Darkness Descending

Two

After so long on the island of Obuda, the Ilszang Mountains, the borderland between Gyongyos on the one hand and Unkerlant on the other, seemed almost like home to Istvan. As a matter of fact, the valley where he’d been born and raised lay only a couple of hundred miles northwest of the hillside path along which he marched now. He scratched at his long, thick, tawny beard. Stars above! He could even think about going home on leave, something unimaginable out in the middle of the vast Bothnian Ocean.

“Come on, you mangy sons of goats,” he called to the men in his squad. “The stars have never once looked down on such a pack of lazy wastrels as you.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant,” Szonyi said. “Back on Obuda, you were a common soldier yourself, you know.”

Istvan raised a hand to brush its back against the single white hashmark embroidered on his collar tab. Sure enough, on Obuda he’d hated Sergeant Jokai’s petty tyranny. He still wasn’t so harsh as Jokai had been, but now, with rank of his own bestowed on him for good service, he better understood why Jokai had acted as he did. “The boot was on the wrong foot then,” he answered. “It’s on the right one these days--so step lively.”

“I don’t know why you’re worrying, Sergeant.” That was scrawny, bespectacled Kun, still as argumentative, as fussily precise, as he had been back on the island. His wide wave almost knocked Istvan off the path and down the hillside. “I don’t think there are any Unkerlanters for miles around.”

“I’m worrying because worrying is my job,” Istvan told him. “And that’s why we’re moving forward so easy, too: because the lousy goat-eaters have their hands full way off in the east, I mean. Pick up your clumsy feet, like I told Szonyi. Let’s grab with both hands while we can.”

Not even the former mage’s apprentice had a good comeback for that. On he tramped, with Istvan, with the rest of the squad, with the rest of the company, with the rest of the regiment, with the baggage train of horses and mules. Istvan wished there were a ley line anywhere close by. But ley lines were few and far between in this stars-forsaken country, country so little traveled that wizards surely hadn’t yet mapped all the ones there were.

Szonyi grinned at Kun, and at the other troopers in the squad from the coastal lowlands or from the Balaton Islands off the coast. “Even if there aren’t any Unkerlanters around here, you’ve got to look sharp. Otherwise, a mountain ape’ll sneak down, tuck you under his arm, and walk off with you.”

Kun stared at him over the tops of his spectacles. “The only mountain ape I see in these parts is you.”

“Oh, you won’t see them, Kun,” Istvan said, nodding toward Szonyi. “No, you won’t see them. But sure as sure, they’ll see you.”

“Bah!” Kun kicked a pebble. “If they didn’t keep the cursed things in menageries, I wouldn’t even believe in them. And I’ll bet you anything you care to name that nine stories out of every ten the old grannies tell about ‘em are lies. I’m no superstitious fool, not me.” He puffed out his weedy chest and looked wise, or at least supercilious.

“Have it your way,” Istvan answered with a shrug. “One thing the grannies say is that whoever calls someone else a fool names himself, too.”

With an angry grunt, Kun kicked another pebble down the steep hillside. Istvan ignored the little show of pique. His eyes were on the slopes above the path.

Somewhere up there, mountain apes were liable to be staring hungrily down at his companions and him. Years--centuries--had driven them up into the desolate heights and taught them wariness when it came to man. That did not mean they would not sneak down and raid, only that they picked their spots with care.

One of the lowlanders newly attached to the squad, a broad-shouldered fellow named Kanizsai, said, “I heard a savant claim once that mountain apes weren’t really apes at all, not like the apes in the jungles of Siaulia. What this chap said was, we ought to think of them as really stupid people instead.”

That notion kept the next couple of miles light and full of laughter. Everybody had his own candidate for who should be reckoned a mountain ape, starting with childhood rivals and ending up with King Swemmel and most of the population of Unkerlant.

“And what about us?” Szonyi added. “If we had any wits, would we be tramping through these miserable mountains just because somebody told us to?”

“Oh, now wait a bit,” Kanizsai said. “We’re warriors, by the stars. This is what we’re supposed to be doing.” The argument took off from there, like a dragon taking wing. Istvan and Kun sided with Szonyi. Most of the new men, men who hadn’t yet seen action, ranged themselves behind Kanizsai.

“You’ll find out,” Istvan said. “Aye, we’re warriors. That means we know how to fight and we’re not afraid to do it. Ask anybody who’s seen real war if he likes it, though, and you’ll hear some different stories.” Now Kun and Szonyi supported him.

“But there’s glory in crushing the foes of Gyongyos,” Kanizsai declared. “The stars shine brighter when we show ourselves to be true men.”

“Where’s the glory in huddling in a hole in the rain while the enemy tosses eggs at you?” Istvan returned. “Where’s the glory in sneaking up behind a Kuusaman who’s squatting in the bushes with his trousers around his ankles and cutting his throat so you can steal whatever food he’s carrying?”

Kanizsai looked revolted. Having been through the course that hardened recruits into warriors, Istvan knew it stressed ferocity. That was all very well--to a point. He wanted men at his side who would not give way in battle. But he did not want men at his side who would endanger themselves and him by rushing ahead when they ought to hold back.

Today, all that hardly mattered. The Unkerlanters offered no resistance to the advance. Maybe the war in the east did preoccupy them. Maybe they just didn’t care about losing this stretch of mountains. Had it belonged to Istvan, he wouldn’t have cared about losing it either.

When evening came, the squadron encamped on the flattest stretch of ground Istvan could find. It wasn’t a very flat stretch of ground, or very large, either. “We’ll keep two men on watch,” he ordered. “Three shifts through the night.” He named the sentries for each shift. One of the best things about being promoted to sergeant was that he didn’t have to take a turn on sentry-go himself. As he rolled himself in his blanket, he smiled at the thought of sleeping till morning.

Someone shook him. He came awake at once, as he’d learned to do on Obuda. Men who couldn’t rouse quickly and completely there often never roused at all. The dying embers of the campfire gave the only light. “What is it?” he asked, his voice a thin thread of whisper.

“Sergeant, someone’s coming,” Kun whispered back. “I can’t see anybody, but I know.”

“Your little piece of magecraft?” Istvan asked. Kun nodded, the motion next to invisible in the gloom. He’d used that trick he’d learned from his master before, back on Obuda. Istvan seized his stick and got to his feet in one smooth motion. “All right. You’d better show me.” The squad was his. This was the price he paid for not having to stand guard or do some of the other things common soldiers did.

“Follow me,” Kun said. Istvan did, as quietly as he could, up the side of the hill above the encampment to a boulder from behind which Kun could keep an eye on the slope than ran up higher still. When they got there, Kun mumbled to himself. He played what looked like a child’s finger game. After a moment, he raised his head and looked at Istvan. “He’s still out there, whoever he is. Coming closer, too, or the sorcery wouldn’t spot him.”

“Aye,” Istvan said. “An Unkerlanter spy, I’ll lay, maybe with a crystal, so he can let his friends know what he sees.” A brave man, he thought. No one but a brave man would dare come spying on his enemies when they were here in numbers and he alone, so very alone.

Istvan peered up the slope. He wished for a moon; the stars, however beautiful and potent they were, did not yield enough light to suit him. The pale stones seemed dark, the inky shadows impenetrable. King Swemmel’s men could have concealed not just a single spy but a battalion up there. But for Kun’s little sorcery, no one would have known till they attacked.

“Sergeant--” Kun began.

“Wait.” Istvan’s answer was an almost voiceless whisper, but it slapped the mage’s apprentice into silence. Istvan leaned forward, ever so slightly. One of those inky shadows had . . . moved? As if Istvan’s stick had a life of its own, it took aim at that shadow, which was now so still, he doubted whether he’d seen what he’d thought he saw.

He waited. Patience hard won on Obuda came in handy now. He tried not to hear his own soft breathing, or Kun’s. All of him was pointing toward that shadow, waiting for it to do something, to do anything. If he’d imagined the motion, the Unkerlanter could be sneaking up on him from another direction.

The shadow moved again. Istvan blazed. His finger found the blazing hole before he was consciously sure he’d seen the motion. The bright beam tore at his dark-adapted eyes.

From up the slope, a harsh cry rang out. Istvan dashed toward the place from which it had come. Kun pounded at his heels. Now the silent waiting game was over. He heard scrabbling among the rocks, and blazed again. Another cry rewarded him, this one, he was sure, of mortal agony.

“Have a care, Sergeant,” Kun panted. “He might be shamming.”

“If he is, you’ll avenge me,” Istvan answered. The cries had roused the other soldiers in the squad. He heard them coming up the hillside behind him. After glory, he thought. All he wanted was a dead Unkerlanter, or perhaps a live one from whom answers could be ripped by someone who spoke the easterners’ ugly language.

Kun pointed. “There!”

Istvan was already hurrying toward the form from which the stink of burnt meat rose. And then, all at once, he stopped short. “I’ll be a son of a goat,” he said softly. “You may not have much believed in mountain apes, Kun, but your mage-craft did, and took it for a man.”

“Is it dead?” Kun asked in an unwontedly small voice.

“Not yet, I don’t think,” Istvan answered. As if on cue, the mountain ape writhed. He blazed it once more, this time in the head. It groaned, as a man might have done, and lay still. Istvan turned to the oncoming soldiers in his squad, calling, “Somebody start a torch and fetch it up here. I want a good look at this beast.”

Unlovely in life, the mountain ape seemed even more unlovely sprawled in death under the flickering torchlight. It was bigger than a man, and its long, coarse, shaggy reddish hair made it look bigger still. Its low brow, broad nose, and mouth full of enormous (though not very sharp) teeth turned it into an embarrassing caricature of mankind. Was that a club fallen from its huge hand, or just a branch that happened to lie close by? Istvan couldn’t be sure.

Kun turned away in fastidious disgust. “Abominable creature,” he muttered. “Simply abominable.”

“I suppose so,” Istvan said. “It’s dead, and it didn’t hurt any of us. That’s what counts.” He looked east into the night. “When we do finally run into the Unker-lanters, they’ll have more with them than clubs, worse luck.”

In the dark quiet of the second-story farmhouse bedchamber, Merkela moved slowly, delicately, above Skarnu. “Oh,” he said in a soft voice, still astonished at the joy she could wring from him.

He peered up at her. Her face, inches above his own, was half intent, half slack with pleasure. The tips of her breasts brushed the bare skin of his chest as she sat bent above him. Somehow, that excited him almost as much as anything else she was doing. He ran a hand down the smooth curve of her back till he clenched one meaty buttock. The fingers of his other hand tangled in her golden hair as he pulled her mouth down to his. He found her lips sweeter than honey, sweeter and more intoxicating than the finest fortified Jelgavan wine.

All at once, she moaned and strained and bucked against him, delicacy forgotten. She clenched him inside her, as if with a hand. He cried out; he could no more have held back than he could have stopped himself from breathing. Merkela cried out, too, a curious, mewing wail, almost like a cat’s. Then, spent, she slumped down onto him.

And then, as she did after every time they joined, she began to weep as if her heart would break. No--as if it were already broken. “Gedominu!” she wailed. “Oh, my poor Gedominu!”

Skarnu held her and stroked her and waited for the worst of the sorrow to pass, as he knew it soon would. There were jokes, there were sayings, about the chances a man took when he consoled a new widow in her bedchamber. Discovering she still loved her dead husband was not the least of them. Her tears felt hot as molten lead against the side of his neck and the hollow of his shoulder.

“I can’t bring him back,” Skarnu said once the sobs had ebbed to sniffles. The Algarvians had blazed Gedominu, as they’d blazed a good many other Valmieran hostages, to punish resistance against their occupying army. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

That was true, even if it meant Merkela would not be giving herself to him now. It might not have meant anything of the sort; what had smoldered between them might have caught fire even with Gedominu still limping around his farm. “He was a brave man.” That was also true. Skarnu would have said it even were it not, to honor the dead.

“Aye, he was.” Merkela’s head came up. From grief, she swung quickly to rage. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but her eyes glittered with fury. “He was brave, and the redheads blazed him down like a dog. Powers above spurn them. Powers below eat them through all eternity.” Her voice held an incantatory quality, as if she truly had the power to make her curses bite deep. “They will pay. How they will pay.”

“Aye.” Skarnu kept stroking her, gentling her, as if she were an unbroken unicorn. “They will pay. They are paying. You’re helping to make them pay.”

Merkela nodded. The thought might have come from her own mind, not Skarnu’s. While Gedominu lived, she’d been content to wait at home and let him carry on the clandestine war against the redheads. After they executed him, she’d gone out on every raid Skarnu and his sergeant, Raunu, and the handful of stubborn local farmers and villagers had put on. Skarnu’s greatest fear was not that she would be unable to hold her own but that she would get herself killed from foolish eagerness to throw herself at the foe. It hadn’t happened yet. In time, he hoped, she would get her common sense back.

“And you, Skarnu, you are a brave man,” she exclaimed, suddenly seeming to remember he was there even though she’d been lying mostly on top of him, her naked, sweaty flesh pressed tightly against his. “When they took him, you tried to go in his place.”

Skarnu shrugged. She’d been watching them. He could think of no other reason why he’d offered himself to the Algarvians instead of Gedominu. Had they taken him, had they blazed him, would Merkela now be mourning him, naked in this bed with her old lame husband? Skarnu shrugged and shivered, both at the same time. No one could know such a thing--and just as well, too.

He reached for her, to hold away what might have been. She was reaching for him, too, perhaps to hold away what had been. Only noblewomen in Valmiera were said to know what she knew and used to get him ready quickly. He’d learned before that what people said and what was so often had no connection to each other. Soon, she arched her hips to receive him. “Hurry,” she whispered, there in the darkness.

When her pleasure came this time, she groaned as if it were pain. A moment later, Skarnu groaned, too, and spent himself. Merkela wept again, but only for a little while. Her breathing grew deep and slow. She drifted off to sleep without bothering to put on the loose tunic and trousers she wore at night.

Getting into his own clothes was a matter of a moment for Skarnu. Merkela let him share her bed when they joined on it, but she would not let him sleep with her in the literal meaning of the words. He slipped down the stairs and out of the farmhouse, closing the door behind him. He’d grown very used to sleeping on straw in the barn. A mattress, by now, would probably feel too soft to be comfortable.

“Hello, sir,” Raunu said quietly. Straw rustled under the veteran--Raunu had fought in the Six Years’ War--as he sat up.

“Oh, hello, Sergeant,” Skarnu said in dull embarrassment. Raunu had kept him afloat when, thanks to his being a marquis, he’d taken command of a company in Valmiera’s failed war against Algarve. They’d stayed together after the formal fighting ended, too. Now, since he hadn’t been here, Raunu could hardly help knowing where he had been and what he’d been doing. “I didn’t mean to wake you.

“You didn’t,” Raunu answered. “I was wakeful anyhow.” He didn’t say anything else for a little while after that. Skarnu could see his face but not make out its expression; the inside of the barn was darker even than Merkela’s bedchamber had been. At last, Raunu resumed: “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, sir?”

“Sure?” Skarnu shook his head. “No, of course not. Only fools are sure they know what they’re doing, and they’re commonly wrong.”

Raunu grunted. Skarnu needed a moment to realize that was intended for laughter. Raunu said, “All right, sir, fair enough. If she’d chosen to look at me, I don’t suppose I’d have looked away either.”

“Ah.” Skarnu didn’t want to talk about it. He pulled off his boots. He’d also got used to sleeping in tunic and trousers, to keep the straw from poking him so badly. His yawn might have been a bit theatrical, but he thought it would serve.

Here on the farm, though, sergeant and captain, commoner and noble, were far closer to equals than they had been in the tightly structured world of the army. Raunu did not back off. He said, “Did you know, sir, that Gedominu knew she’d started looking your way before the redheads hauled him off and blazed him?”

That had to be answered. “No, I didn’t know,” Skarnu said slowly. “Nothing happened between us before then.” It was true. How long it would have kept on being true, he didn’t know. He’d started looking Merkela’s way, too. He’d started looking her way from the moment he met her.

He wondered if she mourned Gedominu so extravagantly because she felt guilty about having turned her eye elsewhere before the Algarvians seized her husband. He doubted he would ever know. He could hardly come right out and ask.

Raunu’s thoughts had traveled along their own ley line. “Aye, he knew,” the sergeant said. “It was always one thing after another, he said to me once--that was how he looked at the world. He was sure Algarve would go after Unkerlant next.

With Forthweg and Sibiu and us and the Jelgavans down, Unkerlant was the next duck in a row.”

Skarnu didn’t care about Gedominu’s theories. He yawned again, louder and more stagily than before, and lay down in the straw, which rustled as it compressed under his weight. He felt around till he found his blanket, then wrapped it around himself.

“I hope everything turns out all right, sir, that’s all,” Raunu said, apparently resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t get many more answers from his superior.

But Skarnu gave him one more after all: “Everything’s turned out fine so far, hasn’t it, Sergeant? Our armies will be in Trapani next week at the latest, and Gedominu should have a fine harvest come fall. Or have you heard something different?”

“Well, I walked into that, didn’t I? I only wish we were in the Algarvians’ capital and not the other way round.” Raunu lay down, too; the straw rustled once more. The sergeant sighed and said, “I’ll see you in the morning, sir.”

“Aye.” Now that Skarnu was off his feet, his yawn had nothing forced about it. He fell asleep almost as fast as Merkela had, up in her room.

In the morning, he drew up a bucket of water from the well and splashed it over his face and hands. Raunu used some, too. Then they went into the farmhouse. Merkela fed them fried eggs and bread and butter and beer: all from the farm, nothing bought in town but the salt that went on the eggs.

Thus fortified, they went out to tend the crops and the cattle and sheep, leaving Merkela behind to bake and wash clothes and weed the vegetable garden and feed the chickens. She and Gedominu had got a good enough living from the farm. Skarnu marveled at that. He and Raunu together had trouble doing as much as Gedominu had managed by himself.

“Ah, but there’s a difference, sir,” Raunu said when Skarnu grumbled about it, which he did every now and then. “The old man had a lifetime to learn what he was doing. We’ve had not quite a year.”

“Aye, I suppose so.” Skarnu glanced over toward the veteran. Raunu had had a lifetime to learn how to be a soldier . . . and then Skarnu, with a good deal less than not quite a year’s experience, had been set over him. I ought to count myself lucky he didn’t betray me to the Algarvians, the way so many Jelgavan soldiers did with their officers, he thought. Raunu might have been better off had he decided to turn traitor.

Skarnu was weeding--somewhat more expertly than he had the year before, if not with Gedominu’s effortless skill--when a couple of Algarvians came riding along the path that ran by the fields. They dismounted not far away. One of them nailed a broadsheet to an oak tree. The other one kept him covered, which meant that, for most of the time he was busy, the fellow pointed his stick not quite straight at Skarnu. Once the broadsheet was in place, the Algarvians swung back up onto their unicorns and rode away.

Only after they were out of sight did Skarnu amble over to see what the broadsheet said. In rather stilted Valmieran, it offered a reward for information leading to the capture of soldiers who had gone into hiding rather than surrendering, and a double reward for information leading to the capture of officers.

He stood rocking back and forth on his heels, the picture of rustic indifference. Then, with a shrug more convincing than his yawns had been the night before, he went back to work. Maybe someone in the countryside knew what he and Raunu were and felt like turning a profit on his knowledge. Whether that was so or not mattered little at the moment; Skarnu couldn’t do anything about it. He could do the work. If he didn’t, no one would.

When he and Raunu came in for their midday meal--big bowls of bean soup, with more beer to wash them down--he mentioned the broadsheet. Raunu shrugged. “Figures the redheads would try it sooner or later,” he said. “But not many people like ‘em well enough to talk with ‘em even for money.”

“Someone will,” Merkela said. “Someone will want silver, or will remember an old quarrel with Gedominu or with me. There are always people like that.” She tossed her head to show what she thought of them, a gesture even Skarnu’s sister Krasta might have envied. Skarnu wondered how many of the people who’d had quarrels with Gedominu were jealous of him for taking such a woman to wife.

He chuckled. He hadn’t imagined farmers might have feuds as serious and as foolish as those of the nobility. “Can you think of anyone in particular?” he asked Merkela. “Maybe someone needs to have an unfortunate accident.”

Her eyes flashed. Skarnu would not have wanted that wolfish smile aimed at him. “Or even a fortunate one,” she said.

Captain Hawart said, “Gather round, men.” Corporal Leudast and the other Unker-lanter survivors from his regiment obeyed. They might have filled out three full-strength companies. Hawart was the senior officer still alive. Colonel Roflanz hadn’t lived through the counterattack he’d stupidly ordered against the Algarvian invaders.

Lieudast marveled that he himself was still breathing. The regiment had been encircled twice during the grinding retreat through Forthweg. Once, the men had slipped through the Algarvian lines a few at a time under cover of night. The other time, they’d had to fight their way clear--which was one reason so few of them gathered to listen to Captain Hawart.

He pointed back toward the village in eastern Unkerlant through which they’d retreated the day before. The Algarvians held the place now, or what was left of it: a breeze from out of the east blew stale, sour smoke into Leudast’s nostrils. “Men, we have to retake Pfreimd,” Hawart said, “Once we do it, we can form a line along the western bank of the stream that runs by the other side of the town and have some chance of really stopping the redheads.”

That stream was hardly more than a creek. Leudast hadn’t bothered looking for a ford before wading across it, and the water hadn’t come above his waist. He didn’t think it would prove much of an obstacle to the Algarvians. As a matter of fact, it hadn’t proved much of an obstacle to the Algarvians.

“We’ll have reinforcements coming in behind us,” Hawart promised. “They’ll give us the men we need to make a proper stand on the river line.” It wasn’t a river. Not even in flood could it be a river. But the regimental commander had met Leudast’s most urgent concern.

In any case, Hawart gave the orders. Leudast’s job was to obey them and see that the men in his squad did the same. He glanced over to Sergeant Magnulf. Magnulf shrugged, ever so slightly. He had to obey orders, too. After a moment, Leudast also shrugged. Going straight at the Algarvians was only slightly more perilous than falling back before them.

“Let’s get moving,” Hawart said. “Advance in open order. Use whatever cover you can find. If you can manage it, Unkerlant needs you alive. But Unkerlant needs dead Algarvians even more. Come on.”

“Open order,” Magnulf repeated. “Spread it out as wide as you can. We want to get into the village, we want to clear out the Algarvians, and we want to keep on advancing to the line of the stream. And Leudast here,” he added, pointing toward the corporal, “wants to keep the redheads as far away from his home village as he can.”

“Aye, that’s so,” Leudast agreed. He turned his head to look westward. His village couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty miles west of the battle line, though he was rather south of it, too. “Too many villages lost already.”

“Well, let’s take one back,” Magnulf said.

Leudast did his best to force fear to one side. He couldn’t keep from feeling it. As long as he kept from showing it, though, he could hold his head up among his comrades. Maybe they felt it, too. He hadn’t asked. Nobody’d asked him either.

He trotted forward through fields of growing wheat that might never be harvested. He wished he were dressed in green, not rock-gray. How far forward had the Algarvians moved their outposts during the night? One way to find out was to get blazed by a redhead. Somebody was liable to find out that way. He hoped he wouldn’t be the one.

Eggs started falling on the advancing troops. The Algarvians were demons for making their egg-tossers keep up with the rest of the army. Here, though, they were tossing a little long, so they did less harm than they might have.

Before they could correct their aim, flashes of sorcerous energy came from inside Pfreimd. Leudast let out a glad, startled whoop, then turned it into words: “We’ve got egg-tossers of our own in the fight.” He shook his fist in the direction of the village. “How do you Algarvians like it, curse you?”

He didn’t think the Algarvians liked it at all. Dishing it out was always easier than taking it. The eggs the Unkerlanters flung at the redheads must have put a couple of their tossers out of action, for the rain of eggs down onto the advancing Unkerlanter regiment slowed.

Leudast waved men forward as he himself ran on. Maybe Captain Hawart hadn’t been trying to get what was left of the regiment killed after all. Familiar-looking thatch-roofed houses--some amazingly intact, others nothing but charred ruins--swelled in Leudast’s sight as he drew near them.

“Unkerlant!” he yelled. “King Swemmel! Urra! Urra!”

More Unkerlanter eggs fell on Pfreimd. They would make the Algarvians holed up in the village keep their heads down. With a little luck, that creek on the other side of Pfreimd would become the front line once more. A barricade of Algarvian corpses might keep the defenders safe.

Troopers started blazing at the nearest houses, houses in which the redheads might be lurking. Where beams struck it, thatching began to smolder. So did some of the timbers. Before long, those houses would catch fire. The Algarvians would have to come forth or roast.

In the meanwhile, though, they fought. Beams began cutting down the Unkerlanters advancing on the village. A near miss charred a line through the grass by Leudast’s feet. He threw himself down behind a rock that wasn’t really big enough to shield him and blazed back.

After a moment to gather himself, he was up and running again. Then he was in among the houses of the village, and discovered that the Algarvians hadn’t merely taken cover in them. The redheads had also dug trenches and foxholes by the houses and in the village square. They resisted with everything they had, too, and seemed not in the least inclined to give up Pfreimd.

Well, if they won’t, we’ll have to take it away from them, Leudast thought. He blazed at a redhead in a hole. The fellow reeled back, clutching at himself.

“Surrender!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted in Algarvian. That was a word Leudast had learned.

“Mezentio!” was the only answer the officer got. The Algarvians intended to fight it out in the village. Captain Hawart had said reinforcements were coming to help the regiment he commanded these days. Leudast wondered if the redheads expected help from their friends, too.

If they did, best to finish them now, before that help arrived. “Follow me!” Leudast shouted to his comrades and leaped down into the trenches. To his vast relief, the Unkerlanters he led did follow. Had they hung back, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

As things were, he’d never found himself in such a vicious little fight. The Algarvians might have been used to overwhelming all the foes in their path, but they did not shy away from combat with the odds against them. Nor did they hang back from fighting at close quarters. Some of the work Leudast did was with his stick used as a club and with his knife: warfare as it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and even before.

The last few Algarvians threw down their sticks and surrendered. They looked as frightened as Leudast would have had he been trying to yield to them. “They aren’t nine feet tall and covered with spines after all,” he said to Magnulf.

“No, so they’re not,” Magnulf agreed. He was tying a rag around his arm. Blood soaked through the wool; one of the Algarvians had had a knife, too. “Not too bad,” he told Leudast. “Should heal well enough--and that cursed redhead isn’t going to stick anybody else, believe you me he won’t.”

“Good,” Leudast said. He thought he’d come through without a scratch till he discovered a cut on one leg. He had no idea when he’d got it. In the heat of battle, he hadn’t noticed it till now.

Villagers--those who hadn’t fled or been killed--began coming out of their battered homes to shake the hands of the Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them held out jugs of spirits. “We would have had more,” one of them said, “but these redheaded swine”--he spat in the direction of the Algarvian captives--”stole everything they could find. Still, they did not find it all.”

An old woman pointed to the captives. “What will you do with them now?”

“Send them off to a camp, I suppose,” Captain Hawart answered. “We start killing them in cold blood, they’ll do the same to our men.”

“But they deserve to die,” the woman shouted angrily. “They killed us. They took a couple of our girls to enjoy. They stole. They burned.”

Captain Hawart’s smile was hard and unpleasant. “They’ll have a thin time of it, granny, I promise you that.”

“Not thin enough.” Stubborn as an ox, the old woman stuck out her chin.

Hawart did not argue with her. He detailed a couple of men to take the captives back to the rear. As the Algarvians stumbled away, glad to keep on breathing, he waved his own men forward. “Up to the stream,” he told them. “See? It went just the way we planned it.”

So it had. Leudast scratched his head. He wasn’t used to things going as planned. Even retreats had been botched lately. Now the regiment had successfully advanced against the Algarvian army, the army that had thrown all foes back in confusion. Did that mean the line of the stream would hold after all? Leudast was willing to find out.

A couple of Algarvian behemoths came up toward the eastern back of the stream. Leudast suddenly got less optimistic about holding the position the regiment had just gained--to say nothing of living much longer. He hoped the redheads would come close enough to let him blaze them off their great beasts. But they were too warwise for that. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanters defending Pfreimd and the streambank from a range at which Leudast and his comrades could not hurt them.

But the Unkerlanter egg-tossers that had lobbed packets of sorcerous energy at the redheads in Pfreimd now shifted their attention to the behemoths on the other side of the stream. By chance, one of their eggs burst right on top of one of the beasts. That burst all the eggs the behemoth carried. Leudast shouted himself hoarse. More eggs burst all around the other behemoths and wounded or killed one of the men atop it, but it trotted away from the stream faster than it had advanced.

“Powers above. We held them.” Leudast knew he shouldn’t have sounded astonished, but he couldn’t help himself. Magnulf nodded, looking astonished, too.

Less than an hour later, a messenger ran up. After listening to him, Captain Hawart cursed furiously. “Pull back!” he shouted to his men. “We’ve got to pull back.”

Leudast cursed, too. “Why?” he burst out, along with many others.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Hawart answered. “The redheads have broken through in a big way farther south, that’s why. If we don’t pull back now, we’ll have to try to fight our way out of another encirclement. How many times can we stay lucky?”

Wearily, Leudast got to his feet. Wearily, he tramped back through the wreckage of Pfreimd. The villagers cursed him and his comrades for retreating. He couldn’t blame them. The regiment had done everything it was supposed to do and done it well. Even that hadn’t helped. Here he was, retreating again. Head down, he slogged on.

Looking down from his dragon on the Unkerlanter landscape far below, Colonel Sabrino smiled. From the day the Algarvians began their campaign, it had gone better than the nobleman dared hope. Columns of behemoths broke through one Unkerlanter defensive line after another, and footsoldiers flooded into the gaps the great beasts tore. The foe either found himself outflanked and surrounded or else had to flee for his life.

Sabrino peered back over his shoulder at the wing he commanded: sixty-four dragons painted in the Algarvian colors of green, white, and red. He wished he were wearing a hat, so he could wave it--like almost every Algarvian ever born, he delighted in theatrical gestures. Taking off his goggles and waving them didn’t have the same flair.

He contented himself with a wave of the hand. When he looked back over his shoulder again, half--more than half--the dragonfliers were waving back to him. His smile got wider and fonder. They were good lads, every one. Few had more than half his fifty-odd years; he’d fought on the ground in the Six Years’ War a generation before. One stretch of soldiering in the mud had convinced him he never wanted to go through another. Thus, dragons.

His mount twisted its long, snaky neck this way and that. It let out a fierce shriek that tore at his ears. It was looking for Unkerlanter dragons to flame out of the sky or--better yet, from its point of view--to claw and tear with its taloned forelegs.

It shrieked again. “Oh, shut up, you cursed thing,” Sabrino snapped. The only people who romanticized dragons were those who knew nothing about them. Like any dragonflier, Sabrino scorned the beasts he flew. Bad-tempered, stupid, vicious . . . No, dragonfliers never ran out of bad things to say about their mounts.

He looked down once more, looked down and spied a long column of wagons moving up toward the fighting front through the dust they kicked up rolling along a dirt road. He pointed to it, and also spoke into his crystal: “Let’s make sure those whoresons never get where they’re going.”

The crystal was attuned to those his squadron leaders carried. “Aye, sir, we’ll do it,” Captain Domiziano, one of those squadron leaders, said with a grin. “It’s what we’re for--it’s what we’ve been doing all along.” He seemed altogether too young and eager to hold his rank ... or maybe that was just a sign Sabrino was getting old.

“Down, then,” Sabrino ordered, and used more hand signals to pass on the command to the dragonfliers who didn’t have crystals. His squadron leaders were relaying the order, too, in case the men watched them and not their wing commander.

From his seat at the base of his dragon’s neck, Sabrino leaned forward to tap out the command that would send the beast stooping like an outsized hawk at the wagons and draft animals below. The dragon ignored him, or possibly didn’t notice the signal he’d given it. That was why he carried an iron-tipped goad. He gave the command again, this time with force that probably would have felled a man.

He did get the dragon’s attention. It screeched in outrage and twisted its head back to glare at him with great yellow eyes. He reached out with the goad and whacked it on the end of the nose. It shrieked again, even more angrily than before. Dragons were trained from the days when they were no more than new-hatched lizards with evil dispositions never to flame the men who flew them. But they were also very stupid. Every once in a while, they forgot.

Not this time. After a last scream, Sabrino’s dragon folded its wings and plummeted toward the Unkerlanter supply column. The wind whistled in Sabrino’s face. One more glance behind him showed that the rest of the wing followed.

Down on the ground, the Unkerlanters had spotted the dragons diving on them. Sabrino laughed as he watched them mill around. Not many could hope to run far enough or fast enough to escape the flames of destruction. Unkerlant, by all the signs, had been getting ready to attack Algarve before King Mezentio’s men struck first. Now the enemy was discovering what a mistake he’d made, imagining he could stand on equal terms against the greatest army the continent of Derlavai had ever known.

Here and there, footsoldiers marching with the column blazed at the Algar-vian dragons; Sabrino spied the flashes from the business ends of their sticks. They were brave. They were also foolish. A footsoldier couldn’t carry a stick strong enough to bring down a dragon unless he hit it in the eye, which required as near a miracle of blazing as made no difference. He might also hit a dragonflier, but Sabrino preferred not to dwell on that.

The Unkerlanters swelled from specks to insects to people with astonishing speed. Similarly, their wagons stopped looking like toys. They ripped the canvas cover off one of those wagons. Sabrino wondered what they were doing, but not for more than a heartbeat. To his horror, he saw they’d concealed a heavy stick in the wagon. Soldiers in calf-length rock-gray tunics brought it to bear on one of the Algarvian dragonfliers.

“No!” Sabrino cried in dismay as the beam spat upward. To his frightened eyes, it seemed bright as the sun, wide as the sea. No dragon’s scales, not even if they were silvered, could withstand a beam like that at close range. The beam lashed out again.

But the stick had not been aimed his way. Since he was in the lead, he couldn’t tell whether it had struck one of the beasts behind him--no time to look back, not now. The stick slewed toward him as the Unkerlanters swung it on its mounting. If it blazed once more, it was death.

Sabrino slapped his dragon a different way. This time, the beast obeyed without hesitation, not least because he was ordering it to do what it already wanted to do. Its great jaws yawned wide. It belched forth a sheet of flame that engulfed the Unkerlanters’ heavy stick and the men who served it.

Fumes reeking of brimstone blew back into Sabrino’s face. He coughed and cursed, but he would rather have smelled that odor just then than his mistress’ most delicate perfume. Those fumes and the flames from which they sprang had just saved his life.

Nearer the head of the column, the dragon flamed again, incinerating a wagon and the horses that pulled it. Sabrino whacked it with the goad to make it gain height and come round for another run. As its great wings worked behind him--he could feel the mighty muscles contract and loosen, contract and loosen, with every wingbeat--he craned his neck to see how the rest of the dragonfliers had served the supply column.

He waved the goad with glee. Great clouds of black smoke rose into the sky, the pyre of dozens of wagonloads of food, clothing, eggs, sticks--who could guess what?--that would never reach the Unkerlanters struggling to hold back the Algarvian footsoldiers and behemoths.

A good many Unkerlanter soldiers and drivers had burned, too. So had a good many horses. Not all of them, men or beasts, died at once. A burning horse ran madly through a wheatfield, spreading fire wherever it went. It galloped close to half a mile before falling over.

And two dragons lay not far from the wreckage of the Unkerlanter column. That meant two Algarvian dragonfliers surely dead. Sabrino cursed; the Unkerlanters had caught him by surprise there. They fought hard. From what he’d seen, they fought harder than either the Forthwegians or the Valmierans. Already, the word had gone through the Algarvian army--don’t let yourself get captured behind the enemy’s lines.

Sabrino spoke into the crystal once more: “We’ve done what we came to do. Now we can head back to the dragon farm and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.”

“Aye, sir,” Captain Orosio said. “I’m already bringing my men up into formation.” And so he was. Though a good deal older than Domiziano, he hadn’t commanded a squadron for nearly so long as the other man. Poor fellow, Sabrino thought. His family connections aren’t all they might be. Now that Orosio had the squadron, he handled it with matter-of-fact competence. Too bad he couldn’t get it sooner.

Orosio’s squadron was, in fact, the first one to reform. Because of that, Sabrino ordered that squadron up above the rest, to cover them from attack by Unkerlanter dragons as they flew east. Here and there below them, knots of Unkerlanter troopers still held out against the Algarvians. Elsewhere, though, Algarvian behemoths, some carrying egg-tossers, others with heavy sticks mounted on their mail-covered backs, trotted west with next to no one even to slow them down. By all the signs, it was a rout.

But when the wing flew over land where there’d been fighting, Sabrino saw, as he’d seen before, that things weren’t so simple. The Unkerlanters had fought hard in every village and town; most of them were little more than charred rubble. And the corpses of men and behemoths, unicorns and horses, scattered through fields pockmarked with craters from bursting eggs proclaimed how hard they’d fought in open country, too.

“Dragons, Colonel!” Captain Orosio’s sharp warning snapped Sabrino out of his reverie. Dragons they were, half a dozen of them, painted in Unkerlanter rock-gray that made them hard to spot against the hazy sky. They were flying back toward the west, which meant they’d been raiding behind the Algarvian lines.

They could have escaped Sabrino’s wing and fled into the all but limitless plains of Unkerlant. Instead, no matter how outnumbered they were, they flew straight for the Algarvian dragons.

For Sabrino, it wasn’t a question of urging his mount on. It was a question of holding back the dragon, of making the attack part of an organized assault on the Unkerlanters rather than a wild beast’s headlong rush. With the dragon goad in his right hand, he used his stick with his left. Aiming from dragonback was tricky, but he’d had a lot of practice. If he blazed an enemy flier, the fellow’s dragon would be nothing more than a wild beast, as likely to attack friend as foe.

He’d fought Unkerlanters in the air before and had a low opinion of their skill. Seeing six assail sixty or so, he also had a low opinion of their common sense. But, as with their comrades on the ground, he’d never been able to fault their courage. Here they came, as if they outnumbered his dragonfliers ten to one instead of the other way round. They couldn’t have hoped to win, or even to escape. They intended to sell themselves as dearly as possible.

For his part, he wanted to dispose of them as fast as he could. He sent several of his dragons after each of theirs, to give them no chance for heroism. Somebody blazed one of their fliers almost at once. That dragon, suddenly on its own, flew off. Another one plunged to the ground when an Algarvian got in back of it without its flier’s knowing and flamed it from behind.

Inside a couple of minutes, all the Unkerlanter dragons were out of the fight. Sabrino himself blazed the dragonfliers his group of Algarvians attacked. But one of King Swemmel’s men got a measure of revenge. A couple of Algarvian dragons had flamed the one he flew. It was horribly burned, and so, no doubt, was he. Still, he made it obey one last command: he flew it straight against an Algarvian dragon. They smashed together and both tumbled out of the sky.

“That was a brave man,” Sabrino said softly. A moment later, as an afterthought, he added, “Curse him.” Save for the Algarvians, the heavens were empty. Sabrino waved the wing back toward the dragon farm where they and the handlers would tend to their beasts. But now they had one more slot that wanted filling.

Ealstan looked up from the page of bookkeeping questions his father had set him to find his cousin, Sidroc, grinning a most unpleasant grin. “I’m done with my work for the night,” Sidroc said. “But then, I only have what the school dishes out. I told you you’d end up stuck with more.”

“Aye, and you’ve been telling me, too--telling me and telling me,” Ealstan said. “Why don’t you shut up and let me finish?” He wished Leofsig, his older brother, were around. But Leofsig had gone to hear music with Felgilde, whom he’d been seeing even before he went into King Penda’s levy.

Sidroc went off. He did his best to look insulted, but he was chuckling, too. Ealstan felt like chucking the inkwell after his cousin. Instead, with a sour frown, he buckled down and finished the rest of the problems. After rising, he stretched till his back creaked; he’d been sitting there a long time. It certainly seemed a long time.

He took the problems into the parlor, where his father and Uncle Hengist were sharing a news sheet. His father turned away from the sheet. “All right, son,” he said, “let’s see what you’ve done with this lot.”

“Let’s see what this lot’s done to me,” Ealstan returned. Uncle Hengist--Sidroc’s father--laughed. Ealstan’s father smiled for a moment and started checking the work.

Sidroc must have got his habit of interrupting from Hengist, who set the news sheet on his lap and said, “Looks like the Unkerlanters are finished, eh, Hestan? Algarve’s going to be top dog for a long time to come.”

“What was that?” Hestan asked; his mind had been on the questions. Sidroc’s father repeated himself. Hestan shrugged. “The only news the Algarvians let into Gromheort--into any of Forthweg--is what makes them look good. If anything goes wrong, we’ll never hear about it.”

“Nobody’s said the Unkerlanters are calling the redheads liars, and the Unkerlanters call people liars even when they’re telling the truth,” Hengist replied.

Hestan only shrugged again. He tapped Ealstan’s paper with a fingernail. “Son, you reckoned simple interest here. You should have compounded it. A client would not be happy to find that sort of error in his books.”

“Which one, Father?” Ealstan looked down to see what he’d done wrong. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I’ll fix it,” he said, “and I’ll remember next time, too.” He hated making mistakes, in which he was very much his fathers son. The only real difference between them was that his dark beard was still thin and wispy, while gray had started to streak Hestan’s. Otherwise, they could have come from the same mold: broad-shouldered, swarthy, hook-nosed, like most Forthwegians and their Unkerlanter cousins.

“Let me explain again when you use simple interest and when you must compound,” Hestan began.

Before he could explain, Hengist interrupted once more: “Looks like the Algarvians and the Zuwayzin are both heading toward Glogau. That’s the biggest port the Unkerlanters have up on the warm side of Derlavai. Cursed near the only port up there, too, except for a couple way out to the west. What do you think of that?” He waved the news sheet at Hestan.

“I think it would matter more if Unkerlant didn’t have such an enormous hinterland,” Ealstan’s father answered. “The Unkerlanters need things from the rest of the world less than other kingdoms do.”

“They need sense, is what they need, though you can’t haul that on ships.” Hengist pointed toward his brother. “And you need some sense yourself. You just hate the idea of Algarve winning, that’s all.”

“Don’t you, Uncle Hengist?” Ealstan spoke before Hestan could.

Now Hengist shrugged. “If we couldn’t beat the redheads, what difference does it make? Things won’t be too bad, I don’t expect. It’s not like we were Kauni-ans, or anything like that.”

“Remember what the Algarvians are letting your son learn,” Hestan answered. “Remember what they aren’t. You’re right, they save the worst for the Kaunians--but they do not wish us well.”

“They ruled here when we were boys--have you forgotten?” Hengist said. “If they hadn’t lost the Six Years’ War, if the Unkerlanters hadn’t fought among themselves, we wouldn’t have gotten a king of our own back. The redheads treated Forthwegians better than the Unkerlanters did farther west, that’s certain.”

“But we shouldbt free,” Ealstan exclaimed. “Forthweg is a great kingdom. We were a great kingdom when the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters were nothing to speak of. They had no business carving us up like a roast goose, either a hundred years ago or now.”

“Boy has spirit,” Hengist remarked to Hestan. He turned back to Ealstan. “If you want to get right down to it, we aren’t carved up any more. King Mezentio’s men hold all of Forthweg these days.”

Ealstan didn’t want to get right down to it, not like that. Without waiting to hear when he should use simple interest and when compound, he left the parlor. Behind him, Hestan said, “In the old days, a Forthwegian or even a blond Kaun-ian could get ahead in Algarve--not as easily as a redhead, but an able man could make do. I don’t see that happening now.”

“Well, I don’t want a Kaunian getting ahead of me--unless she’s a pretty girl in tight trousers.” Uncle Hengist laughed.

That’s where Sidroc comes by it, all right, Ealstan thought. Instead of going back to his room, he went into the kitchen, intending to hook a plum. He hesitated when he discovered his older sister Conberge in there kneading dough. Since hard times and the Algarvians came to Gromheort, his sister and even his mother had grown stern about making food disappear like that.

But Conberge looked up from her work and smiled at him. Thus encouraged, he sidled up. Her smile didn’t disappear when he reached toward the bowl of fruit. She didn’t swat him with a floury hand. He took a plum and bit into it. It was very sweet. Juice dribbled down his chin, through the sparse hairs of his sprouting beard.

“What have you got there?” his sister asked, pointing not to the plum but to the paper in his other hand.

“Bookkeeping problems Father set me,” Ealstan answered. With a little effort, he managed a smile. “I’m not wild about doing them, but at least he doesn’t switch me when I make mistakes, the way a master would at school.”

“Let me see,” Conberge said, and Ealstan handed her the sheet. She looked it over, nodded, and gave it back. “You used simple interest once when you should have compounded.

“Aye, so Father told--” Ealstan stopped and stared. “I didn’t know you could cast accounts.” He couldn’t tell whether he sounded indignant or astonished--both at once, probably. “They don’t teach you that in the girls’ academy.”

Conberge’s smile turned sour. “No, they don’t. Maybe they should, but they don’t. Father did, though. He said you never could tell, and I might have to be able to earn my own way one day. This was before the war started, mind you.”

“Oh.” Ealstan glanced back toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hengist were still going back and forth, back and forth, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. “Father sees a long way ahead.”

His sister nodded. “It was a lot harder than writing bad poetry, which is what my schoolmistresses set me to doing, though they didn’t know it was bad. But I think better because of ii, do you know what I mean? Maybe you don’t, because they will teach boys some worthwhile things.”

“They would--till the Algarvians got their hands on the school,” Ealstan said bitterly. But he shook his head. He didn’t want to distract himself. “I didn’t know Father had taught you anything like that, though.”

“And up until not very long ago, I wouldn’t have told you, either.” Conberge’s grimace made Ealstan see the world in a way he hadn’t before. She said, “Men don’t usually want women to know too much or be too bright--or to show they know a lot or they’re bright, anyhow. If you ask me, it’s because most men don’t know that much and aren’t that bright themselves.”

“Don’t look at me like that when you say such things,” Ealstan said, which made his sister laugh. He grabbed another plum.

“All right, you can have that one, but that’s all,” Conberge said. “If you think you’ll get away with any more, you aren’t that bright.”

Ealstan laughed then. Perhaps drawn by his amusement and his sister’s, Sidroc came in from the door that opened on the courtyard. Seeing Ealstan with a plum in his hand, he grabbed one himself. Conberge couldn’t do anything about it, not with Ealstan eating one. As she turned back to the bread dough, Sidroc asked, “What’s so funny?” His voice came blurry around a big mouthful of plum. He looked a good deal like Ealstan, save that his nose bore a closer resemblance to a turnip than to a sickle blade.

“Getting stuck with bookkeeping problems,” Ealstan answered.

“Men,” Conberge added.

Sidroc looked from one of them to the other. Then, suspiciously, he looked at the plum. “Has this thing turned into brandy while I wasn’t looking?” he asked. Ealstan and Conberge both shrugged, so solemnly that they started laughing again. Sidroc snorted. “I think the two of you have gone daft, is what I think.”

“You’re probably right,” Ealstan told him. “They do say that too many bookkeeping problems--”

“Compounded quarterly,” his sister broke in.

“Compounded quarterly, aye,” Ealstan agreed. “Bookkeeping problems compounded quarterly cause calcification of the brain.”

“Even you don’t know what that means,” Sidroc said.

“It means my brain is turning into a rock, like yours was to start with,” Ealstan said. “If the Algarvians had let you take stonelore, you would have found out for yourself.”

“Think you’re so smart.” Sidroc kept smiling, but his voice held an edge. “Well, maybe you are. But so what? So what?--that’s what I want to know. What’s it gotten you?” Without waiting for an answer, he pitched his plum pit into the trash basket and stalked out of the kitchen.

Ealstan wished he could ignore the question. It was too much to the point. Since Sidroc hadn’t stayed around, he turned back to Conberge. “What has being smart got me? Or you, either? Nothing I can see.”

“Would you rather be stupid? That won’t get you anything, either,” Conberge said. After a moment’s thought, she went on, “If you’re smart, when you grow up you turn into someone like Father. That’s not so bad.”

“No.” But Ealstan remained unhappy. “Even Father, though--what is he? A bookkeeper in a conquered kingdom where the Algarvians don’t want us to know enough to be bookkeepers.”

“But he’s teaching you anyhow, and he taught me, too,” Conberge reminded him. “If that isn’t fighting back against the redheads, what is?”

“You’re right.” Ealstan glanced toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hestan were still arguing. Then he looked at Conberge, as surprised as he’d been when he discovered she knew how to cast accounts. “Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all.”

“Maybe I should have gone on seeming stupid.” His sister shook her head. “Then I’d sound like Sidroc.”

“He isn’t really stupid, not when he doesn’t want to be,” Ealstan said. “I’ve seen that.”

“No, he’s not,” Conberge agreed. “But he doesn’t care about the way things are right now. He’s happy enough to let the Algarvians run Forthweg. So is Uncle Hengist. All they want to do is get along. I want to fight back, if I can.”

“Me, too,” Ealstan said, realizing his father might have been teaching him more than bookkeeping after all.

“Milady, he is waiting for you downstairs,” Bauska said as Marchioness Krasta dithered between two fur wraps.

“Well, of course he is,” Krasta answered, finally choosing the red fox over the marten.

“But you should have gone down there some little while ago,” the maidservant said. “He is an Algarvian. What will he do to you?”

“He won’t do a thing,” Krasta said with rather more confidence than she felt. Standing straighter and brushing back a stray lock of pale gold hair, she added, “I have him wrapped around my little finger.” That was a lie, and she knew it. With a younger suitor, a more foolish suitor, it might well have been true. Colonel Lurcanio, though, to her sometimes intense annoyance, did not yield himself so readily.

When Krasta did go downstairs, she found Lurcanio with his arms folded across his chest and a sour expression on his face. “Good of you to join me at last,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if I should ask one of the kitchen women to go with me to the king’s palace in your place.”

From most men, that would have been annoyed bluster. Lurcanio was annoyed, but he did not bluster. If he said he’d been thinking of taking one of the kitchen wenches to the palace, he meant it.

“I’m here, so let’s be off,” Krasta said. Lurcanio did not move, but stood looking down his straight nose at her. She needed a moment to realize what he expected. It was more annoying than anything he required of her in bed. Grudgingly, very grudgingly, she gave it to him: “I’m sorry.”

“Then we’ll say no more about it,” Lurcanio replied, affable again now that he’d got his way. He offered her his arm. She took it. They went out to his carriage together.

His driver said something in Algarvian that sounded rude. Had he been Krasta’s servant, she would have struck him or dismissed him on the spot. Lurcanio only laughed. That irked her. Lurcanio knew it irked her and did it anyhow to remind her Valmiera was a conquered kingdom and she a victor’s plaything.

After the carriage began to roll, she asked him, “Have you ever been able to learn what became of my brother?”

“I am afraid I have not,” Colonel Lurcanio answered with what sounded like real regret. “Captain Skarnu, Marquis Skarnu, is not known to have been slain. He is not known to have been captured. He is not known to have been among those who surrendered after King Gainibu capitulated. It could be--and for your sake, my lovely lady, I hope it is--that the records of capture and surrender are defective. It would not be the first time.”

“What if they aren’t?” Krasta asked. Lurcanio did not reply. After a few seconds, she recognized the expression on his long, somber face as pity. “You think he’s dead!” she exclaimed.

“Milady, there at the end, the war moved very swiftly,” the Algarvian officer replied. “A man might fall with all his comrades too caught up in the retreat to bring him with them. Our own soldiers would have been more concerned with the Valmierans still ahead than with those who could endanger them no more.”

“It could be so.” Krasta did not want to believe it. But, with most of a year passed since she’d heard from Skarnu, she had a hard time denying it, too. As was her way, when a painful fact stared her in the face, she looked in another direction: in this case, around Priekule. “I don’t see so many Algarvian soldiers on the streets these days, I don’t think.”

“You are likely right,” Lurcanio said. “Some of them have gone west to join in the fight against King Swemmel.”

“He’s a nasty sort,” Krasta said. “He deserves whatever happens to him and so does his kingdom.” Civilization, as far as she was concerned, did not run west of Algarve. Not so long before, she would have said it did not run west of Valmiera.

Someone shouted at her from a dark side street: “Algarvian’s hired twat!” Running footsteps said the fellow who’d yelled had not lingered to note the effects of his remark. In that, no doubt, he was wise. Had she been able to catch him, Krasta would not have been gentle.

Colonel Lurcanio patted her leg, a little above the knee. “Just another fool,” he said, “so take no notice of him. I do not need to hire you, do I?”

“Of course not.” Krasta tossed her head. Had Lurcanio offered her money for the use of her body, she would have thrown everything she could reach at him. He’d done nothing of the sort. He’d simply made her afraid of what might happen if she said no. (She chose not to dwell on that; she did not care to think of herself as afraid.)

“Ah, here we are,” Lurcanio said a little later, as the carriage came up to the palace. “An impressive building. The royal palace in Trapani is larger, but, I think, less magnificent. One can imagine ruling all the world from here.” After that praise, his laughter sounded doubly cruel. “One can imagine it, but not all that one can imagine comes true.” He descended from the carriage and handed Krasta down. “Shall we pay our respects to your king, who does not rule all the world from here?” He laughed again.

“I came here the night King Gainibu declared war against Algarve,” Krasta said.

“Then he still ruled some of the world from here,” Colonel Lurcanio said. “He would have done better to keep silent. He would have gone on ruling some of the world. Now he has to ask the leave of an Algarvian commissioner before he takes a glass of spirits.”

“If Algarve hadn’t invaded the Duchy of Bari, he wouldn’t have had to declare war,” Krasta said. “Then everything would still be as it was.”

Lurcanio leaned over and brushed his lips across hers. “You must be an innocent. You are too decorative to be a fool.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Item: we didn’t invade Bari; we took back what was ours. The men welcomed us with open arms, the women with open legs. I know. I was there. Item: Valmiera had no business detaching Bari from Algarve after the Six Years’ War. It was done, but, as with wizards, what one can do, another can undo. And item: things would not still be as they were.” Just for a moment, long enough to make Krasta shiver, he might have been one of his barbarous ancestors. “Had you not gone for us, we would have come after you.”

Krasta turned and looked back toward the Kaunian Column of Victory. It still stood in its ancient park, pale and proud and tall in the moonlight. Unlike during the Six Years’ War, no damage had come to it in this fight. Even so, the imperial victories it commemorated had never seemed so distant to her.

“Well,” Lurcanio said, “let us go in, then, and pay our respects to your illustrious sovereign.” He spoke without discernible irony. In the wink of an eye, he’d pulled the cloak of polished noble courtier over whatever lay beneath.

In the palace, King Gainibu’s servitors bowed to Lurcanio as they might have to a count of Valmieran blood or perhaps even as they might have to a duke of Valmieran blood. They fawned on Krasta as if she were duchess rather than marchioness, too. That went a long way toward improving her mood.

At the door to the reception hall--the Grand Hall, Krasta realized, the hall in which Gainibu had declared his ill-fated war--a uniformed Algarvian soldier checked Lurcanio’s name and hers against a list. After affirming they had the right to go past him, he stood aside. He and Lurcanio spoke briefly in their own language.

“What was that about?” Krasta asked irritably.

“Making sure neither of us is an assassin in disguise,” Lurcanio answered. “Still a few malcontents loose in the provinces. They’ve murdered some nobles who cooperate with us, and some of our men, too. If they managed to sneak a murderer in here, they could do us some harm.”

He thought of harm to his kingdom. Krasta thought of harm to herself. When she looked around the room, she found it odd to realize Algarvians were more likely to keep her safe than her own countrymen. She made a beeline for the bar and got herself a brandy laced with wormwood. She tossed it back as if it were ale. The sooner the world got blurry, the better she’d like it.

Lurcanio took a glass of white wine for himself. He drank. He enjoyed drinking. Krasta had seen that. But she’d never seen him fuddled. She doubted she ever would. Foolishness, she thought. Anything worth doing was worth doing to excess.

“Shall we go over and greet his Majesty?” Lurcanio asked, glancing toward the receiving line at whose head Gainibu stood. His mouth tightened. “Perhaps we should do it now, while he will still remember who we are--and who he is.”

Gainibu held a large tumbler half full of amber spirits. By the way he stood, by the vague expression on his face, he’d already emptied it a good many times. Krasta remembered Lurcanio’s sardonic comment outside the palace. The Algarvian commissioner must not have given the king any trouble about refills.

Krasta and Lurcanio worked their way up the receiving line. It was shorter than it would have been before the war. Not all the guests bothered presenting themselves to Gainibu. He was not the most important man in the room, not any more. Several of Lurcanio’s superiors possessed more authority than he. Again, Krasta had the sense of ground shifting under her feet.

Gainibu’s decorations, honorary and earned, glittered on his chest. Lurcanio saluted him as junior officer to senior. Krasta bowed low. “Your Majesty,” she murmured.

“Ah, the marchioness,” Gainibu replied, though Krasta was not sure he knew which marchioness she was. “And with a friend, I see. Aye, with a friend.” He took another sip from the tumbler. His eyes followed it as he lowered it from his mouth. Before the war, his eyes had followed beautiful women that way. They’d followed Krasta that way, more than once. What was she now? Just another noblewoman on a conqueror’s arm, less interesting than the spirits that swirled in his glass.

Lurcanio touched Krastas elbow. She let him lead her away. Behind her, King Gainibu mumbled something courteous to someone else. “He is not the man he was,” Lurcanio said, hardly caring whether Gainibu heard or not. In a different tone, it might have been pity. It was scorn.

To her surprise, sudden tears filled Krasta’s eyes. She looked back toward the king. There he stood, impressive, amiable, drunk. His kingdom was a prisoner of Algarve. And he, she thought with a burst of insight that surely came from the wormwood, was a prisoner within himself.

“Now we have done our duty,” Lurcanio said. “We can enjoy ourselves the rest of the evening.”

“Aye,” Krasta said, though she had seldom felt less like enjoying herself. “Excuse me for a moment.” She hurried over to the bar. An expressionless servitor gave her another glass of the wormwood-flavored brandy. She gulped it down with reckless speed.

“Have a care, there,” Lurcanio said from behind her. “Will I need to carry you up the stairs to your bedchamber tonight?” An eyebrow quirked. “I do not think I need to make you pass out drunk to have my way with you.”

“No.” Melancholy and insight were not natural to Krasta. Ingenious lubricity was. She ran her tongue over her lips, tilted a hip and gazed saucily up at the Algar-vian officer. “But would you enjoy it that way?”

He considered. Slowly, he smiled. “Once, perhaps. Everything is interesting once.” Krasta needed to hear no more. She turned back to the bar and began to drink in earnest.