Darkness Descending

Five

Krasta rounded on her maidservant. “Curse you, Bauska, I ought to box your X i ears,” she said furiously. “It’s only the middle of the afternoon. If you think you can fall asleep on me, you had better think again.”

“I am sorry, milady,” Bauska said around a yawn. “I’m sure I don’t know what’s come over me the past few days.” Wise in the ways of servants, Krasta had no doubt she was lying, but couldn’t tell why. Bauska yawned again, yawned and then gulped. Her complexion, always pale, went distinctly green. After another gulp, she made a strangled choking noise, turned, and dashed out of Krasta’s bedchamber.

When she returned, she still looked wan but somewhat better, as if she’d got rid of what ailed her. “Are you ill?” Krasta demanded. “If you are, you had better not give it to me. Colonel Lurcanio and I are supposed to go to a banquet tomorrow night.”

“Milady...” Bauska stopped. A faint--a very faint--flush darkened her white, white cheeks. She resumed, picking her words with obvious care: “What I have, it is not catching, not between me and you.”

“What are you talking about?” Krasta asked. “If you’re ill, have you seen a physician?”

“I am sick now and then, milady, but I am not ill,” her servant said. “And I have no need to go to a physician. The moon has told me everything I need to know.”

“The moon?” For a moment, the words meant nothing to Krasta. Then her eyes widened. That explained it. “You are with child!”

“Aye,” Bauska said, and again blushed faintly. “I have been sure now for the past ten days or so.”

“Who’s the father?” Krasta asked. If Bauska presumed to tell her it was none of her business, she promised herself the maidservant would regret it for the rest of her life.

But Bauska did nothing of the sort. Looking down at the carpet, she whispered, “Captain Mosco, milady.”

“You are carrying an Algarvians bastard? A cuckoo’s egg?” Krasta said. Not raising her eyes, Bauska nodded. Anger shot through Krasta, anger oddly mixed with envy: she’d thought from the beginning that Mosco, who was years younger than Lurcanio, was also better looking. “How did it happen?”

“How?” Now Bauska did look up. “In the usual way, of course.”

Krasta hissed in exasperation. “That is not what I meant, and you know it perfectly well. Now, then--have you told this fellow what he’s done to you?”

Bauska shook her head. “No, milady. I have not dared, not yet.”

“Well, you are about to.” Krasta seized her maidservant by the arm. Had she been just a little more provoked, she would have seized Bauska by the ear. As things were, she gripped Bauska tightly enough to make the servant whimper. Krasta ignored that; she was used to ignoring protests from her servants. Bauska whimpered again when Krasta marched her down the stairs and into the wing of the mansion the Algarvians occupied. Krasta ignored that, too.

A couple of the clerks who helped administer Priekule for King Mezentio looked up from their desks as the two Valmieran women went by. They eyed Krasta (and Bauska, too, though Krasta paid no attention to that) far more brazenly than Valmieran commoners would have dared to do. Their leers had infuriated Krasta at first. Now she accepted them, as she accepted so much of Algarvian rule.

“But there are limits,” she muttered. “By the powers above, there are limits.” Bauska made a questioning noise. Krasta went right on ignoring her.

She knew where Captain Mosco worked: in an antechamber outside the larger room that served these days as Colonel Lurcanio’s office. Mosco was speaking into a crystal mounted on a desk undoubtedly plundered from a Valmieran cabinetmaker’s shop. He murmured something in Algarvian. As the image in the crystal faded away, he rose and bowed and shifted into his accented Valmieran: “How lovely to see you, ladies--and twice as lovely to see you both together.”

Oh, he was smooth. Bauska smiled and curtsied and started to say something sweet--exactly what the situation didn’t call for, as far as Krasta was concerned. What the situation did call for seemed plain enough. “Seducer!” Krasta shouted at the top of her lungs. “Betrayer of innocence! Defiler of purity!”

That made all the officious Algarvian clerks--or at least the ones who understood Valmieran--stare through the doorway at her with something other than lust on their minds. It also brought Colonel Lurcanio out into the antechamber. It did not, however, much abash Captain Mosco. Like so many of his countrymen, he had crust. With another bow, he said, “I assure you, milady, you are mistaken. I am no defiler, no betrayer, no seducer. I assure you also”--he looked insufferably male, insufferably smug--”no seduction was necessary, not with the lady your maidservant being at least as eager as I.”

Krasta glared at Bauska. She was perfectly willing to believe the commoner wench a slut. With some effort, though, she remembered that was neither here nor there. She had considerable practice sneering, and put that practice to good use. “Lie however you please,” she said, “but all your lies will not explain away the child this poor woman is carrying.”

“What is this?” Lurcanio said sharply. Mosco stared, then kicked at the carpet. He still looked very male, but now like a sulky small boy caught after he’d broken a fancy vase he should have handled carefully.

“Speak up!” Krasta told Bauska, and squeezed the maidservant’s upper arm--which she’d never let go of--harder than ever.

Bauska whimpered yet again, then did speak, in a very small voice: “Milady tells the truth. I will have a baby, and Captain Mosco is the father.”

Mosco had wasted no time recovering his aplomb. With an extravagant Algarvian shrug, he said, “Well, what if I am? That’s what comes of poking, every now and then anyhow.” He turned to Lurcanio. “It’s not as if I’m the only one, my lord Count. These Valmieran women spread their legs at a wink and a wave.”

“I know that,” Lurcanio answered. He was looking at Krasta. Blood rushed to her face--the blood of outrage, not that of embarrassment. She squared her shoulders and drew in a deep breath, preparatory to scorching Lurcanio. But, a moment later, she exhaled, the scorching undelivered. She did not care to admit it even to herself, but Lurcanio intimidated her as no one else ever had.

He spoke to Mosco now in Algarvian. Mosco kicked at the carpet again as he answered in the same language. Krasta had no idea what they were saying. Though she had an Algarvian for a lover, she had not bothered learning above half a dozen words of his language.

To her surprise, Bauska leaned over to her and whispered, “They say half-breeds are the last thing they want. What are they going to do to me?” She looked as if she wanted to sink through the floor.

“You understand the funny noises they make?” Krasta said in some surprise. To her way of thinking, servants barely had the wit to speak Valmieran, let alone any other language. But Bauska nodded.

Lurcanio and Mosco went right on talking, taking no notice of the two women. Krasta squeezed Bauska’s arm again to make the maidservant tell her what they were jabbering about. In due course, Bauska did: “Mosco says they’ll have to make sure the baby weds an Algarvian, come the day. In a few generations, he says, the Kaunian taint will be gone.”

“He says that, does he?” Krasta whispered back, outraged all over again. Everyone knew--everyone in her circles knew--Kaunian blood was infinitely superior to that of the swaggering barbarians from Algarve. But she did not have the nerve to throw that obvious truth in Lurcanio’s face. Instead, she tried a different ploy: “How happy will Captain Mosco’s wife be to learn of his little bastard?”

She wasn’t sure Mosco had a wife. By the way he flinched, though, he did. Lurcanio spoke in a flat voice, the one he used to give orders: “You will not say a word to Captain Mosco’s wife, milady.”

After gathering herself, Krasta looked defiance at him. In trying to keep her from playing the game of scandal, he had, for once, overreached himself. “I will bargain with you,” she said. “If Mosco acknowledges the bastard as his, if he supports the brat and Bauska as they deserve, his wife need not hear anything unfortunate. If he acts as so many men are in the habit of acting ...”

Lurcanio and Mosco spoke back and forth in Algarvian. Again, Krasta had no idea what they were saying. Bauska did, and let out an angry squawk. Pointing at Mosco, she said, “You certainly are the father! I don’t tomcat around, and you’ve proved you do.” Krasta didn’t know whether to believe her or not; she operated on the assumption that servants lied whenever they got the chance. But Bauska sounded convincing, and Mosco wouldn’t have an easy time proving she lied--not for some months, anyhow.

He thought of that, too. “If the child has hair the color of straw, it can starve for all of me,” he growled. But then, with a sour look at Krasta, he went on, “If I see signs I did in truth sire it, it shall not lack, nor shall its mother. This I would do for my own honor’s sake, but--”

“Men speak of honor more often than they show it,” Krasta said.

“You do not know Algarvians as well as you think,” Mosco snapped.

“You do not know men as well as you think,” Krasta retorted, which drew a startled gasp of laughter from Bauska and a couple of harsh chuckles from Lurcanio.

“I was trying to tell you--if that is so, the child and mother shall not lack,” Captain Mosco said. “And, if they do not lack, not a word of this shall go back to Algarve. Is it a bargain?”

“It is a bargain,” Krasta said at once. She did not ask Bauska’s opinion; Bauska’s opinion meant nothing to her. When her maidservant nodded, she scarcely noticed. Her contest was with the Algarvians--and she had done better against this pair than the Valmieran army had done against Mezentio’s men. If only we might have blackmailed the redheads instead of fighting them, she thought.

Lurcanio sensed that he and Mosco had come off second best. Waggling a finger under Krasta’s nose, he said, “Do remember, you have made this bargain with my aide, who has his own reasons for agreeing to it. If you seek to play such games with me, you shall not be happier for it afterwards, I promise you.”

Nothing could have been more nicely calculated to make Krasta want to try to punish him for his Algarvian arrogance .. . though having his child struck her as going too far. And Lurcanio had shown her he was not in the habit of bluffing. Disliking him for the steadfastness she was also compelled to respect, she made her head move up and down. “I understand,” she said.

“Good.” He was arrogant indeed. “You had better.” And then his manner changed. He could take off and put on charm as readily as he took off and redonned his kilt up in Krasta’s bedchamber. “Shall we go out this evening, milady, as well as tomorrow? Viscount Valnu, I hear, has promised one of his entertainments on the spur of the moment.” He raised an eyebrow. “If you are irked at me, I can always go alone.”

“And bring some ambitious little tart back here?” Krasta said. “Not on your life!”

Lurcanio laughed. “Would I do such a thing?”

“Of course you would,” Krasta said. “Mosco may not know men, but I do.” Lurcanio laughed again and did not presume to contradict her.

Pekka hurried around the house flicking at imaginary specks of dust. “Is everything ready?” she asked for the dozenth time.

“As ready as it can be,” her husband answered. Leino looked around the parlor. “Of course, we haven’t stuffed Uto into the rest crate yet.”

“You told me I’d get in trouble if I went in the rest crate,” Uto said indignantly. “That means you can’t put me in there either. It does, it does.” He drew himself up straight, as if defying Leino to deny it.

“Big people can do all sorts of things children can’t,” Leino said. Pekka coughed; she didn’t want this issue complicated. Leino coughed, too, in embarrassment, and yielded the point: “This time, you’re right. I’m not supposed to put you in the rest crate.” Under his breath, he added, “No matter how tempted I am.” Pekka heard that, and coughed again; Uto, fortunately, didn’t.

Before any new arguments could start--and arguments accreted around Uto as naturally as nacre around of bit of grit inside an oyster--someone knocked on the front door. Pekka jumped, then hurried to open it. There stood Ilmarinen and Siuntio. Pekka went down on one knee before them, as she would have before one of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. “Enter,” she said. “Your presence honors my home.” It was a commonplace greeting, but here she meant it from the bottom of her heart.

As the two elderly theoretical sorcerers stepped over the threshold, Leino also bowed. So did Uto, a beat slower than he should have. He stared at the mages from under his thick mop of black hair.

Ilmarinen laughed at that covert inspection. “I know about you, young fellow,” he said. “Aye, I do. And do you know how I know?” Uto shook his head. Ilmarinen told him: “Because I was just the same way when I was your size, that’s how.”

“I believe it,” Siuntio said, “and you haven’t changed much in all the years since, either.” Ilmarinen beamed, though Pekka wasn’t sure Siuntio had meant it as a compliment.

Gathering herself, she said, “Masters, I present to you my husband, Leino, and my son, Uto.” She turned to her family. “Here we have the mages Siuntio and Ilmarinen.”

Leino and Uto bowed again. Leino said, “It is indeed an honor to have two such distinguished men as my guests.” He smiled wryly. “It would be an even greater honor were I privileged to hear what they discuss with my wife, but I understand why that cannot be. Come on, Uto--we’re going next door to visit Aunt Elimaki and Uncle Olavin.”

“Why?” Uto had his eye on Ilmarinen. “I’d rather stay and listen to him. I already know what Auntie and Uncle will do.”

“We can’t listen to these mages and your mother talk, because they’ll be talking about secret things,” Leino said. Pekka thought that only more likely to make Uto want to stay, but her husband retrieved the situation by adding, “These things are so secret, even I’m not supposed to hear about them.”

Uto’s eyes widened. He’d known his parents didn’t--couldn’t--tell each other about everything they did, but he’d never seen that brought home so dramatically. He went with Leino to Pekka’s sister’s house without another word of protest.

“A likely lad,” Ilmarinen said. “Likely to make you want to pitch him into the sea a lot of the time, I shouldn’t wonder, but likely the other way, too.”

“I think you’re right on both counts,” Pekka said. “Sit. Make yourselves comfortable, I pray you. Let me bring refreshments.” She hurried into the kitchen, then returned with bread, sliced smoked salmon and onions and pickled cucumbers, and a pot of ale from Kajaani’s best brewer.

By the time she got back, Siuntio had spectacles on his nose and a Lagoan journal in his hand. He set it aside willingly enough to eat and to accept a mug of golden ale, but his eyes kept sliding over to it. Pekka noticed and said nothing. Ilmarinen noticed and twitted him: “The Lagoans watch us, and so you feel compelled to watch the Lagoans?”

“And what if I do?” Siuntio asked mildly. “This does, after all, touch upon our reason for coming to Kajaani.”

Not even Ilmarinen could find a way to disagree with him. “The vultures gather,” he said. “They clawed at the scraps of what we published. Now that we’ve stopped publishing, they claw at the scraps of what isn’t there.”

“How good a mage is this Fernao?” Pekka asked. “From the questions he asked me in his letter, he knows as much as I did a couple of years ago. The question is, can he ferret out the direction I’ve taken since then?”

“He is a first-rank mage, and he has Grandmaster Pinhiero’s ear back in Setubal,” Siuntio said, sipping at his ale.

“He is a sneaky dog, and would have stolen everything in Siuntio’s belt pouch had the two of them met,” Ilmarinen said. “He tried slitting mine, too, but I’m an old sinner myself and not so easy to befool.”

“He came to us openly and innocently,” Siuntio said. Ilmarinen made a rude noise. Siuntio corrected himself: “Openly, at any rate. But how many mages from how many kingdoms are sniffing at the trail of what we have?”

“Even one could be too many, if he served King Swemmel or King Mezentio,” Pekka said. “We don’t know yet how much power lurks at the heart of this link between the two laws or how to unleash whatever there is, but others with the same idea might pass us on the way, and that would be very bad.”

Ilmarinen looked east. “Arpad of Gyongyos has able mages, too.” He looked west. “And Fernao is not the only good one in the stable of Vitor of Lagoas. Gyongyos hates us because we block her way across the islands of the Bothnian Ocean.”

“Lagoas does not hate us,” Siuntio said.

“Lagoas doesn’t need to hate us,” Ilmarinen answered. “Lagoas is our neighbor, so she can covet what we have without bothering to get excited about it. And we and the Lagoans have fought our share of wars over the years.”

“Lagoas would have to be mad to fight us at the same time as she wars with Algarve,” Pekka said. “We outweigh her even more than Mezentio’s kingdom does.”

“If she were ahead of us on this path you mentioned, that might not matter so much,” Siuntio said.

“And she is at war, and kingdoms at war do crazy things,” Ilmarinen added. “And the Lagoans are cousins to the Algarvians, which gives them a good head start on craziness by itself, if anyone wants to know what I think.”

“Kaunians are proud because they’re an old folk, as we are,” Siuntio said. “Algarvic peoples are proud because they’re new. That doesn’t make them crazy, but it does make them different from us.”

“Anyone who’s enough different from me is surely crazy--or surely sane, depending,” Ilmarinen said.

Pekka declined to rise to that. She went on with Siuntio’s though: “And Unkerlanters are proud because they aren’t Kaunian or Algarvic. And Gyongyosians, I think, are proud because they aren’t like anyone else at all. When it comes to that, they’re like us, but no other way I can think of.”

“They’re much uglier than we are,” Ilmarinen said. Siuntio sent him a reproachful look. He bore up under it. “They cursed well are--those overmuscled bodies, that tawny yellow hair sprouting every which way like dried-out weeds.” He paused. “Their women do look better than their men, I will say that.”

And what do ou know of Gyongyosian women? The question stood on the end of Pekka’s tongue, but she didn’t ask it. Something in Ilmarinen’s expression warned her that he would tell her more than she wanted to hear. He had, after all, been attending mages’ meetings longer than she’d been alive. Instead, she said, “We have to learn more ourselves, and we have to be careful while we’re doing it.”

“Oh, indeed,” Siuntio said. “There you have in the compass of an acorn shell one of the reasons for our journey from Yliharma.”

Ilmarinen glanced over to him. “Aside from gulping down Mistress Pekka’s excellent food and guzzling her ale, I thought that was the reason we came to Kajaani.”

“Not quite,” Siuntio said. “I have been pondering the implications of your truly astonishing insight into the inverse nature of the relationship between die laws of similarity and contagion.” He bowed in his seat. “I would never have thought of such a thing, not if I examined the results of Mistress Pekka’s experiment for a hundred years. But once furnished with the insight that sprang from a mind more clever than mine, I have tried to examine some of the avenues down which we may hope to follow it.”

“Look out,” Ilmarinen said to Pekka. “The more humble he sounds, the more dangerous he is.”

Siuntio took no notice of Ilmarinen. Pekka got the idea that Siuntio had a lot of practice taking no notice of Ilmarinen. From his belt pouch, Siuntio drew out three sheets of paper. He kept one and gave one to each of his fellow theoretical sorcerers. “I hope you will not hesitate to point out any flaws you may find in the reasoning, Mistress Pekka,” he said. “I do not give Ilmarinen the same warning, for I know he will not hesitate.”

“Truth is truth,” Ilmarinen said. “Everything else is fair game.” He donned a pair of spectacles to help him read. After a little while, he grunted. After another little while, he grunted again, louder, and looked over the tops of the spectacles at Siuntio. “Why, you old fox.”

Pekka made slower going of the lines of complex symbols Siuntio had given her. About a third of the way down the closely written sheet, she exclaimed, “But this would mean--” and broke off, for the conclusion to which Siuntio was leading her seemed one only a maniac could embrace.

But he nodded. “Aye, it would, or I think it would, could we but find a way to do it. Believe me, I was quite as surprised as you.”

“You old fox,” Ilmarinen repeated. “This is why you’re the best in the business. Nobody pays attention to the details the way you do--nobody. If I had a hat on, I’d take it off to you.”

Pekka worked her way down to the bottom of the sheet. “This is amazing,” she said. “It’s elegant, too, which argues that it ought to be true. I find no flaws in the logic, none whatever. But that I don’t find them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Experiment is an even better test of truth than elegance.”

She hoped she hadn’t offended the master mage, and breathed a sigh of relief when Siuntio grinned. “Truly you will go far in your craft,” he told her, and she inclined her head in thanks. He went on, “Some of the required experiments may--will--be difficult to formulate.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Pekka said. “Why--” She explained an idea that had come to her while she was nearing the end of Siuntio’s work.

Now Siuntio dipped his head to her. To her surprise, so did Ilmarinen, who said, “Well, well. I wouldn’t have come up with that.”

“Nor I,” Siuntio agreed. “You deserve to be the one to try it, Mistress Pekka. In the meanwhile--for I can see that it will take some preparation--Ilmarinen and I will acquaint Raahe and Alkio and Piilis with our progress, for the three of us seem to have drawn somewhat ahead of them. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Aye.” Pekka knew she sounded dazed. The two finest theoretical sorcerers in Kuusamo had just let her know they thought she belonged in their company. All things considered, she decided she’d earned the right to sound a little dazed.

Back in his study, Brivibas labored over yet another article on the bygone days of the Kaunian Empire. By immersing himself in the past, Vanai’s grandfather did what he could to ignore the unpleasant present. Vanai wished she could find such an escape for herself.

She longed for escapes of all sorts, escape from Major Spinello chief among them. She glanced back toward the study. Brivibas would not come out till suppertime and would do his best to ignore her while they ate. She had hours in which to try her spell, the casting of which would take only a few minutes. Her grandfather would be none the wiser, and what he did not know he could not tell.

As Vanai opened the book of classical Kaunian sorcerous lore, she laughed without much humor and bowed in the direction of the study. “You have not trained me in vain, my grandfather,” she murmured, “even if I use my knowledge to ends different from yours.”

Though she was no trained mage, the spell before her looked simple enough. She’d had no trouble getting daffodil root from Tamulis the druggist; to this day, the boiled root was a simple preventive against bladder pains, and Brivibas had reached an age where it was easy to imagine him suffering from such. And Vanai’s mother had owned a set of silver earrings, necklace, and bracelet set with sea-green beryls. Taking an earring from the dusty jewelry case without her grandfather noticing had been simplicity itself.

“Now,” she said, gathering herself, “to hope this proves a true spell.” There lay the rub, as she knew only too well. However loath Brivibas was to admit it, the ancient Kaunians had been a superstitious lot, believing in all manner of demons modern thaumaturgy proved nonexistent. Some of what they’d reckoned magic, too, was nothing but imagination run wild. Too many of their spells gave no results when worked by--or against--skeptical moderns.

Vanai shrugged. One way or another, she’d learn something. I can write a paper afterwards, she thought. But she did not want to write a paper. She only wanted Major Spinello gone.

As the classical text recommended, she’d made a crude straw image of her Algarvian tormentor. Soaking the top of the image’s head in red ink showed its model came from Mezentio’s kingdom. Now that the ink had dried, Vanai held the image in her left hand. With her right, she stirred a bowl of water in which she’d boiled the daffodil root. As she cast the image into the bowl, she called out the classical Kaunian invocation from the text: “Devil, begone from my house! Devil, begone from my door!”

Devil, begone from my bed, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud--she wanted to scream it. But the charm said, Follow exactly what is written, and thou shalt surely gain thy desire: and this hath been proved in our time. She would not deviate, not yet. If the charm failed her (which she knew to be only too likely), she would think about what to do next.

For now, she took the image out of the bowl of infused water and dried it on a rag. Some of the red ink had smeared, which made the straw man look badly wounded. Vanai’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predatory grin. She didn’t mind that. No, she didn’t mind that at all.

Once the image was dry enough to suit her, she laid the beryl on its ink-stained chest. “Beryl is the stone that driveth away enemies,” she intoned. “Beryl is the stone that maketh them meek and mild and obedient to the operator’s will.” And my will is that he go away and never trouble me again, or any other Kaunian either.

When she was done, she threw the image and the rag on which she’d dried it into the cookfire. For one thing, she hoped that would hurt Spinello, too. For another, it got rid of the evidence. Like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men took a dim view of those they had defeated practicing sorcery against them. After the image had gone up in smoke, she poured down the privy the daffodil root and the water in which she had boiled it. The earring went back into the case from which it had come, the book of charms onto its shelf.

As she set about peeling and slicing parsnips to add to the pot of bean soup simmering above the fire, she wondered if she’d just wasted her time. Also like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men were warded against their enemies’ magecraft. And she didn’t know whether she’d truly practiced magecraft or simply tried to use one of her ancestors’ outworn, mistaken beliefs.

But she hoped. Oh, how she hoped.

Brivibas, as usual these days, was taciturn over supper. He’d given up lecturing her and reproving her, and had no idea how to talk to her in any more nearly normal, more nearly equal way. Or maybe, she thought as she watched him spoon up the soup, he had so many nasty things he wanted to tell her, he simply couldn’t decide which one to shout out first and so swallowed all of them. However that worked, his silence suited her.

Major Spinello did not visit her the next day. She hadn’t expected that he would; she’d come to know the rhythms of his lust better than she wanted to. Knowing them at all, for that matter, was knowing them better than she wanted to. When he stayed away the day after that, she began to hope. When he stayed away the day after that, too, her heart sang a hymn of freedom inside her.

That made the peremptory, unmistakably Algarvian knock on the door the following morning all the more devastating. Brivibas, who had been examining one of the antiquities in the parlor, let out a disdainful sniff and retreated across the courtyard to his study. He slammed the door behind him as if taking refuge in a besieged fortress.

He would be long since dead, were I not doing this, Vanai reminded herself. But her steps dragged even more than usual as she made her way to the door. “Took you long enough,” Spinello said. “You don’t want to keep me waiting, you know, not if you want to keep your grandfather breathing.”

“I am here,” Vanai said dully. “Do what you will.”

He took her back to her bedchamber and did exactly that. And then, because he hadn’t done it for longer than usual, he wanted to do it again. When he didn’t rise to the occasion quite so promptly as he’d hoped he would, Vanai had to help him. Of all the things he made her do, she despised that most of all. If I bite down hard, she thought, not for the first time--for far from the first time--the redheads will slay me and my grandfather, and the powers above only know what they’ll do to the rest of the Kaunians in Oyngestun. And so she refrained, though the temptation got stronger every time.

At last, after what seemed like forever, Spinello gasped his way to a second completion. He preened and strutted as he got back into his kilt and tunic. “I know I’m spoiling you for every other man,” he said, meaning it as a boast.

Vanai cast down her eyes. If Spinello wanted to think that maidenly modesty and not disgust, she would let him. “Aye, I think you are,” she murmured. If he wanted to think that agreement rather than disgust. . . again, she would let him.

He left Brivibas’ house whistling cheerfully, the picture of sated indolence. Vanai barred the door after him. She went back to the house’s crowded bookshelves, to the text from which she’d taken the classical spell of repulsion. She’d hoped that, because it was so old, Spinello would not be warded against it. Maybe he was. Or maybe the spell, like so many from the days of the old Empire, had no real value. Either way, she wanted to throw the book into the fire or drop it down the privy.

As she had when pleasuring Spinello, she refrained. She’d made sure she put the text back exactly where she’d got it. If it went missing, Brivibas would know and would hound her without mercy till it turned up or till she explained why it couldn’t. Or he might think Spinello had stolen it. If anything could rouse her grandfather to violence, a purloined book might.

Spinello returned three days later--he probably needed extra rest after his unusual exertion during his previous visit--and then again two days after that. In his own way, he was nearly as regular and methodical as Brivibas. Vanai cursed the classical Kaunians under her breath, and sometimes above it. Her grandfather remained convinced his ancient ancestors had been the font of all knowledge. Maybe so, but what they’d reckoned magecraft couldn’t keep the Algarvian major out of her bed. As far as she was concerned, that made them useless--worse than useless, for she’d built up her hopes relying on their wisdom, only to see those hopes dashed.

Two days later, Spinello came back, and then two days after that. By then, Vanai had resigned herself to the failure of her ploy. She let him do what he wanted. He did leave more quickly these days than he had at first; he’d discovered she didn’t care to listen to his tales of Algarvian triumphs in Unkerlant, and so had stopped regaling her with them. He allowed her all sorts of small courtesies, but not the larger one of deciding whether she wanted to give herself to him.

And, after another two days, he returned once more. This time, to her surprise, he had a couple of ordinary Algarvian troopers at his back. Horror blazed through her. Was he going to give her to them as a reward for good service? If he tried to do that, Vanai would ...

She realized she didn’t have to decide what she would do then. One of the troopers carried a crate holding four jars of wine; the other was festooned with sausage links and cradled a ham in his arms. Spinello spoke to them in Algarvian. They set the food and drink inside the front hall, then went away.

Spinello came in and closed the door behind himself. As he was barring it, Vanai found her voice: “What’s all this?”

“Farewell gift,” Spinello answered lightly. “My superiors, in their wisdom, have decided I am better suited to fighting the Unkerlanters than to administering a Forthwegian village. It will be boring, I expect--no antiquities, and mostly homely women--but I am the king’s to command. You will have to take your chances with the constables who take over for me. But”--he slid a hand under her tunic--”I am not gone yet.”

Vanai let him lead her back to her bedchamber. When he had her straddle him, she did it joyfully. It was not the joy of fulfilled desire, but it was the joy of a fulfilled desire, and surprisingly close to the other--closer than she’d ever come with Spinello, of that she was certain.

Had he wanted a second go then, she would have given it to him without much resentment, knowing it would be the last. But after she’d brought him to his peak, he caressed her for a moment, then patted her bottom to show he wanted her to let him up. She did, and he began to dress.

“I’ll miss you, curse me if I won’t,” he said, bending down to kiss her. An eyebrow quirked. “You won’t miss me a bit, and curse me if I don’t know that, but I brought the meat and wine to give you something to remember me by.”

“I will always remember you,” Vanai said truthfully as she got back into her own clothes. Now, perhaps, she might not remember him quite as she would have before his gift--or not to the same degree, at any rate. She might even hope he would live when he went into battle--though she might not, too.

To her relief, he didn’t ask her anything about that. He kissed and fondled her at the doorway before going out. She closed the door and barred it. Then she stood in the entry hall for a couple of minutes, scratching her head as she stared down at the sausages. Had her spell got Spinello sent off to fight King Swemmel’s men, or was this only a coincidence? If it was only a coincidence, had some coincidences like it convinced the ancient Kaunians they had an effective cantrip?

How could she be sure? Had she been her grandfather, she would have gone to the shelves of dusty journals to find out what historians and historical mages had written. But she was not Brivibas. Knowing how she’d got free of Spinello didn’t matter to her. Knowing that she’d got free did. There in the crowded little hallway, she began to dance.

For once, Corporal Leudast looked at behemoths with admiration rather than dread. These behemoths belonged to his own side and were trotting into action for King Swemmel and against the Algarvian invaders. “Stomp ‘em flat!” he shouted at the Unkerlanter soldiers riding the big beasts.

“Poor tactics, Corporal,” Captain Hawart said. “More efficient to blaze the redheads down or toss eggs onto their heads.” But having delivered that admonition, he grinned. “I hope they stomp the buggers flat, too.”

“We’ve got fine big behemoths there to do it,” Sergeant Magnulf remarked. “I think they’re bigger than most of the ones the Algarvians breed.”

Hawart nodded. “I think you’re right. That’s the far western strain, bigger and fiercer than any the redheads or the Kaunians ever tamed. I wish we had more of them.” His grin faded. “I wish the size difference mattered more nowadays, too. With the weapons behemoths carry, it’s not body against body and horn against horn as often as it used to be.”

“Maybe not, sir,” Leudast said, “but if I don’t like medium-sized Algarvian behemoths coming at me, Mezentio’s men sure won’t like great big Unkerlanter behemoths coming at them.”

“Here’s hoping they don’t,” Hawart said. “Whatever we do, we’ve got to hold the corridor between Glogau and the rest of the kingdom. The Zuwayzin have stopped their push, but the Algarvians--” He broke off, his face grim.

Leudast wondered if anything could stop the Algarvians. Nothing had yet, or he and his comrades--those of them left alive--wouldn’t have been pushed so far back into Unkerlant. But new recruits in rock-gray tunics kept coming out of die training camps farther west. King Mezentio’s men occupied his own village along with countless others, but Unkerlant still held even more.

“Come on!” Captain Hawart shouted to the mix of veterans and new men making up his regiment. “Forward, and stick close to the behemoths. We need them to smash a hole in the enemy’s line, but they need us, too. If the redheads pop up out of the grass and blaze the men off those beasts, they aren’t any good to us by themselves.”

“Algarvian tactics,” Leudast remarked.

Sergeant Magnulf nodded. “The redheads had a long time to figure out how to put all the puzzle pieces together. We’re having to learn on the fly, and I think we’re doing a lot better than we were just after they hit us.”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “Nothing comes cheap for them these days.” But trying to hold back the Algarvians didn’t come cheap, either. As one who’d started fighting them in central Forthweg and was still fighting them here deep inside Unkerlant, Leudast understood that better than most.

“Forward!” Magnulf shouted, echoing Captain Hawart, and Leudast shouted, too, echoing his sergeant. And forward the Unkerlanter footsoldiers went, on the heels of their behemoths. In a way, such willingness to keep on counterattacking was surprising, considering how often such blows either came to nothing or were frittered away; Leudast remembered the fight for Pfreimd only too well. In another way, though ... A lot of the men who’d retaken Pfreimd only to have to yield it up again were by now dead or wounded. The fresh-faced young soldiers who’d replaced them didn’t realize how easily their superiors could throw their lives away for no good reason.

They’ll find out, Leudast thought. The ones who live will find out. The ones who died would find out, too, but the knowledge would do them no good. After another couple of strides, he wondered how much good it would do the ones who lived.

He pounded along, hunched forward at the waist to make himself as small a target as he could. Men who’d seen some fighting imitated him, and also imitated him in zigzagging frequently so as not to let any Algarvian footsoldiers grow too sure where they’d be in the next moment. Troopers newly pulled from their villages stood straight up and ran straight ahead. The ones who lived would soon learn better, and that lesson would actually do them some good.

Bursting eggs from the behemoths’ tossers tore up the wheatfield ahead. The Algarvians were supposed to have come that far, though no one on the Unkerlanter side seemed sure of exactly where they were. That struck Leudast as inefficient. Quite a few things about the way his side was fighting the war struck him as inefficient. But mentioning them struck him as efficient only in the sense that it would be an efficient way to get himself into trouble.

Sure as sure, a behemoth-rider threw up his arms and slid out of his seat to lie crumpled and still among stalks of wheat now going from green to gold. Leudast hadn’t seen whence the beam came. But a couple of Unkerlanters cried out “There!” and pointed to a spot in the field not far ahead of him.

A moment later, a beam blazed past his head, so close he could feel the heat on his cheek. He threw himself flat and scrambled forward through the grain. The rich smells of fertile soil and ripening wheat reminded him the harvest would be coming soon. Were he back in his village, were this a time of peace, he would follow the horse-drawn reaper, gathering up the grain it cut down. Now he wanted to cut down that Algarvian soldier who’d come so close to reaping him.

As he moved toward the spot where he thought the redhead hid, he tried to work out what the Algarvian would be doing. If he was a new man himself, he’d probably be running. But a veteran might well sit tight, knowing he was unlikely to escape and intent on doing all the damage he could before being hunted down and killed. The way this fellow had coolly blazed down the behemoth-rider argued that he knew what he was about.

Never had it crossed Leudast’s mind that the redhead might come hunting him. But the stalks of wheat parted in front of him, and there was the Algarvian, waxed mustachios all awry. He shouted something in his language and swung the business end of his stick toward Leudast.

He was smart and dangerous and very fast. But so was Leudast, and Leudast blazed first. A neat hole appeared in the redhead’s face, just below his right eye. The beam boiled his brains inside his skull; most of the back of his head blew out. He was dead before he crashed to the ground like a dropped sack of barley.

“Powers above,” Leudast muttered. Cautiously, he got to his feet and looked around to find out what had happened in the bigger fight while he and the Algarvian carried on their own private war. The Unkerlanter behemoths and his comrades were still going forward. He too hurried ahead.

Algarvian dragons fell out of the sky on the behemoths. But a couple of those dragons smashed to earth; the Unkerlanters manning the heavy sticks some of the behemoths carried were not caught napping. And Unkerlanter dragons, their scales painted the rock-gray of Leudast’s tunic, attacked the beasts gaudy in Algarve’s red, green, and white. The redheads hurt the troop of behemoths, but could not wreck it.

Here and there, little fires smoldered in the wheat. Had the wind been stronger, they would have grown and spread. A couple of them, one around the burning body of a dragon, were trying to spread anyhow. Leudast skirted them and ran on. He’d seen far worse things than fields afire.

More eggs began falling among his comrades, these not dropped from dragons but hurled by Algarvian egg-tossers behind the line. Leudast threw himself into a hole one of them had made in bursting. A moment later, after another burst close by, Sergeant Magnulf jumped into the same hole--and onto Leudast, who said, “Oof!”

“Sorry,” Magnulf said, though he didn’t sound very sorry. Leudast wasn’t unduly put out; Magnulf worried about saving his own neck first and everything else afterwards, as any sensible soldier would have. The sergeant went on, “Stinking redheads hit back faster than you wish they would, don’t they?”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “I wish I could say you were wrong.” He tried to look on the bright side: “We’re getting better at that ourselves, too. Our dragons gave them more than they wanted a little while ago.”

“I know, but they do it all the stinking time,” Magnulf said. “The whoresons have more crystals than we do, and they keep on talking into them.”

Shouts from ahead warned that the Algarvians were doing more than talking into their crystals. Leudast and Magnulf scrambled up to the edge of their hole and looked east. Behemoths and soldiers and eggs had flattened enough of the wheat to let them see troopers in tan kilts and tunics running toward them in loose order.

Leudast laughed out loud. “They didn’t do enough talking this time. Look, Sergeant--they didn’t bring any behemoths with ‘em, and we’ve still got some of ours.”

Magnulf’s eyes glowed. “Ha! They’ll pay for that.” Gloating anticipation filled his voice.

Pay for it the Algarvians did. The Unkerlanter behemoths’ heavy sticks blazed them down at a range from which the redheads could not hurt the beasts or their riders. Eggs from other behemoths’ tossers burst among the Algarvians, tossing some aside like broken dolls and making most of the rest go to earth to keep from suffering a like fate.

“Forward!” Captain Hawart called. Leudast heaved himself out of the hole and made for the Algarvians. So did Sergeant Magnulf. Almost without noticing they were doing it, they spread apart from each other, making themselves into less inviting targets for the enemy.

But the Algarvians were as quick to correct their own mistakes as they were to punish the Unkerlanters’. Reinforcements came to the rescue of the men the Unkerlanter attack had been on the edge of crushing, and those reinforcements included behemoths with redheads aboard. One thing Leudast had seen before was that Algarvian behemoth-riders went after their Unkerlanter counterparts the instant they spied them. So it was in this fight, too, and, with fewer behemoths backing them, King Swemmel’s footsoldiers faltered.

Shouting King Mezentio’s name, the Algarvians came on again, hot to retake the stretch of ground the Unkerlanters had wrested from them. But a flight of dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on them, dropping eggs on their behemoths and flaming their footsoldiers. Leudast shouted himself hoarse, or rather hoarser, for the smoke in the air had left his throat raw now for quite a while.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he was surprised to see the sun dipping toward the western horizon. The fighting had gone on all day, and he’d hardly noticed. Now he felt how worn and hungry and thirsty he was.

Unkerlanter reinforcements came up during the night. So did a little food. Leudast had more than a little food on him; he knew supplies were liable to be erratic. During the night, the wind shifted, as it had a way of doing as summer swung toward fall. It blew from out of the south, a cool breeze with a warning of rain in it.

Sure enough, at dawn gray clouds covered most of the sky. Eyeing them, Sergeant Magnulf said, “It’ll already be raining, I expect, down in the village I come from. Nothing wrong with that, you ask me.”

“No,” Leudast said. “Nothing wrong with that at all. Let’s see how the redheads like slogging through the mud. If the powers above are giving us an early winter, maybe they’ll give us a nasty winter, too.” He stared up at one of the few patches of blue sky he could see, hoping the powers were listening to him.

Along with a dozen of his comrades, Tealdo sheltered in a half-wrecked barn somewhere in southern Unkerlant. It was raining almost as hard inside the barn as it was outside. Tealdo and Trasone held a cloak above Captain Galafrone to keep water from dripping down onto the map the company commander was examining to try to figure out just where they were.

“Curse me if I know why I’m bothering,” Galafrone growled. “This miserable thing lies more often than it tells the truth.”

Trasone pointed to a line printed in red. “Sir, isn’t that the highway?” “That’s what the map says,” Galafrone answered. “I saw Unkerlanter roads during the Six Years’ War, but I thought they might have got better since. They were supposed to have got better since. But the stinking ‘highway’ is just another dirt track. Huzzah for Swemmel’s efficiency.”

“Mud track now,” Trasone said. His legs, like everyone else’s, were mud to the knees and beyond.

Tealdo said, “Maybe Swemmel’s efficient after all. Hard for us to go very far very fast if we bog down every step we take.”

Galafrone gave him a sour look. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny.”

“I didn’t mean it for a joke, sir,” Tealdo said. “I meant it for the truth.”

“They have as much trouble in this slop as we do,” Trasone said.

“What if they do?” Tealdo answered. “They’re not trying to go forward right now, or not so much. They’re only trying to hold us back.”

That produced a gloomy silence. At last, Captain Galafrone said, “We’ve got ‘em by the ears and we’ve got ‘em by the tail. Can’t very well let go now, can we?” He bent closer to the map, then swore. “I’ll be cursed if I don’t need spectacles to read the fornicating letters when they’re printed that fornicating small. Where in blazes is the town called Tannroda?”

Trasone and Tealdo both peered at the map--rather awkwardly, since they had to keep holding the cloak over it. Tealdo spotted the place first. He pointed with his free hand. “There, sir.”

“Ah.” Galafrone’s grunt held more weariness than satisfaction. “My thanks. Northwest, is it? Well, that makes a deal of sense--it’s in the direction of Cottbus. Once we take his capital away from him, King Swemmel won’t be so much of a much.” He folded up the map and put it back in his belt pouch. “Come on, boys. We’ve got to get moving. The Unkerlanters won’t wait for us.”

“Maybe they’ve all drowned in the mud,” Trasone said.

“Don’t I wish.” Galafrone grunted again. For the first time since the veteran had taken command of the company, Tealdo thought he saw his years telling on him. Galafrone made himself rally. “It’s too much to hope for, and you know it as well as I do. If we don’t shift ‘em, they won’t get shifted.”

“Maybe the Yaninans can do the job,” Tealdo said slyly as Galafrone started toward the open barn door.

The captain stopped and gave him a baleful look. “I wouldn’t pay you a counterfeit copper for a whole army of those chicken thieves. They think we’re supposed to do the fighting while they steal anything that isn’t spiked down. Only thing they’re good for is holding down quiet stretches of the line--and they’re not much good for that, either. Come on. We’ve wasted too much time here.”

Out they went. The rain was still coming down hard; Tealdo felt as if he’d been slapped in the face with a wet towel. More bedraggled Algarvians emerged from the farmhouse, which had taken an even worse beating than the barn. Still others were resting in haystacks and under trees. Like Tealdo, they all squelched forward toward Tannroda and, somewhere beyond it, Cottbus.

Every step was an effort. Tealdo, like most of the company, stayed on what was called the highway for lack of a suitably malodorous word. Others insisted moving through the fields to either side was easier. It probably didn’t make much difference, one way or the other. Mud was mud.

They slogged past a ley-line caravan whose forwardmost several cars no longer floated above the ground but lay on it, canted at drunken angles. The Algarvian soldiers who’d been riding in those cars now stood around in the mud--except for the ones who lay in it, hurt when the caravan went awry.

“Poor dears,” Tealdo said. “They’ll get wet.”

Trasone’s laughter had a nasty edge. “They look like new men--probably never saw an Unkerlanter in all their born days. They’ve been drinking wine and pinching pretty girls back in Algarve while we’ve had to go out and work for a living. Whoresons might as well find out what it’s like over here.” He spat into the muck. The drumming rain drowned his spittle.

They hadn’t gone much farther before the reason the caravan had come to grief became obvious. Three or four Algarvian mages stood around and in a large hole in the ground that was rapidly turning into a pond. A colonel shouted at them: “Hurry up and fix the damage to this ley line, powers below eat you all! I have men to move, and how am I supposed to move them with the line broken?” He stamped his booted foot, which only made it sink into the soggy ground.

“Try walking,” Tealdo called, confident the rain would cloak him. And, sure enough, the colonel whirled in his direction, but couldn’t pick him out from among the other vague, dripping shapes.

In any case, the officer was more concerned with the mages, and they with him. One of them said, “My lord Colonel, the egg the cursed Unkerlanters buried and then burst did too good a job of wrecking the line for us to repair it right away. It wasn’t meant to try to absorb so much energy all at once. And the Unkerlanters use different spells from ours to maintain the line--and they’ve done their best to obscure those, too. It’ll be awhile before you’re gliding again.”

“How long awhile?” the colonel ground out.

Before answering, the mage put his head together with his colleagues. “A day, certainly,” he said then. “Maybe two.”

“Two?” the colonel yelped. He waved his arms and stamped his foot again and loosed some extravagant curses, as any Algarvian might have. None of that did him any good. Being under his command, the mages had to try to soothe him instead of telling him what they thought of him, which Tealdo knew he would have wanted to do had he been in their place.

“Come on,” Galafrone said. “They may be stuck, but we’re not--quite.”

On the footsoldiers went, leaving the sabotaged ley line behind them. After another mile or so, the road became an even worse bog than it had been. Dragging himself out of the ooze, Tealdo discovered the going was better--not good, nowhere close to good, but better--in the field to one side.

“Something else is buggered up ahead,” Trasone predicted. “You wait and see--we’ll find out what it is.”

They’d gone only a little farther when the wide-shouldered bruiser proved himself a good prophet. There ahead were half a dozen behemoths stuck belly-deep in the clinging mud. “Hurrah,” Tealdo said. “First they ruined the road for us, then they went and ruined it for themselves, too.”

“They’re in so deep, they’re liable to drown there,” Trasone said. One of the trapped behemoths evidently thought the same, for it lifted its head and let out a loud, frightened bellow. It thrashed in the mud, trying to get free, but succeeded only in miring itself even worse.

“There, precious, there.” One of the behemoth-riders was down in the mud with the beast, doing his best to keep it calm. Tealdo would not have wanted that fellow’s job, not for anything. The behemoths’ crews had already done everything they could to lighten their animals, stripping off not only egg-tossers and heavy sticks but also the chainmail coats the behemoths wore. As far as Tealdo could tell, none of that had done much good.

A troop of Algarvian horsemen rode up across the field. Not having been churned by the behemoths, the ground there held their weight better than the alleged road would have. The horsemen had ropes with them. The men who rode the lead behemoth began making lines fast to their beast. “Do they really think they’ll be able to pull him out?” Tealdo asked.

“If they don’t, they’re going to a cursed lot of trouble for nothing,” Trasone answered.

Tealdo hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about putting ropes around a behemoth to get it out of the mud. Unlike him, though, the men who rode the great animals looked to have considered the problem before, for they went about the business as matter-of-factly as he would have built a fire.

“Go!” a behemoth-rider shouted to the horsemen. They urged their animals forward, but could not move the heavy behemoth. “Go!” the rider shouted again. The horses had no better luck the second time. The behemoth-rider threw up his arms in despair. Then his eye fell on the men of Captain Galafrone’s company slogging past. “Lay hold of the ropes and lend a hand, will you?” he asked--begged, actually.

Had he tried to order Galafrone’s soldiers to help, Tealdo was sure the company commander would have consigned him to the powers below. As things were, Galafrone said nothing but, “Aye--needs doing,” and ordered his men to the ropes.

With a company of soldiers adding their strength to that of the horses, the behemoth came up, ever so slowly, out of the clinging mud. The men who rode him cheered themselves hoarse. Then they fastened the ropes to the next behemoth so that the footsoldiers and horses could pull him free, too.

Getting all six of the great beasts out of the ooze took all day. And, by the time the dripping sky began to darken, Tealdo was more worn than he had been after any battle in which he’d ever fought. Too weary to eat, he wrapped his blanket around himself, lay down not far from where he’d labored so hard, and slept like a dead man.

Someone kicked him awake, not unkindly, at dawn the next day. A field kitchen had found the company sometime in the night; he wolfed down a couple of bowls of hot barley porridge with bits of unidentified meat floating in it. In his civilized days, he would have turned up his nose at such coarse fare. Now it brought him back to life. He resumed the long tramp westward with more spirit than he would have thought possible before he ate.

“We’re going to be late to Tannroda,” Galafrone muttered discontentedly. “Powers above, we’re already late to Tannroda.”

When they got to the town, it didn’t seem worth reaching. The Unkerlanters must have fought hard there; it looked as if a giant had set it afire and then stamped out the flames with his feet. A military constable asked Galafrone to which regiment his men belonged. The captain told him, looking apprehensive.

But the fellow just nodded and said, “You’re only the third company through--this wretched weather is playing hob with everyone. Use the northwest road--that one there. The Unkerlanters, curse ‘em, are mounting another counterattack.”

“I thought King Swemmel was supposed to be running short of men by now,” Tealdo said as he and his comrades slogged on to try to throw the Unkerlanters back yet again.

“You’ve been in the army awhile now,” Trasone answered. “Don’t you know better than to believe everything you hear yet?” Tealdo pondered, grunted, nodded, and kept marching.

Tired as usual after a long day’s labor, Leofsig made his way through the streets of Gromheort back toward his home. He stepped carefully; the pavement was wet and slippery from a shower that had passed through earlier in the afternoon. He was wet from the shower, too, which meant he was a little less filthy than on most days. He thought about heading for the baths, but decided not to bother. The sooner he got home, the sooner he could eat and sleep. Nobody was as clean as in the days before the war.

He’d got more than halfway home before he noticed the new broadsheet pasted to walls and fences and trees. The Algarvians had put it up, of course--the penally for a Forthwegian putting up a broadsheet was death, and the penalty for a Kaunian probably something worse. But, regardless of whether the Algarvians had put it up, it showed the tough, jowly image of Bung Plegmund, arguably Forthweg’s greatest ruler, and a troop of hard-looking soldiers carrying spears and bows and dressed in the styles of four hundred years before.

PLEGMUND SMASHED THE UNKERLANTERS, read the legend below the illustration. YOU CAN, TOO! JOIN PLEGMUND’S BRIGADE. BEAT BACK BARBARISM. Smaller letters gave the address of the recruiting station and also warned, No Kaunians will be accepted into this Brigade.

With a snort, Leofsig walked on. He had a hard time imagining Kaunians wanting to join a brigade under the control of people intent on grinding their noses in the dirt. For that matter, he had a hard time imagining Forthwegians wanting to join a brigade under Algarvian control. Who would do such a daft thing? Somebody one jump ahead of the constables, maybe. He wished the Algarvians joy of trying to make such recruits into soldiers.

A blond woman about his own age stepped out from between a couple of buildings as he went by. “Sleep with me?” she called, doing her best to make her voice alluring. Her tunic and trousers clung so tightly, they might have been painted onto her.

Leofsig started to shake his head and walk on. Then, to his dismay, he realized he recognized her. “You’re Doldasai,” he blurted. “My father used to cast books for yours.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he had them back. Better for both of them if he’d pretended he didn’t know her and gone on his way. Too late for that now. She hung her head; she must have wished he’d kept his mouth shut, too. “You see my shame,” she said. If she remembered Leofsig’s name, she didn’t want to use it. “You see my people’s shame.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, which was true and useless at the same time.

“Do you know the worst of it?” Doldasai said. “The worst of it is, you can still have me if you pay me. I need the silver. My whole family needs the silver, and the Algarvians won’t let any of us make it any other way.” Nasty promises glowed in her blue-gray eyes, promises of things he hadn’t done, perhaps of things he’d scarcely imagined.

And he was tempted, and hated himself for being tempted. When he still hoped Felgilde would let him slip his hand under her tunic--she hadn’t yet--why wouldn’t he have been tempted to find out what all he’d been missing? Of itself, his hand slid toward his belt pouch.

Doldasai made a peculiar noise, half bitter mirth, half. . . disappointment? Leofsig gave her a couple of coins. “Here. Take this,” he said. “I wish I could afford to give you more. I don’t want anything from you.” That wasn’t quite true, but it kept things simpler.

She stared down at the small silver coins, then abruptly turned her back on him. “Curse you,” she said, her voice thick and muffled. “I didn’t think anyone could make my cry any more, not after everything I’ve had to do. Go on, Leofsig”--she knew who he was, all right--”and if the powers above are kind, we’ll never see each other again.”

He wanted to help her with something more than a little money. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t think of what he might do. And so, ingloriously, he left. He didn’t look back over his shoulder, either, for fear he would see Doldasai propositioning some other Forthwegian who might part with cash for a few minutes’ pleasure.

“You made good time coming home,” Elfryth remarked as she unbarred the front door to let him in.

“Did I?” he said, not wanting to tell his mother he’d fled Doldasai as the Forthwegian army had ended up fleeing the Algarvians.

“Aye, you did.” To his relief, his mother didn’t seem to notice any false note in his voice. “You have time to wash a little”--which meant he remained rank in spite of the rain shower--”and drink a glass of wine before supper. Conberge even came up with some meat to mix in with the peas and beans and pulses.”

“What kind of meat?” Leofsig asked suspiciously. “Roof rabbit?” He meowed.

Elfryth shook her head. “The butcher called it mutton, but I think it’s got to be goat. It’s been in the pot for hours, and it isn’t close to tender yet. But even tough meat is better than no meat at all.”

Leofsig couldn’t argue with her. He wondered how long it had been since Doldasai and her family had eaten meat. His family was going through hard times. Hers was going through catastrophe. He grabbed a towel off the rack and went off to use the pitcher and basin in his room. It wouldn’t be a bath, but would be better than nothing.

Ealstan looked up from a page of work: not problems from their father, for once, but verses of a poem. “Why the grim face?” Leofsig’s younger brother asked.

“I didn’t know I had one,” Leofsig answered as he started to wash.

“Well, you do,” Ealstan said. “How come?”

“Do you want to know why?” Leofsig considered. Ealstan wasn’t a baby anymore. “I’ll tell you why. I ran into Daukantis’ daughter coming home--remember, the olive-oil merchant?” He told the tale in a few words.

Ealstan clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s hard,” he said. “I’ve heard other stories like it, but not anybody we know. You ought to tell Father--if anyone can do anything for them, he can.”

“Aye, that’s so,” Leofsig said through the towel he was using to dry his face. He looked over it at his brother. “It’s a good idea, in fact. You’re getting a man’s wits faster than I did, I think.”

“Living under the redheads pushes everybody along faster--except for the people it pushes under, like the Kaunians,” Ealstan said. “Did you see the broadsheet for what the Algarvians are calling Plegmund’s Brigade?”

“Aye, I saw it. You’d have to be blind not to see it; they’ve slapped up enough copies,” Leofsig answered. “Disgusting, if you ask me.”

“Well, I think so, too, but Sidroc says he’s dead keen on joining.” Ealstan held up a hand before Leofsig could burst like an egg. “I don’t think he loves Mezentio. I think he just wants to go out there and kill something, and this would give him the chance.”

“What do Father and Uncle Hengist have to say about it?” Leofsig asked.

“Uncle Hengist was shouting at him just before you got here,” Ealstan said. “He thinks Sidroc’s flown out of his bush. Father hasn’t said anything that I know of; maybe he figures Sidroc is Hengist’s worry.”

With practicality so cold-blooded it alarmed even him, Leofsig said, “Maybe he ought to join Plegmund’s Brigade. If he’s off marching on Cottbus, he can’t very well tell the Algarvian constables here that I broke out of the captives’ camp.”

His brother looked horrified. Before Ealstan could say anything, Conberge came by in the courtyard, calling, “Supper’s ready.” Ealstan hurried off to the dining room with transparent relief. As Leofsig followed, he decided he was just as well pleased not to have that conversation go any further, too.

Whatever the meat in the stew was, it wasn’t mutton. He knew it at the first bite. It might have been goat. For all he could prove, it might have been mule or camel or behemoth. It didn’t taste spoiled; he’d had to choke down spoiled meat in the army and in the captives’ camp. He wouldn’t have taken Felgilde to a fancy eatery to dine off this, but it helped fill the enormous hole in his belly.

He kept glancing over at Sidroc. His cousin seemed as intent on eating as he was himself. Leofsig wondered if he really wanted Sidroc to join the Algarvians’ puppet force. If Sidroc joined of his own free will, what could be wrong with that?

After a sip of wine, Leofsig s father turned to Uncle Hengist and remarked, “The news sheets talk about heavy fighting in the west.”

“Aye, Hestan, they do,” Hengist said. Neither of them looked at Sidroc. Hestan was less ostentatious about not looking at him than Hengist was. Up until today, Hengist would probably have added some comment about how the Algarvians were still moving forward in spite of the hard fighting. Now he just nodded, still not looking at his son. He wanted Sidroc to think about what hard fighting meant. The trouble with that was, Sidroc had never experienced it. Leofsig, who had, hoped he never did again.

In a musing voice, Hestan went on, “Heavy fighting’s bound to mean a lot of men dead, a lot of men hurt.”

“Aye,” Hengist said again. Again, he said no more. A couple of days before, things would have been different, sure enough.

Sidroc spoke up: “A lot of Unkerlanters stomped down into the mud, too. You’d best believe that.” He glowered at Hestan, as if defying him to disagree.

But Leofsig’s father only nodded. “Oh, no doubt. Still, would King Mezentio want Forthwegians to do his fighting for him if he weren’t running low on redheads?”

“If we don’t show we can fight, how will we ever get our kingdom back?” Sidroc said. “If you ask me, that’s what Plegmund’s Brigade is all about.”

Now no one else at the table wanted to look toward Sidroc. “Fighting is all very well,” Leofsig said at last, “but you have to remember for whom you’re fighting and against whom you ought to be fighting.” He didn’t see how he could put it any more plainly than that.

Ealstan found a way. Very quietly, he asked, “Cousin, who killed your mother? Was it Swemmel’s men or Mezentio’s?”

Uncle Hengist drew in a sharp breath. Sidroc stared. In spite of everything he could do--and he fought hard--his face began to work. His eyes screwed shut. He let out a great sob. Tears poured down his cheeks. “Curse you, Ealstan!” he shouted in a grief-choked voice. “Powers below eat you, starting at the toes!” He sprang to his feet and ran blindly from the room. A moment later, the door to the bedchamber he shared with his father slammed. In the silence enveloping the table, Leofsig could hear his weeping even through the thick oak portal.

Leofsig leaned toward Ealstan and murmured, “That was well done.”

“Aye, lad, it was,” Uncle Hengist said. He shook himself. “Sometimes we lose track of what matters. You did right to remind Sidroc--and me, too, I’ll own.”

“Did I?” Ealstan sounded not at all convinced.

“Aye, son, you did,” Hestan said. Elfryth and Conberge also nodded.

Not even his family’s reassurance seemed to persuade Ealstan. “Well, it’s done, and I can’t change it,” he said with a sigh. “I just hope Sidroc won’t hate me in the morning the way he does now.”

He was looking at Leofsig. Leofsig started to ask why it mattered what Sidroc thought. But that answered itself. If Sidroc decided he really hated Ealstan, he was liable to decide he really hated Leofsig, too. Even if he also hated the Algarvians, who could guess what he might do in such a state? “I hope he won’t, too,” Leofsig said.