Into the Darkness

4.

“Now this,” Leudast said as he tramped through western Forthweg, “this is what efficiency is all about.”

Sergeant Magnulf nodded. “You had best believe it, soldier,” he said. “Shows the Forthwegians need lessons. If you’re stupid enough to start a war on one border when the kingdom on your other border can’t stand you, seems to me you deserve whatever happens to you.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Leudast said. “I was just thinking we’re going to have a lot easier time than we did against the Gyongyosians.” He looked around. “A lot better country to fight in, too.”

“Aye, so it is,” Magnulf agreed.

“Reminds me of home, as a matter of fact.” Leudast pointed westward. “My family’s farm isn’t that far on the other side of the border, and it looks a lot like this back there.” He waved.

Most of the farm buildings hereabouts were of sun-dried brick brightened with whitewash or, less often, paint. Wheat ripened golden in the fields; plump, ripe olives made branches sag. The breeds of cattle and sheep the Forthwegians raised were similar to those with which Leudast had grown up back in Unkerlant.

Nor did the Forthwegians themselves look that different from Unkerlanters. They were, most of them, stocky and swarthy, with proud, hook-nosed faces. Save that the men wore beards, Leudast would have been hard pressed to prove he’d entered another kingdom.

Most of the beards he saw were grizzled or white; the young men were off in the east, fighting the Algarvians. Graybeards and women, those who had not fled, stared with terrible bitterness as the Unkerlanter soldiers marched past. Every so often, one of them would shout something Leudast almost understood; the Unkerlanter dialect he spoke wasn’t that far removed from Forthwegian. It was close enough to make him certain the locals weren’t paying compliments.

Every so often, Forthwegian border guards and the small garrisons King Penda had left behind in the west would try to make a stand against the Unkerlanters, defending a line of hills or a town or sending out cavalry to nip at the thick columns of men King Swemmel had flung into their kingdom.

They were brave. Leudast couldn’t see that it did them much good. The Unkerlanters flowed around them, surrounded them, and attacked them from all sides at once. Behemoths trampled Forthwegian cavalry underfoot. Unkerlanter officers would go forward under flag of truce to urge surrenders, pointing out that the Forthwegians could not possibly hope to resist. Their foes sent them back and kept fighting as long as they could.

“Inefficient,” Magnulf said as his squad encamped one evening after pushing another fifteen or so miles into Forthweg—a typical day’s advance. “They aren’t stopping us. They’re hardly slowing us down. What’s the point to throwing their lives away?”

“Stubborn fools,” Leudast said. “They should see they’re beaten and give up.”

“I heard one of them shout, ‘Better to die under King Penda than to live under King Swemmel!’” Magnulf said, mimicking the Forthwegian tongue as well as he could. The sergeant shrugged. “I think that’s what he said, anyhow. And now he’s dead, and it’s not going to keep the Forthwegians from living under King Swemmel, not one little bit it’s not. We’ll be knocking on the door at Eoforwic in another few days.”

Leudast looked east. “We don’t quarrel with the Algarvians, though?”

“Not if they stay on their side of what used to be the border before the Six Years’ War,” Magnulf answered. “We won’t cross it—we’re just taking back what was ours, not stealing from anybody else.”

That night, Forthwegian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters’ forward positions. The noise from the bursts kept Leudast awake, but none of them came particularly close.

The next morning, the Unkerlanters approached Hwiterne, a city whose stone keep would have been a formidable defense in the days before eggs were flung for miles or fell from dragons. Again, King Swemmel’s officers went ahead to ask the town to surrender. Again, the Forthwegian garrison refused.

Before long, pillars of smoke rose into the sky from Hwiterne. Under cover of that barrage, Unkerlanter troops pushed through the patchily inhabited suburbs and into the town itself. Leudast discovered he had not only Forthwegian soldiers but also townsfolk blazing at him. He blazed back. He blazed at anyone he spied in Hwiterne who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He suspected he might have wounded innocent bystanders. That was inefficient, but not nearly so inefficient as letting himself get killed.

He flopped down in the rubble that had been a house. A woman with a bandage on her head lay not far away from him. He didn’t blaze her down; he could see she had no weapon. “Why?” she asked him. “Why did you cursed Unkerlanters come here? Why didn’t you leave us alone?”

Leudast followed that well enough. “We came to take back what’s ours,” he answered.

She glared at him. “Can’t you see we don’t want you? Can’t you see we”—a word he didn’t know—“King Swemmel?” Whatever the word meant, he doubted it was praise.

“If you’re not strong enough to stop us, what difference does that make?” Leudast asked in honest puzzlement.

She cursed him then, her voice full of bitter hopelessness. He could have killed her for it. No one would have been the wiser. No one who mattered to Leudast would have cared at all. She had to know as much. She cursed anyhow, as if defying him to do his worst.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. She cursed again, harder than ever. His indifference seemed more wounding to her than rage would have been. Shrugging once more, he said, “You didn’t curse when King Penda invaded Algarve. What business have you got doing it now?”

She stared at him. “The Algarvians deserve everything that happens to them. We don’t deserve any of this.”

“That’s not what King Swemmel thinks,” Leudast said. “He’s my king. I obey him.” Dreadful things happened to Unkerlanters who didn’t obey King Swemmel. Leudast preferred not to dwell on those.

A Forthwegian egg burst not far away. Chunks of wood and mud brick rained down on him and the woman with the bandaged head. Dreadful things, he realized, could also happen to Unkerlanters who did obey King Swemmel. For a moment, he wondered why, in that case, he willingly put himself into danger.

He didn’t have to search hard for the answer. Dreadful things might not happen to him if he fought the Gongs or the Forthwegians. Nothing too dreadful had happened to him yet. If, on the other hand, he set his own will against the king’s… Swemmel had shown over the years that disaster surely befell anyone rash enough to do such a thing.

The Unkerlanters rained eggs on the center of Hwiterne, from which resistance was fiercest. Officers blew whistles. Sergeants shouted. Leudast scrambled to his feet and dashed forward. For a couple of heartbeats, he heard the Forthwegian woman cursing him yet again. Then her voice was lost in the greater din of battle.

He ran past the corpse of a behemoth, killed with most of its crew by a Forthwegian egg. A moment later, he dove for cover behind another dead behemoth. A strong stink of burnt meat rose from this one: the Forthwegians had concealed a stick heavy enough to blaze through the beast’s armor in a building now wreckage. Leudast warily looked around for more such traps, though the Unkerlanters had driven the foe from this part of Hwiterne. Trying to use behemoths in the middle of a built-up area struck him as inefficient. He wondered if it would strike his officers the same way.

Hwiterne fell. So did the keep at its heart, smashed to ruins by the miracles of modern sorcery. Filthy, dejected Forthwegian captives shambled off into the west, a handful of Unkerlanters guarding them. A good many corpses wearing civilian-style tunics rather than those of the Forthwegian army lay in the streets, each dead man with a neat hole blazed in the center of his forehead. Someone had painted a sign in Unkerlanter and what Leudast presumed to be Forthwegian (the Forthwegians used an alphabet different from his): IF YOU ARE NOT A SOLDIER, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR BLAZING AT KING SWEMMEL’S MEN.

Some few of the prisoners in Forthwegian uniform were tall, yellow-haired men, not short, swarthy ones. Pointing at them, a soldier in Leudast’s company exclaimed, “Powers below! How did the cursed Gyongyosians get over here to the other side of the kingdom to help the Forthwegians?”

“Those aren’t Gongs, Nantwin, you goose,” Leudast answered. “They’re just Kaunians. They’ve been here since dirt.”

“What’s a Kaunian?” Nantwin asked. He had a strong Grelzer accent, which meant he came from the far south of Unkerlant. No Kaunians in that part of the world, sure enough.

“They used to run a whole lot of the northeast,” Leudast said, “back before the Algarvians and Forthwegians smashed up their empire.”

“How come they look like Gongs?” Nantwin said.

“They don’t, really,” Leudast said. “Aye, they’re blond, but that’s about it.” The differences seemed obvious to him; there were Kaunians not far from his farming village. Not only were they tall and skinny, but their hair lay flat on their heads, where the Gyongyosians’ sprang out wildly in all directions. Kaunians’ hair ran to silver gilt, too, while that of the Gongs was a tawny yellow.

Such subtleties were lost on Nantwin, who said, “Curse them, they look like Gyongyosians to me.”

“Fine,” Leudast said. “They look like Gongs to you.” Life was too short for arguments over things that didn’t matter. “Inefficient,” he muttered.

A prisoner of Kaunian blood stared at him—through him. By the expression on the fellow’s face, Leudast looked like scum to him. Leudast laughed. The Kaunian jerked as if he’d stepped on a thorn. Leudast couldn’t have cared less about a worthless captive’s opinion of him.

“Why are you wasting your time gaping at these miserable bastards?” Sergeant Magnulf demanded. “Odds are King Swemmel will put ’em to work mining brimstone and quicksilver, and they’ll never come out from the holes again. They might as well be dead already. You get moving.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” said Leudast, who knew he would be wasting his time if he tried to explain to Magnulf that he’d been trying to show Nantwin the Kaunians of Forthweg were different from Gyongyosians. Magnulf didn’t want explanations. Obedience was all he craved.

He grunted now, satisfied that he’d got it. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll be breaking into Eoforwic in another few days.” Leudast tramped after him. He would rather have been back on his farm. If he had to find himself in the middle of a war, though, he was just as well pleased to find himself in the middle of an easy one.

Colonel Sabrino ducked out of his tent. One of the tethered dragons at the temporary farm north of Gromheort flapped its wings and hissed at him. The Algarvian dragonflier stopped in his tracks, as if a human foe had insulted him. He sent the most obscene gesture he knew back at the dragon, which hissed again; it might have been insulted in turn. Laughing, Sabrino swaggered off toward the officers’ club.

That too was housed in a tent. The tapman bowed when Sabrino came inside. “How may I please you, my lord?” he asked.

“If you’d turn into a beautiful woman, that would give you a head start on the job, no doubt about it,” Sabrino answered. A couple of fliers from his wing who were sitting around with drinks in front of them laughed. So did the tapman, though he remained resolutely male and on the homely side. With a sigh, Sabrino said, “I suppose I’ll have to content myself with a glass of port. Put it on my scot.”

“Aye, my lord.” The tapman pulled cork from bottle and poured. Sabrino sipped. The fortified wine was not of the best, but it would have to do. Wartime meant sacrifice.

“Join us, Colonel, if you would,” Captain Domiziano said. He tapped the stool beside him. Senior Lieutenant Orosio, who shared the table with Domiziano, nodded to show the invitation came from him, too.

“Don’t mind if I do.” Sabrino perched on the stool and raised his glass. “Here’s to a splendid little war.”

“A splendid little war,” Domiziano and Orosio echoed. They drank with their commanding officer. Orosio said, “As near as I can see, sir, we’ve got Forthweg in a box with a pretty ribbon around it.”

“That’s how things look to me, too,” Sabrino said, nodding. “Pity we had to let them cross the border and do so much damage inside our kingdom, but we’ve paid them back and then some.”

“So we have,” Domiziano agreed. He had a bandage over one ear, which a Forthwegian beam had cooked. But he’d accounted for four Forthwegian dragons and torn up the enemy’s countryside; the small wound hardly seemed to upset him. He went on, “We’d have done the same even if the Unkerlanters hadn’t sneaked up behind King Penda and kicked him in the arse.”

“No doubt about it,” Sabrino repeated. “None at all. The Forthwegians are brave enough, but they haven’t got enough behemoths and they haven’t got enough dragons and they don’t quite know what to do with the ones they have got. We’d have needed another couple of weeks to overrun the whole kingdom, but we’d have done it, all right.”

Orosio scratched at the edge of his goatee. “Sir, what do we do if we meet Unkerlanter dragons in the air?”

“Pretend they don’t exist,” Sabrino said at once. “If the fliers blaze at you, evade. Not to put too fine a point on it, run away. King Mezentio does not want a war with Unkerlant. I’m told that’s going to be the subject of a general order in the next day or two. We have enough on our plate now without worrying about King Swemmel, too.”

“I don’t think the Unkerlanters are any great worry,” Domiziano said. “We taught them enough of a lesson in the Six Years’ War that Swemmel isn’t likely to want to tangle with us, either.”

“Here’s hoping,” Sabrino said, and drank to the hope. His junior officers drank with him.

An orderly stuck his head into the officers’ club. Spying Sabrino, he immediately looked relieved. “Ah, here you are, sir,” he said. “A message on the crystal just came in: your wing is ordered to join in the attack on the town of Wihtgara.” He pronounced the uncouth Forthwegian syllables as well as an Algarvian might be expected to do.

Sabrino drew a map from the vest pocket of his uniform tunic. He spread it out on the table so Domiziano and Orosio could study it, too. After a moment, Sabrino’s forefinger stabbed out. “About fifty miles northwest of here,” he said, and turned to the orderly once more. “Tell the crystallomancer to reply that we shall be flying within half an hour.” He knocked back the rest of his port—it wasn’t really good enough to linger over—and nodded to his companions. “Time to give the Forthwegians another dose, lads.”

As usual, Sabrino had to pick his way among the tethered dragons to keep from fouling his boots with their noxious droppings. As usual, his own mount had forgotten he’d been flying it for years. As usual, it hissed and flapped and spluttered, doing its best to keep him from climbing aboard. It did refrain from trying to flame him down; that was beaten into war dragons from hatchlinghood. For small favors, Sabrino gave thanks.

He gave thanks again when the dragon’s enormous batwings thundered behind him and the ground dropped away below. The view he got from on high was almost worth putting up with the stupidity and viciousness of dragons. The view of the rest of the dragons in his wing, bellies silvered, backs painted in red and white and green, was splendid, too.

“Come on,” he said, and tapped his dragon with the goad to bring its course farther north of west. “We can do it.”

The dragon, predictably, didn’t want to. As far as it was concerned, it was up in the sky to hunt. Sabrino’s purposes mattered little to it. It had been perfectly content to fly along in the direction it had chosen. When he tried to get it to change the small stubborn spot that passed for its mind, it twisted its head back along the length of its long, sinuous neck and did its best to pluck him off his perch with its teeth.

Even though it didn’t flame him, its breath, full of the stinks of brimstone and old meat, was nearly enough to knock him over. “Son of a worm!” he shouted, and whacked it in the snout with the iron-shod goad. “Daughter of a vulture! I am your better! You shall obey me!”

Every once in a while, a dragon forgot the most fundamental part of its training—in which case, the dragonflier never got another chance to curse it. Sabrino refused to let that risk enter his mind. He whacked the dragon’s scaly snout again. With an irate hiss, it straightened its neck once more. He gave it another tap, and this time, however sullenly, it swung its path more in the direction of Wihtgara.

Down below, Algarvian columns filed down roads and across fields. Here and there, scattered Forthwegian companies tried to withstand them. They had little luck. Sabrino shook his fist at them. “This is what you get for invading Algarve!” he cried, though only his dragon could hear him. “What you visited on us, we visit on you a hundredfold.”

He’d been worried when the Forthwegians approached Gozzo. Had the city fallen, King Penda’s soldiers could have spread across the plains of northern Algarve and done untold damage. But behemoths and dragons had turned the battle in front of Gozzo, and turned every fight since, too. However brave the Forthwegians were, they could not stand up against such force.

Here and there, the retreating Forthwegians had set fire in the fields and woods to slow the Algarvians’ advance. Had they done that more systematically, they would have got more good from it. As things were, occasional whiffs of smoke rose to Sabrino’s nostrils: hardly what the enemy could have hoped to accomplish.

More smoke rose above Wihtgara. Sabrino’s countrymen had bypassed the town to the north and south and joined hands beyond it, as they’d done with Gromheort a few days before. The Forthwegians trapped inside the jaws of the pincers still battled to break free, but they had little chance. Unicorn cavalry, tiny as dots down below, charged a squadron of behemoths. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks the behemoths bore on their backs wrecked the charge before the Forthwegians got to close quarters.

Dragons wheeled above Wihtgara. Till Sabrino drew near, he thought them Algarvian beasts dropping eggs on the defenders below. Then he saw they were painted in blue and white: Forthwegian colors. There were only a dozen of them or so. Without hesitation—or without any more hesitation than balky dragons usually caused—they hurled themselves at his entire wing.

Sabrino waved to his dragonfliers. “If they want it, we’ll give it to them!” he shouted, though he didn’t think any of the other men could hear. That they would give it to the Forthwegians, he had no doubt. Even after losses in the fighting thus far, he still commanded four times as many dragons as the foe had.

Like the unicorn cavalry down on the ground, the Forthwegian dragonfliers cared nothing about the odds. On they came. Sabrino’s dragon made a noise that reminded him of hot oil sizzling in a frying pan about the size of a small duchy: a challenge. Sabrino raised his stick and blazed at the nearest Forthwegian. If he didn’t have to fight at close quarters, he didn’t want to, no matter how eager his mount was to flame the Forthwegian dragon out of the sky.

But blazing straight wasn’t easy, not with both him and the Forthwegian moving at high speed along courses that changed unpredictably as one dragon or the other took it into its ferocious, empty head to dodge a little. Fighting in the air wasn’t just man against man. It was also dragon against dragon, and the beasts wanted nothing more than to burn each other and tear each other to shreds.

Here came the Forthwegian. He had some idea of what he was about, and a dragon that, by Forthwegian standards, was decently trained: the beast rose to give him a clear blaze at Sabrino instead of simply trying to close with the Algarvian’s dragon. Sabrino flattened himself against his mount’s neck to present a harder target as he goaded his dragon to climb, too.

And Forthwegian standards did not measure up to those practiced in King Mezentio’s domain. Moreover, Sabrino’s dragon was larger and stronger and swifter than his foe’s. He outclimbed the Forthwegian and got round behind him, despite the enemy’s best efforts to twist in the air.

When Sabrino’s dragon flamed, fire licked the other beast’s back and left wing.

The Forthwegian dragon’s hissing shriek of anguish was music to Sabrino’s ears. Very likely, the Forthwegian dragonflier shrieked, too, but his cry, if he made one, was lost in the greater cry of his mount. The enemy dragon plummeted out of the sky, not just burnt but burning. Because of the brimstone and quicksilver that had helped fuel it, dragon-fire clung and clung.

Sabrino’s dragon bellowed its triumph and spurted more flame. He whacked it with the goad to make it stop. It might need that fire in future fights. His head swiveled as he tried to see which of his dragonfliers needed help. He spied none who did. Most of the Forthwegian dragons were falling in flames (so, he was sad to see, were a couple painted in Algarvian colors). A couple of the enemy flew west, off to the shrinking stretch of territory Forthweg still held. And one, its flier blazed off it, struck out at the dragons around it like the wild beast it was till it too tumbled out of the sky.

More dragons were flying in out of the east, these lower, and with eggs slung under their bellies. As the eggs began falling on Wihtgara, Sabrino smiled broadly. “A splendid little war!” he cried, exultation in his voice. “Splendid!”

Occupied. Ealstan had heard the word before the war, of course. He’d heard it, and thought he’d known what it meant. Now he was learning the bitter difference between knowledge and experience.

Occupation meant Algarvian troops swaggering along the streets of Gromheort. They all had sticks at the ready, and they all expected everybody to understand Algarvian. People who didn’t understand the ugly, trilling speech—in Ealstan’s ears, it sounded like magpies’ chatter—fast enough to suit them were liable to get blazed for no better reason than that. No one could punish the Algarvians for doing such things. Their commanders probably praised them.

Occupation meant that Ealstan’s mother and sister stayed inside their house and sent him or his father out when they needed errands run. The Algarvians hadn’t perpetuated that many outrages, but they’d done enough to make decent Forthwegian women uninterested in taking chances.

Occupation meant that Sidroc and his family crowded the house to overflowing. An egg had turned their home to rubble. Ealstan knew it could have been his as easily as not. Sidroc and his father—Ealstan’s father’s brother—still shambled around as if stunned, for his mother and sister had been in the house when the egg burst.

Occupation meant broadsheets written in awkward Forthwegian going up on almost every wall that hadn’t been knocked flat. THE KAUNIAN KINGDOMS YOU LED INTO THAT WAR, some of them said. Others asked, WHY DO FORTHWEGIANS FOR KAUNIANS DIE? Ealstan had never had any particular use for the Kaunians who lived within Forthweg’s borders—except watching the blond women in their tight trousers. If the Algarvians wanted him to hate them, though, there had to be more to them than he’d thought.

Occupation meant having no idea what had happened to his brother, Leofsig. That was worst of all.

And yet, even with Count Brorda fled and an Algarvian officer ensconced in his castle, life had to go on. Ealstan’s sister stuffed a chunk of garlicky sausage, some salted olives, a lump of hard white cheese, and some raisins into a cloth sack and thrust it at him. “Here,” she said. “Don’t dawdle. You’ll be late for school.”

“Thanks, Conberge,” Ealstan said.

“Remember to stop at a baker’s on the way home and bring us more bread,” Conberge told him. “Or if the bakers are all out, get ten pounds of flour from a miller. Mother and I can do the baking perfectly well.”

“All right.” Ealstan paused. “What if the millers are out of flour, too?”

His sister looked a bit harried. “In that case, we all start going hungry. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She raised her voice to a shout: “Sidroc! Aren’t you ready yet? Your masters will beat you black and blue, and you’ll deserve it.”

Sidroc was still running a tortoiseshell comb through his dark, curly hair when he hurried into the kitchen to receive a lunch similar to Ealstan’s. “Come on,” Ealstan said. “Conberge’s right—they’ll break switches on our backs if we’re late again.”

“I suppose so,” Sidroc said indifferently. Maybe he needed a thrashing to bring him out of his funk. Ealstan didn’t, and didn’t want to get one because his cousin remained in a daze. He grabbed Sidroc by the arm and hauled him out on to the street.

No Algarvians were strutting past his house, for which he was duly grateful. The mere sight of kilts set his teeth on edge. Being unable to taunt the Algarvians hurt, too, but he didn’t care to take his life in his hands. Women were not the only ones the occupiers outraged.

Ealstan was sure Leofsig and his comrades had done no such things while on Algarvian soil. No: that Leofsig and his comrades could have done such things never entered his mind. And even if they had, the Algarvians would have deserved it.

When he turned the corner on to the main thoroughfare that led to his school, Ealstan could no longer pretend Gromheort remained a free Forthwegian city. For one thing, the Algarvians had checkpoints every few blocks. For another, signboards written in their script—so sinuous as to be hard to read, especially for someone like Ealstan, who was used to angular Forthwegian characters—sprouted everywhere. And, for a third, heading up the thoroughfare toward the school showed him what a battering Gromheort had taken before it finally fell.

The Algarvians had set gangs to work clearing the wreckage of ruined buildings. “Work, cursing you!” a kilted soldier shouted in bad Forthwegian. The Forthwegians and Kaunians the occupiers had rounded up were already working, throwing tiles and chunks of bricks and shattered timbers into wagons. A Kaunian woman bent to pick up a couple of bricks. An Algarvian soldier reached out and ran his hand along the curve of her buttocks.

She straightened with a squeak of outrage. The soldier and his companions laughed. “Work!” he said, and gestured with his stick. Her face a frozen mask, she bent once more. He fondled her again. This time, she went on working as if he did not exist.

Ealstan hustled past the work gang, lest the Algarvians make him join it. Sidroc followed, but kept looking back over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and staring as he watched the solider amuse himself. “Come on,” Ealstan said impatiently.

“Powers above,” Sidroc muttered, as much to himself as to his cousin. “Wouldn’t you like to do that with a woman?”

“Sure I would, if she wanted me to,” Ealstan answered, even though thinking a woman might one day want him to do such a thing required all the imagination he had. But despite that, he noted a distinction Sidroc had missed: “That soldier wasn’t doing it with her—he was doing it to her. Did you see her face? If looks could kill, she’d have wiped out all those stinking redheads.”

Sidroc tossed his head. “She was only a Kaunian.”

“You think the Algarvian cared?” Ealstan asked, and shook his head to give the question his own answer. “He would have done it to”—he started to say to your mother, but checked himself; that hit harder than he wanted to—“to Conberge the same way. Everybody’s fair game to Mezentio’s men.”

“They won,” Sidroc said bitterly. “That’s what you get when you win: you can do as you please.”

“I suppose so,” Ealstan said. “I never thought we could lose.”

“We cursed well did,” Sidroc said. “We might even be worse off, you know? Would you rather we were off in the west, and King Swemmel’s Unkerlanters came stomping through Gromheort? If I had to chose between them and the Algarvians—”

“If I could make a choice, I’d choose to have all of them go far, far away.” Ealstan sighed. “But magic doesn’t work that way. I wish it did.”

They got to the school just as the warning bell clanged, and then ran like madmen to their first class. In spite of his lethargy, Sidroc didn’t want to have his back striped after all. “Why couldn’t the Algarvians have dropped an egg here?” he muttered fretfully as he flung his bottom on to his stool.

But the master of classical Kaunian was not in the chamber to note—and to punish—his tardiness and Ealstan’s. After a heartfelt sigh of relief, Ealstan turned to the scholar next to him and whispered, “Did Master Bede have to visit the Jakes?”

“Don’t think so,” the other youth answered. “I haven’t seen him at all this morning. Maybe the Algarvians have him grubbing stones.”

“He’d be on the other end of the switch if they do,” Ealstan said. Seeing the Kaunian woman molested had bothered him. He could contemplate the master’s being put to hard labor without batting an eye.

A man strode into the classroom. He was a Forthwegian, but he was not Master Bede, even if he did carry a switch in his left hand. “I am Master Agmund,” he announced. “From this day forth, by order of the occupying authorities, all studies in classical Kaunian are suspended, the language being judged useless both because of its antiquated, outmoded nature and because folk of Kaunian blood have wickedly attempted to destroy the Kingdom of Algarve.”

He spoke as if reading from a script. Ealstan gaped. Master Bede and earlier masters of Kaunian had drilled into him—often painfully—that anyone in eastern Derlavai with the slightest claim to culture had to be fluent in the language, regardless of his own blood. Had they been lying? Or did Algarve have its own purposes here?

Agmund answered that in a hurry, saying, “Instead, you shall be instructed in Algarvian, in which subject I am your new master. Attend me.”

One of Ealstan’s classmates, a youth named Odda, thrust his hand in the air. When Agmund recognized him, he said, “Master, can we not learn Algarvian from the soldiers in the city? Why, already I can say ‘How much for your sister?’ just from having heard them say it so much.”

A vast silence fell on the classroom. Ealstan stared, admiring Odda’s defiant bravado. Master Agmund’s stare was of a different sort. He advanced on Odda and gave him the fiercest thrashing Ealstan had ever seen. Agmund said, “My clever little friend, if you were half as funny as you think you are, you would be twice as funny as you really are.”

When the beating was over, the lessons began. Agmund proved himself a capable enough master, and was plainly fluent in Algarvian. Ealstan repeated the words and phrases the master set him. He had no desire to learn Algarvian, but he had no desire to be whipped, either.

He and Sidroc took turns telling the story around the supper table that evening. “The boy did a brave thing,” Sidroc’s father said.

“He certainly did, Uncle Hengist,” Ealstan agreed.

“Brave, aye,” his father said. Hestan looked from Ealstan to Sidroc to Hengist. “Brave, but foolish. The lad suffered for it, as you and your cousin said, and his suffering is not over yet, either, unless I miss my guess. And his family’s suffering will barely have begun.”

Hengist grunted, as if Hestan had hit him in the belly. “You are likely to be right,” he said. “Of course this new master is an Algarvian lapdog. What he hears, the redheads will hear.” He pointed to Sidroc. “We have suffered enough already. Whatever you think of this new language master, keep it locked in your head. Never let him suspect it, or we will all pay.”

“I don’t mind him so much,” Sidroc said with a shrug. “And Algarvian looks to be a lot easier than classical Kaunian ever was.”

That wasn’t what Hengist had meant. Ealstan understood as much, even if Sidroc didn’t. Understanding such things went with being occupied, too. If Sidroc didn’t figure them out pretty soon, he would be sorry, and so would everyone around him.

Ealstan’s mother understood. “Take care, all of you,” Elfryth said, and that was also good advice.

The next morning, Odda was not in the Algarvian class. He was not in any of his classes that day. He did not return to school the next day, either. Ealstan and Sidroc never saw him again. Ealstan understood the lesson. He hoped his cousin did, too.

King Shazli nibbled at a cake rich with raisins and pistachios. He licked his fingers clean, then glanced at Hajjaj from lowered eyelids. “It would seem King Swemmel did not purpose attacking us after all,” he said.

When his sovereign decided to talk business, Hajjaj could with propriety do the same, even if his cake lay on the tray before him only half eaten. “Say rather, your Majesty, that King Swemmel did not yet purpose attacking us,” he replied.

“You say this even after Unkerlant and Algarve have split Forthweg between them, as a man will tear a peeled tangerine in half that he might share it with his friend?”

“Your Majesty, I do,” the foreign minister said. “If King Swemmel intended to leave Zuwayza alone, we would not see these continual proddings along the border. Nor would we see his envoy in Bishah lyingly denying that any fault attaches to Unkerlant. When Swemmel is ready, he will do what he will do.”

Shazli started to reach for his teacup. At the last moment, his hand swerved and seized the goblet that held wine. After drinking, he said, “I confess I am not sorry that King Penda chose to flee south instead of coming here.” Hajjaj drank wine, too. Thinking of the King of Forthweg as an exile in Bishah was enough to make any Zuwayzi turn to wine, or perhaps to hashish. “We could not very well have turned him away, your Majesty, not if we cared to hold our heads up afterwards,” he said, and then, before Shazli could speak, he went on, “We could not very well have kept him here, not if we cared to hold our heads on our shoulders.”

“You speak nothing but the truth there.” Shazli gulped the goblet dry.

“Well, now he is Yanina’s worry. I tell you frankly, I am more glad than I can say that King Tsavellas has to explain to Unkerlant how Penda came to go into exile in Patras. Better him than me. Better Yanina than Zuwayza, too.”

“Indeed.” Hajjaj tried to make his long, thin, lively face look wide and dour, as if he were an Unkerlanter. “First, King Swemmel will demand that Tsavellas turn King Penda over to him. Then, when Tsavellas tells him no, he’ll start massing troops on the border with Yanina. After that”—the Zuwayzi foreign minister shrugged—“he’ll probably invade.”

“If I were Tsavellas, I’d put Penda on a ship or a dragon bound for Sibiu or Valmiera or Lagoas,” Shazli said. “Swemmel might forgive him for harboring Penda just long enough to palm him off on someone else.”

“Your Majesty, King Swemmel never forgives anyone for anything,” Hajjaj said. “He proved that after the Twinkings War—and those were his own countrymen.”

King Shazli grunted. “There, I judge, you speak nothing but the truth. Everything he has done since seating himself firmly on the throne of Unkerlant goes toward confirming it.” He reached for his wine goblet again, so abruptly that a couple of his gold armlets clashed together. Discovering the goblet was empty, he called for a servant. A woman came in with a jar and refilled the goblet. “Ah, thank you, my dear,” Shazli said. He watched her sway out of the antechamber, then turned his attention back to Hajjaj: Zuwayzin saw too much flesh to let it unduly stir them. “If, as you seem to think, we are next on Swemmel’s list, what can we do to forestall him?”

“Dropping an egg on his palace in Cottbus might have some effect,” Hajjaj said dryly. “Past that, we are, as your Majesty must know, in something less than the best position.”

“As I must know. Aye, so I must.” Shazli’s mouth twisted. “Finding allies would be easier if we were of the same blood as most of the other folk of Derlavai. If you were a tow-headed, fair-skinned Kaunian, Hajjaj—”

The foreign minister presumed to interrupt his sovereign (not much of a presumption, not with an easygoing king like Shazli): “If I were a Kaunian, your Majesty, I’d long since be dead in this climate of ours. It’s no wonder the old Kaunian Empire traded with Zuwayza but never tried planting colonies here. Even more to the point, the only kingdom with whom we share a border is Unkerlant.”

“Aye.” Shazli looked at Hajjaj as if that were his fault—or perhaps Hajjaj was feeling the strain from continued Unkerlanter pressure, to imagine such a thing. “This also makes the search for allies more difficult than it might be otherwise.”

“No one will ally with us against Unkerlant,” Hajjaj said. “Forthweg might have, but Forthweg, as we have seen, as we have just discussed, is no more.”

“And, as we have seen, Unkerlant and Algarve had divided the kingdom between them as smoothly as two butchers chopping up a camel’s carcass,” Shazli said discontentedly. “I had hoped for better—better from our point of view, worse from theirs.”

“So had I,” Hajjaj said. “Given half a chance, King Mezentio can be as headstrong as King Swemmel. But, with Algarve so sorely beset from so many sides at once, Mezentio almost has common sense forced upon him.”

“What an unfortunate development.” Shazli paused, looking thoughtful. “Of course, Mezentio no longer has to fret about his western frontier, which may leave him more room to maneuver.”

“If I may correct your Majesty, King Mezentio no longer has a war on his western frontier,” Hajjaj said. “With Unkerlant as his new neighbor, he would be a fool indeed did he not fret about it.”

“You have the right of it there, Hajjaj, without a doubt,” King Shazli admitted. “See how delighted we are, for instance, to have Unkerlant for a neighbor. And Unkerlant and Algarve are by no means enamored of each other. Have we any hope of exploiting that to our advantage?”

“As your Majesty will know, I have had certain conversations with the Algarvian minister here in Bishah,” Hajjaj answered. “I fear, however, that Marquis Balastro has not been encouraging.”

“What of Jelgava and Valmiera?” Shazli asked.

“They are sympathetic.” Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. “Sympathy, however, is worth its weight in gold.” King Shazli pondered that for a moment, then laughed. It was not a happy laugh. Hajjaj went on, “Also, the Kaunian kingdoms are not only warring against Algarve but very far away.”

Shazli sighed and drained his second goblet of wine. “We are truly in a desperate predicament if King Mezentio offers our best hope of aid.”

“It is not a good hope,” Hajjaj said. “It is, if anything, a very faint hope. Balastro has made it clear Algarve will not anger Unkerlant while the war goes on in the east and south.”

“A faint hope is better than no hope at all,” Shazli said. “Why don’t you pay another call on the good marquis today?” Seeing the foreign minister’s martyred expression, the king laughed again, this time with something approaching real amusement. “Spending an afternoon in clothes will not be the death of you.”

“I suppose not, your Majesty,” Hajjaj replied in a tone that supposed anything but. King Shazli laughed again, and gently clapped his hands together to show the meeting with the foreign minister was over.

While Hajjaj’s secretary spoke on the crystal with the Algarvian ministry to arrange a time for the appointment, Hajjaj himself went through his meager wardrobe. He did have some Algarvian-style tunics and kilts, just as he kept tunics and trousers—which he truly loathed—for consultations with envoys from Jelgava and Valmiera. After donning a blue cotton tunic and a pleated kilt, he examined himself in the mirror. He looked as he had in his student days. No—his clothes looked as they had then. He’d grown old since. But Marquis Balastro would be pleased.

Hajjaj sighed. “What I do in the service of my kingdom,” he muttered.

His secretary had set up the meeting with the Algarvian minister for midafternoon. Hajjaj was meticulously on time, though the Algarvian set less stock in perfect punctuality than did the folk of Unkerlant or the Kaunian kingdoms. Outside the ministry, clothed and sweating Algarvian guards stood watch, as their Unkerlanter counterparts did outside the residence of King Swemmel’s envoy. The Algarvians, though, were anything but still and silent as they watched good-looking Zuwayzi women saunter by. They rocked their hips and called lewd suggestions in their own language and in what scraps of Zuwayzi they’d learned.

The women kept walking, pretending they hadn’t heard. Such public admiration was anything but the style in Zuwayza. Hajjaj had been shocked the first time he’d heard it when he’d gone off to Algarve for college. It didn’t start clan feuds there, though. Algarvian girls giggled and sometimes gave back as good as they got. That had shocked him, too.

He was harder to shock these days. And the Algarvian minister’s secretary was a polished man by any kingdom’s standards. Escorting Hajjaj past the guards and into the ministry, he murmured in fluent Zuwayzi: “I do beg your pardon, your Excellency, but you know how the soldiers are.”

“Oh, aye,” Hajjaj answered. “I have learned to make allowances for the foibles of others, and hope others will make allowances for mine.”

“What an admirable way to look at things,” the foreign minister exclaimed. He ducked into a doorway and returned to his own native tongue: “My lord, the Zuwayzi foreign minister.”

“Send him in, send him in,” Marquis Balastro said. He did not speak Zuwayzi, but, since Hajjaj knew Algarvian well, they had no trouble talking with each other. Balastro was in his early forties, and wore a little stripe of hair under his lower lip and mustaches waxed till they were as straight and sharply pointed as the horns of a gazelle. Such adornments aside, he had as little of the fop in him as any Algarvian, and was, for a diplomat, forthright.

He—or his secretary—also knew not to plunge too abruptly into business with a Zuwayzi. A tray of cakes and wine appeared as if by magic. Balastro made small talk, waiting for Hajjaj to open: another nice courtesy. At length, Hajjaj did begin, saying, “Your Excellency, it is surely destructive of good order among the kingdoms of the world when the large can with impunity bully and oppress the small for no better reason than that they are large.”

“With Algarve so grievously beset, I could hardly fail to admit the principle,” Balastro said. “Its application, though, will vary according to circumstances.”

Algarve was hardly a small kingdom. Hajjaj refrained from saying as much. What he did say was, “As you will have heard from me before, King Swemmel of Unkerlant continues to make unreasonable demands on Zuwayza. Since Algarve, from its own experience, understands such extortion—”

Balastro held up a hand. “Your Excellency, let me be plain about this. Algarve is not at war with Unkerlant. King Mezentio does not now desire to make war on King Swemmel. This being so, Algarve cannot reasonably object to whatever King Swemmel chooses to do on frontiers distant from her. King Mezentio may privately deplore such deeds, but he will not—I repeat, will not—seek to hinder them. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do, unmistakably so.” Hajjaj did his diplomatic best to hold disappointment from his voice. Balastro had not been encouraging before. Now he was blunt. Zuwayza would have no help from Algarve. Zuwayza, very probably, would have no help from anyone.

Krasta was angry. When she was angry, people around her suffered. That was not how she thought of it, of course. As far as she was concerned, she was making herself feel better. In any case, other people’s feelings had never seemed quite real to her, any more than the idea that there could be numbers smaller than zero had. But the master who’d taught ciphering had been so marvelously handsome, she’d pretended to believe it harder than she would have otherwise.

Now, though, the noblewoman had no reason to dissemble. Waving a news sheet at Bauska, she cried, “Why do they feed us such lies? Why don’t they tell us the truth?”

“I don’t understand, milady,” the servant said. She would not have presumed to read the news sheet before her mistress saw it. Had she so presumed, she would not have been rash enough to admit it.

Krasta waved the news sheet again; Bauska had to leap back hurriedly to keep from getting hit in the face. “They say only that we are advancing in Algarve and moving on the enemy’s fortifications. We’ve been moving on them for weeks. We’ve been moving on them since this stupid war started. Why haven’t we moved past them yet, in the name of the powers above?”

“Perhaps they are very strong, milady,” Bauska replied.

“What are you saying now?” Krasta’s eyes sparked furiously. “Are you saying that our brave soldiers—are you saying that my brother, the hero—cannot break through whatever defenses the barbarians throw up against us? Is that what you’re saying?”

Bauska babbled denials. Krasta listened with only half an ear. Servants always lied. Krasta threw down the news sheet. As far as she was concerned, the war had gone on far too long already. It had grown boring.

“I am going into town,” she announced. “I shall spend the day in the shops and the cafes. Perhaps—perhaps, mind you—I shall find something of interest there. Summon the coachmen at once.”

“Aye, milady.” Bauska bowed and hurried away. As she went, she muttered something under her breath. It could not possibly have been what it sounded like, which was, Out of my hair for a while. Krasta dismissed the possibility from her mind. Bauska would never have dared say such a thing, not where she could hear it. The servant knew what was liable to happen to her if Krasta found her even slightly disrespectful. All the servants at the estate knew.

With a low bow, the coachman handed Krasta up into the carriage. “Take me to the Avenue of Equestrians,” she said, naming the street with the most shops—and the most expensive shops—in Priekule. “The corner of Little Hills Road will do. I shall expect to see you there again an hour before sunset.”

“Aye, milady,” the coachman said, as Bauska had done before. Some nobles let their servants speak to them in tones of familiarity. Krasta was not one to make that mistake. They were not her equals, they were her inferiors, and she intended that they remember it.

The carriage went swiftly through the streets. Not much traffic was on them. Many common folk, Krasta knew, had had their horses and donkeys impressed into the service of the kingdom. The public caravans that traveled the ley lines were also far from crowded. Most of the passengers aboard them were women, so many men having been summoned into King Gainibu’s army.

Like the traffic on its thoroughfares, Priekule seemed a shadow of its former self. Many shops and taverns were shuttered. Some of those shutters no doubt meant the owners had gone off to war. And some shutters were up because owners wanted to save their expensive glass if Algarvian eggs burst in the capital of Valmiera. None had yet. Krasta was serenely confident none would.

Workmen were piling sandbags around the base of the Kaunian Column of Victory. Cloth sheathed the carved stone. Krasta giggled, thinking of lamb’s-gut sheaths for other columns. A wizard walked around the ancient monument, incanting busily. Perhaps he was fire-proofing the cloth or otherwise sorcerously strengthening it. Valmiera could afford to do that for its treasures. Few nobles and even fewer commoners could afford to do it for their private property.

Horses snorting, the carriage pulled to a stop. Krasta stepped out on to the Avenue of Equestrians. She did not look back, nor wonder even for a moment what the coachman would do till it was time to retrieve her. As far as she was concerned, he stopped existing when she no longer needed him. If he didn’t start existing again the moment she required him, he would be sorry.

Shops on the Avenue of Equestrians remained open. Clerks fawned on Krasta as she strutted into a jeweler’s, a milliner’s, a fancy lampseller’s. The clerk in a fine tailor’s shop did not fawn enough to suit her. She had her revenge: she ran the young girl ragged, trying on every pair of silk and leather and linen trousers in the place.

“And which will milady choose for herself today?” the sweating clerk asked when Krasta redonned her own trousers at last.

“Oh, I do not care to buy today,” Krasta answered sweetly. “I was just comparing your styles to the ones I saw the other day at the House of Spogi.” Out she went, leaving the clerk, slump-shouldered with dejection, staring after her.

Setting the commoner in her place immensely improved Krasta’s mood. She hurried across the street to the Bronze Woodcock, a cafe she’d always favored. An old waiter with a bushy mustache of almost Algarvian impressiveness was leading her to an empty table by the fire when a man a couple of tables away sprang to his feet and bowed. “Will you join me, Marchioness?”

The waiter paused, awaiting Krasta’s decision. She smiled. “Of course I will, Viscount Valnu,” she replied. With a tiny shrug, the waiter steered her to Valnu’s table. The viscount bowed again, this time over her hand. He raised it to his lips, then let it fall. Krasta’s smile got wider. “So good to see you, Viscount,” she said as she sat down. “And since I hadn’t seen you in a while, I thought you must have put on a uniform, as my brother has done.”

Valnu took a pull at the flagon of porter in front of him. Firelight played off his cheekbones. Depending on how it struck his features, they were either beautifully sculpted or skeletal: sometimes both at once. His blood, Krasta thought, was very fine. With a wry smile of his own, he said, “I fear the rigors of the field are not for me. I am a creature of Priekule, and could flourish nowhere else. If King Gainibu grows so desperate as to need my martial services, Valmiera shall be in desperate peril indeed.”

“Porter, milady?” the waiter asked Krasta. “Ale? Wine?”

“Ale,” she said. “Ale and a poached trout on a bed of saffron rice.”

“And I will have the smoked sausage with vinegared cabbage,” Valnu declared. “Hearty peasant fare.” He himself was neither peasantish nor hearty. As the waiter bowed, he went on, “You need not hurry the meals overmuch, my good fellow. The marchioness and I shall amuse ourselves in the meantime by talking about rank.” The waiter bowed again and departed.

Krasta clapped her hands together. “That is well said!” she cried. “Truly you are a man of great nobility indeed.”

“I do my best,” Valnu said. “More than that, I cannot do. More than that, no man can do.”

“So many of the superior class do not even try to come up to such standards,” Krasta said. “And so many of the lower order these days are so grasping and vulgar and rude, they require lessons in the art of dealing with their better.” She explained how she had dealt with the clerk in the clothier’s establishment.

Valnu’s delighted grin displayed very white, even teeth and made him look more like a skull than ever, save only for the glow of admiration in his bright blue eyes. “That is excellent,” he said. “Excellent! You could hardly have done better without running her through, and, had you done that, she would not have long appreciated what you’d taught her.”

“I suppose not,” Krasta agreed regretfully, “though that might have left a stronger impression on the rest of the vulgar herd.”

Valnu clicked his tongue between his teeth several times, shaking his head all the while. “People would talk, my dear. People would talk. And now”—he sipped his porter—“shall we talk?”

Talk he and Krasta did: who was sleeping with whom, who was feuding with whom (two topics often intimately related), whose family was older than whose, who had been caught out while trying to make his family seem older than it was. That was meat and drink to Krasta. She leaned across the small table toward Valnu, so intent and interested that she hardly noticed the waiter bringing them their luncheons.

Valnu did not at once attack his sausage and sour cabbage, either. In a sorrowful voice, he said, “And, I hear, Duke Kestu lost his only son and heir in Algarve the other day. When I think of how the Six Years’ War cut down so many noble stems, when I think of how likely this war is to do the same … I fear for the future of our kind, milday.”

“There will always be a nobility.” Krasta spoke with automatic confidence, as if she had said, There will always be a sunrise in the morning. But her family’s male line depended on her brother. And Skarnu was fighting in Algarve, and he had no heir. She did not care to think about that. To keep from thinking about it, she took a long pull from her flagon of ale and began to eat the trout and rice on the plate before her.

“I hope everything goes as well as it can for you and yours, milady,” Valnu said quietly. Krasta wished he had not said anything at all. If he had to say something, that was more kindly and less worrisome than most of the other things she could think of.

He dug into the pungent cabbage and sausage—peasant fare indeed—and made them disappear at an astonishing rate. However emaciated he appeared, it was not due to any failure of appetite.

Nor, very plainly, was anything wrong with any of his other appetites, either. As Krasta ate, she was startled—but, given some of the things she’d heard about Valnu, not surprised—when, under the table, his hand came down on her leg, well above the knee. She brushed it away as she might have brushed away a crawling insect. “My lord viscount, as you yourself said, people would talk.”

His answering smile was hard and bright and predatory. “Of course they would, my dear. They always do.” The hand returned. “Shall we, then, give them something interesting to talk about?”

She considered, letting his hand linger and even stray upwards while she did. He was well-born, and was attractive in a bony way. While he would certainly be unfaithful, he would never pretend to be anything else. In the end, though, she shook her head and took his hand away again. “Not this afternoon. Too many shops I haven’t yet visited.”

“Thrown over for shops! For shops!” Valnu clapped both hands over his heart, as if pierced by a beam from a stick. Then, in an instant, he went from melodrama to pragmatism: “Well, better that than being thrown over for another lover.”

Krasta laughed. She almost changed her mind. But she still had gold in her handbag, and plenty of shops along the Avenue of Equestrians she hadn’t seen. She paid for her luncheon and left the Bronze Woodcock. Valnu blew her a kiss.

Skarnu stared in grim dismay at the line of fortresses ahead. Having seen them, the Valmieran captain no longer wondered why his superiors hesitated before hurling their army at those works. The Algarvians had lavished both ingenuity and gold on them. Whoever tried to smash them down, whoever tried to break through them, would pay dearly.

“Come away, Captain,” Sergeant Raunu urged. “Like as not, the stinking Algarvians’ll put a hole through anybody who takes too long a look.”

“Like as not, you’re right,” Skarnu said, and ducked back down into the barley that helped shield him from unfriendly eyes—and, east of where he crouched, there were no eyes of any other sort. East of where he crouched, too, were very few places to hide. Whatever else might happen to it, the Algarvians’ defensive line would not fall to surprise attack.

“In the last war, we’d throw eggs at forts and then just charge right at ’em,” Raunu said. “Maybe they’ve learned something since.”

“If they’d learned anything since, we wouldn’t be in a war now,” Skarnu answered. The veteran sergeant blinked, then slowly nodded.

Off to the north, Valmieran egg-tossers started lobbing destruction at the line of forts. The burst resounded like distant thunder. Skarnu wondered how much damage they were doing. Not so much as he would have liked: he was certain of that. The Algarvians had used stone and earth and cement and iron and bronze to fashion a line of death that ran for many miles north and south and was most of a mile deep. How long would soldiers batter their heads against that line, as Raunu had said, in search of a breakthrough that might not be there at all? Forever?

Probably not. Even so, Skarnu sighed as he said, “They built that to dare us to try to go through it, to dare us to spend the men we’d need to get to the other side. They don’t think we have the nerve to do it.”

“I wouldn’t be sorry if they were right, either,” Raunu said.

“Would you rather fight inside Valmiera, the way we did for most of the Six Years’ War?” Skarnu returned.

“Sir, it’s like you said: if you ask me what I’d rather, I’d rather not fight at all,” the sergeant said.

Skarnu clicked his tongue between his teeth. Sergeant Raunu had indeed used his own words to reply to him, which meant he could hardly take exception to what the veteran said. But he’d seen that a good many of the common soldiers had little stomach for the fight against Algarve in general, and even less for the assault on the forts. He said, “We should have pushed harder, so we would have been through this line before the Forthwegians collapsed.”

“Aye, I see what you’re saying, sir, but I don’t know how much difference that would have made.” Raunu pointed ahead. “Doesn’t look like the cursed redheads have put any new men in their lines, even if they don’t have to worry about their western front any more.”

“They don’t have to worry about Forthweg any more,” Skarnu corrected. “Now they’re face to face with Unkerlant. If they’re not worried about that, they’re fools.”

“Of course they’re fools. They’re Algarvians.” Raunu spoke with an automatic scorn Skarnu’s sister Krasta might have envied. But then, as Krasta would never have done, he changed course slightly: “They’re fools most ways, I mean. They make good soldiers, whatever else you say about ’em.”

“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Skarnu said. “Our lives would be easier.” The Algarvians had resisted the Valmieran advance to the fortified line with only light forces, but they’d fought stubbornly. They’d also fought skillfully, perhaps more skillfully than the men he commanded. Had there been more of them, he wondered if his men would have been able to advance at all. Along with most of his other worries, he kept that one to himself.

A runner came up to him. “My lord marquis?” the fellow asked.

“Aye?” Skarnu said in some small surprise. Far more often these days, he was addressed by his military rank, not title. After a moment, a possible reason for this exception came to mind.

And, sure enough, the runner said, “My lord, his Grace the Duke of Klaipeda bids you sup with him and with some of the other leading officers of our triumphant army at his headquarters this evening. The supper shall begin an hour past sunset.”

“Please tell his Grace I am honored, and of course I shall attend him,” Skarnu answered. The runner bowed and hurried away.

Raunu eyed Skarnu. He’d understood Skarnu was a noble, of course. That was one thing. An invitation extended to a captain to sup with the commander of an army of tens of thousands was something else again. Almost defensively, Skarnu said, “I went to school with his Grace’s son.”

“Did you, sir?” the sergeant said. “Well, you’ll get a good meal out of it, and that’s the truth. I will say, though, sir, the men think well of you for eating out of the same pot they use.”

“It’s the best way I could think of to make sure they got decent food,” Skarnu said. “Nobody cares when a common soldier fusses and complains. When a captain grumbles, though, people start to notice.”

“Aye, sir,” Raunu said, “especially when he’s a captain who went to school with the Duke of Klaipeda’s son.” More than half to himself, he added, “It’s a wonder you’re just a captain and not a colonel.”

Skarnu wished he hadn’t had to mention his connection with the duke, whose son, while not the depraved little monster so beloved of romancers without much imagination, had been one of the most boring youths he’d ever met. He also wished the duke were paying more attention to the commanders who would lead great parts of the Valmieran army into battle and less to his son’s social connections.

But, regardless of the duke’s shortcomings, Skarnu spruced himself up and made his way back toward the village of Bonorva. The village was a good deal more battered than it had been when he’d first seen it from the woods that now lay on the far side from the front. The duke had taken up residence in one of the larger houses there. It still looked scarred and abused: no point cleaning it up and offering the Algarvians a target. Skarnu chuckled as he drew near. After he wrote to Krasta, she’d be sick with jealousy at the exalted company he was keeping.

When he went inside the unprepossessing building, Skarnu might have been transported to another world, the world in which the Valmieran nobility had idled away its time in Priekule and on estates out in the provinces. Lights blazed; dark cloth over the windows and behind the door kept it from leaking out and drawing the notice of Algarvian dragons overhead or the cunning snoops who kept trying to spy targets for the enemy’s egg-tossers.

Marstalu, the Duke of Klaipeda, stood just inside the doorway greeting new arrivals. He was a portly man in his late fifties, his complexion very pink, his hair gone white as snow: he looked like everyone’s favorite grandfather. His uniform put Skarnu in mind of those the Kaunian Emperors had won. So did the brilliant constellation of medals—some gold, some silver, some bejeweled, some with ribbons like comets’ tails—spangling his chest.

Skarnu bowed low, murmuring, “Your Grace.”

“Good to see you, lad. Good to see you,” the duke said, beaming in a grandfatherly way. “Make yourself at home. Plenty of good things to eat and drink here—better than you’ll find at the front, that’s certain.”

“No doubt, sir.” Skarnu felt out of place here despite Marstalu’s friendly words. Most of the other noble officers present glittered hardly less than their commanders. Skarnu’s unadorned uniform made him look and feel like a servant. It also made him feel like a real soldier in amongst a flock of popinjays. Perhaps that was what made him ask, “Sir, when will the attack against the Algarvian works go in?”

“When all is in readiness,” Marstalu answered easily. That might mean anything. It might mean nothing. Skarnu suspected it meant nothing here. The duke went on, “Perhaps we could be more zealous now had we reached this position before the Algarvians finished their dismantling of Forthweg.”

Skarnu didn’t know what to say to that. Marstalu was saying the same thing he had to Raunu. Raunu hadn’t thought it would make a difference. Skarnu had to hope the sergeant was right and he and the commander of the army wrong. But, had the Duke of Klaipeda wanted to reach the fortified belt before Forthweg collapsed, he should have pushed harder. He could have. Of course, he couldn’t have known Algarve’s attack would shatter Forthweg, but everything Skarnu had ever soaked up about the military art suggested that wasting time was never a good idea.

Pushing Marstalu further would accomplish nothing but getting him on the commander’s black list. He could see as much at a glance. That being so, what better choice than enjoying the choice viands and potables set out on the tables before him? He sat down between a pair of bemedaled colonels. One of them jabbed a serving fork into the large, savory bird lying on a tray in front of him. Juices spurted. “Have some, Captain,” he said. “As you can see, we’ve finally gone and cooked Algarve’s goose.”

The colonel on the other side of Skarnu laughed so uproariously at that sally, Skarnu was convinced he’d already emptied the crystal goblet before him several times. Lifting his own wine goblet, Skarnu said, “May we serve the king as we have served the goose.”

“Oh, well said, young fellow, well said,” both colonels exclaimed in the same breath. They drank. So did Skarnu. He carved off a thick slice of goose, then spooned a good helping of parsnips seethed in cream and dotted with butter on to his plate. The salad was of fine lettuces and chopped scallions dressed with wine vinegar and walnut oil.

One of the colonels boasted about the speed of the fine horses he had liberated from an Algarvian noble’s stables. The other boasted about the agility of the fine mistress he had liberated from an Algarvian noble’s bedchamber. Skarnu tried to boast about the fighting qualities of the men in his company. Neither colonel seemed the least bit interested. They were fascinated with each other’s brags, though. Sometimes it was hard to tell which one was talking about his new acquisition.

Gloom settled over Skarnu like a winter fog in Priekule. King Gainibu had been more interested in starting the war against Algarve than his officers were in fighting it. They’d taken what the Algarvians were willing to yield. Now that the Algarvians had yielded everything up to their long-established defensive line, they weren’t going to be willing to yield any more. And going up against that line was, ever more plainly, the last thing any Valmieran commander wanted to do.

One of the boastful colonels upended his goblet once too often. He set his head down on the table and started to snore. Skarnu felt like getting that drunk, too. Why not? he thought. Raunu runs the company just as well when I’m not there.

In the end, though, he refrained. He started to make his way over to the Duke of Klaipeda to say his farewells, but Marstalu seemed far gone in wine himself. Skarnu slipped out into the cool, dark night and headed east toward his company. All things considered, he would rather not have been invited to the feast. He’d hoped for reassurance. What he’d got was more to worry about.