Into the Darkness

17.

When he served the Sibian Navy, Cornelu had rarely ridden Eforiel to the south, toward the land of the Ice People. Sibiu had worried—and had had reason to worry—about Algarve. Almost all the time he’d spent aboard his leviathan had been in the channel between his island kingdom and the mainland of Derlavai to the north.

Now Lagoas had sent him and Eforiel down toward the austral continent. He wished the powers that be in Setubal had chosen to send him a couple of months earlier. Despite his rubber suit, despite the sorcery the Lagoan mages had added to the suit, he was chilly. Of course, the waters around the land of the Ice People weren’t warm even in high summer, such as it was down near the bottom of the world. Now… the sea hadn’t started freezing yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

Cornelu’s teeth might have felt like chattering, but Eforiel thought the Lagoans had sent her (and, incidentally, her rider) to a fine restaurant. For reasons mages had never been able to fathom, fish flourished in the frigid waters of the Narrow Sea. Eforiel put on more blubber with every mile she swam. It did a better job of keeping her warm than rubber and mage-craft did for her master.

Thanks to the Lagoans, he’d taught her a new trick. At his tapped command, she stood on her tail, thrusting the front part of her body up out of the water. That let Cornelu, who clung not far back of her blowhole, see farther than he could have from a couple of feet above the surface of the sea.

He sighed. The Lagoans were clever, no doubt about it. They hadn’t invaded his kingdom. They had taken him in as an exile. He wished he liked them better. He wished he liked them at all.

Whether he liked them or not, he preferred them to the Algarvians, whom he actively despised. Lagoas being the only kingdom still in the fight against Algarve, she perforce had his allegiance. He urged Eforiel up on her tail once more. Was that smoke he saw, there to the southwest?

“Aye, it is,” he said, and urged the leviathan toward it.

Mizpah was falling. Had the Yaninans put their full effort into the attack on the Lagoan towns at the edge of the land of the Ice People, Mizpah would have fallen long since. But King Tsavellas kept most of his men at home, to watch the border with Unkerlant. Cornelu wasn’t sure whether that made Tsavellas wise or foolish. King Swemmel was likely to go to war against Yanina. If he did, though, a few regiments wouldn’t do much to slow him down. They might have been used to better purpose on the austral continent.

King Tsavellas had chosen otherwise, though. Because of that, the Lagoans and their nomad allies still had a grip on Mizpah, even if the Yaninans finally had fought their way into egg-tosser range, which meant the outpost would not hold much longer. But the Lagoans had the chance to salvage some of what they thought important from Mizpah before it fell.

“A fugitive king and a mage,” Cornelu said to Eforiel. “I can see that. Both will be useful, and the Lagoans love what is useful. But I wager plenty of other people in Mizpah would sooner we were coming for them.”

Eforiel’s jaw closed on a good-sized squid that swam right in front of her. By the way she frisked under Cornelu, she would be delighted to visit these waters again. Cornelu gently patted the leviathan. By the time she took these men back to Lagoas, Mizpah would not be worth visiting, not for anyone with Lagoas’s interests in mind. He couldn’t explain that to the leviathan, and didn’t bother trying.

“A little spit of land east of the harbor,” Cornelu murmured. That was where the fugitives were supposed to be. He wondered if they could get there with the Yaninans investing Mizpah. He shrugged. If they weren’t there, he couldn’t very well pick them up.

He had Eforiel rear in the water again. If that wasn’t the right spit of land, there a few hundred yards ahead, he didn’t know what would be. He didn’t see any people on it. He shrugged again. The Lagoan officers who sent him forth had thought the fugitives would be there.

“Oh, aye,” one of them had said just before he and Eforiel left Setubal harbor. “The one of them has a name for getting out of scraps—and the mage isn’t supposed to be bad at it, either.” Cornelu remembered the fellow laughing uproariously at his own sally. Among Lagoans, it passed for wit.

Cornelu was harder to amuse. These days, nothing less than the prospect of King Mezentio’s palace going up in flames, and all of Trapani with it, would have set him to laughing uproariously. He would have howled like a wolf for that, laughed like a loon. Even thinking about it with no likelihood of its happening was enough—more than enough—to make him smile.

He urged Eforiel closer to the end of the spit of land. Maybe the mage and the king hadn’t got there yet. Maybe the mage would detect his arrival by some occult means and hurry out to meet him. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

He blinked. He would have taken oath … a proper oath, an oath on the name of King Burebistu—the spit was empty of people. Had he done so, he would have been forsworn. Suddenly, he saw two men there, one tall and lean and of Algarvic stock, the other shorter and stockier with, aye, a Forthwegian or Unkerlanter look. They saw him, too, or more likely the leviathan, and began to wave.

He had rubber suits along for men of their builds. If the mage knew his business, he’d be able to keep himself and his royal companion from freezing in this icy water. If he didn’t—Cornelu shrugged one more time. He himself would do everything he could. What he couldn’t do, he wouldn’t worry about.

He brought Eforiel in toward the land as close as he dared. Having her beach herself wouldn’t do, here and now even less than most other places and times. Cornelu slid off her back and swam toward the rocky, muddy land, pushing ahead of him a bladder that held the rubber suits.

When he came up on to the land, the mage greeted him with a slew of almost incomprehensible Lagoan. “Slow,” Cornelu said. “I speak only a little.” He pointed to the five crowns on the chest of his own rubber suit. “Cornelu. From Sibiu. Exile.” That was one word of Lagoan he knew very well.

“I speak Sibian,” the mage said, and he did, with a good accent—none of the variations on Algarvian that most Lagoans thought were Cornelu’s native language. The fellow went on, “I am Fernao, and here before you you see King Penda of Forthweg.”

“I speak Algarvian—not Sibian, I fear,” Penda said.

Cornelu bowed. “I also speak Algarvian, your Majesty: better than I would like,” he said. The king of Forthweg scowled at that, scowled and nodded.

“We are all speaking too much,” the mage said in Sibian, and repeated himself in what Cornelu presumed to be Forthwegian. Whatever language he spoke, he made good sense. Turning back to Cornelu, he went on, “I presume those are suits to keep us from coming back to Setubal as if packed in ice?”

“Aye.” Cornelu opened the bladder. “The suits, and whatever protective magic you can add to them. Warmth and breathing underwater would be useful, I expect.”

The mage said, “Aye, I expected as much. I can do all that. Useful, you call the breathing spell? A good word for it, I would say. I will have to drop the magic that keeps people from noticing much about the spit. I tried not to project much of it out to sea; I’m glad you could find us.”

“I can see how you might be,” Cornelu agreed, his voice dry. “And we shall surely have much to discuss—at another time. Do now what you must do, that we may leave this place and eventually gain the leisure in which to hold such a discussion. For we have none here and now.”

“There you speak the truth,” Fernao said. He translated the truth into Forthwegian for Penda’s benefit—though, if the king spoke Algarvian, he could probably follow some Sibian. Penda nodded and made an imperious gesture, as if to say, Well, get on with it, then.

Get on with it Fernao did. Cornelu knew the exact moment when the Lagoan mage abandoned the spell that drew eyes in Mizpah—and outside the Lagoan outpost—away from the spit of land. The Yaninan attackers, suddenly noticing people out there, began tossing eggs at them.

They were less than accomplished. Cornelu, accustomed to soldiers trained to higher standards, found their aim laughable and alarming at the same time. It was laughable because none of the eggs came very close to him. It was alarming because some of those eggs came down in the waters of the Narrow Sea—the waters where Eforiel waited. A spectacularly bad toss might prove as disastrous as a spectacularly good one. If, while missing Cornelu and the men he had come to take away, the Yaninans hit his leviathan, they would have done what they’d set out to do, though they might not know it.

“I suggest you make haste,” Cornelu said to Fernao.

“I am making haste,” the mage snarled through clenched teeth when he reached a point where he could pause in his incanting. Cornelu chuckled, recognizing the annoyance any good professional showed at having his elbow joggled. Cornelu understood and sympathized with that. Even so, he wished Fernao would make haste a little more quickly—or a lot more quickly.

After what seemed far too long—and after a couple of eggs had burst much closer than Cornelu would have liked—the mage declared, “I am ready.” As if to prove as much, he pulled off his tunic and stepped out of his kilt, standing naked and shivering on the little spit of land. Penda imitated him. The king’s body had more muscle and less fat than Cornelu would have guessed from seeing him clothed.

Both men rapidly donned the rubber suits Cornelu had brought, and the flippers that went with them. “And now,” the Sibian exile said, “I suggest we delay no more. Eforiel awaits us in the direction from which I came up on to the land.” He pointed, hoping with all his heart that Eforiel did still await them there. He didn’t think the Yaninans had hit her, and didn’t think they could frighten her away if they hadn’t. He didn’t want to discover he’d been disastrously wrong on either of those counts.

As he turned and started for the water, King Penda said, “Eforiel? A woman? Do I understand you?”

“No, or not exactly,” Cornelu answered with a smile. “Eforiel—a leviathan.”

“Ah,” Penda said. “You in the south are much more given to training and riding them than we have ever been.”

“Another discussion that will have to wait,” said Fernao, who showed more sense than the fugitive king. Fernao splashed into the sea and struck out for Eforiel with a breast stroke that was determined if not very fast. Penda swam on his back, windmilling his arms over his head one after the other. He put Cornelu more in mind of a rickety rowboat than a porpoise, but he didn’t look like sinking.

Cornelu shot past both of them, which was just as well. They would not have been glad to meet Eforiel without him there to let her know it was all right. As he drew near the leviathan, or to where he hoped she was, he slapped the water in a signal to which she had been trained to respond.

Respond she did, raising her toothy beak out of the water. Cornelu took his place on her back, then waited for his passengers. They were gasping when they reached the leviathan, but reach her they did. Cornelu slapped her smooth hide and sent her off toward the northeast, toward warmer water, toward warmer weather.

Hajjaj never relished a visit to the Unkerlanter ministry. He particularly did not relish it when Minister Ansovald summoned him as if he were a servant, a hireling. People kept insisting Unkerlanter arrogance had its limits. The Unkerlanters seemed intent on proving people wrong.

With autumn having come to Bishah, Hajjaj minded putting on clothes less than he did in summertime. And long, loose Unkerlanter tunics were less oppressive than the garments in which other peoples chose to encase themselves. Having to wear the clinging tunics and trousers of the Kaunian kingdoms was almost enough by itself to make the Zuwayzi foreign minister glad Algarve had conquered them and relieved him of the need.

As usual, Ansovald was blunt to the point of rudeness. No sooner had Hajjaj been escorted into his presence than he snapped, “I hear you have been holding discussions with the Algarvian minister.”

“Your Excellency, I have indeed,” Hajjaj replied.

Ansovald’s eyes popped. “You admit it?”

“I could scarcely deny it,” Hajjaj said. “Discussing things with the ministers of other kingdoms is, after all, the purpose for which my sovereign sees fit to employ me. In the past ten days, I have met with the minister of Algarve, as you said, and also with the ministers of Lagoas, Kuusamo, Gyongyos, Yanina, the mountain kingdom of Ortah, and, now, twice with your honorable self.”

“You are plotting against Unkerlant, plotting against King Swemmel,” Ansovald said, as if Hajjaj had not spoken.

“Your Excellency, that I must and do deny,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said evenly.

“I think you are lying,” Ansovald said.

Hajjaj got to his feet and bowed. “That is, of course, your privilege, your Excellency. But you have gone beyond the usages acceptable in diplomacy. I will see you another day, when you find yourself in better control of your judgment.”

“Sit down,” Ansovald growled. Hajjaj took no notice of him, but started toward the door. Behind him, the Unkerlanter minister let out a long, exasperated breath. “You had better sit down, your Excellency, or it will be the worse for your kingdom.”

One hand on the latch, Hajjaj paused and spoke over his shoulder: “How could Unkerlant treat Zuwayza worse than she has already done?” His tone was acid; he wondered if Ansovald noticed.

“Do you really care to find out?” the Unkerlanter minister said. “Go through that door, and I daresay you will.”

However much he wanted to, Hajjaj could not ignore such a threat. Reluctantly, he turned back toward Ansovald. “Very well, your Excellency, I listen. Under duress of that sort, what choice have I but to listen?”

“None,” Ansovald said cheerfully. “That’s what you get for not being strong. Now sit back down and hear me out.” Hajjaj obeyed, though his back was stiff as an offended cat’s. Ansovald paid no attention to his silent outrage. The Unkerlanter minister raised crude brutality almost to an art. He pointed a stubby finger at Hajjaj. “You are not to hold any more meetings with Count Balastro, on pain of war with my kingdom.”

Hajjaj started to get up and walk out again. Ansovald’s demand was one no representative of any kingdom had the right to make on the foreign minister of another kingdom. But Hajjaj knew King Swemmel only too well. If he openly defied the Unkerlanter minister here, Swemmel would conclude he had good reason to defy him, and would hurl an army of men in rock-gray tunics toward the north.

Swemmel might even be right, though his minister here would not know that. Ansovald leaned back in his chair, smugly delighted to see Hajjaj squirm. One reason he was good at bullying was that he enjoyed it so much. Hajjaj temporized: “Surely, your Excellency, you cannot expect me to refuse all intercourse with the minister from Algarve. Should he order me to do such a thing in regard to you, I would of course refuse.”

Ansovald stopped leaning back and leaned forward instead, alarm and anger on his strong-featured face. “Has he ordered you to stop seeing me?” he demanded. “How dare he order you to do such a thing?”

What he did, he took for granted. That anyone else might presume to do the same thing was an outrage. Hajjaj might have laughed, had he not felt more like crying. “I assure you, it was but a hypothetical comment,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said, and spent the next little while smoothing Ansovald’s ruffled feathers. When Hajjaj finally judged the Unkerlanter minister soothed enough, he resumed: “I can hardly avoid him at receptions and the like, you know.”

“Oh, aye—that sort of business doesn’t count,” Ansovald said. Hajjaj had been far from sure he would prove even so reasonable. The Unkerlanter pointed at him again. “But when you and Balastro put your heads together for hours on end—” He shook his own head. “That won’t do.”

“And if he invites me to the Algarvian ministry, as you have invited me here?” Hajjaj asked, silently adding to himself, He would be more polite about it, that’s certain.

“Refuse him,” Ansovald said.

“He will ask me why. Shall I tell him?” Hajjaj inquired. Ansovald opened his mouth, then abruptly closed it again. Hajjaj said, “Your Excellency, I think you begin to see my difficulty. If I, the foreign minister of a sovereign kingdom, am forbidden to see the representative of another sovereign kingdom, would not that second kingdom reckon the kingdom that had forbidden me guilty of insult against it?”

With a certain malicious amusement, he watched the Unkerlanter minister’s lips move as he worked his way through that. Ansovald was not swift, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He took a bit, but got the right answer: Algarve will think Unkerlant guilty of insult. Considering what the Algarvians had done to every foe they’d faced in the Derlavaian War, Hajjaj would not have wanted them thinking him guilty of insult.

By the expression on Ansovald’s face, he didn’t want that, either. Hajjaj politely looked away while the Unkerlanter minister coughed and tugged at his ear and pulled loose a small flap of skin by his thumbnail. At last, Ansovald said, “Maybe I was a little hasty here.”

From a Zuwayzi, that would have been a polite commonplace. From an Unkerlanter, and especially from King Swemmel’s representative in Bishah, it was an astonishing admission. When Ansovald didn’t seem inclined to come out with anything more, Hajjaj asked a gentle question: “In that case, your Excellency, what should my course be?”

Again, Ansovald didn’t answer right away. Hajjaj understood why: the Unkerlanter minister had just realized that following instructions he’d got from Cottbus was likely to lead him into disaster. But not following any order he got from Cottbus was also likely to lead him into disaster. As Ansovald dithered, Hajjaj smiled benignly.

With a sigh, Ansovald said, “I spoke too soon. Unless I summon you again, you may ignore what has passed between us here.”

Unless King Swemmel decides he doesn’t mind insulting the Algarvians, was what that had to mean. Now Hajjaj had to fight to hide surprise. Might Swemmel think of taking such a chance? Hajjaj had often wondered whether the king of Unkerlant was crazy. Up till now, he’d never thought him stupid.

He wished the state of King Swemmel’s wits didn’t matter so much to Zuwayza. Far easier, far more reassuring, to think of it as Ansovald’s problem and none of his own. He couldn’t do that, worse luck. If Unkerlant caught cold, Zuwayza started sneezing—and Unkerlant went as Swemmel went.

Hajjaj also wished he could take Ansovald down a peg—down several pegs—for his insolence and arrogance. He couldn’t do that, either, not when he’d just got what he wanted from the Unkerlanter. He said, “Let it be as you desire, your Excellency. I tell you truly, we have seen—all of Derlavai has seen—enough of war this past year and more. I wish with all my heart that we may have seen the end of it.”

Ansovald only grunted in response to that. Hajjaj had trouble figuring out what the grunt meant. Was it skepticism, because Zuwayza had lost one war to Unkerlant and could be expected to want revenge? Or did Ansovald know Swemmel was indeed contemplating war against Algarve? For all Hajjaj’s skill in diplomacy, he saw no way to ask without waking suspicions better left to slumber.

Rousing somewhat, Ansovald said, “I think we have done everything we can do today.”

They’d alarmed each other. Ansovald had intended to harm Hajjaj. He hadn’t intended to be alarmed in return. Well, Hajjaj thought, life does not always turn out as you intend. He got to his feet. “I think you are right, your Excellency. As always, a meeting with you is most instructive.”

He left the Unkerlanter minister chewing on that and not nearly sure he liked the flavor. Getting out among his own people was a pleasure, going back to the palace a larger one, and pulling the tunic off over his head the greatest of all. Once comfortably naked, he went to report the conversation to King Shazli.

There he found himself balked. “Do you not recall, your Excellency?” one of Shazli’s servitors said. “His Majesty is out hawking this afternoon.”

Hajjaj thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I’d forgotten,” he admitted.

The servitor stared at him. He understood why: he wasn’t supposed to forget anything, and came close enough to living up to that to make his lapses notable. He stared at her, too; she was worth staring at. Idly—well, a little more than idly—he wondered what sort of amusement she would make. Lalla really had grown too extravagant to justify the pleasure he got from her.

Resolutely, Hajjaj pushed such thoughts aside. He still craved the pleasures of the flesh, but not so often as he once had. Now he could recognize that other business might take precedence over such pleasure. With a last, slightly regretful, glance at the serving woman, he returned to his office.

He considered using the crystal there, but in the end decided against it. He did not think Unkerlanter mages could listen to what he said, but did not want to discover he was wrong. Paper and ink and a trusty messenger would do the job.

Your Excellency, he wrote, and then a summary of the relevant parts of his recent conversation with Ansovald. He had sanded the document dry when Shaddad appeared in the doorway. “How do you do that?” Hajjaj asked as he sealed the letter with ribbon and wax. “Come just when you’re wanted, I mean?”

“I have no idea, your Excellency,” his secretary replied. “I am pleased, however, that you find me useful.”

“I find you rather more than useful, as you know perfectly well,” Hajjaj said. “If you would be so kind as to put this in a plain pouch and deliver it…”

“Of course,” Shaddad said. Only a slight flaring of his nostrils showed his opinion as he went on, “I suppose you will expect me to clothe myself, too.”

“As a matter of fact, no,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said, and Shaddad smiled in glad surprise. Hajjaj continued, “You will be less conspicuous without mufflings, and there are times—and this is one of them—when discretion seems wisest. Just take this over to the Algarvian minister like the good fellow you are.”

Shaddad’s smile, now perhaps one of anticipation, grew broader. “Just as you say, your Excellency.”

Garivald squelched through the mud to return a sharpening stone he’d borrowed from Dagulf. “Thanks,” he said when the other peasant opened his door. “Did my sickle a deal of good when I needed it the most.”

Dagulf’s scar pulled the smile on his face into something like a leer. “Aye, you need sharp tools at harvest time,” he said. “Bloody work’s hard enough without you doing more than you need.”

“Aye,” Garivald said. “We did pretty well, we did, even if I do wish the rain would have held off for another couple of days.”

“Don’t we both? Don’t we all?” Dagulf peered through drizzle toward the prison cell he and Garivald had helped to build. Lowering his voice, he went on, “Wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to feed the captives and guards and that worthless, drunken mage through the winter.”

“We’d get by easy then,” Garivald agreed. Under his cape, his shoulders sagged as he sighed. “Would have been better if they—well, the guards, anyhow—would have helped with the harvest. Then they’d’ve earned their keep, you might say.”

Dagulf’s laughter was short, sharp, and bitter. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for it, is all I’ve got to tell you.”

“I wasn’t,” Garivald said. “Those miserable, lazy bastards just take. If you asked ’em to give, they’d fall over dead.”

“But we’ve got a crystal connecting us to Cottbus.” Dagulf seemed more disgusted than delighted.

“Oh, aye, so we do,” Garivald said. If he was delighted, he concealed it so well, even he didn’t know about it. “When Waddo gets a brainstorm nowadays, he tells us it’s Cottbus’s idea, so we have to go along with it. Isn’t that grand?”

Dagulf spat. “You ask me, he doesn’t talk on the crystal half as much as he says he does. He just tells us what to do and says it’s an order from the capital. How can we prove any different? You have a crystal in your house so you can talk to King Swemmel and ask him what’s going on?”

“Oh, of course I do,” Garivald answered. “Two of ’em, matter of fact. The other one’s attuned to Marshal Rathar, so he can send in the army when I tell him what a big liar Waddo is.”

Both men laughed. Neither’s laugh was altogether comfortable, though. Truth was, Waddo could talk to Cottbus and they couldn’t. And if he wasn’t talking to Cottbus, they had no way of knowing that, either. They’d always been powerless when measured against inspectors. Now they were powerless against their own firstman, too. Garivald shook his head. That wasn’t how things were supposed to be.

He shook his head again. It wouldn’t really matter till spring. Not even the most energetic firstman, which Waddo wasn’t, would be able to accomplish much during winter in southern Unkerlant. The peasants would stay indoors as often as they could, stay warm as best they could, and drink as much as they could. Anyone who expected anything different was doomed to disappointment.

Interrupting Garivald’s caravan of thought, Dagulf said, “I hear tell Marshal Rathar got on Swemmel’s bad side some way or other. Don’t know how much good your crystal attuned to him will do you.”

“Now that I think on it, I heard that, too.” Garivald threw his hands in the air. “Isn’t that the way things turn out? You go to all the trouble to get the cursed crystal, and then it’s not worth anything.” He spoke with almost as much regret and resentment as if a crystal really did sit on the mantel above his fireplace.

Dagulf played along with him. “Ah, well, maybe you can attune it to the new marshal, whoever he turns out to be—and then to the one after him, too, when Swemmel decides he won’t answer.”

Garivald looked back toward the gaol again. No, the guards couldn’t possibly have heard that. He didn’t even think Dagulf’s neighbors could have heard it. Still… “You want to be careful what you say,” he told Dagulf. “Now word really can get back to Cottbus, and you won’t be happy if it does.”

“You’re a good fellow to have around, Garivald,” Dagulf said. “You brought back my hone, and I didn’t even have to come over and tell you I was going to burn down your house to get it. And you’re right about this other nonsense, too. It’s like having somebody peeking in your window all the time, is what it is.”

“You’re too ugly for anybody to want to peek in your window,” Garivald said, not wanting an unfounded reputation as a paragon to get out of hand.

“My wife says the same thing, so maybe you’ve got something there,”

Dagulf answered. “But I still get some every now and then, so I must be doing something right.”

Snorting, Garivald turned and headed back toward his own house. As he passed the cell he’d helped build, he paused in the drizzle to listen to one of the captives singing. It was a song about a boy falling in love with a girl—what else was there to write songs about, except a girl falling in love with a boy?—but not one Garivald had heard before. People had been singing most of the songs he knew for generations.

The captive had a fine, resonant baritone. Garivald didn’t. He liked to sing anyway. He listened attentively, picking up tune and lyrics. Sure enough, it was a city song: it talked about paved streets and parks and the theater and other things he’d never know. It had an odd feeling to it, too, a feeling of impermanence, as if it didn’t really matter whether he got the girl or not: if he didn’t, he could always find another one. Things weren’t like that in Zossen, or in any of the countless other villages dotting the broad plains and forests of Unkerlant.

“City song,” Garivald muttered. He didn’t walk away, though, even if he and Dagulf had just spent the last little while running down Cottbus and everything it stood for. He stood listening till the captive finished, and wasn’t sorry when the fellow started over again. That gave him the chance to pick up the words to the first part of the first verse, which he’d missed while talking with Dagulf.

He was singing the song—not loudly, feeling his way through it—when he came in the door. His wife didn’t need to hear more than a couple of lines before she said, “Where did you pick that up? It’s new.”

“One of the captives was singing it,” Garivald answered. He groped for the next line and discovered he couldn’t find it. “Ahh, curse it, you made me mess it up. Now I have to go back to the beginning.”

“Well, do, then.” Annore turned away from the dough she was kneading. Her arms were pale almost to the elbows with flour. “Been a while since we’ve had a new song. That one sounded good, even if you haven’t got the best voice in the village.”

“I thank you, dear,” Garivald said, though he knew she was right. He thought for a moment—how did that first verse go?—then plunged back in. He wasn’t so good a singer as the captive, but he remembered all the words and didn’t do too much violence to the tune. Annore heard him out without a sound. Her lips moved a couple of times as she fixed phrases in her mind.

“That’s a good song,” she said when he was through, and then, thoughtfully, “Well, a pretty good song. It’s… strange, isn’t it? I bet it come out of Cottbus.”

“I bet you’re right,” Garivald agreed. “If we hadn’t got married for one reason or another, I’d still be a bachelor, and I’d be frantic about it. But the fellow in the song? ‘Another boat at the dock, Another bird in the flock.’ ” After singing the lines, he shook his head. “Anybody wants to know, that’s not the way people ought to think.”

Annore nodded. “We have too many men chasing women who aren’t their wives the way things are.”

Garivald could think of only a couple of such cases in Zossen since he’d started paying attention to what men and women did. Maybe even a couple seemed too many to Annore. He could also think of a couple of women who’d gone after men not their husbands. If he brought them up, he was sure his wife would find something to say in their defense. Since he was sure, he didn’t bother. They found enough things to quarrel about without looking for more.

He did say, “Even if the words are peculiar, I like the tune.”

“So do I.” Annore hummed it. Her voice was high and pure, a good deal better and more pliable than Garivald’s. After a verse or so, she clicked her tongue between her teeth. “I do wish it had better words. Somebody should put better words to the tune.”

“Who?” Garivald asked—a good question, since no one in Zossen had ever shown any signs of talent along those lines. “Waddo, maybe?” He rolled his eyes to make sure Annore knew he was joking.

“Oh, aye, he’d be the perfect one.” His wife rolled her eyes, too.

“’Another story on his house,’” Garivald sang to the tune of the captive’s song. “ ‘A fancy crystal for the louse.’”

He and Annore both laughed. She looked thoughtfully at him. “Do you know, that’s not bad,” she said. “Maybe you could make a real song, not just a couple of lines poking fun at Waddo.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Garivald exclaimed.

“Why not?” Annore asked. “You started to.”

“But I’m not a person who makes songs,” Garivald said. “People who make songs are—” He stopped. He had no idea what people who made songs were like, not really. Every so often, a traveling singer would come through Zossen. The only thing he knew about them was that they drank too much. Once, back before he was born, a traveling singer passing through Zossen had left with a peasant’s daughter. People still gossiped about it; the girl seemed to get both younger and more beautiful every year.

“Well, if you don’t want to …” Annore shrugged and went back to kneading dough. She also went back to humming the new song.

Garivald stood there rubbing his chin. Words crowded his head. Some of them were words from the song. The first verse was fine, and anybody could lose a girl he’d thought would be his for good. But what he did afterwards, what he thought afterwards, how he felt afterwards… Maybe someone up in Cottbus would do those things, would think and feel those things, but nobody in Zossen or any other peasant village would.

A line occurred to Garivald, and then a word that rhymed with it. He had to cast about for the rest of the line that would go with the word. He wished he could read and write. Being able to put things down so they didn’t keep trying to change in his head would have helped. Waddo could do it. So could a couple of other men in the village. Garivald had never had time to learn.

But he had a capacious memory—partly because he couldn’t read and write, though he didn’t realize that. He kept playing with words, throwing away most of them, keeping a few. Leuba woke up from a nap. He hardly noticed Annore taking her out of the cradle: he was looking for a word that rhymed with harvest.

Half an hour later, he said, “Listen to this.” Annore came in from the kitchen again. She cocked her head to one side, waiting. Garivald turned away, suddenly shy in front of her. But, even if he couldn’t face her, he loosed his indifferent voice.

Only when he was through did he look back toward her. He tried to read the expression on her face. Surprise and… was she crying? He’d tried to make a sad song—it had to be a sad song—but… could she be crying? “That’s good,” she sniffed. “That’s very good.”

He stared, astonished. He’d never imagined he could do such a thing. Maybe a young swallow felt the same way the first time it scrambled out of its nest, leaped off a branch, and spread its wings. “Powers above,” Garivald whispered. “I can fly.”

Bembo lifted a long-stemmed wine glass. “Here’s to you, pretty one,” he said, beaming across the cafe table at Saffa.

The sketch artist raised her own glass. “Here’s to your good notion, and to the bonus Captain Sasso gave you for it.”

Since he was spending some of that bonus to take her out, Bembo drank to the toast. He hoped the bonus wasn’t the only reason she’d finally let him take her to supper. If she was that mercenary … he didn’t want to know about it right now. He took another sip of his own wine—better than he usually bought. “I’m a man on the way up, I am,” he said.

Something glinted dangerous in Saffa’s eyes. Whatever the egg of her thought was, though, she didn’t drop it on his head, as she assuredly would have before. “Maybe you are,” she said after no more than the slightest pause. “You didn’t start pawing me the instant I came out of my flat. That’s certainly an improvement.”

“How do you know?” he said, and pressed a hand to his heart, the picture of affronted dignity. “You never let me meet you at your flat before.”

“Do I look like a fool?” Saffa asked, which made Bembo go through another pantomime routine. Her laugh showed very sharp, white, even teeth. He wondered if she’d finally chosen to go out with him in hope of a good time (either vertical or horizontal) or in the expectation of sinking teeth and claws into him later on. That might mean a good time for her, but he didn’t think he would enjoy it.

To keep from thinking about it, he said, “Good to see Tricarico lit up again at night.”

“Aye, it is,” Saffa agreed. “We’re too far north for any dragon from Lagoas to reach us here, and we’ve beaten our other enemies.” Pride rang in her voice. She glanced at Bembo with more warmth than he was used to seeing from her. “And you helped, spotting those cursed Kaunians with their dyed hair.”

Before Bembo could go on for a while about what an alert, clever fellow he was, the waiter brought supper, which might have been just as well. Saffa had trout, Bembo strips of duck breast in a wine-based sauce. He didn’t usually eat such a splendid meal; he couldn’t usually afford such a splendid meal. Since he could tonight, he made the most of it. He and Saffa emptied another bottle of wine during supper.

Afterwards, as they walked to the theater, she let him put an arm around her shoulder. A few steps later, she let him slide it down to her waist. But when, as if by accident, his hand brushed the bottom of her breast, her heel came down hard on his big toe, also as if by accident.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured in tones that couldn’t have meant anything but, Don’t push your luck. With a good deal of wine in him, Bembo promptly did push his luck, and as promptly got stepped on again. After that, he concluded Saffa might have been dropping a hint.

At the theater, the usher eyed Saffa appreciatively but gave what passed for Bembo’s best tunic and kilt a fishy stare. Still, Bembo had tickets entitling him and Saffa to a pair of medium-good seats. Whatever the usher’s opinion of his wardrobe, the fellow had no choice but to guide him down to where he belonged. “Enjoy the production, sir—and you, milady,” the young man said, bowing over Saffa’s hand.

Bembo tipped him, more to get rid of him than for any other reason. Saffa let the constable slip an arm over her shoulder again. This time, he had the sense not to go exploring further. The house lights dimmed. Actors pranced out on stage, declaiming.

“I knew it would be another costume drama,” Bembo whispered.

“They’re all the rage these days,” Saffa whispered back. Her breath was warm and moist in his ear.

Up on the stage, actors and actresses in blond wigs played imperial Kaunians, all of them plotting ways and means to keep the dauntless, virile Algarvians out of the Empire—and the women falling into clinches with the Algarvian chieftains every chance they got. The story might have been taken straight from one of the historical romances Bembo had been devouring lately. Along with the rest of the audience, he whooped when a Kaunian noblewoman’s tunic and trousers came flying over the screen that hid her bed from the spectators.

Afterwards, Saffa asked, “Do you suppose it was really like that?”

“Must have been,” Bembo answered. “If it wasn’t, how would we ever have beaten the cursed Kaunians?”

“I don’t know,” the sketch artist admitted. She yawned, not too theatrically. “You’d better take me home. We both have to work in the morning.”

“Did you have to remind me?” Bembo said, but he knew she was right.

Outside her flat, she let him kiss her—actually, she kissed him. When his hands wandered, she stretched and purred like a cat. Then he tried to get one under her kilt, and she twisted away from him. “Maybe one of these nights,” she said. “Maybe—but not tonight.” She kissed him on the end of the nose, then slipped into her flat and had the door barred before Bembo could make a move to follow her.

He wasn’t so angry as he thought he should have been. Even if he hadn’t bedded her, he’d come closer than he’d expected he—would—and she hadn’t clawed him too badly after all. Not a perfect evening (had it been a perfect evening, she would have reached under his kilt), but not bad, either.

He still looked happy the next morning, so much so that Sergeant Pesaro leered. “What were you doing?” he said, in tones suggesting he already knew the broad outlines but wanted the juicy details. He made a formidable interrogator, whether grilling criminals or constables.

Since Bembo had no juicy details to give him, and since Saffa would kill him or make him wish she had if he invented some, all he said was, “A gentleman goes out of his way to protect the reputation of a lady.”

“Since when are you a gentleman? For that matter, since when is Saffa a lady?” Pesaro wasn’t trying to get her to flip up her kilt, so he could say what he pleased. Bembo just shrugged. Pesaro muttered under his breath, then went on, “All right, if you won’t talk, you won’t. I can’t beat it out of you, the way I can with the ordinary lags. Anyhow, there’s a good job of work ahead for the force today.”

Ah?” Bembo’s ears came to attention. So, rather lackadaisically, did the rest of him. “What’s toward, Sergeant?”

“We’re going to round up all the cursed Kaunians in town.” Pesaro spoke with considerable satisfaction. “Order came in just after midnight by crystal from Trapani, from the Ministry for Protection of the Realm. Everybody’s been having kittens since you caught the blonds dyeing their hair. King Mezentio’s decided we can’t take the chance of letting ’em run around loose any more, so we won’t. They’ll be pulling ’em in all over Algarve.”

“Well, that’s pretty good,” Bembo said. “I bet we got rid of a lot of spies that way. Probably should have done it back at the start of the war, if anybody wants to know what I think. If we had done it back at the start of the war, my guess is the stinking Jelgavans wouldn’t have come half so close to taking Tricarico.”

“Nobody cares what you guess,” Pesaro said. But then he checked himself; after Bembo had discovered the Kaunians dyeing their hair, that might be less true now than a few weeks before. Grimacing at the absurdity of having to take Bembo seriously, the sergeant went on, “No matter when they should have done it, they are doing it now. We’ve got lists of known Kaunians, and we’re going to send constables out in pairs to make sure they don’t give us a tough time. Or if they try that, they’ll be sorry.” He folded a meaty hand into a fist.

Bembo nodded. Inside, he was laughing. Pesaro sounded tough, as if he’d be hauling in Kaunians himself instead of sending out ordinary constables like Bembo to do the job. The sergeant’s comment sparked another thought, an important one: “Who are you pairing with me?”

“Have to check the roster.” Sergeant Pesaro ran a fat finger down it. “I’ve got you with Oraste. Does that suit?”

“Aye,” Bembo said. “He’s not one to back away from trouble. And we’ve worked together before, in a manner of speaking—he helped me bring in that Balozio, remember?”

“I didn’t, no, but I do now that you remind me of it,” Pesaro said. The doors to the station house swung open. In came Oraste, as broad through the shoulders as a Forthwegian. “Just the man I’m looking for!” Pesaro exclaimed happily, and explained to Oraste what he’d just told Bembo.

Oraste listened, scratched his head, nodded, and said, “Give us the list, Sergeant, and we’ll get at it. You ready, Bembo?”

“Aye.” Bembo wasn’t so ready as all that, but didn’t see how he could say anything else. He was glad to have Oraste at his side precisely because Oraste never backed away from anyone or anything. Oraste didn’t back away from duty, either.

The first Kaunians on the list were Falsirone and Evadne. “Those don’t look like Kaunian names,” Oraste said, but then he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. If they’re Kaunians, they’re gone.”

Falsirone and Evadne stared in dismay when the constables strode into their tonsorial parlor. They stared in horror when Bembo told them why the constables had come. Pointing a finger at him, Evadne shrilled, “You told us we wouldn’t get into trouble, you liar!”

“You’re not in trouble for that,” Bembo said, strangling the guilt that crept out from the dark places at the bottom of his mind. “This is only a precaution, till the war is safely won.” He didn’t know that—no one had said anything of the sort—but it seemed a reasonable guess.

Oraste smacked his club into the palm of his hand. “Get moving,” he said flatly.

“But what about everything here?” Evadne wailed, waving an arm to show off the shop and everything in it.

Bembo glanced at Oraste. Oraste’s face had not the slightest particle of give in it. Bembo decided he had better not show any give, either. “Hazard of war,” he said. “Now come along. We haven’t got all day here.”

Still complaining loudly and bitterly—still acting very much as veritable Algarvians would have done—Evadne and Falsirone came. Bembo and Oraste led them to the park where Bembo had spent his unhappy hours as an emergency militiaman. More constables, and some soldiers as well, took charge of them there. “On to the next,” Oraste said.

The next proved to be a prominent restaurateur. Bembo understood another reason why his superiors had sent constables out in pairs: it made them harder to bribe. With Oraste glaring at him as if looking for the smallest excuse to beat him bloody, the Kaunian didn’t even try, but came along meek as a lamb heading for sacrifice. Bembo let out a silent sigh. He would have been much more reasonable.

When he and Oraste got to the third establishment on their list, they found it empty. Oraste scowled. “Some other bastards beat us to it,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” Bembo answered. “I think word’s out on the street. A lot of blonds will be figuring they ought to disappear.”

“We’ll get ’em,” Oraste said. “Sooner or later, we’ll get ’em.”

By nightfall, the constables had rounded up several hundred Kaunians. Almost an equal number, though, had not been there to round up. Despite that, Captain Sasso said, “Good job, men. The kingdom’s long overdue for a cleanup, and we’re the fellows who can take care of it. When we’re done, when the war is won, Algarve will be a better place.”

“That’s right,” Oraste said, and Bembo nodded, too.

Istvan longed for the days when the worst Sergeant Jokai could do to him was send him off to shovel dragon shit or to serve as a dowser’s beast of burden. Jokai was dead these days, smashed to bits when a Kuusaman egg burst too close to him. For all practical purposes, Istvan was a sergeant himself, though no officer had formally conveyed the rank on him. He was a veteran on Obuda, and the soldiers he led new-come reinforcements. Having stayed alive gave him moral authority even without rank.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a clump of bushes. “These fruits stay good even when they’re dried out and wrinkled like that. Grab as many as you can; stars above only know when we’ll see any proper meals again.”

“What are these fruits called?” asked one of the new men, a thin, bespectacled fellow named Kun.

“Curse me if I know,” Istvan answered. “The Obudans have a name for ’em, but I don’t know what it is. Names don’t matter, anyhow. What matters is, like I said, they’re good to eat. With the supply system all buggered up the way it is, I think I’d eat a goat if one came strolling up the path.”

Some of the men laughed and nodded. Some of them looked revolted. Despite profane bravado, Istvan wasn’t sure if he would really eat goat. Only a starving Gyongyosian would even think of such a thing—a starving Gyongyosian or a depraved one. When he was a boy, four men in the next valley over from his had been caught at a ritual supper of goat stew after they’d murdered—and done worse things to—a pregnant woman. No clan feud had started when they were buried alive. Even their own families thought they deserved it, as much for the goat-eating as for their other crimes.

Kun cleared his throat a couple of times and said, “Names always matter. Names are part of the fabric from which reality is woven. If your name were different, you would not be the man you are, nor I, nor any of us. The same must surely hold true for these fruits.”

He was, as he seldom let anyone forget, a mage’s apprentice. He was also a bumbler, as tales said mages’ apprentices often were. Istvan marveled that he still lived when better men had died around him. Sometimes pretending not to understand him was the best way to stop him from going on and on. Istvan tried it: “If these fruits had a different name, I think I’d still be the man I am.”

“That is not what I meant,” Kun said, giving him an indignant look over the top of those spectacles. “What I meant was—” He paused, looking foolish, as the possibility that Istvan might have been making a joke occurred to him. That took longer than it should have. Istvan was surprised it happened at all.

Before he could finish the job of putting Kun in his place, eggs started falling not far away. The men he led had been on Obuda and in action long enough to know what that meant. Istvan thought he was the first to throw himself flat, but none of the rest was more than a moment behind him.

The ground shuddered under him. Leaves and twigs fell on his back; someone close by cursed as a branch a good deal bigger than a twig came down on his leg. Through the din of bursting eggs and falling trees, Istvan shouted, “Now—is that us trying to kill the Kaunians or them trying to kill us?”

“If you like, I will undertake a divination to find out,” Kun said.

“Never mind.” Istvan shook his head, dislodging the end of a twig from his ear. “If one of those lands on us, we end up dead either way.” Kun couldn’t very well argue with that, and so, for a wonder, he didn’t.

A dragon screeched, just above the treetops. It was, Istvan thought unhappily, more likely to be flown by a Kuusaman than by one of his own countrymen. The Kuusamans were able to bring dragons by the shipload from out of the east, where Gyongyos had to fly them from island to island to get them to Obuda. Because the Gyongyosian dragons inevitably arrived worn, the beasts from Kuusamo had the better of it in the air.

“I wish we could drive the Kuusaman fleet out of these waters,” Istvan muttered, his face still in the dirt. He sighed. “I suppose the little slant-eyed sons of billy goats wish they could drive our fleet out of these waters.”

Sometimes (mostly by night, for looking for a good view by day was asking a Kuusaman sniper to put a beam in one ear and out the other), he would look out at the warships tossing eggs and blazing at one another. Neither side, as yet, was able to keep the other from reinforcing its army on Obuda. A lot of ships had gone to wreckage and twisted metal trying, though. He wondered which side could go on throwing them into the fight longer than the other.

More screeches overhead, and then the noise, like a dozen men all being sick at once, of a dragon flaming. The sound that followed was not a screech but a shriek. More sounds came: the sounds of a large body crashing down through the canopy of leaves and branches above the Gyongyosians and then thrashing about on the ground only a stone’s throw away.

Istvan scrambled to his feet. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Let’s get rid of that cursed thing before it flames half the forest afire. Let’s see what we can do about the flier, too. He might not be dead—he didn’t fall that far.”

“If he’s a Kuusaman, we’ll take care of that,” Szonyi said. He might not have done any fighting till the men from the far east invaded, but he was a veteran now.

“Aye,” Istvan said. “Either we kill him or we send him back so our officers can squeeze him.” Normally, Istvan would have done the latter. As things were, he’d been on his own for a couple of days, and wasn’t sure where to send a captive if he got one.

Getting one, he realized, wouldn’t be easy. That dragon might have been flamed out of the sky, but it was a long way from dead; branches must have done a better job than usual of cushioning its fall. It sounded as if it were trying to knock down every tree it could reach. It didn’t flame, though, which argued it still had a flier on its back: an unrestrained dragon would have vented its fury every way it could.

Kun pointed ahead. “There it is,” he said unnecessarily: that great scaly tail could not have belonged to any other beast. At the moment, it was doing duty for a flail, smashing bushes to bits.

“Surround it,” Istvan said. “Blaze for the eyes or the mouth. Sooner or later we’ll kill it. And watch out for the flier. He’s liable to be blazing at you while you’re blazing at the dragon.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” Kun said. But he did as Istvan told him, so Istvan couldn’t come down on him for talking back. Istvan couldn’t come down hard on him for talking back, anyhow—a disadvantage of lacking formal rank.

Spreading out to surround the dragon made the Gyongyosians cast their net widely indeed. The beast was still doing its best to level the woods. It couldn’t knock over large trees. With that exception, its best was quite good; a stampeding behemoth would have been hard pressed to match it.

Istvan peered through the bushes toward it. Sure enough, it was a Kuusaman dragon, painted in sea green and sky blue. Its right wing and a stretch of the body behind the wing were charred and black. Without a doubt, a Gyongyosian dragon had won that duel in the air. But the Kuusaman still somehow astride it at the base of its neck seemed alert and not badly hurt. He had a stick in his hands and was looking now this way, now that, ready for anything that might happen to him.

For a moment, Istvan wondered why he didn’t get off the dragon and make for the woods. Then he realized the dragon was liable to squash the flier if he dismounted. He raised his own stick to his shoulder and sighted along it. Before he could blaze, the Kuusaman did, but at someone off to the other side. A hoarse cry said the dragonflier hit what he’d blazed at, too.

When Istvan blazed at the Kuusaman, the fellow jerked as if stung. But, even if Istvan’s beam bit, it didn’t knock the foe out of the fight. The fellow used his own stick as a goad, and the dragon, hurt though it was, obeyed the command he gave it. Its head swung toward Istvan. He blazed at it, but it kept turning his way. Its jaws opened enormously, preposterously, wide. Flame shot from those jaws, straight at Istvan.

He thought he was a dead man. Though it was daylight, he looked up toward the heavens, toward the stars where he expected his spirit would go. But the sheet of flame fell short. Trees and bushes between the dragon and him began to burn. He threw his hands up in front of his face to protect himself from the blast of the heat, but the fire did not quite reach him. He stumbled backwards, his lungs feeling seared from the one breath of flame-heated air he’d drawn in.

Coughing, he staggered off to one side of the fire. It would spread, but not quickly; Obuda had had a lot of rain lately, so the plants were full of juice. The dragon was swinging its head away from Istvan now. It flamed again. A shriek of anguish announced that whoever it flamed at this time hadn’t been far enough away to escape the fire.

Istvan blazed at the dragonflier again. His comrades were doing the same now. At last, after what seemed like forever, the Kuusaman slumped down on his dragon’s neck, the stick slipping from his fingers. The dragon, with no one controlling it, began sending bursts of flame in all directions—until it had no flame left to send.

After that, disposing of the great beast was relatively easy, for the Gyongyosians could approach without fear. When it opened its mouth and tried to flame Szonyi, he sent a beam through the soft tissue inside that maw and into its brain. Its head flopped down. The body kept thrashing a while longer, too stupid to realize right away that it was dead.

Kun nodded to Istvan. Istvan nodded back, in some surprise; he thought the dragon had flamed the mage’s apprentice. Kun looked surprised, too. Pointing to the dead Kuusaman flier, he said, “You were right. Those little demons really can fight bravely.”

“Too right they can,” Istvan answered. “If they couldn’t, don’t you think we’d have thrown ’em off this island long since?”

“We did throw ’em off this island once,” Szonyi said. “The whoresons came back.” He paused. “I suppose that says something about them.”

“Aye,” Istvan said. “They aren’t Gyongyosians—they aren’t warriors born—but they’re men.” He pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dragon’s carcass. “I’m going to worry a tooth or two, by the stars. When I go back to my valley one of these days, I’ll wear a dragon’s fang on a chain around my neck. That should keep some of the local tough boys quiet.” He smiled in anticipation.

He wasn’t the only soldier who took a souvenir from the dragon, either. Kun cut several fangs from its mouth. “I ought to be able to get some sort of sorcerous use out of these,” he said. “And, as Istvan says, one worn around the neck will be a potent charm against bullies.”

“We earned them, sure enough.” Szonyi’s hands were bloody, as were Istvan’s. They both kept rubbing them on the ground. Even a dragon’s blood burned.

“Aye, we earned them,” Istvan said. “Now we have to hope we drive the Kuusamans off this stinking island and that we get off it ourselves.” A moment later, he wished he’d spoken as if that were assured. For better or worse, though, he’d seen too much fighting to fool himself for long.

Leudast squelched through mud. What the Forthwegians called roads were hardly better than their Unkerlanter equivalents: good enough when dry, boggy when wet. “Wait till the snow starts falling,” Sergeant Magnulf said. “They’ll harden up again then.”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “But winters are milder here than they are farther south, you know. It’s not always one blizzard after another. Only sometimes.”

“That’s right—you’re from not far from these parts, aren’t you?” Magnulf said.

“Farther west, of course,” Leudast answered. “Fifty, maybe a hundred miles west of what used to be the border between Forthweg and Unkerlant. Just about this far south, though, and the weather wasn’t a whole lot different than the way it is here.”

“I’m sorry for you,” Magnulf said, which made Leudast and everybody else in the squad laugh. After he was done laughing, Leudast wondered why he’d done it. The weather in most of Unkerlant was worse than it was hereabouts, or in the part of the kingdom where he’d grown up.

“One good thing about the rain,” a common soldier named Gernot said. “The cursed Algarvians aren’t going to jump on our backs for a while.”

“They’ll drown in the muck if they try,” Leudast said, at which his companions nodded. Some of them laughed, too, but only some. Most realized they would also drown in the muck if the Algarvians attacked.

Magnulf pointed ahead. “There’s the village where we’re supposed to billet ourselves. Miserable little hole in the ground, isn’t it?”

Seen through spatters of rain, the village did look distinctly unappetizing. The thatch-roofed cottages weren’t much different from the ones in the village where he’d lived till the impressers dragged him into King Swemmel’s army. Two buildings were bigger than the rest. He knew what they’d be: a smithy and a tavern. The whole place, though, had a dispirited, rundown look to it. No one had bothered painting or whitewashing the houses for a long time. Sad clumps of dying grass stuck out of the ground here and there, like surviving bits of hair on the scalp of a man with a bad case of ringworm.

“Powers above,” Gernot muttered. “Why would anyone want to live in a dump like this?” Unlike his comrades, he hadn’t been dragged off a farm, but from the streets of Cottbus. He was vague about what he’d done on the streets of Cottbus, which naturally made Leudast figure he had good reason to be vague.

Magnulf said, “It’ll be better than spending time under canvas, anyway.”

“Aye, so it will,” Leudast said, and wished he sounded more as if he believed it. Maybe it’s the rain, he thought. With the sun shining, the place had to look better. It could hardly have looked worse.

A dog started barking as the Unkerlanter soldiers drew near the village, and then another and another, till they sounded like a pack of wolves in full cry. One of them, about as big and mean-looking as a wolf, stalked toward the soldiers stiff-legged and growling. They shouted and cursed at it. Somebody threw a glob of mud that caught it on the end of the nose. The dog let out a startled yip and sat back on its haunches.

“That was well done,” Magnulf said. “We’d have had to blaze the cursed cur if it kept coming on.”

None of the other dogs seemed quite so bold, for which Leudast was duly grateful. They kept on barking, though. Doors in the peasants’ huts opened. Men and women came out—not far, staying under the protection of the overhanging eaves—to stare at the soldiers. Save only that the men let their whiskers grow, they might have been Unkerlanter peasants.

Leudast shook his head. Now that the Twinkings War was over, peasants would have looked at the soldiers with pity in their eyes, not the sullen hatred on the faces of these people.

Magnulf nudged him with an elbow. “You can make more sense of their language than the rest of us. Let ’em know what we’re here for.”

“Aye, Sergeant,” Leudast said resignedly. More often than not, speaking a dialect of Unkerlanter close to Forthwegian came in handy. He had no trouble making taverners understand what he wanted. In the last village where the squad had been stationed, he’d talked a reasonably pretty girl into sleeping with him. But he sometimes got more work to do, too, as now. Turning to the villagers, he asked, “Who is the firstman here?”

No one said anything. No one moved. “Do they know what you’re saying?” Magnulf asked.

“They know, Sergeant. They just don’t want to give me the time of day,” Leudast answered. “I can fix that.” He spoke to the Forthwegians again: “We will stay here. Tell me who the firstman is. We will put more men in his house.”

Magnulf chuckled. So did a couple of other men. Leudast had never known an Unkerlanter village where very many people loved their firstman. From what he’d seen, the Forthwegians weren’t much different there.

And, sure enough, several of them looked toward a stern-faced fellow with an iron-gray beard. He glared at them and at the Unkerlanters in turn, as if trying to decide whom he hated more. His wife, who stood beside him, had no doubts. Could her eyes have blazed, she would have knocked down all her neighbors.

“You are the firstman?” Leudast asked.

“I am the firstman,” the Forthwegian said. “I am called Arnulf.” It might have been an Unkerlanter name. “What do you want with us?” Now that he had decided to speak, he spoke slowly and clearly, so Leudast could follow. He sounded like a man of some education, which was not what Leudast would have expected from anyone in a place like this.

“We are to stay here,” Leudast answered. “Show us houses where we can stay.” He said no more about billeting extra men on Arnulf.

“How long are you to stay here?” the firstman asked.

Leudast shrugged. “Until our officers order us to go.”

Arnulf’s wife wailed and turned that terrible scowl on the firstman. “It could be forever!” She tugged at Arnulf’s sleeve. “Make them leave. Make them go away.”

“And how am I to do that?” he demanded in loud, heavy exasperation. She spoke a couple of sentences in Forthwegian too quick and slangy for Leudast to follow. Her husband made a fist and made as if to thump her with it. She snarled at him. Several of the Unkerlanter soldiers behind Leudast laughed. They, or men in their villages, kept women in line the same way.

“Show us houses where we can stay,” Leudast repeated. “Otherwise, we will pick the houses ourselves.” Arnulf’s face stayed blank. Leudast tried again, substituting choose for pick. The firstman got it then. He didn’t like it, but he got it.

Scowling more darkly than ever, he asked, “How many houses?”

Leudast had to relay that to Magnulf, who answered, “Five houses,” and held up his hand with the fingers spread. To Leudast, he said, “Two of our boys in each house and they won’t get tempted to try anything cute.”

“You will want food, too,” Arnulf said, as if hoping Leudast would contradict him. Leudast didn’t. Sighing, the firstman said, “The whole village will share in feeding you.” He started pointing at villagers.

All five of the ones he picked shouted and cursed and stomped their feet, none of which did them any good. Arnulf’s wife screeched something at them that Leudast, again, couldn’t quite follow. The villagers did, though, and fell silent. They might not like the idea of having Unkerlanters quartered among them, but they didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Arnulf’s wife, either.

“This village will go hungry if we have to feed you through the winter,” Arnulf said.

“Something worse will happen to you if you don’t,” Leudast told him. He got another vicious glare for that.

The villager whose hut he and Gernot went to take over had sons too young to have fought in the war. His wife was severely plain. However unhappy they looked, however hard they pretended not to understand Leudast’s stabs at Forthwegian, they would have been more worried and surly still had they had daughters. Leudast was sure of that. Maybe Arnulf hadn’t chosen only people he disliked.

Gernot complained about the porridge and cheese and black bread and almonds and salted olives they got to eat. “What’s wrong with this stuff?” Leudast asked, puzzled. “Better than our rations, and that’s the truth.” He’d grown up eating just this sort of food.

“Boring.” Gernot rolled his eyes. “Very boring.” Leudast shrugged. His belly was full. He’d never found that boring.

After a few days, he might have been living back in his own village, except he didn’t have to work so hard here. No one had to work so hard as a peasant, not even a soldier. The squad patrolled the surrounding countryside—they weren’t far from Algarvian-occupied Forthweg—and returned to eat and rest and amuse themselves. The villagers didn’t love them, but their loathing grew less overt.

Leudast liked that. Magnulf didn’t. “It’s like they’re waiting for something to go wrong,” the veteran sergeant said. “When it does…”

A couple of days later, it did. A Forthwegian girl stood in the village square, screaming that one of the Unkerlanter troops had forced her to lie with him. Rather to Leudast’s surprise, she didn’t accuse Gernot but a common soldier named Huk who’d always seemed too lazy to violate anyone. And Huk denied it now, saying she’d freely given herself to him and started screaming only when he wouldn’t pay.

Knowing Huk, Magnulf ruled in his favor and did not punish him. Leudast waited for some outburst from the villagers. It didn’t come. They looked to Arnulf. Arnulf stood by his doorway, dour but silent.

Two nights later, Leudast woke with cramps in his belly. So did Gernot, at just the same time. Their unwilling hosts stayed asleep, apparently well. “Are we poisoned?” Gernot whispered.

“I don’t think so,” Leudast whispered back. “I think we’re magicked.” He paused, then chuckled grimly as pieces fit together in his mind. “The firstman, or else his wife. But they’d have to be better mages than they are to break through the protections King Swemmel’s soldiers get. They’ll be sorry they tried, too. Come on.”

The cramps pained him, but not so much that he couldn’t move. He and Gernot stole out of the hut. He wasn’t surprised to see other Unkerlanter soldiers coming out of the houses where they were billeted. When he saw Magnulf, he pointed toward the firstman’s home. The sergeant nodded.

Behind the shutters there, a light was burning. Stick in one hand, Leudast tried the door with the other. It wasn’t barred. If Arnulf and his wife were village wizards, who would dare steal from them? He threw the door wide.

Arnulf and his wife looked up in horror from where they crouched over an image—a cloth doll—in a rock-gray tunic. The firstman’s wife still held a long, brass-headed pin in her hand. Her face twisted in a ghastly attempt at a smile. Arnulf knew smiles were wasted. Cursing, he threw himself at Leudast and the other Unkerlanters behind him.

Leudast blazed him down, then blazed his wife, too. He also blazed the doll, lest a stronger mage get hold of it. “That’s good,” Magnulf said. “That’s very good.”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “We shouldn’t have any more trouble here.”