cornelu grunted. He hadn’t found the ley line, but he’d found where it wasn’t. That gave him a better idea of where it was. He turned the leviathan back toward the north and swam past--he hoped he swam past--the point where he’d begun trying to reacquire it. Then he checked the instrument once more and nodded to himself. The vanes were separating.

Before long, he’d found the ley line again. He sent the leviathan southwest down it. These were Algarvian-controlled waters. Where were the warships with which the Algarvians controlled them?

Most patrols, by the nature of things--the ocean was vast, the targets upon it few and small and far between--ended in futility. Cornelu’s whole war up till now had been futile. He didn’t know how much more futility he could stand.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before he spotted a speck on the horizon. Hope flooded into him. If he could bring his leviatJhan back to Setubal after sinking an Algarvian ship, even the haughty Lagoans would have to give him his due.

Haughty wasn’t quite fair. The Lagoans thought they were better than anybody else, but they didn’t flaunt it the way, say, Valmierans did. For his part, Cornelu remained convinced one Sibian was worth three Lagoans any day. Nobody who talked through his nose the way King Vitor’s subjects did was altogether to be trusted.

Well, now Cornelu had the chance to prove that of which he was convinced. He urged the leviathan toward the ship--and the ship was coming toward him, too. He couldn’t have caught it from behind, not unless it was just lazing along.

He pulled a brass spyglass off his belt. A minor magic kept its lenses dry so he could peer through it right away. The ship seemed to leap toward him. He gasped. For a moment, he thought it was a floating fortress. Then he realized it was the next class down, a ley-line cruiser. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “It will have to do,” he said.

Through the spyglass, he saw sailors on the deck of the cruiser. A jack of green, white, and red snapped in the breeze. Cornelu nodded. He wouldn’t be attacking a Lagoan ship by mistake. That would be biting the hand that fed him.

Those sailors would be on the lookout for leviathans. If they spied him, he would never get close enough to plant his egg against the cruiser’s flank. He fought the Algarvians, ironically, by keeping his mount at the surface. Mezentio’s men would be watching for the big plumes of vapor that rose when a leviathan came up from the depths. So long as his beast kept breathing steadily, it wouldn’t give itself away too soon.

Cornelu had to gauge when to dive for his attack. If he waited too long, Mezentio’s men would spot him. If he dove too soon, his leviathan wouldn’t be able to come alongside the cruiser. He would have to surface before it got there, and then he would really be in trouble.

When he judged the moment ripe, he tapped the leviathan, which slipped beneath the waves and sped toward the ley-line cruiser. It knew it had to swim alongside or under the ship long enough to let him attach the egg. He’d sometimes wondered if leviathans had any true notion why men did such things. The beasts fought among themselves, over mates and sometimes over food. Did they know their masters fought, too?

And then Cornelu had no more time to wonder, for the leviathan brought him up right below the cruiser. His lost Eforiel could not have done a finer job. All he had to do was pick the moment to signal the leviathan to swim belly-up beneath the Algarvian warship, so he could slide along the harness and release an egg. The egg clung to the hull of the ley-line cruiser. As soon as its shell touched the ship, a spell began to bring it to life.

Cornelu regained his position near the leviathan’s blowhole. Urgently now, he ordered his mount away from the ship. The egg would burst whether he was close or far. He didn’t want to have to endure a burst close by: this egg was far heavier and more potent than any a dragon could haul into the air. He also wanted to get far enough from the ley-line cruiser to let the leviathan surface safely.

He didn’t quite manage that. The leviathan had to spout a little sooner than he’d expected. The Algarvians flashed mirrors in his direction. They weren’t sure to which side he belonged. He took a mirror from his belt pouch and flashed back. His signal would be wrong, but, as long as they kept playing with mirrors, they wouldn’t be lobbing eggs at him. And his leviathan swam farther from the cruiser with every heartbeat.

Before long, the Algarvians realized he wasn’t one of their own. Eggs began flying through the air toward the leviathan. The first couple fell short, but the enemy’s aim was liable to improve in a hurry.

Then the egg he’d planted burst. The ley-line cruiser staggered in the water, as if it had collided with an invisible wall. The Algarvians forgot all about him as they tried to save their ship. They couldn’t. Its back broken, it plunged beneath the sea. Cornelu’s bellow of triumph might have burst from the throat of a warrior from five hundred years before: “For King Burebistu! For Sibiu!” This time, he’d struck the enemies of his kingdom a heavy blow.

About every other Algarvian officer who came into the tailor’s shop Traku ran took one look at Talsu working beside his father and told him, “You are lucky to be alive.” Each time, he had to nod politely and say something like, “Aye, I know it.” However polite he acted, he wasn’t always sure it was a good thing that he was alive. The wound in his left side still pained him. When he walked, he wanted to bend his body to favor it as much as he could. When he sat, he kept twisting to find the position where it hurt least. He couldn’t find a position where it didn’t hurt at all. By what the healer said, that would be awhile yet, if it ever came.

What made it hard to stay polite, though, was that the Algarvians didn’t mean he was lucky to be alive after the redheaded soldier stabbed him. They meant he was lucky the occupying authorities hadn’t seized him, tied him to a post, put a blindfold on him, and blazed him.

One of Mezentio’s officers wagged a forefinger under Talsu’s nose. “You are a fortunate fellow in that the military governor for this district is an easygoing old man who would sooner swive his pretty young mistress than do his job. With most of his kind ...” And the fellow drew that finger across his own throat.

“Oh, aye, I’m about the luckiest man in the world,” Talsu agreed. By then, he’d said it so often, he managed to sound as if he believed it. The Algarvian captain shut up and left him alone.

But what right did the redheads have to take any woman who struck their fancy? What right did they have to pick a fight with someone who happened to be a Jelgavan woman’s friend? What right did they have to stab someone who didn’t care for their lewdness?

The right of the conqueror. That was what they would answer. That Algarvian had proved his answer with the point of his knife and had got off scot free. Talsu didn’t have so sharp a counterargument.

“Well, Father, it will be awhile yet before I can run around and get in trouble like I could before,” he told his father that evening as Traku was closing up the shop.

Traku started to slap him on the shoulder, as he would have done before Talsu made the acquaintance of a blade. He stopped awkwardly, the motion half completed. Any jar hurt Talsu these days. Embarrassed at himself, Traku said, “I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

“I wouldn’t mind if I did, either,” Talsu said, “but I can’t, not for a while. I haven’t got the strength to haul rocks or break them, either. But you taught me the needle and scissors, so I can still bring in money.”

“Once upon a time, the way fathers will, I hoped you’d make something better than a tailor of yourself,” his father answered, barring the door. “But you couldn’t hope to rise too far out of your class, and I’m glad you’re content to stay where you are.” That wasn’t exactly what Talsu had said. Before he could tell his father so, Traku went on, “And if you want to right about now, I bet we could fix up a marriage for you that’s in our class, and the arrangements would go like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Talsu flushed. “D’you really think so?” he mumbled.

“Aye, I do,” Traku said. “Gailisa’s never hated you, you know, and now that you took on the redheads to keep them from doing whatever they would have done to her, she really thinks the sun rises and sets on your head.”

A slow smile stretched across Talsu’s face. “Aye, I had noticed that. She’s come visiting a lot since I got stuck, hasn’t she?”

“Just a bit,” his father said solemnly. “Pretty girl. Good girl, too, and that counts for more in the long run, though you can’t always see as much when you’re young. She’s grateful to you, sure enough.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “She shows it, too, in ways that count. “We haven’t eaten this well since before the war. If you end up deciding needle and scissors and tape measure and tailoring magic don’t suit you, you might have yourself a grocer’s shop instead.”

“I’m not going to worry about that right now,” Talsu said. A delicious smell floated down the stairs. He grinned. “I’d sooner worry about supper--stuffed cabbage, or my nose has gone daft.”

“The rest of you, maybe. Your nose, no.” His father held out a hand. “Do you want some help getting up the steps?”

“I can manage,” Talsu said. “It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.” Going up or down stairs, especially up them, made him raise his legs higher than usual, which meant the healing muscles in his flanks had to work harder. Up he went, slowly. Saying it hurt less than it had was true, but didn’t mean it didn’t hurt at all.

He made it, though, and made it without gritting his teeth more than a couple of times. That was a sizable improvement on the bent-over hobbling he’d done when he first came home. And once, a few days before, he’d stumbled going up the stairs. He’d thought he was going to come to pieces. He’d rather hoped he would, in fact; he hadn’t hurt so much since just after he got stabbed.

He also had to sit carefully. Once he was at the table and had taken a couple of deep breaths, the pain eased. It didn’t go away, but it eased. His sister Ausra set a heaping plate in front of him. He dug in. The sauce, sharp with vinegar and sweet with honey, livened up the cabbage and the mix of meat and barley with which it was stuffed. “Good,” he said enthusiastically--and blurrily, because he didn’t bother swallowing first. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me--thank your lady friend,” his sister answered. “She’s the one who got us the ground mutton and the honey.”

“My lady friend,” Talsu echoed. “I guess maybe she is.”

His father coughed. His mother smiled. His sister laughed out loud. “Of course she is, you dunderhead,” Ausra said. “She’s as much your friend as you want her to be.”

Traku had said the same thing. Hearing it from another woman, though, made it somehow seem more real, more immediate. (Not that thinking of Ausra as a woman rather than as a brat and a nuisance of a little sister didn’t feel strange.) “Well, maybe,” Talsu muttered.

“No maybes about it--it’s true.” That wasn’t his sister, but his mother--and Laitsina spoke with great certainty.

Traku coughed again. “What I told him was, he could stay a tailor if he chose, or he could go into the grocer’s line if he didn’t. Pass me that pitcher of wine, will you, Ausra?”

Talsu’s ears burned. “Don’t you think it’s rude to run somebody’s life for him right in front of his face?” he asked the rest of his family.

Ausra stuck out her tongue at him. “Would you rather have us run your life behind your back?” she asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t try to run it at all,” Talsu said. “I had enough of that and to spare in the army, even if the food is better here.”

“The food wasn’t much better here till a little while ago,” Ausra said, not about to give in. “And why is it now? Gailisa, that’s why.”

If they’d teased him about Gailisa anymore, he thought he might start hating the grocer’s pretty daughter. Such irks always lasted till Gailisa came into the tailor’s shop, at which point they blew away like fog in the Bratanu Mountains. So it was again the next morning, when she walked in while he was cutting the pieces for an Algarvian officer’s cloak.

“Hello,” she said, and then, “How are you feeling today?”

Waggling the palm of his hand back and forth, he answered, “Not bad. I am getting better.” If he said that often enough, maybe he’d believe it was true.

“That’s good,” she said, nodding, hanging on his every word. “I’m glad to hear it. Those Algarvians have never been back since .. . since the day you had trouble.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Talsu said. “Here’s hoping they get sent to Unkerlant, or maybe to the land of the Ice People.”

His father made a sour face. “They’re winning both places, if you believe the news sheets. Even if you only believe a quarter of what’s in the news sheets, they’re still winning.” Traku opened a drawer, rattled through it, and slammed it shut, then did the same with another. Shaking his head, he muttered, “Must have left the fool thing upstairs. I’ll be back when I find it.” Off he went, leaving his son alone with Gailisa.

Talsu was convinced his father had done that on purpose. By the way she smiled, so was Gailisa. “Your father is a nice man,” she said, which, to Talsu, only proved she didn’t know Traku all that well.

He laughed. Gailisa raised an eyebrow and waited to hear what he had to say. After a moment’s thought, he said it: “I don’t know but what we had more fun when you were snippy all the time. You keep treating me like I’m one of the powers above and I’m liable to start believing it, and then where would we be?”

“Here in Skrunda, probably,” Gailisa answered. “It’s hard to be snippy with you after you did what you did, you know what I mean? I liked you before, and then--” She stopped and turned red.

Before Talsu could say anything to that, his side twinged. He grabbed it and grunted. Sound and movement were altogether involuntary. After it eased a little, he said, “I’m glad it made you like me better, but I’m not so glad as all that, if you hear what I’m telling you.”

“Of course I do,” Gailisa said. “I thought you were going to die, right there on the floor.”

“So did I,” Talsu said. “Thanks for getting help so fast.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. Then she walked over to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him. “I like this better than being snippy. What do you think of that?”

“I think I like it, too,” Talsu told her. “Kiss me again, so I can find out for sure.” She did. When Traku came downstairs, neither one of them noticed him. He went back up again, chuckling under his breath.

After the narrow valley in which Kunhegyes lay, the vast expanse of western Unkerlant seemed all the more enormous to Istvan. And the forest of pine and spruce and fir ahead looked big enough to cover half the world.

Staring, Istvan said, “We spent more than half a year fighting our way through the mountains and down onto the flatlands, and now we have to go through thisi We could be another year on the way.” If anything, that was liable to be a low guess. The forest might swallow anything, up to and including a Gyongyosian army.

“It’s not so bad as that, Sergeant.” Captain Tivadar took a map out of a leather map case and pointed at the red lines snaking through the green on the paper. “Here, do you see? Plenty of roads going through.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan said. He could hardly disagree, not when he was a sergeant, a cobbler’s son, talking to an officer with a fancy pedigree. He did add, “What do you want to bet, though, that King Swemmel’s men fight at every crossroads?”

“If it were going to be easy, we would already have done it,” Tivadar answered. He pointed ahead, then to the map again, and nodded in satisfaction. “See? There’s the highway we’ve been following.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan repeated. The alleged highway wouldn’t have been much of a road even in the Gyongyosian valley where he’d just spent his leave. It was narrow, twisting, altogether unpaved, and at the moment muddy. It disappeared among the trees as if it had no intention of ever coming out the other side--if the forest had another side.

“Onward, then,” Tivadar said. “This is splendid timber, some of the finest in the world. If we can find ley lines to take it away, it’ll make Gyongyos rich.”

If there were any ley lines in this stars-forsaken country, the Unkerlanters would have cut down the forest and hauled it away themselves. So Istvan thought, at any rate. Since they hadn’t, ley lines were likely to be few and far between--or perhaps they really were just undiscovered out here on the edge of nowhere. But Tivadar had his orders, and had given Istvan his.

Istvan turned to his squad. “Forward!” he called. “Into the woods. We’re going to take them away from the accursed Unkerlanters.”

“Aye,” the troopers chorused. They were warriors, of a proud warrior race. They would obey. Even bespectacled Corporal Kun, lean and knowing and gratingly sophisticated, said, “Aye,” with the rest as they advanced on the forest.

Szonyi said, “I wonder if they’ve got egg-tossers in there, waiting for us to get right up to the edge of the trees before they let us have it.” He sighed. “Only way to find out is the hard way.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Istvan said, more in resignation than anything else. “Well, they haven’t killed us yet, so we’re still ahead of the game.” As other sergeants and officers were doing, he raised his voice: “Come on, you miserable lugs, get moving. Somewhere in there, we’ve got Unkerlanters to flush out.”

He and his men tramped across the meadow that led to the forest. The grass was a brilliant green, far brighter than the nearly black needles on the trees ahead. Yellow ox-eye gentian and red clover brightened the meadow more. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower. Some sort of ground squirrel, not long out of its burrow after a long winter’s nap, stood up on its hind legs and chattered indignantly at the soldiers marching past.

And then, off to Istvan’s left, the ground erupted in a roar. A trooper shrieked, but not for long. Istvan stared up at the sky. No dragons wheeled there, only a rusty-red jay like the ones he might have seen at home. And no more eggs were flying through the air to land on the advancing Gyongyosians.

Someone else shouted out what flashed through his mind: “Have a care, all! The stinking sons of goats have buried eggs under the meadow. Tromp on one and you’ll never tromp on anything else.”

All at once, Istvan wanted to walk above the grass. His bowels knotted with every step he took. Kun spat and said, “I wonder how much fun we’ll have going down the highway that’s supposed to run through the forest.”

Istvan didn’t like thinking about that, either. “Have we got any mages who can sniff out buried eggs for us?” He asked the question in a loud, hopeful voice. Nobody responded to it. Istvan rounded on Kun. “What about you? You were a mage’s apprentice, after all.”

Kun bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. “If I could, do you think I’d be stomping along like everybody else?”

“No law against hoping, is there?” Istvan said.

“No, and there’s no law against stupidity, either, though there cursed well ought to be,” Kun retorted. That was insubordinate, but Istvan let it slide. He knew why Kun was unhappy. He was unhappy for the same reason himself.

Another egg burst, this one half a mile over to the right. Istvan couldn’t hear whether the luckless Gyongyosian who’d trodden on it shrieked or not. He ground his teeth and kept going. Half a minute later, yet another burst shattered the morning calm. A magpie screeched annoyance at having its hunt for worms and crickets and maybe mice disturbed.

Higher and higher, the trees loomed ahead. But for the roadway that led into the forest, no one had ever taken an axe to it. Gyongyos had few woods like this, and none so vast. People were scattered thinly over this part of the world; it looked, Istvan judged, much as it had when the stars first shone down on it.

“Kun, walk point,” he called as his squad went into the forest a little to the north of the road. “Szonyi, on the right. Fenyes, on the left. I’ll take rear guard for a while. Keep your eyes open, everyone. Somewhere in there, the filthy goat-buggers are waiting for us.”

The world changed when he went in among the trees. The sun disappeared, except for occasional dapplings sneaking through the thick branches overhead. The air got cooler and damper; spicy, resinous scents filled it. Istvan’s boots scuffed on red-brown fallen needles. Here and there, especially at the bases of tree trunks, lacy green ferns sprang up.

On the meadow, Istvan had been able to see for miles. Here, the trees cramped his vision, and not just from side to side. When he looked up, those dark boughs hid the sky. He shook his head. He didn’t like that.

“No stars tonight,” he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.

But one of his troopers heard, and answered, “They’ll see us, Sergeant, even if we can’t see them.”

“Aye,” Istvan answered, but he remained unreassured. He kept looking up. Every once in a while, he managed to spy a sliver of blue. When he did, he felt he’d won a victory.

A red squirrel holding a fir cone in its front paws peered down at him with beady black eyes and chittered in annoyance, as its cousin had out on the meadow. He raised a hand. The squirrel ducked back, putting the bulk of the branch--which was as thick as a man’s leg--between itself and what looked like danger.

Seeing it put a new thought in his mind. “Keep watching overhead,” he called to his men. “If the Unkerlanters haven’t put some snipers in the trees, I’m an even bigger fool than you think I am.”

Up ahead, Kun said something. Istvan thought he heard the word impossible, but he wasn’t sure. He decided not to find out.

Heading east and not getting turned around in this dim, shadowless world kept the whole squad--and probably the whole army--busy. Kun’s sorcerous training, though scanty, did come in hand there. From somewhere or other, he’d got a chunk of lodestone. He tied it on the end of a string and chanted over it. It swung in a particular direction. “That’s south,” he said confidently, and made half a turn to his left. “So this is east.” He pointed.

“How does the lodestone know where south lies?” Istvan asked.

“Curse me if I can tell you,” the former sorcerer’s apprentice said. “But I know that it does, which is what we need.”

“What we need is to bump up against the Unkerlanters, so we can knock ‘em out of the way,” Istvan said. “All this waiting is making my belly gripe.”

“It’ll loosen up when the fighting starts, that’s certain,” Szonyi said. “If you’re anything like me, you’ll thank the stars that you don’t foul yourself.”

That was no way for a member of a warrior race to talk, but Istvan just chuckled and nodded. Maybe some heroes didn’t think about what might happen to them when they went into action, but he did. He couldn’t help it.

Twilight under the trees was darkening toward real twilight when he and his countrymen ran into the first positions the Unkerlanters had built to block their path. “Down!” Kun shouted, and everyone in the squad threw himself flat. A beam zipped past above Istvan’s head. Whether it would have caught him had he not gone down, he didn’t know. It struck a tree trunk behind him and blazed through the bark deep into the wood. Aromatic steam gushed from the wounded pine.

Istvan scuttled over behind another tree. Ever so warily, he glanced around it. He saw nothing but more trees ahead. “Where are they?” he called softly.

“Up ahead somewhere,” Kun answered, which was doubtless true but imperfectly helpful. Sounding exasperated, the point man went on, “They’re Unkerlanters, curse it. They’re good at hiding to begin with, and they’ve had plenty of time to get ready for us.”

Shouts and curses and screams rang out all through the forest, as the Gyongyosian army ran into the concealed Unkerlanter defenders. The Unkerlanters had egg-tossers hidden among the trees along with their soldiers and started using them as soon as their foes collided with them.

And King Swemmel’s men had left forces in the woods who’d waited and stayed hidden while the Gyongyosians went past, then attacked from the rear after Istvan and his comrades bumped into the main defensive line. Istvan found out about that when one of them blazed at him from behind. He’d thought he had good cover, but suddenly a charred hole appeared in the tree in back of which he was hiding and only bare inches from his head.

He whirled and threw himself down on his belly. Where had the beam come from? Shouts of “Swemmel!” echoed through the darkening woods. For a moment, panic filled him. Was the whole Gyongyosian force surrounded and about to be cut to pieces? If it was, the Unkerlanters would have to go through a lot of stubborn men like him. Maybe there was something to springing from a warrior race after all.

Was that a rock-gray tunic? Istvan blazed. An Unkerlanter groaned and tumbled out from behind the trunk of a spruce. Istvan yanked a folding shovel off his own belt and began digging a hole in the soft dirt. He’d named himself rear guard for the squad. That meant he was the one who had to be first defender against threats from behind.

He smelled smoke. No matter how moist the forest was, all the blazes and bursting eggs had set it afire. He dug harder than ever, but wondered even as dirt flew whether he was doing anything more than digging his own grave. He also wondered whether anyone, Unkerlanter or Gyongyosian, would come out of the forest alive.

As Krasta came downstairs from her bedchamber, Colonel Lurcanio was pacing back and forth in the hall at the bottom of the stairway. His green eyes sparked as he glared up at her. “What took you so long, milady?” he growled. But then, however unwillingly, he bowed over her hand and kissed it. “You do look very lovely tonight, I must say, which almost makes the delay worthwhile.”

Had he left off the almost, Krasta would have known she’d created just the effect she wanted. Lurcanio was difficult--sometimes impossible--to manage. But she didn’t wish she’d got Captain Mosco instead, not anymore. Off in the trackless wilds of Unkerlant. . . She didn’t want to think about that.

“I’m sure your driver will be able to get us to the reception in good time,” she said. “He doesn’t dawdle over everything, the way mine does.”

“He is an Algarvian, and he is a soldier,” Lurcanio said. The angry rumble had left his voice; Krasta decided he’d put it there to see if he could make her afraid. This time, it hadn’t worked. And he didn’t push it, either, as he sometimes did. He slipped his arm around her waist. “Let us be off, then.”

His driver was indeed an Algarvian and a soldier. The fellow proved that by leering at Krasta as Lurcanio handed her up into the carriage. He was tall and young and handsome, but surely had no breeding at all. Krasta did not believe in rutting with her social inferiors.

Lurcanio spoke to the driver in their own language. The driver nodded, flicked the reins, and got the horses going. Despite what Krasta had said about him, he didn’t drive very fast, not when all the streets of Priekule were lit only by a sinking crescent moon. Lagoan dragons didn’t fly up to the capital of occupied Valmiera very often, but the Algarvians made things as hard as they could for tliem on principle.

Taking advantage of the darkness, Lurcanio set a hand on Krasta’s leg just above the knee and slowly slid it higher and higher along her thigh. “You’re in a bold mood tonight,” she said, amused.

“I am in a happy mood tonight,” Colonel Lurcanio declared, and moved his hand higher still. “And do you know why I’m in a happy mood tonight?”

“I can think of a reason,” Krasta said archly, setting her hand on his.

He chuckled. “Oh, that, too, my dear,” he said, “but I can get that anytime I want.”

Her back stiffened. “Not from me, you can’t. Not if you talk that way.”

“If not from you, then from someone else. Finding it isn’t hard, not in a conquered kingdom.” Lurcanio sounded annoyingly smug. The trouble was, Krasta knew he was right--and if she threw him out of her bed in a fit of pique, she would be left without an Algarvian protector. When she didn’t rise to his bait, Lurcanio went on, “No, the chief reason I am happy tonight is that we have smashed the attack the Unkerlanters made on our positions south of Aspang.”

“Good,” Krasta said, though she couldn’t have found the city on a map to save herself from the headsman’s axe.

“Oh, aye, it is,” Lurcanio replied. “Swemmel’s men spent most of the winter smashing us, which is the main reason Captain Mosco’s bastard will likely never see his--or even her--father. Had they kept on smashing us now that spring has come, it would have been a great deal less than amusing.”

“They’re only Unkerlanters, after all,” Krasta said.

Lurcanio nodded. “Even so. And they are once more proving they are only Unkerlanters, if you take my meaning.”

Krasta didn’t, not altogether. She didn’t trouble herself to go looking for it, either. Instead, she craned her neck for a better look at the skyline. “It still seems wrong not to have the Column of Victory standing tall and white and pretty there.”

“It wouldn’t be lit up now, not in wartime.” Lurcanio could be annoyingly precise. “Maybe one day King Mezentio will build a new and grander column in its place: an Algarvian Column of Victory, to last for all time, not just a paltry double handful of centuries.”

“In Priekule? That would be--” For once, Krasta remembered in the nick of time who and what her companion was, and swallowed a remark that would have got her in trouble with Lurcanio.

A few minutes later, the carriage pulled up in front of the mansion that belonged to Sefanu, the Duke of Klaipeda’s nephew. The duke had commanded Valmiera’s beaten army in the war against Algarve. He’d since retired to his country estates. His nephew was quite happy playing host to the occupiers.

As usual at these affairs, Algarvian and Valmieran men were present in about equal numbers. All the women, though, were blondes, and all young and pretty: Krasta wasted no time before looking over the potential competition. Some of the Valmieran women were nobles like her, some commoners she’d seen at other functions, and some new faces. Her lip curled. The Algarvians could pick and choose and discard as they pleased, and they did.

Some of the new faces topped painfully thin bodies. Several of that type congregated at the buffet, exclaiming over meats and cheeses the likes of which they hadn’t seen for a long time. No noblewoman would have stuffed herself as they did. But their Algarvian escorts stood around watching with amused smiles. Probably brought them here just to fatten them up, Krasta thought spitefully.

Rather more Valmieran noblewomen than commoners wore Algarvian-style kilts. Krasta scowled when she noticed that. Some of the Valmieran men had taken to wearing the Algarvian style, too. Krasta liked that no better.

Sure enough, here came Viscount Valnu, in a kilt so short, he would have had trouble staying modest if he bent over. His bonily handsome face wore a dazzling smile. “Hello, darling!” he said, fluttering his fingers at Krasta. He hugged her and kissed her on the cheek, then hugged Lurcanio and kissed him on the cheek, too. “Hello, my lord Count! And how are you?”

“Well enough, thanks,” Lurcanio said, and kept his distance from Valnu from then on. Algarvian men were more apt to kiss than Valmierans, but they didn’t usually do it quite like that--though Krasta recalled seeing Valnu at one party with an Algarvian officer who was definitely like that.

Valnu, to her certain knowledge, wasn’t, or wasn’t altogether. “What have you been doing lately?” she asked him, more than a hint of malice in her voice.

“Why, whatever I can, of course,” he answered. “Come with me, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He turned to Lurcanio. “I wouldn’t steal your lady without your leave, my lord Count. That were rude indeed.”

“It’s all right,” Lurcanio said indulgently. By his tone, he thought he was safe enough entrusting Krasta to this creature of no obvious gender.

Krasta knew better, and the thought of being unfaithful to her redheaded lover suddenly looked delightful, not so much for Valnu’s sake as to put one over on Lurcanio. She took hold of Valnu’s arm. “Aye,” she gushed, “tell me everything”

Valnu’s smile grew brighter yet. “Oh, I will,” he said, and led her off through the crowd. Behind her, Lurcanio laughed. Krasta was laughing, too, but inside, where it didn’t show. You don’t know as much as you think you do.

She steered Valnu over to the bar so she could collect a mug of ale, then let him steer her out of the mansion and onto the street. “You do need to know that I came here with Lurcanio’s driver, not my own,” she murmured.

“Oh, I do, do I?” Valnu said. “And why is that?”

“Because you can’t have this fellow drive along some quiet road while we do whatever we want in the carriage,” Krasta answered. “He’d blab to Lurcanio, sure as sure.”

“While we do whatever we want?” Valnu laughed softly. “The last time we tried that, you shoved me out of the carriage and left me to walk home alone in the dark. I don’t know about you, my dear marchioness, but that isn’t what I had in mind when we started on the ride.”

Krasta shrugged impatiently. “You deserved it, for picking just the wrong time to start chattering about shopgirls.”

“I won’t say a word about them now, I promise you.” Valnu slid his arm around her. “Stroll with me. We can look up at the stars together, or do anything else we happen to think of.”

There were more stars to look at than there had been when Priekule was at peace. With the city dark, they shone in great, glittering profusion: multicolored jewels scattered across black velvet. After one brief glance, Krasta forgot about them. She hadn’t come out with Valnu to stargaze. She’d come out to enjoy revenge on an Algarvian keeper who took her for granted.

But Valnu really did feel like strolling, or so it seemed. Fuming a little, Krasta went along for a block or so. Then she got mulish. Planting her feet firmly on the slates of the pavement, she took hold of Valnu and said, “If you brought me out here to trifle, what are you waiting for?”

“To get a little farther away,” Valnu answered, which made no sense to her. “But this will do well enough.” He gathered her in. She kissed him more fiercely than she’d ever kissed Lurcanio. The Algarvian was a skilled and pleasing lover, but he also held the whip hand, and Krasta knew it. Not here, not now.

Valnu was nuzzling her neck and nibbling her ear when a thunderous roar behind her knocked both of them off their feet. The first thing Krasta noticed was that she’d torn a knee out of her velvet trousers. Only after cursing at that did she proclaim, “Powers above! What happened?”

“If I had to guess, I would say an egg burst in Sefanu’s mansion,” Valnu answered. He rose and, with startling strength, hauled her to her feet. “Come on.”

Because he sounded sure of himself and acted as if he knew what he was doing, Krasta followed him back toward the mansion. His guess had been right on target, and so, she saw, had the egg. The mansion’s second and third stories had fallen in on themselves, and fire was beginning to spread in the ruins.

Shrieks from injured and trapped people inside made the night hideous. A few men and women, disheveled and bleeding, pulled themselves free of the rubble and came staggering away. Krasta yanked at an arm sticking out from under a pile of bricks. It came away, with no body attached to it. She dropped it with a horrified cry. Her stomach lurched, as if aboard a diving dragon.

“Lurcanio,” she muttered. It hadn’t been his arm--it had belonged to a woman. But what chance had he had to get away?

And then, from behind her, he said, “I am here.” He’d lost his hat. He had a cut over one eye, and another on his forearm. He also had most of his aplomb. Bowing, he said, “Good to see you intact, milady. Your pretty popinjay picked just the right time to entertain you there.”

“Aye,” Krasta said, and realized for the first time that she might easily have been inside the mansion when the egg burst. Her stomach lurched again. “Curse the Lagoan dragons!” she exclaimed.

“Dragons?” Lurcanio shook his head. “No dragons tonight. That egg didn’t drop, milady--it was smuggled in and left to burst. Plenty of ways to arrange such a thing. And when we find out who did it, we’ll arrange his guts as pretty as you please. Oh, he’ll take a long time to die.” He sounded as if he looked forward to seeing that. In some ways, Algarvians remained barbaric after all. No matter how fine and mild the night was, Krasta shivered.

Vanai laid her hand on Ealstan’s forehead. He was burning hot, as he had been an hour before, as he had been a day before, as he had been ever since he came down sick three days before. He thrashed and muttered and stared up at her from the bed. “Conberge,” he muttered.

Biting her lip, Vanai soaked a washrag in a bowl of cold water, wrung it out till it was nearly dry, and put it on his forehead. If he thought she was his sister, he was in a bad way indeed. No one in his right mind could have mistaken her for a swarthy, solidly made Forthwegian woman.

“What am I going to do?” she exclaimed. She’d managed to get occasional sips of water and broth down Ealstan, but that wasn’t nearly enough, and she knew it. And he needed something more than a cold compress to fight the fever, too. She turned the compress over. Already, the heat that came off him had gone a long way toward drying the side that had touched his skin.

He needs a physician, she thought, or at least real medicine. She’d been thinking that for most of the past day, ever since it had become clear that the fever wasn’t going to leave anytime soon. He would have gone out for her. She knew that. But he didn’t face capture and worse if he stuck his nose outside the door to the flat.

“Chilly,” he said in conversational tones, and started to shake. He wasn’t chilly; he was as far in the world as he could be from chilly. But he thought he was freezing. His teeth started to chatter. Vanai piled blankets on him, but he kept shivering underneath them. He’d done that before, too. It never failed to appall Vanai.

With a grimace, she made up her mind. Ealstan had to have more help than she could give here with what little they had in the flat to fight fever. Taking care to speak Forthwegian so he wouldn’t fret, Vanai said, “I’m going out now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She did her best to sound as if everything were perfectly normal, as if she could go out anytime she chose, as if nothing could possibly happen to her when she went out into Eoforwic.

Maybe she even succeeded, for Ealstan said, “All right, Mother. Be careful out in the blizzard.” Because he thought he was cold, he thought the rest of the world had to be cold, too.

“I will,” Vanai promised. She took all the money she could find in the flat--a good deal more than she’d thought she and Ealstan had. Algarvians were famous for being bribable. She’d bribed Major Spinello with her body. Next to that, she didn’t worry about silver.

Stepping out into the hall, seeing walls that weren’t the walls of her flat, felt very strange. She wished she’d changed into the long tunic Ealstan had got for her, but it wouldn’t disguise what she was, not on a fine, bright spring day. She hurried downstairs and out of the block of flats.

Street noise hit her like a blow. Eoforwic dwarfed Oyngestun; she’d forgotten how big and brawling the capital was. She’d seen it briefly when she and Ealstan first came here from the east. Since then, she’d stayed high up, looking out through window glass at the world but taking no part in it.

Seeing strange faces up close felt wrong, unnatural. And people stared at her, too. A Forthwegian with a face like a big-nosed ferret grabbed her by the arm. Even as she twisted away, he demanded, “Lady, are you out of your skull? You want the redheads to nab you?”

She needed a moment to notice that the question had come in Kaunian, a slangy dialect far removed from what she’d heard and used back in Oyngestun-- the kind of Kaunian pickpockets and thieves would speak. This fellow had probably learned it from blond pickpockets and thieves.

“I need an apothecary,” she said in Forthwegian--no use drawing attention to herself by ear as well as eye. “My . . . brother’s sick.”

“Uh-huh.” The ferret-faced Forthwegian didn’t believe that. After a moment, she understood why: a brother would have been as conspicuous as she was. That meant this fellow knew she had a Forthwegian lover. But he was saying, “Two blocks over, a block and a half up, and he won’t ask no questions. Just stay invisible between here and there.”

“My thanks,” Vanai said. But the Forthwegian had gone on his way as if she really were invisible.

Few of the other dark, blocky men and women on the streets seemed to notice she was there, either. In Eoforwic, she remembered, Forthwegians and Kaunians had rioted together against the Algarvian occupiers when they learned what happened to the Kaunians the redheads sent west. It hadn’t been like that in Oyngestun. It hadn’t been like that most places in Forthweg. Had it been, the Algarvians would have had a harder time doing what they did.

“What do you need?” a gray-bearded Forthwegian asked her. He was grinding some powder or another with a brass mortar and pestle. As the fellow who’d recommended his place had said, he didn’t seem to care that she was a Kaunian.

“A fever-fighter,” she answered, and described Ealstan’s symptoms without saying who or what he might be in relation to her.

“Ah.” The apothecary nodded. “There’s a deal of that going around, so there is. I’ll mix you up some willow bark and poppy juice, aye, and a bit of hairy marshwort, too. It’s got an ugly name, but it’s full of virtue.” He reached for bottles full of bark and a dark liquid and dried leaves, then mixed them together after grinding all the solids to powder. After that, he poured in something clear and sparkling. “Just a bit of grain spirits--for flavor, you might say.”

“Whatever you think best.” Vanai trusted him at sight. He knew what he knew, and was good at what he did. Had an Algarvian or a naked black Zuwayzi told him of the same symptoms, he would have made the identical medicine. She was sure of that.

“Here you are,” he said when he was done. “That’ll be three in silver.” Vanai nodded and paid; she thought Tamulis, back in Oyngestun where things were cheaper, would have charged her more. As she turned to go, the apothecary showed the first sign of knowing what she was: he called after her, “Get home safe, girl. Get home and stay there.”

She looked back over her shoulder. “That’s what I intend to do. Thank you.” He didn’t answer. He just went back to the medicine he’d been compounding when she came into the shop.

She clung close to the walls of shops as she scurried back toward her block of flats, as if she were a mouse scurrying along a baseboard to its hole. Again, most Forthwegians she saw pretended not to see her. She did hear one shout of, “Dirty Kaunian!” but even the woman who yelled made no move to do anything about it.

Powers above be praised, she thought as she reached the last corner she had to turn before reaching her building. I got away with it. She turned the corner . . . and almost walked into a pair of Algarvian constables who were about to turn onto the street she was leaving.

Had Vanai seen them half a block away, she could easily have escaped; they were both pudgy and middle-aged. But one of them reached out and grabbed her even as she was letting out a startled squeak. “Well, well, what are we having here?” he said in fairly fluent Forthwegian.

“Let me go!” Vanai exclaimed. She kicked at him, but he was nimble enough despite his bulk; her shoe didn’t strike his stockinged shin. Then she thought to use guile instead of force. “I’ll pay you if you let me go.” She reached down and made the silver in her pocket jingle.

The constable who didn’t have hold of her leered. “How you paying us, eh?” His Forthwegian was worse than his partner’s, but Vanai had no trouble understanding what he wanted from her.

Most of the horror that gripped her was horror at not feeling more horror. If that was what it took to get rid of the Algarvians, why not? Major Spinello had inflicted himself on her for months. After that, what were a few minutes with a couple of strangers? She should have been appalled at thinking that way. Part of her was, but only a small part. Spinello had burned away the rest of her sense of. . . shame?

In quick, almost musical trills, the Algarvians talked back and forth. One of them pointed to the dark mouth of an alleyway across the street from where they stood. If they took her back there, they could do what they wanted with her and no one would be the wiser unless she screamed. “Let’s be going,” said the one who had hold of her, and he gave her a shove in that direction.

She would have seized a chance to escape, but they offered her none. Now I have to hope they’ll let me go after. . . this, she thought, grinding her teeth. Relying on the honor of men all too liable not to have any made her legs light and shaky with fear.

And then a Forthwegian loomed in front of the constables. “Turn her loose,” he rumbled. “She ain’t done nothing.”

“Aye, that’s right,” a woman said from behind her.

“She is being a Kaunian,” the constable answered, as if that explained everything. Most places in Forthweg, it would have.

Not here. “Aye, she’s a Kaunian, and you’re a son of a whore,” said the burly man blocking the constables’ path. A crowd started to gather. The Forthwegian repeated, “Turn her loose, curse you.”

Had he shouted for Vanai’s blood, he might well have got that. As things were, everybody in the growing crowd shouted for the constables to let her go. The two Algarvians looked at each other. They were time-servers, not heroes. The bold, the young, the brave, were off doing real fighting. These fellows couldn’t hope to blaze everybody who was yelling at them. They would get mobbed, and a riot would start.

The one who had hold of Vanai’s arm held out his other hand. “Ten silvers’ fine, for being on street without permitting,” he declared.

Vanai gave him the coins without hesitation. The other constable stuck out his hand, whereupon the first one split the money with him. They both beamed. Why not? They’d made a profit, even if she hadn’t gone into the alley and done lewd things for them.

With a pat on the head as if she’d been a dog, the first constable let her go. “Run along home,” he told her.

She didn’t wait to let him change his mind--or for the crowd to disperse, which might have tempted him to do just that. And the crowd helped in another way, for it kept the Algarvians from seeing which building she entered. “Safe,” she breathed as she got inside. She hurried up the stairs to give Ealstan the medicine. She clutched the jar tightly. It had ended up being expensive, but oh!--how much more it might have cost.

Waddo came limping up to Garivald as the peasant tramped in from the fields with a hoe on his shoulder as if it were a stick. The firstman grabbed Garivald by the elbow and pulled him aside. “It’s gone,” he said hoarsely, his eyes wide with fear.

“What’s gone?” Garivald asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

“Why, the crystal, of course,” Waddo answered, proving him right. “It’s gone, and powers above only know who’s got it or what he’s going to do with it.” He stared at Garivald. “ You haven’t got it, have you? We were going to take it out of the ground together, the two of us.”

“No, I haven’t got it,” Garivald said. Waddo hadn’t asked him if he’d dug it up. Had the firstman asked him that, he would have denied it, too, not caring at all whether he lied. The less Waddo knew, the less anyone--particularly anyone Algarvian--could wring out of him.

At the moment, Waddo seemed not far from panic. “Someone has it!” he said. “Aye, someone has it. Someone who’ll use it against me. He’ll tell the redheads, and they’ll hang me. They’re bound to hang me.”

He wasn’t a brave man. Garivald had known that since before he’d started to shave. The firstman had enjoyed his petty authority in Zossen while he had it. Now that he had it no more, he lived in constant fear lest the Algarvians make him pay for everything he’d done while the village was under King Swemmel’s rule.

“Try not to worry,” Garivald said, though he might as well have told the sun not to rise tomorrow. He thought about letting Waddo know the Unkerlanter irregulars who roamed the woods had the crystal--thought about it and put it out of his mind. The less Waddo knew, the better, sure enough.

“Don’t tell me that! How can you tell me that?” the firstman said. Garivald only shrugged; no answer he gave the firstman would satisfy him. Wide-eyed, Waddo stumped away, digging the end of his stick into the ground at every stride.

“What’s chewing on him?” Garivald’s friend Dagulf asked.

“Powers above only know,” Garivald answered. “You know how Waddo gets sometimes. It never means anything.”

“I haven’t seen him that heated up since the Algarvians came into Zossen,” Dagulf said, rubbing the scar on his cheek. “And he thought they were going to boil him for soup then.”

“They’d have to skim a lot of fat off before they could eat it if they did,” Garivald said, which made Dagulf laugh. It also made the other peasant stop asking questions, which was what Garivald had had in mind.

As the peasants and their wives were going out to work the next morning, the Algarvian sergeant in charge of the little occupying force started beating on the lid of a pot with a hammer to summon them to the village square. He read a proclamation from a sheet of paper, which meant his Unkerlanter was grammatically accurate even if badly pronounced: “His Majesty, King Raniero of Grelz, announces that, with the help of his brave allies from Algarve, the wicked invasion of his domain by the forces of Swemmel the usurper has been beaten back, crushed, and utterly quashed. Now let us all give three hearty cheers to thank the powers above for this grand and glorious victory, the harbinger of many more.”

Along with the rest of the villagers, Garivald dutifully cheered. He’d learned from experience that, if the cheers weren’t hearty enough to suit the redheads, they’d keep the peasants there till the shouts suited them. He had work to do. Cheering loudly from the start let him go do it. He didn’t have time to waste standing around.

He wondered how much truth the proclamation held. The Algarvians had been in the habit of announcing victories even in the middle of winter, when the irregulars made it clear Mezentio’s men were getting pounded. But Algarvian soldiers had come forward through Zossen in the past few days, which likely meant things weren’t going so well for Unkerlant.

Another squad of Algarvians, these men mounted on unicorns, rode into the village while he was out weeding. Garivald paid them no particular attention, even when they didn’t go west right away. He’d grown too used to the redheads to worry about any one lot of them very much. A year before, he’d never so much as seen an Algarvian. He heartily wished he’d never see any more of them, either, but that wasn’t the sort of wish likely to be granted right away.

When sunset came, he shouldered his hoe and trudged back toward Zossen, as he did every evening. Again, he noticed the Algarvians standing at the edge of the village without paying them any special heed. It was Dagulf who remarked, “Looks like that cursed long-winded bugger of a sergeant is pointing at you.”

“Huh?” Garivald looked up in surprise. Sure enough the redhead who’d delivered the proclamation did have his index finger aimed his way. When he saw Garivald had noticed him, he beckoned.

“What’s he want with you?” Dagulf asked.

“Curse me if I know.” Garivald shrugged and sighed. “Guess I’d better go find out, though.” He turned away from the shortest path toward his home and walked over to the sergeant, who stood with some of the newcomers to the village.

“You being Garivald, is not being so?” the sergeant said. His Unkerlanter was much worse when he had to try to speak it without a script.

“Aye, I’m Garivald,” Garivald answered. The question, plainly, was for the record; the sergeant knew who he was.

All the Algarvians who’d come into Zossen that day aimed their sticks at him. “By order of King Raniero and King Mezentio, you are under arrest,” one of them said. His Unkerlanter was much better than the sergeant’s. Even so, Garivald had trouble following what the fellow said through the roaring in his ears: “You are to be taken to Herborn for trial, the charge being treason through subversive songs. After the trial, you are to be executed in accordance to the law. Any resistance and you shall be blazed without trial. Now come along.”

Numbly, Garivald came. Later, he thought he should have laid about him with the hoe and with luck have slain a couple of the redheads before they did blaze him down. At the moment, stunned by the catastrophe that had overfallen him, he let them take away the hoe, let them tie his hands behind his back, and let them lead him to their unicorns.

With his hands tied, he couldn’t mount one of the beasts by himself. A couple of Algarvians helped him get aboard. He’d never ridden a unicorn before. He would just as soon not have started riding one in this particular way. But he had no choice; he’d lost any possibility of choice once the hoe was gone. The Algarvians tied his feet together under the unicorn’s barrel.

“What happens if I fall out of the saddle?” he asked.

“You get dragged to death or trampled to death,” answered the Algarvian who’d announced his arrest. “We don’t care. We can deliver your body. If you want to keep breathing a little longer, don’t fall.”

They wasted no time. Unkerlanters, at King Swemmel’s urging, talked about efficiency. The redheads personified it. They--and Garivald--rode out of Zossen before Annore could burst shrieking from the house she’d shared so long with her husband.

Even after darkness fell, they kept on heading east, back toward the capital of Grelz. Garivald had heard the irregulars boasting of what they did to small bands of Algarvians they caught away from help. He’d believed those boasts. Tonight, he discovered that, like so many, they were nothing but wind.

The Algarvians treated him like a domestic animal, without either kindness or cruelty beyond what they needed to make sure he didn’t escape. When he asked them to stop so he could ease himself, they did. Toward midnight, they rode into another village. They fed him then, from their own rations--spicier than what he was used to eating, but no worse--and gave him wine to drink. They let him sleep in a hut, but posted guards around it. He was too worn even to think about escape for more than a moment.

Not long after sunset, they--and, perforce, he--started off again. Had he been less weary and saddlesore and frightened, he might have marveled at the endurance of the unicorn he rode. That, though, wasn’t what struck him. By midafternoon, he was farther from his home than he’d ever been in his life.

“Will you sing us one of your songs to pass the time?” asked the Algarvian who spoke Unkerlanter.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Garivald said stolidly. “I don’t know anything about making songs.”

To his surprise, the Algarvian nodded. “Aye, I’d say the same in your boots,” he agreed. “But it won’t do you any good, not once we get you to Herborn. They’ll blaze you or hang you or boil you no matter what you tell them.”

“Boil me . . .” Garivald didn’t want to say that aloud, but couldn’t help it. Everybody knew what had happened to Kyot at the end of the Twinkings War. To think of that happening to him . . .

On they rode, past meadows and woods and fields under cultivation and fields going to weeds, past villages that looked achingly like Zossen and past villages that were nothing but charred ruins. Garivald had heard about what the war had done, but he’d never really seen it, not till now. Words started to shape themselves inside his mind. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Whatever songs he made now, he’d never have the chance to sing them.

No village was near when evening came. Confident as if in the middle of their own kingdom, the Algarvians encamped at the top of a low hill. They had three men up and watching all through the night: watching Garivald, watching their unicorns, watching for any trouble that might come their way. Garivald had kept hoping irregulars might use the cover of darkness to attack them, but none did.

“Herborn in a couple of days,” the redhead who spoke Unkerlanter said to him the next morning. “Then your trial, then the end.” He wasn’t gloating. He was as matter-of-fact as if talking about the weather. That made him more frightening to the peasant, not less.

On went the unicorns, taking Garivald on toward the big city he’d never seen and would not see for long. Late that afternoon, the road went through a wood of mixed beeches and birches and pines. The Algarvians chattered back and forth in their own language and kept looking this way and that--they didn’t like riding along so close to the trees that they could reach out and touch them.

And they had reason to mislike it. When the ambush hit, it hit hard and fast. A barricade of logs and brush blocked the road. Mezentio’s men had barely reined in before Unkerlanters started blazing at them from behind trees and bushes. Algarvians tumbled out of the saddle one after another. One of the redheads lifted his stick to blaze Garivald but crumpled, clutching at himself, before he could loose his beam.

Some of the unicorns fell, too, shrieking shrilly from the pain they couldn’t understand. Garivald could only stay where he was. If anyone blazed his unicorn, it would crush him when it went down.

Before long, the irregulars came out of the woods to finish ofFthe two or three Algarvians still groaning. One of them strode up to Garivald. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Why did the whoresons grab you?”

“To kill me, that’s why,” Garivald answered. “I’m Garivald the songmaker.”

He wondered if the fellow had heard of him. When the irregular’s eyes widened, Garivald knew he had. “Garivald the songmaker, in my band?” he exclaimed. “I will gain fame for that.” He thumped his chest, then drew a knife. “I, Munderic, set you free. You are one of my men now.” Far from home, suddenly saved from certain death, Garivald nodded eagerly. He was a peasant no more, nor a captive, either. As Munderic’s knife bit through his bonds, he gladly became an irregular.