Jaws of Darkness

Thirteen

Krasta stood naked by the side of the bed, staring down at herself. “I still don’t look like I’m pregnant,” she said, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself.

Colonel Lurcanio, lying naked in the bed, lazy and cheerful after making love, nodded. “Not, not very much,” he answered agreeably.

“What do you mean, not very much?” Krasta demanded, her indignation quick to kindle even toward her dangerous Algarvian lover. “My belly doesn’t bulge at all.”

“Well, so it doesn’t.” Lurcanio reached out and set the palm of his hand on that still-flat belly. Krasta expected it to slide lower, down between her legs. Instead, Lurcanio went on, “But your breasts are larger than they were- not that I mind, you understand.” Rather than reaching down from her belly, he reached up to caress her.

She hissed. “Be careful. They’re more tender than they used to be, too.” She couldn’t help admitting that. It was both blessing and curse. When his hands weren’t gentle, or sometimes simply when she moved too fast, they would hurt. But they also gave her more pleasure when he did a proper job of caressing them than they ever had before she quickened.

“Sorry, my dear.” Lurcanio continued in almost clinical tones: “And your nipples are larger and darker than they were.”

“Are they?” Krasta looked down at herself again. “I hadn’t noticed that.”

“I’m not surprised, or not very,” Lurcanio said. “Men are liable to pay more attention to that sort of thing than women do.”

“I should hope so.” Krasta sat down beside him-carefully, so her tender breasts wouldn’t bounce. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re just… there.” A sudden thought took her by surprise. “But I suppose they’ll matter to me if I decide to nurse the baby myself.”

“Aye, I’m sure they would.” Lurcanio raised an eyebrow. “And would you do such a thing, or would you hire a wet nurse?”

“Idon’t know,” Krasta said with an impatient toss of the head. She promptly regretted it, for it jerked the upper part of her body, too. She hissed again, and brought a protective hand up to her breasts. “They’re just… there,” she repeated.

“Like Algarvians in Valmiera,” Lurcanio said.

She nodded. “Aye, like Algarvians in Valmiera.” Only after she’d repeated that, too, did she pause to wonder about it. “What an odd way to put things.”

“Not so odd. We have been here four years, /have beenhere four years,” Lurcanio said. “Considering some of the places I might have gone instead, I have no complaints. You may rest assured that that is the truth. But I do not know how much longer I can stay here.”

“What do you mean?” Krasta had always hated change. These days, Lurcanio in her bed and Algarvians on the streets of Priekule were what she was used to.

He stroked her again. That was all he was likely to do. He wasn’t a young man any more, and wouldn’t want her more than once of a night. Voice detached and ironic as usual, he answered, “Unlike some people I could name, I am usually in the habit of meaning what I say, and neither more nor less than that.”

“But…” Krasta frowned, trying hard to think despite finding the exercise unfamiliar. “Where would you go? What would you do?”

“Unkerlant or Jelgava, most likely,” he replied. “I would fight for my king and my kingdom. That is one of the things a soldier may be called upon to do from time to time, you know.”

“But what wouldI do?” Krasta exclaimed. When she did think, she usually thought about herself first.

Colonel Lurcanio laughed. “I presume that, were I to depart this mansion tomorrow, the very next day you would start trying as hard to convince Viscount Valnu that your baby is his as you’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince me it is mine.”

“Itis yours,” Krasta insisted with much more certainty than she felt. All along, though, she’d done her best to make herself believe the baby was Lurcanio’s. And if the Algarvian officer should disappear, would she have to start believing the child was Valnu’s? She glared at Lurcanio. “You’re a horrid man, too, you know.”

“Thank you,” Lurcanio said, which only annoyed her more. He laughed, but the amusement wouldn’t stay on his face. When it faded, he looked a long way indeed from young. “I have not got my orders yet, you understand, but I fear they may not be far away.”

Krasta didn’t feel so happy, either. Seeing her lover look not so young reminded her she wasn’t quite so young, either. So did the weariness that came with carrying a child. Fighting back a yawn, she said, “If you Algarvians need all your officers and soldiers in those other kingdoms far away, how will you hold on to Valmiera?”

She thought about the soldiers she’d seen marching up the Boulevard of Horsemen, the blond soldiers in Valmieran uniform with Algarvian flags on their sleeves. Did the redheads think they could use men like that to hold down the kingdom? If they were right, what did that say about Valmiera? What did lying naked here beside an Algarvian say about her? It was all very confusing.

Lurcanio patted her. He liked to touch her even when he didn’t feel like doing-or couldn’t do-anything more. “That is a good question, my sweet,” he said. “When King Mezentio figures out a good answer for it, I hope he will let me know. Until then…” He got out of bed and started getting into his clothes. When he was dressed, he bowed to her. “I shall see you in the morning.” He seldom spent nights in her bedchamber.

Krasta turned out the lamp without bothering to put on pyjamas. A month into summer, the night was fine and warm-nothing like the long, frigid, miserable hours of darkness the winter before. And she’d had it easier than most, because of the Algarvians in the mansion with her. She didn’t dwell on that for long; she just slid under the linen sheets and fell asleep.

A couple of hours later, distant rumblings woke her-those and flashes of light on the horizon. Thunder? she wondered muzzily. But the day was bright and clear. Then her wits began to work, and she remembered the sorry world in which she lived. “Oh,” she said out loud, around a yawn. “The islanders are dropping eggs on us again.”

She took it for granted. Why not? It had happened before, a good many times. It would doubtless happen again, too. She sighed and went back to sleep.

When she came down to breakfast the next morning, she found Colonel Lurcanio in a foul temper. “How are we supposed to go about fighting a proper war if they keep dropping eggs on our heads?” he demanded.

“They have dragons,” Krasta said, spreading butter and Jelgavan marmalade on toast. “Don’t you have dragons, too?”

“Of course we have dragons, too,” Lurcanio answered irritably. He was going to be difficult. Krasta could feel it. And she was right. More irritably still, Lurcanio went on, “We have dragons fighting to keep the Lagoans and Kuusamans on Sibiu from dropping eggs on Algarve herself. We have dragons, some dragons, fighting the islanders down in Jelgava. And we have dragons in the west, in Unkerlant and Forthweg, fighting Swemmel’s men.”

“Unkerlantand Forthweg?” Krasta asked. “I hadn’t heard that before.”

“And you have not heard it now, either. Forget I said it,” Lurcanio told her. He passed a hand across his face. It was still early morning, but he looked weary. After a moment, he looked up at Krasta again. “Where was I? Ah, aye. With all those dragons flying over the rest of Derlavai, how many do you think Algarve has left to put in the air above Priekule?”

“Not enough-that’s plain,” Krasta said. “And so eggs land on Valmierans. You people should have thought this out better before you got into such a big war, if you want to know what I think.”

Lurcanio stared at her out of red-rimmed eyes. He started to laugh. Krasta started to get angry. Then her Algarvian lover said, “Out of the mouths of babes.” He got up, walked around the table, and kissed her. “You are right, my sweet. We probably should have thought this out better. But it is rather too late to worry about that now, would you not agree?”

“Lurcanio…” she said as he went back to his seat.

He looked her way in some surprise. She hardly ever called him by name. “What is it?” he asked, his voice more serious than usual, the mocking note so often in it now entirely gone.

“You’re going to lose the war, aren’t you?” The words came forth in a rush, blurted out before Krasta had the chance to think about whether she really wanted to ask that question.

“Eat your breakfast,” Colonel Lurcanio told her, as if she were a child asking something whose answer had to be too hard for it to understand. But then he shook his head, a gesture aimed more at himself than at Krasta. “Things are not easy these days,” he said slowly. “I do not know when they will be easy again. I do not know if they will ever be easy again. But I tell you this: if Algarve goes down, we shall go down fighting. Do you doubt it, even for a moment?”

“No.” Krasta shivered, though the day already promised considerable heat.

“We shall go down fighting,” Lurcanio repeated, as if she hadn’t spoken. “We shall put sticks in the hands of the veterans left alive from the Six Years’ War, and in the hands of fourteen-year-old boys still sore from their circumcisions. For if we lose this war as we lost the last one, what shall be left for Algarve?”

For once in all the time they’d spent together, Krasta wanted to go around the table and comfort him. But she didn’t. She just sat where she was. She wished the baby inside her would let her drink brandy, even so early in the day. But the mere thought made her belly clench.

Lurcanio shrugged and smiled, as if deliberately pushing worry to one side. “Well,” he said, “the evil time has not yet come for us. And, while it may come, it also may not. I intend to do what I can to enjoy myself in the meanwhile.”

No, the evil time hasn’t come for the Algarvians yet, Krasta thought. What about for the Kaunians of Forthweg? What about for Kaunians all over Derlavai?

She couldn’t ask Lurcanio that question. That she couldn’t ask it of him was probably the most important reason she hadn’t got up and gone around the breakfast table to him. She was, in an odd way and with certain gaps, truly fond of him. But he was an Algarvian, and she had yellow hair. Walls would always stand between them, whether he fully realized it or not.

He rose and bowed to her. “And now I needs must go do what needs doing, to hold the evil time at bay as best I can. If you will excuse me”-one of his eyebrows twitched-”or even if you will not…” He bowed again and left.

He sits at a desk, but he fights for Algarve, just as much as if he had a stick in his hand. Krasta had known that for four years, but knowing it and having it hit home were two different things. He’s worth even more than an ordinary soldier, because he can do things no ordinary soldier can do.

And you… may have his baby inside you. No matter what Lurcanio would do to her if she bore a blond, Krasta hoped with all her heart the child was Valnu’s.

After the impressers hauled Garivald into King Swemmel’s army, he hadn’t got much in the way of training. He hadn’t got any training, as a matter of fact. They’d given him a uniform and a stick and told him to obey the officers and underofficers set over him if he knew what was good for him. Then they’d taken him to the front in northern Unkerlant, stuck him in a squad there, and thrown him at the Algarvians. He still had trouble recalling that his name was supposed to be Fariulf.

And now, less than a month after he’d followed a behemoth over and through the Algarvian trenches when the assault began, he found himself a corporal, and a corporal in a foreign kingdom at that, for his regiment had pushed into Forthweg a couple of days earlier. Forthwegian peasant villages didn’t look much different from their Unkerlanter equivalents, except that the locals painted their houses in brighter colors and that the men wore beards.

No, another difference: therewere a lot of men in the villages. That took some getting used to. “When the redheads came through, these Forthwegians knuckled under,” one of Garivald’s squadmates said. “They didn’t fight back, not like we did.”

And so more of them are left alive, Garivald thought. He kept that notion buried down deep; getting a name for the subversive kind of grousing might have proved fatally inefficient. What he did say was, “The redheads put up a tougher fight down in the south than they’re doing up here.”

“That’s ‘cause half the Grelzers are traitors,” another trooper said, which wasn’t quite true but came too close to truth for comfort. The fellow went on, “Besides, what do you know about it, Corporal? Even if you did get promoted, you’re a new fish.”

Garivald started to answer that. He’d seen plenty of fighting down in Grelz, even if not formally as one of King Swemmel’s soldiers. His irregulars-Munderic’s, till he took over the band-had harassed the Algar-vians and their Grelzer puppets… and even a few Forthwegians, the ruffians in the outfit called Plegmund’s Brigade.

But, in the end, Garivald kept his mouth shut and let the question go with just a shrug. He didn’t want people knowing Corporal Fariulf was really Garivald, the fellow who’d led irregulars and written songs and done other things to draw the unfriendly notice of people in Cottbus. King Swemmel and those who followed him trust no one who’d fought the redheads on his own. After all, such people might turn and fight him one day, too.

Dragons streaked by overhead, flying east. They were all painted the rock-gray of Garivald’s tunic. “Haven’t seen many Algarvian dragons lately,” he remarked. That seemed a safe enough way to change the subject.

“Don’t miss those bastards, either, not even slightly.” Two soldiers said it at the same time, in almost identical words. Garivald hadn’t had to worry about Algarvian dragons down in Grelz. Mezentio’s men hadn’t had so many that they bothered using them against irregulars. Almost every beast they put in the air flew against King Swemmel’s main army.

But now Garivald was part of that main army. If the Algarvians put dragons in the air here in the north, they would be flying them at his comrades and him. But if the Algarvians put dragons in the air here in the north, swarms of Unkerlanter dragons would try to knock them down. Garivald had never seen so many dragons in his whole life. He’d never imagined that so many dragons could be gathered together and fed and flown over one stretch of the front.

“Halt! Who comes?” a sentry called as someone approached their camp-fire. The answer came back in Forthwegian. Some Unkerlanters, especially those from the northeast, could make sense of the related language, but it was just tantalizing noise to a Grelzer like Garivald. The sentry was a northern man. When he said, “Come ahead, then,” in his dialect of Unkerlanter, the Forthwegian must have been able to follow him, for he approached the fire.

Except, as he got close, he provednot to be a Forthwegian. Oh, he had dark hair and a dark beard, as Forthwegian men did, but he was tall and slim and had blue eyes and a short, straight nose, nothing like the beaks belonging to Forthwegians and their Unkerlanter cousins. And, instead of a sensible knee-length tunic, he wore a short tunic and trousers, garments Garivald had heard of but, till now, had never seen.

“Corporal?” he asked Garivald: that was a word nearly identical in Forthwegian and Unkerlanter. When Garivald nodded, the local bowed low before him, as if he were at least a colonel rather than a junior underofficer. He said something that might have beenThank you or might as easily not have been. Then he jabbed a thumb at his own chest and said, “I-Kaunian.”

“Kaunian?” Garivald said. “I thought Kaunians were blond.” He didn’t think a whole lot of Kaunians were left alive in Forthweg, either, but saying that didn’t strike him as the best way to make this fellow his friend. As things turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered, for the local plainly didn’t understand his dialect. In some exasperation, Garivald called out to the sentry: “Come back here and translate for me, Rivalin.”

“Aye, Corporal,” Rivalin said. “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all you can do,” Garivald agreed. “Ask him why his hair isn’t yellow if he’s one of these Kaunian buggers.”

Rivalin spoke in his own dialect, exaggerating some of the sounds and slurring others till Garivald could scarcely make out what he was saying. The Kaunians seemed to get it, though, and answered quickly. Too quickly: He and Rivalin had to go back and forth a couple of times before the sentry turned to Garivald again. “Corporal, he says he is a blond, only he dyed his hair for some kind of a magical disguise he had that made him look like a Forthwegian so the redheads wouldn’t grab him.”

“Oh.” Garivald started to nod, then checked himself. “Wait a minute. If he had this magical disguise, why did he need to dye his hair? Wouldn’t the magic take care of that for him?”

More back-and-forth between Rivalin and the Kaunian. At last, Rivalin returned to a brand of Unkerlanter Garivald could readily understand: “Corporal, Ithink he’s saying he did it on account of his hair would turn yellow again if it got cut while he had the spell on, but I’m not quite sure.”

“Oh,” Garivald repeated. “All right, now ask him why he decided to quit his disguise and start wearing those silly clothes.”

When Rivalin translated that, the Kaunian spoke with considerable heat-so much heat that the Unkerlanter sentry had to ask him to slow down several times. When the torrent of words finally ebbed, Rivalin answered, “I don’t think he’s got a whole lot of use for Forthwegians.”

“Powers above,” one of the troopers behind Garivald said, “I haven’t got a whole lot of use for Forthwegians, either.” Garivald shrugged. Except for the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, these were the first Forthwegians he’d ever seen.

The Kaunian spoke again. “He says he wears those clothes on account of those clothes are what Kaunians wear,” Rivalin reported. Garivald shrugged again. Forthweg was a lot warmer than the Duchy of Grelz. Why anybody would want to wear trousers up here… Even the Algarvians weren’t so foolish. And then, through Rivalin, the Kaunian said, “He wants to know how to join up with us, Corporal. He wants to start killing Algarvians. Says it’s his turn now.”

“I can’t do anything about that. You know I can’t,” Garivald said, and Rivalin nodded. Garivald went on, “Take him to Lieutenant Andelot. Maybe he’ll figure out what to do with him-and he’ll be out of our hair.”

“Right.” Rivalin grinned at him. “You haven’t been a corporal very long, Fariulf, but you know eggs is eggs.” He led the Kaunian away.

“I should hope I know eggs is eggs,” Garivald said. “I know we need a new sentry, too.” He named another man and sent him out to take Rivalin’s place.

When Rivalin came back, he looked astonished. “I think they’re going to recruit that whoreson,” he said.

“Why not?” Garivald said. “He wants to blaze some redheads. If he gets a couple before they get him, that’s a bargain for us. And even if he doesn’t, they blaze him instead of an Unkerlanter. That’s a bargain, too.”

Rivalin eyed him. “You sure the impressers just scooped you off your farm?”

“Too right I am,” Garivald answered. “I wish I were back there now, getting my crop in.” He paused. “Part of me wishes that, anyway. The rest… Well, it’s not like I don’t owe the Algarvians anything.”

Heads solemnly went up and down. A lot of the newer soldiers in Swemmel’s army came from lands regained from the redheads. They’d seen how the Algarvians ruled the countryside they held. A lot of them had kinsfolk missing or dead, the way Garivald did. And a lot of them fought as if the war were a personal struggle against Algarve. In some fights, not a great many captives got taken.

More behemoths came up during the night. Before dawn the next morning, they rumbled forward, tearing a hole in the Algarvian line through which footsoldiers swarmed. Garivald had done that again and again. He almost got the feeling he-or rather, the Unkerlanter army-could do it any time.

Almost. He’d already seen that Mezentio’s men, even when outnumbered and outflanked, fought hard for every foot of ground. And they didn’t fight with sticks and behemoths alone. He’d heard about the magic that shook the ground and tore fissures and sent lambent purple flames shooting up from it. Now his squad met that magecraft at first hand.

Men screamed when the earth opened and then closed on them. Men whom the flames caught had no chance to scream, and simply ceased to be. One burst of flame not only charred a behemoth but also touched off the eggs it carried, spreading ruin through the footsoldiers closest to it.

But then the magic ebbed, almost as swiftly as it had sprung up. Lieutenant Andelot happened to be crouched by Garivald as it faded. The officer said, “That’s our mages, sacrificing our people to beat down their wizardry.”

“Is there any other way to beat it?” Garivald asked.

“If there is, we haven’t found it yet,” Andelot answered. “Life energy gives mages a lot of force to work with.”

Life energy: a bloodless way to saykilling people. Garivald found exactly what it meant that afternoon, when he and the survivors from his squad pushed past the sacrifice the Algarvian mages had made to try to stop them: row upon row of blond men and women, all blazed through the head. “No wonder that Kaunian wanted to join up,” Garivald said. “If the Algarvians had done this to us, I’d want to kill every Algarvian ever born.”

“No wonder at all,” Rivalin said. Like Garivald’s, his eyes kept coming back to the dead blonds in sick fascination.

But then Garivald reflected that Mezentio’s men hadn’t lined up Unkerlanters row on row and sacrificed them. Their own mages had done that. He wished he hadn’t thought of it in such terms. They only do it because the Algarvians are killing these blonds. That was true, but eased his mind only so much. They were doing it, andwhy counted little. Sooner or later, a day of reckoning would have to come… Wouldn’t it?

Whenever Bembo went out on the streets of Eoforwic these days, he found himself looking west. That was the direction rain came from, not that rain was likely in the Forthwegian capital in the middle of summer. But, despite heat and bright blue skies and dazzling sun, a storm was brewing in the west, and he knew it.

The Algarvian constable noticed he wasn’t the only one glancing that way. With a distinct effort of will, he turned his gaze away from the west and onto his partner. “It’s on your nerves, too, eh, Delminio?” he said.

“Aye,” Delminio answered, not needing to ask whatit was. “Who would’ve thought things could just fall apart like that?”

“Not me,” Bembo said. “And tell me, what difference will it make to the cursed Unkerlanters, powers below eat ‘em, if I’m toting a long stick like a soldier and not the regular short one? This miserable thing is heavy.” He could always find something to complain about, even though he’d carried an army-issue stick going into the Kaunian quarter.

Despite the long stick slung on his own back, Delminio had no trouble shrugging an elaborate Algarvian shrug. “No, it probably wouldn’t make much difference to Swemmel’s bastards, if they ever get here,” he allowed.

“Powers above grant that they don’t,” Bembo said. “Powers above grant that the army stops ‘em somewhere, anywhere.” He’d never imagined sounding plaintive and worried about the Algarvian army, but that was how he felt.

Delminio went on as if he hadn’t spoken, repeating, “It won’t matter much to the Unkerlanters, no. But suppose these Forthwegian whoresons here in town start feeling frisky. Wouldn’t you rather be toting something that’ll knock ‘em over from more than a hundred feet away?”

“Urk,” Bembo said, and meant it most sincerely. “D’youthink it’ll come to that?”

“Who knows?” Delminio shrugged again. “But I’ll tell you this: there’s an awful lot of Forthwegians walking around with their peckers up because they know we’re hurting. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

He sounded as if he hoped Bembo would tell him he was just imagining things. Bembo wished he could do that, but he couldn’t. Before, the Forthwegians on the streets had scrambled out of the way when they saw constables coming. They might not have loved them (Who ever loves a constable? Bembo wondered, not wasting a chance for self-pity), but they feared them, which would do.

Now… If they weren’t laughing behind the constables’ backs, Bembo would have been astonished. Some of them had the nerve to laugh in the constables’ faces. Bembo wouldn’t have minded teaching them a lesson, but he didn’t. Orders were not to do anything that might touch off a riot. The Algarvians had enough to worry about in Forthweg these days without adding the Forthwegians to the mix.

Delminio’s grunt might have meant he thought Bembo’s silence proved his point. Since Bembo thought the same thing, he didn’t push his partner. The stinking Unkerlanters were getting close to the Twegen River, the stream that flowed north to the sea right past the western edge of Eoforwic.

“Do they think they’ll have a happy time if Swemmel’s whoresons take this place away from us?” Bembo asked no one in particular. “Not likely.”

“No, not likely at all,” Delminio agreed. “Other question is, do they care? And that’s not likely, either. Most of’em don’t think about Unkerlanters one way or the other, except that Swemmel’s men are giving us a hard time. They think King Penda will come back if they throw us out, and they’ll all be happy again.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Bembo said. “Wasn’t Swemmel about ready to boil somebody alive because whoever it was wouldn’t hand Penda over to him?”

“Tsavellas of Yanina had him,” Delminio said.

Bembo snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Thanks. I’d forgotten who it was. When I was back in Tricarico, reading about all this stuff in the west in the news sheets, it didn’t seem to matter so much.”

“Only goes to show, you can’t tell ahead of time,” Delminio said, and Bembo nodded. He hadn’t thought much about Forthweg at all, not in the days before the war started. He’d never imagined he would have the bad luck to get stuck in this miserable kingdom for years.

A Forthwegian with a gray-streaked black beard reaching halfway down his chest came out of his shop and shouted at the constables in bad Algarvian: “When you catch villains who theft from me? How I make living, they theft my trunks?”

“Well, however you make a living, it won’t be as an elephant,” Bembo answered. Delminio snickered.

The shopkeeper, who sold luggage, didn’t speak Algarvian well enough to get the joke. “Elephant? What you talk about, elephant?” he said. “Powers below eat elephant. Go catch thefts. What you good for? All you Algarvians, you nothing but crazy peoples.”

Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed, as if at a compliment. “Thank you,” he said. Delminio snickered again. The shopkeeper said something in sonorous, guttural Forthwegian. Whatever it was, Bembo didn’t think it was praise. The fellow turned around and stumped back into his shop.

“If the bugger who stole from him starts selling those trunks, maybe we’ll nab him,” Delminio said. “If he doesn’t, how can we get our hands on him?”

“And why should we care?” Bembo added. “You think I want to work hard for somebody who calls me names? If he’d dropped a little silver, now, that’d be a different story.”

“Sure enough,” Delminio agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below are welcome to all these Forthwegians. I wouldn’t shed a tear if we started shipping them west along with the blonds.”

“Trouble with that is, it’d really spark off an uprising,” Bembo said.

After pondering for a couple of paces, Delminio nodded. “Aye, you’re probably right.” He took another step. “Of course, the uprising’s liable to come anyway. If it does, these buggers ought to be fair game, you ask me.”

“You talk like Oraste,” Bembo said.

“Who?” Delminio waggled a finger. “Oh, your old partner. He seems like a pretty good man to have at your back.”

“He is.” Bembo let it rest there. Along with being a good man to have at one’s back, Oraste believed the way to settle problems was to settle the people who made them-by choice, permanently.

The shift was long and slow and dull. Another argument with a Forthwegian right at the end made it even longer. Delminio was furious, and didn’t even try to hide it. He was all for arresting the local, who was unhappy because somebody’d flung a rock through a window he’d just replaced. Bembo didn’t want to arrest him. He wanted him to shut up and go away. Then his partner and he could go back to the barracks and relax.

“If we drop on him, we have to drag him over to the gaol and fill out all the cursed forms,” he said. “That always takes hours, and we’re already late getting back, and I’m hungry.” He patted his belly. To him, that argument, like the belly in question, carried considerable weight.

In the end, it carried weight for Delminio, too. He contented himself with taking hold of his stick and starting to swing it toward the Forthwegian. That stopped the argument in the middle of the ley line: the Forthwegian turned pale and fled. “We ought to shiphim west,” Delminio said. “Nobody’d miss him a bit.”

“Powers below eat him,” Bembo said. “Let’s go home and see if there’s anything left in the refectory. Those other greedy buggers better not eat everything in sight.” He was almost hungry enough to hurry back to the barracks to make up for lost time-almost, but not quite.

He and Delminio were still three or four blocks away, and squabbling good-naturedly over what the evening’s entree would be, when a great roar ahead staggered them both. The ground shook under Bembo’s feet. Windows shattered without rocks pitched through them.

Bembo listened for the bells that warned of Unkerlanter dragons, but didn’t hear them. He had trouble hearing much of anything. “They somehow snuck one through, the bastards,” he shouted, and even had trouble hearing his own voice.

Delminio’s words came to Bembo as if from very far away: “Was that the barracks?” Bembo’s eyes opened wide. He hadn’t thought of that. He and Delminio started to run.

When they rounded the last corner, Bembo skidded to a stop. Broken glass and pebbles skritched under his boots. The whole front of the barracks was gone. Not far from him, a big chunk of stone had come down on someone-a Forthwegian, by his tunic. The result wasn’t pretty.

“This must have been an enormous egg.” Delminio had to shout it two or three times before Bembo’s battered ears caught it.

He nodded. “Too big for a dragon to carry, you’d think.” He had to do some shouting of his own to get his partner to understand. “And I still don’t hear any warning bells.” Someone came staggering out of the barracks: an Algarvian, badly burned and bleeding. How anyone could have lived through that blast of sorcerous energy was beyond Bembo, but he ran toward the other constable to give him what help he could.

Before he reached his countryman, the fellow clapped both hands to his chest and toppled. He might almost have been blazed. Then a beam burned the ground by Bembo’s feet, and he realized the other Algarvianhad been blazed.

He wasn’t a soldier. He’d never been a soldier. He had no interest in becoming a soldier. He had a great deal of interest innever becoming a soldier. All of which, when someone started blazing at him, meant exactly nothing. He dove for cover as if he’d been fighting in the west against the Unkerlanters for years.

“Get down!” he shouted to Delminio, who still stood there staring as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on. Maybe Delminio didn’t. A moment later, Bembo’s partner clutched at his shoulder and went down, so he’d got his lesson. Bembo hoped it wouldn’t prove too expensive.

Other shouts started piercing the ringing in Bembo’s ears. They weren’t in his language, but in raucous Forthwegian. He couldn’t understand a word of them. No, that wasn’t true after all. One word he understood very well: Penda.

Stupid buggers have gone and risen up, sure as blazes, he thought, peering out from behind the smoking rubble in back of which he sprawled. They’ll pay for that. Oh, how they‘ll pay.

Someone in a half-shattered building across the street from the barracks moved. Bembo didn’t know exactly what the motion was or just who’d made it. Whoever it was, though, was bound to be a Forthwegian, which meant- which suddenly meant-an enemy. Bembo raised his stick to his shoulder and blazed. He heard a shriek. He heard it very clearly, and shouted in fierce triumph. All at once, he was delighted he had that long, heavy army-issue stick.

“You want us, you’ll have to pay for us!” he yelled. A beam seared the air inches above his head. He smelled thunder and lightning. Exultation trickled out of him as he realized the Forthwegian rebels were liable to be willing to do just that.

Saxburh wailed in her cradle. Vanai hurried to pick up the baby and put her on her breast. That was what Saxburh wanted. Her cries ceased. She sucked and gulped contentedly. Vanai stroked her fine, soft hair. It was dark, as Ealstan’s was, but the baby’s skin was too fair, too pale, for a full-blooded Forthwegian’s. Sure enough, Saxburh showed both sides of her family.

Eggs burst, not far away. The windows rattled. They hadn’t shattered yet; powers above only knew why. Vanai felt like shrieking, too, but who would comfort her if she did? No one she could think of. Not even Ealstan could do that.

Vanai cursed softly, desperately. Was Ealstan here, staying close by her side while she took care of their daughter? She shook her head. “He had to go fight,” she told Saxburh. “He had to try to kick the redheads out of Eoforwic. He thought that was more important.”

Her daughter stared up at her out of eyes darkening from blue toward brown. The baby had just learned how to smile. She tried to smile and nurse at the same time. Milk dribbled down her chin.

“He’s a fool,” Vanai went on in classical Kaunian, dabbing at Saxburh’s face with a rag. “He’s nothing but a fool. He thinks the Algarvians will go away just like that.” She snapped her fingers. The sound startled the baby, who jerked her head-and tried to take Vanai’s breast with it. Vanai yelped. That made Saxburh look back toward her, again without letting go. Her moving that way hurt less.

After a little while, Saxburh grunted and made a mess in her drawers. Vanai changed them, cleaned the baby off and rubbed olive oil on her bottom, and then nursed her some more. Saxburh’s eyes sagged shut. Vanai slid the nipple out of her mouth, hoisted the baby to her shoulder, and got a sleepy belch out of her. A couple of minutes later, she set Saxburh back in the cradle and closed the toggles on her tunic.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of wine. Nursing always left her thirsty. As she drank, she looked out the window. She wasn’t afraid anyone on the street would recognize her as a Kaunian. For one thing, the Forthwegians held this part of Eoforwic. And, for another, her masking spell worked as well as it always had, now that she wasn’t pregnant any more. She looked like a Forthwegian, and she would for hours yet.

Dark brown bloodstains marred the gray slates of the sidewalk. Vanai couldn’t tell which ones came from Algarvians and which from Forthwegians. No Algarvians were left alive hereabouts, not now.

Smoke’s sharp scent filled the air. So did the nastier dead-meat stench from unburied bodies. Looking west, Vanai saw fresh smoke rising from a dozen fires inside Eoforwic and even more smoke, huge black columns of it, on the far side of the Twegen River. The Unkerlanters were closing in on Eoforwic, moving so fast that not even the news sheets, which had to give forth with Algarvian lies, could cover up the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen Mezentio’s men here in the north.

Vanai’s mouth twisted. If the Unkerlanters hadn’t come so far so fast, the Forthwegian underground wouldn’t have risen up. Vanai didn’t much care whether Forthwegians or Unkerlanters gave orders in these parts-anyone but Algarvians suited her fine.

But Ealstan cared. Though he differed from most of his countrymen in his views about Kaunians, Ealstan was a Forthwegian patriot. He wanted King Penda back. He wanted the Forthwegians to free their own kingdom, or as much of it as they could. And he was willing-no, he was horribly eager- to risk his life to help bring that about.

“He’s an idiot,” Vanai whispered-she didn’t want to disturb Saxburh. But she meant it all the way down to the depths of her soul. The baby was real. The baby was there. Set against Saxburh’s reality, what did the kingdom of Forthweg matter? Nothing, not so far as Vanai could see. But Ealstan thought differently.

Men are stupid, went through Vanai’s mind, not for the first time. She’d done everything she could to keep Ealstan here in the flat. Nothing had worked: not argument, not pleading, not tears. Pybba told him there was going to be a fight, and after that he might as well have been deaf and blind. Vanai had no trouble at all hating the pottery magnate.

More eggs burst, all in one sector of the city north of the flat. Vanai cursed again, in classical Kaunian and in Forthwegian. The Algarvians had far more egg-tossers than Pybba’s ragtag and bobtail. True, Mezentio’s men needed everything they could scrape together against the Unkerlanters, but they also couldn’t afford to lose Eoforwic. They were fighting back hard.

Footsteps in the hallway. Vanai’s heart beat faster. She didn’t have to fear Algarvian constables, not for a while. That thudding heart meant hope. And, at the coded knock, she jumped in the air and squeaked for joy.

Carrying a stick with the Algarvian green-red-and-white shield enameled on near the touch-hole, Ealstan strode into the flat. His tunic was filthy. So was he. He wore an armband, also grimy now, that said free forthweg-as close as the irregulars came to having real uniforms. “Home for a little while,” he said around a yawn. “Then I have to go back.”

Despite the dismay stabbing through her at that, and despite his not having bathed for days, Vanai threw her arms around him and kissed him. Then she said, “There’s hot water on the stove. I can pour some in a basin. If you want to clean up while I get you something to eat. ..”

“Aye,” Ealstan said, and yawned again. He pulled off his tunic, his shoes and socks, and his drawers, and stood there in the kitchen careless of his nakedness. Vanai just smiled and hurried to get the hot water. A few years before, she would have been shocked. What her grandfather would have said… Idon’t care what my grandfather would have said, she thought firmly. This is my husband.

She gave him bread and oil and cheese and olives and onions: all sorts of food that would keep. She wished they had a rest crate for meat and other perishables. They could have afforded one, but they’d never got around to buying it. Now they had to do without. Ealstan sat down, still naked. He wolfed down everything in sight and looked around for more.

“When did you eat last?” Vanai demanded.

“Yesterday?” he said vaguely. “Aye, yesterday, I think. It’s been busy out there.” He shook his head; a few drops of water sprayed out from his hair and his beard. “We’re doing what we have to do-so far, anyway. How’s the baby?”

“She’s fine,” Vanai said, which drew a grin from Ealstan. She got up and filled his mug with wine once more. A moment later, it was empty again. Vanai went on, “She really is starting to smile.”

“That’s good. That’s very good,” Ealstan said. “Here’s hoping we’re able to give her something to smile about.” As if to underscore his words, more eggs burst. He grimaced. “Powers below eat the Algarvians. They don’t care if they knock Eoforwic flat, as long as they get rid of us.”

“Will the Unkerlanters help us?” Vanai asked.

“Who knows what the Unkerlanters will do?” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they’ll do? This isour kingdom, curse it. It doesn’t belong to Swemmel any more than it belongs to Mezentio.”

“Which is all very well,” Vanai said, “but will Swemmel pay any attention if you tell him that?”

“I doubt it.” Ealstan spoke with a bitter cynicism Vanai had heard from other Forthwegians talking about their kingdom’s unhappy history. “When have our neighbors ever paid any attention to us?”

Vanai got up, walked around the table, stood beside Ealstan, and set her hands on his bare shoulders. “I’ll pay attention to you, if you wouldn’t sooner fall asleep.”

He laughed as he looked up at her, but hesitated even so. “Will you be all right if we do?”

“I think so,” she answered. “It should be long enough-and I’ve missed you, too, you know.” She kissed him. That might have been a cue in a farce: Saxburh started to cry. Instead of getting angry, Ealstan laughed again. Vanai hurried off to tend the baby. Saxburh turned out to be both wet and hungry. She also turned out to be wide awake and full of smiles.

“Maybe I will just fall asleep,” Ealstan said after a while.

“Whatever you like.” Vanai knew she would be up a couple of times in the night. Saxburh hadn’t quite got the idea of sleeping through it yet. In a way, having the baby in the flat was an advantage; it left her so tired, the din of fighting outside seldom disturbed her rest.

After a couple of hours, Saxburh went back to sleep again. Vanai set her in the cradle. Ealstan, to her surprise, was still awake. “I must be important to you,” she said as she got undressed.

“You think you’re joking,” he said.

“No.” Vanai shook her head. “I don’t. I know what being tired means, too.”

Ealstan soon proved he wasn’ttoo tired. Vanai straddled him, carefully lowering herself onto him. It hurt. She wasn’t surprised that it did, not after a baby had gone through there. It hurt almost as much as her first time had. She did her best not to let Ealstan see that. She took no pleasure from it. No, that wasn’t true. She took no sensual pleasure, but she did enjoy pleasing Ealstan. He moved slowly and carefully, doing his best not to hurt her, even when he groaned and clutched her backside and spent himself.

She leaned down and kissed him. “Go to sleep now, sweetheart. Nothing’s going to happen till the morning.” Saxburh would, inevitably, wake up between now and then, but Ealstan couldn’t do anything about that.

When the baby did wake up, Ealstan didn’t even hear her cries; he kept on breathing deeply, not quite snoring, in the bed beside Vanai. His breathing didn’t change when she slid out of bed. She shook her head in bemusement. Back in the days when he’d gone to work and she’d had to stay in the flat for fear of being seized as a Kaunian, he’d often risen without waking her. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

Occasional flashes of light came through the shutters as Vanai changed Saxburh’s wet linen and put the baby to her breast: bursts of sorcerous energy, along with the fires those bursts could start. Those flashes meant men shrieking and buildings crashing to ruin, but they looked and sounded like nothing so much as a thunderstorm without the drumming rain.

Saxburh nursed. She burped. She went back to sleep without much fuss. Vanai laid her in the cradle, then lay down beside Ealstan. All sorts of questions filled her mind. Would this uprising do Forthweg any good? If it did, would Ealstan come through safe? The second mattered more to her than the first. If anything happened to Ealstan, she didn’t care what happened to Forthweg.

And then she fell asleep herself. No matter how worried about Ealstan she was, she couldn’t hold her eyes open another moment.

When she woke, it was beginning to get light outside. She found herself alone in bed. She hurried out to the kitchen. Ealstan had left a note behind. /hope I see you again soon, he’d written in classical Kaunian. Whatever happens, I shall love you as long as I live. She stared at that. Tears filled her eyes.

Saxburh chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. Vanai scooped her out of the cradle and sat down to give her her breakfast. As the baby began to nurse, they were both crying.

Ealstan wondered whether he’d been wise to go home during the lull in the fighting. He loved Vanai, and wanted to see her as much as he could. His new little daughter entranced him. But seeing them, while it reminded him of why he was fighting, also reminded him of how much he had to lose. He didn’t need that reminder, not if he was going to lay his life on the line against the redheads.

Leofsig did it, he thought. That brought his fury up to the proper pitch. If it hadn’t been for the Algarvians, his cousin Sidroc never would have quarreled either with him or with his brother. Ealstan hoped Sidroc was dead these days. If he wasn’t, he was still fighting in Plegmund’s Brigade on the Algarvian side. Recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade remained on some walls, though the Forthwegian rebels who held most of Eoforwic had whitewashed the greater number of them.

Ealstan picked his way through rubble up to the barricade of brickwork and boulders and benches behind which the rebels sheltered. A fellow named Beortwulf, who’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army and served as a captain here, nodded to him. “Pretty quiet right now. The redheads have been busy further west.” He pointed across the Twegen before continuing, “To them, we’re an afterthought. They’re really sweating about Swemmel’s men.”

“Afterthought, eh?” Ealstan bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “Let’s seem ‘em try moving men through Eoforwic and call us an afterthought.”

“Something to that,” Beortwulf agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below can eat Algarve and Unkerlant both.”

“Aye.” Ealstan nodded. “It’d make things a lot easier for Forthweg, that’s certain.”

Before Beortwulf could answer, a runner called Ealstan’s name. When he admitted to being in the neighborhood, the fellow said, “Come on with me. The big boss wants to have a chat with you.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Ealstan said. “Suppose I don’t feel like talking to him?” But he followed the man deeper into Eoforwic, to find out what Pybba had in mind. Whatever it was, the Algarvians wouldn’t like it.

Pybba still worked out of the pottery, and ran the rebellion from there as he’d run the underground before seizing the chance to strike at Mezentio’s men. The Algarvians still hadn’t figured out who their chief tormentor was. Had they done so, eggs would surely have smashed Pybba’s establishment to potsherds.

“What now?” Ealstan asked when he came into Pybba’s sanctum. “Do you want me to cast accounts for you?”

“I’d ask you to if I didn’t have something better for you to do,” the pottery magnate replied with a laugh. He turned to the two Forthwegians already in the room with him and said, “Here’s the clever lad who figured out how to make us look like Algarvians when we need to.”

Both the other Forthwegians were in their mid-to late thirties: old men, Ealstan thought uncharitably. Then he took a second look at them and realized either one could tear him to pieces without breaking a sweat. He prudently kept his unkind thought to himself. Pybba’s pals were looking him over, too. One of them said, “I suppose he’ll have to come along, then. He looks like he might be able to cut it.”

“He’s already got himself an Algarvian stick,” the other noted, approval in his voice.

Ealstan refused to let himself be baited. He also refused to show undue curiosity, no matter what he felt. He just nodded to Pybba and said, “Tell me what you need me to do.”

Pybba nodded, too. So did the other two, unnamed, Forthwegians. The one who’d spoken first said, “Kid sounds like he’s got his head on straight. He may do.”

“He’s got gall,” Pybba said, high praise from him. He turned back to Ealstan. “The redheads are still hanging on to the royal palace and the ley-line caravan depot and one ley-line route through Eoforwic. That lets ‘em ship some men west, and it lets ‘em give us a hard time. If their military governor all of a sudden came down with a slight case of loss of life…”

“Ah.” Ealstan nodded again, doing his best to stay dispassionate. “You’ll have the right kind of Algarvian uniforms to let us get away with a masquerade?”

“Kid’s no dummy, sure enough,” one of the-assassins?-said to his comrade. The fellow suddenly switched to unaccented Algarvian: “You understand me, kid? Can you talk like this, too?”

“I understand,” Ealstan answered in the same language. “If I talk much, I give us away. I do not talk well.”

“Could be worse,” the other Forthwegian said. “All right, you’ll be junior to us. We’ll do the talking. At least you’ll know what’s going on. How long does your fancy spell hold?”

“Six or eight hours,” Ealstan said.

That seemed to please both of the men in the office with Pybba and him, and the pottery magnate as well. “Plenty of time,” Pybba said. “You can get into your new clothes just before sunup and sneak into Algarvian territory, do what you want to do, and then lie up somewhere till you can get back to our lines.”

“Why lie up?” Ealstan asked. “Why not hustle back to our lines?”

“Ha! You don’t think of everything after all,” one of the rough men said. “We hustle back looking like redheads, our fornicating pals’ll fornicating blaze us before we can tell ‘em who we are.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ealstan said. “I can turn us back as easy as I can make us look like Algarvians.” Everyone else beamed; maybe he hadn’t mentioned that part of the sorcery to Pybba before.

Before sunrise the next morning, Ealstan put on an Algarvian sergeant’s uniform, while his comrades-he still didn’t know their names-donned the clothes of a captain and a major. Ealstan had to fiddle with his cantrip a little to shift it from first person to third so it would work on the other two men. He cast it twice in quick succession, and the other two men took on the appearance of the enemy. Then he used the original version on himself. A grunt from one of the others told him it had worked; he couldn’t sense it on himself, any more than Vanai could tell that she looked like a Forthwegian after casting her own disguising spell.

“Good thing we saw you do that,” a Forthwegian fighter said, “or we’d kill you on the spot.” One of his pals nodded.

Ealstan was content to follow the older men’s lead as they sneaked out of the Forthwegian positions and toward the corridor through Eoforwic the Algarvians still held. As soon as they were on a street where redheads might see them, the two Forthwegians in officers’ clothing became Algarvians themselves, with what seemed a deeper magic than the one with which Ealstan had disguised them. It wasn’t just that they spoke the language. They imitated the strut and swagger that distinguished Mezentio’s men, imitated those things so well that it did not seem an imitation, but rather something real.

Ealstan had to work hard to imitate them. His own swagger seemed painfully artificial to him, but none of the real Algarvians pointed his way and shouted, “Impostor!” After a bit, he noticed that a lot of underofficers and troopers-not all of them, but a good many-were less flamboyant than their officers. Once he’d seen that, he stopped worrying so much about having to overact.

What amazed him as he pressed on toward the royal palace was how ordinary the Algarvians acted among themselves. He’d seen them up to now only as occupiers, harassing his fellow Forthwegians and doing worse than harassing the Kaunians of Forthweg. Now, though, even more than when he’d sneaked into the Kaunian quarter looking for Vanai, he might have been an Algarvian among Algarvians, which gave him a whole different perspective.

Among themselves, they were just people, going on about their business and laughing and joking as he might have done with his friends. No one is ever the villain in his own story, Ealstan reminded himself. It was a far cry from what he usually thought of the Algarvians, and far from the most comfortable notion he’d ever had.

If he hurried after the other two, he didn’t have to think. Redheaded guards in short tunics and kilts ringed the palace from which King Penda had once ruled Forthweg. The palace had suffered worse indignities than Algarvian guards, too. The Forthwegians had made a stand there when Unkerlant stabbed Ealstan’s kingdom in the back, and the Unkerlanters in their turn had tried and failed to keep the Algarvians from capturing it. Many of the towers famous throughout the kingdom had fallen in one fight or another. But the Algarvian banner still flew from a tall flagstaff in front of the palace, and an Algarvian military governor still ruled Forthweg for King Mezentio from inside it.

One after another, the guards stiffened to attention as Ealstan’s comrades and he went past them. No one barked a challenge. If they looked like Algarvians, they were assumed to be Algarvians. Ealstan had to fight down the urge to snicker. That might have given the game away.

“We have a situation report for the governor from the west,” said the Forthwegian who looked like an Algarvian major. He kept saying that, again and again; it was plenty to get him and his companion who was dressed like a captain and Ealstan with them whisked through the palace and toward the governor, their target. The speed with which it got them whisked through the palace again told Ealstan what the redheads truly reckoned important. The Forthwegian uprising in Eoforwic was a nuisance to Algarve; the endless grinding war against Unkerlant really mattered.

Ealstan had expected to see some of the magnificent trappings of the Forthwegian monarchy on display in the palace. He didn’t. Before long, he realized he’d been naive. What the Unkerlanters hadn’t stolen, the Algarvians surely had.

He was halfway through the throne room, in fact, before he recognized it for what it was. The throne remained, but only as a chair; all the gold leaf had been stripped off. He hadn’t even time to feel outrage. Before it could start to grow, he was pressing on toward the governor’s office, which had been the king’s.

Although the governor-a fat man with a duke’s silver dragon perched on the left breast of his uniform tunic-was talking with some other, lesser, official, he sent the man away at once, declaring, “The front comes first.” Ealstan understood him very clearly. When the other redhead went out, Ealstan shut the door behind him. The governor went on, “What is the latest, gentlemen? Will we be able to keep Swemmel’s men from crossing the Twegen and aiding these stinking Forthwegians?”

The two men dressed as officers led him toward a map. He paid no attention whatever to Ealstan. Why should a governor notice a sergeant? Ealstan unslung his stick. He had all the time in the world to blaze the Algarvian duke in the back of the head. The man crumpled without a sound.

“Good work,” the Forthwegian dressed as a major said. “Let’s get out of here.” Out they went, locking the door behind them. “His Grace is preparing a response for us,” the counterfeit major told the fellow who’d been conferring with the governor. “He’ll need a little while.” The genuine redhead nodded.

Ealstan and his comrades were out of the palace and in the back room of an abandoned house two blocks away when the hue and cry began. By then, he’d already turned the other two men who looked like Algarvians back into Forthwegians, and they’d pulled ordinary Forthwegian tunics from their packs and put them on. He gave himself his proper appearance, too. Leaving their sticks behind was a nuisance, but couldn’t be helped.

They went out onto the street once more without the slightest trace of fear. Ealstan felt like cutting capers. Mezentio’s men were looking for three of their own kind. They paid no attention to lowly unarmed Forthwegians, just as the governor had paid no attention to a lowly sergeant. Ealstan grinned and clapped his hands together once, liking the comparison very much.

For once, even Marquis Balastro’s bravado failed him when Hajjaj called on him at the Algarvian ministry in Bishah. The Zuwayzi foreign minister took that as a bad sign. Doing his best to conceal his worry, he said, “You are gracious for agreeing to see me on such short notice, your Excellency.”

“You are gracious for wanting to see me at all, your Excellency,” Balastro returned. “I am glad you do not find Algarve a sinking ship, to be abandoned as soon as possible.”

As a matter of fact, Hajjaj did reckon Algarve a sinking ship. Abandoning it was another matter. Abandoning Algarve meant casting Zuwayza on King Swemmel’s mercy, and Swemmel hardly knew the meaning of the word.

“I am sorry to find our officers were right about the building Unkerlanter offensive in the north,” Hajjaj said, “and even sorrier you have not had better fortune repelling it.”

“So am I,” Balastro said bleakly.

“Do you think you will be able to hold on the line of the Twegen?” Hajjaj asked.

“For a while,” the Algarvian minister replied. “Perhaps for a long while.” Hajjaj wondered if that was bravado returning. But Balastro went on, “After all, Swemmel lets us do him a favor if he stops there.”

“A favor?” Hajjaj scratched his head. Having to wear clothes on a blisteringly hot day like this, he felt like scratching everywhere at once, but refrained. “I’m sorry, your Excellency, but I don’t follow that.”

“We did the Forthwegians a favor. We got rid of their Kaunians for them, and precious few of them miss the blonds even a little bit,” Balastro said. “Now we’re getting rid of a whole great whacking lot of Forthwegians who enjoy rising up and causing trouble. If we kill them, they can’t very well rise up and cause trouble for the Unkerlanters, now can they?”

“Oh,” Hajjaj said. “I see what you mean. Do you really think King Swemmel is that devious?”

“When it comes to getting rid of people who might cause him trouble one fine day, nobody’s better than Swemmel.” Marquis Balastro spoke with great conviction.

And he was probably right, too. Turning the subject away from Forthweg and toward something more immediately important to him, Hajjaj said, “You will understand that King Shazli has a certain amount of concern because the front has shifted so far to the east.”

That was a diplomatic way to say, King Shazli is scared green because there aren‘t any Algarvian soldiers anywhere close enough to help us hold back the Unkerlanters, and we can’t do it by ourselves. We already tried, and we lost. To Hajjaj’s relief, the Algarvian minister understood it as such. Balastro said, “We will send you more dragons, your Excellency. We will send you as many behemoths as we can spare. We will send as many soldiers and mages as we can spare, too.”

“Thank you for your generosity,” Hajjaj said. “You might have done better to send us all these things earlier, you know.”

“Maybe.” Balastro sounded bland. “But King Mezentio has not forgotten you, and that is something you must always remember.”

Hajjaj nodded. Now he understood. The more worried Algarve was that Zuwayza might drop out of the war, the more the redheads would do to keep her in it. The more enemies Unkerlant had to fight, the better off Algarve was. In a way, that was reassuring. In another way, as the Zuwayzi foreign minister had said, it was liable to be too little, too late. Hajjaj rose and bowed. “I shall take your reassurances back to the palace. His Majesty will be glad to have them.”

When he got back to the palace, though, he went to General Ikhshid before calling on the king. Ikhshid’s fleshy face was unhappy. “So they’ll send us more dragons and behemoths, will they?” he said, one white eyebrow rising. “They’d better do it fast, if they’re going to do it.” He didn’t sound convinced. He didn’t sound cheerful, either.

“Fast?” Hajjaj raised an eyebrow, too. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“Maybe,” Ikhshid answered, “but it’s nothing that’d surprise you very much, I’d bet. The Unkerlanters are starting to bring more and more soldiers up against our lines in the south.”

That didn’t surprise Hajjaj. It did alarm him. “Can we beat them back?” he asked anxiously.

“We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got and whatever the Algarvians give us,” General Ikhshid said. “You hit anything hard enough, though, and it’ll break. If the Unkerlanters put enough men in the fight, we’re in trouble. We saw that four and a half years ago.”

“Do you think they can?” Hajjaj asked.

“Depends on how they’re doing against Algarve and Gyongyos.” Ikhshid’s jowls wobbled as he frowned. “Odds are better now that they can than they were six weeks ago. They’ve gone a long way east, and the redheads don’t seem able to stop them anywhere.” Hajjaj explained Balastro’s theory of why the Unkerlanters had paused on the Twegen. It made Ikhshid no more cheerful. He said, “I wish that made less sense than it does.”

“My thought exactly,” Hajjaj said. “Have you told the king what you just told me?”

General Ikhshid shook his head. “Not yet.”

“I have to see him now,” Hajjaj said. “I’ll give him the broad outline, if that’s all right with you, and you can fill in the details later.”

“Fine. Fine.” Now Ikhshid nodded. “He’ll likely take it better from you than he would from me.”

Hajjaj thought the general overestimated his powers of persuasion, but headed off to see Shazli nonetheless. The king served him tea and wine and cakes, and didn’t take the royal privilege of cutting short the small talk that accompanied the refreshments. Having played many such games himself, Hajjaj judged that Shazli knew the news would be bad and didn’t much want to hear it.

At last, though, with a sigh, King Shazli said, “I’m comfortably certain this is no mere social call, your Excellency, although I am always glad of your company.”

“No one ever pays a king a mere social call, save perhaps another king,” Hajjaj said, and quickly summarized what he’d learned from Balastro and Ikhshid.

King Shazli sighed when he finished. “We knew this day was coming when the Unkerlanters began driving the Algarvians back this summer.” Before Hajjaj could speak, Shazli held up a pale-palmed hand. “We knew this day might come when the Algarvians failed before Cottbus, and we knew it probably would come when they failed in Sulingen. Now we have to deal with it as best we can.”

Hajjaj gave the king a seated bow. “Just so, your Majesty. As long as you keep that view of the world, Zuwayza is in good hands.”

“Provided the Unkerlanters don’t end up parading through Bishah,” Shazli said. “Well, if worse comes to worst, your Excellency, I rely on you to keep that dark day from dawning.”

“I’ll do my best,” Hajjaj promised, though he thought the king relied on him for altogether too much.

After his busy and gloomy morning, after a nap in the heat of noontime, Hajjaj left Bishah and went up into the hills to pass the rest of the day at home. “I didn’t expect you back so soon, young fellow,” Tewflk said when Hajjaj alighted from his carriage.

“Life is full of surprises,” Hajjaj said, doing his best to forget how many of them were unpleasant. “Would you be so kind as to have a servant”-he would never have offended the majordomo by sayinganother servant -”bring some date wine to the library for me?”

“Of course, your Excellency,”Tewfik replied; Hajjaj would have been astonished had he said anything else.

Once inside the library, Hajjaj pulled out a book of poetry by a Kaunian named Mikulicius, who’d lived in what the historians called Late Imperial times. Mikulicius had watched things fall apart all around him, and written about what he’d seen. With his kingdom’s Algarvian allies in headlong retreat, with the Unkerlanters massing against Zuwayza, the bitter verses seemed perfectly timely even if they were more than a thousand years old.

The door opened. The servant with the wine, Hajjaj thought. Without glancing up from the book, he said, “Just set the tray down, if you please.”

“Aye, your Excellency.”

That answer did make him look up, in surprise. It came in throatily accented Algarvian, not the Zuwayzi he’d expected. There with the tray and the wine jug and the cup stood Tassi. She wore no more than she had when she’d first knocked on the door to Hajjaj’s home. He looked her up and down; he could hardly help doing that. He switched to Algarvian-sharp Algarvian-himself to ask, “Who sent you here?” Minister Iskakis’ very estranged wife hadn’t learned much Zuwayzi yet.

“Why, Master Tewfik did,” she answered, her eyes perhaps too convincingly innocent. “He said you needed some wine.”

“Did he?” Hajjaj said. Tassi dipped her head, as Yaninans often did instead of nodding. “And did he say I needed anything else?”

“No.” Now she tossed her head, a gesture that gave birth to enchanting motions of other parts of her body. Curse it, she doeslook naked to me, not nude. Hajjaj had to think in Algarvian to have that make any sense to him; his own tongue lacked the distinction between the words. Tassi went on, “He did say you seemed unhappy.”

“Did he say why?” Hajjaj asked.

Tassi tossed her head again. “Why does not matter,” she replied, which went dead against a lifetime of experience for Hajjaj. She took a deep breath. Hajjaj admired that, too. She said, “I have been unhappy, too. I know what it is like. I know it is bad. I understand.”

Do you? he wondered. Does being unhappy because your husband likes boys more than he likes you let you understand a man who is unhappy because he sees his kingdom in mortal danger? Analytical as always, Hajjaj found the idea unlikely, but couldn’t quite dismiss it out of hand.

Tassi had not an analytical bone in her body. She got down on the carpet beside Hajjaj. “Whatare you doing?” he demanded, though he knew, and knew he could do what she obviously had in mind.

“Making you happy for a little while,” she answered. “Your senior wife said I should just do this, and not pay any attention to your grumblings.”

“Kolthoum said that, did she?” Hajjaj asked. Tassi dipped her head again. Her hair-she’d perfumed it-brushed over his chest and belly. “And Tewfik sent you?” he said. She didn’t bother responding to that; she’d already answered it once. Hajjaj took off his reading glasses and wagged a finger at her. “I sense a plot.”

Tassi didn’t respond to that, either-not with words, at least. But she didn’t need words to be very distracting. Hajjaj supposed he could have picked her up bodily and thrown her out of the library. But that would have been undignified, and a man would suffer almost anything before losing his dignity. Not, he thought as his arms went round her, that I’m suffering too much.

Fourteen

Every news sheet, every rumor, that came to the farm in southern Valmiera brought Merkela ferocious joy. “They’re losing,” she gloated. “They’re running. They’d running like whipped, bleeding dogs with their tails between their legs.” Then, suddenly, her grim delight faded. “Gedominu!” she exclaimed. “What did you just put in your mouth?”

The baby had started crawling not long before. That meant she and Skarnu had to keep a closer eye on him than ever. She reached down, grabbed him, and stuck a finger in his mouth. She got something out of there, then wiped her hand on her trousers. “What was it this time?” Skarnu asked with clinical curiosity.

“Just a dust bunny, powers above be praised,” Merkela answered. She glared at Gedominu with mock fury. “At least you didn’t swallow that dead cockroach a couple of days ago.” Gedominu laughed. He thought it was funny-though he’d squealed in outrage when his mother took the bug away from him. Merkela set him down once more. He started to crawl backwards, but then decided to go ahead instead.

Adventures with Gedominu notwithstanding, Skarnu hadn’t forgotten what Merkela was saying. Every news sheet, every rumor, that came to the farm brought him nothing but frustration. “Aye, they’re losing,” he said. “Aye, they’re running. They’re running in the west. They’re running in Jelgava. But what are they doing here? Not bloody much, powers below eat them.”

“That’s not true,” Merkela said.

And, in fact, it wasn’t true, or it wasn’t strictly true. The Algarvians occupying Valmiera had sent a lot of men west to fight the Unkerlanters, and a few north to fight the Lagoans and Kuusamans in Jelgava. Their grip on the countryside had loosened. Skarnu worried much less than he had before about an Algarvian patrol swooping down on the farm here.

But the redheads still held the southern coast strongly against invasion from across the Strait of Valmiera. They still held the kingdom’s towns- with no small aid from the Valmieran constabulary and from the many traitors they’d recruited to do their dirty work for them. True, the underground could strike more readily than it had. Still, its strikes remained pinpricks, and everywhere else, or so it seemed, Mezentio’s men were taking hammer blows.

“I want tosmash the Algarvians,” Skarnu said. “I want to smash them till they can’t get up again. Our army fell to pieces. I was there. I watched it happen. We never knew what hit us. We need revenge for that now if we’re ever going to be able to hold our heads up once this war finally ends.”

“Ends?” Merkela stared at him as if she’d never heard the word before. She pursed her lips. “Do you know, I never thought about the war ending. Never once. Either the Algarvians would have us down, or we’d have them down. Having them down is what I look forward to… Gedominu!” She grabbed their son. This time, she got whatever was in his hand before he could stick it in his mouth.

“I look forward to having them down, too,” Skarnu said. “But I also look forward to knocking them down. It won’t be the same if a pack of foreigners does it all for us.”

“I don’t care how it happens,” Merkela said. “I just want it to happen.”

“I want to have something to do with it,” Skarnu said stubbornly. “I want to march into Priekule at the head of an army and go back to my mansion and clean out my sister and every sign the Algarvians were ever there. I want to do that myself, with my countrymen. I don’t want a bunch of foreigners telling me, ‘All right, little boy, it’s safe to go home now.’ “

“Priekule. Mansion.” Merkela spoke the words as if they were foreign to her. And so they were, even if they were in Valmieran. Skarnu had discovered that the capital and what went on there didn’t seem real to a lot of Valmierans from the countryside. As for the other… Merkela murmured, “Most of the time, I forget what blood you bear.”

Before the war, being a marquis had mattered more to him than almost anything else. Now he said, “Our son bears my blood, and he bears yours, too. And when the war is over, I intend to wed you and set you up in that mansion… unless you decide you’d sooner dwell somewhere else. In that case, wherever it is, I’ll live there with you.”

She shook her head. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Nobles don’t come to farms and want to marry peasant girls, not in real life they don’t.”

“No, they don’t get that lucky,” Skarnu said, which brought a smile to her face. He went on, “Having the Algarvians swallow up the whole kingdom isn’t something out of a fairy tale, either. It’s out of a nightmare.”

Merkela nodded. Before she could say anything, someone knocked on the door. At a good many times over the past couple of years, that would have brought panic to Skarnu. No more. Merkela walked to the door and opened it. “Raunu!” she exclaimed, real pleasure in her voice. “Come in. Let me pour you a mug of ale.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Skarnu’s veteran sergeant said. “Don’t mind if you do, either.” He looked down at Gedominu, who had drool on his chin-he was cutting a tooth. “He’s just about big enough to march.”

“Seems that way,” Skarnu agreed. Merkela came back with not one but three mugs of ale on a wooden tray, and a pitcher from which to refill them, too. Skarnu eyed Raunu. “But you didn’t come here to tell me what a big boy I’ve got, not unless I miss my guess.”

“No.” Raunu took a pull at his ale, then nodded to Merkela. “Now this is your own brewing-I can taste it.”

“Aye.” She looked pleased, but not for long. “Skarnu’s right. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need him to do something. A while ago, you would have needed us both to do something. That’s not so simple anymore.” Her glance toward Gedominu was fond, but also wistful. She missed the days when she could easily go forth against the redheads, too.

“Well, I’m always glad to come here,” Raunu said, “but you’re right-it’s got to do with business.” He nodded to Skarnu. “We’ve had some practice wrecking the redheads’ ley-line caravans, you and me-and you to, milady,” he added, as if Merkela were already a marchioness. “But you’ve got other things on your mind for a spell.” She nodded. Her eye kept going back to Gedominu.

“Where?” Skarnu asked. “What needs doing?”

“Up in the north,” Raunu answered. “They’ll be moving a good many caravans before long, using the ley lines through that rugged country to get soldiers to Jelgava by the shortest way. It’d be nice if some of ‘em didn’t get there.”

“It would be nice if a lot of them didn’t get there,” Skarnu said, and both Raunu and Merkela muttered agreement. He added, “Fitting if we give them a hard time up in the north, too.” That puzzled his lover and the sergeant. He didn’t try to explain, but still thought he was right. Four years earlier, Mezentio’s men had moved footsoldiers and, more important still, masses of behemoths through country Valmiera had thought too rough for such maneuvers. The Valmierans, full occupied with another Algarvian attack down in the south, hadn’t noticed the stroke till it had already slipped between their ribs and into their heart. Revenge, even a small measure of revenge, would be sweet.

“You’ll come, then?” Raunu asked. He meant it seriously; the underground wasn’t like the army, even if most of its members had been soldiers.

“Of course I will,” Skarnu answered.

As he’d gone down to the southern seacoast, so he rode the ley-line caravan from the little town of Ramygala up to the wooded hills and gullies of northern Valmiera. He felt like a stranger there, half a foreigner, wary of opening his mouth: the local dialect was a long way from the brand of Valmieran he spoke. “Don’t worry about it,” Raunu told him when he worried out loud. “The cursed Algarvians can’t tell the difference between how they talk here and the right way.”

“No, the Algarvians can’t,” Skarnu agreed, “but there are bound to be traitors here. There are traitors everywhere.” If he’d seen one thing in occupied Valmiera, that was it.

“Some of them have had accidents,” was all Raunu said to that. “The rest of the whoresons… they’re thoughtful, you might say.” Skarnu hoped he was right.

Right or wrong, they both had work to do. The locals had got them papers showing they were foresters, and other papers-which they were not to display-that gave them enough jargon to pass as the real article unless questioned by someone who really knew what he was talking about. With luck, that wouldn’t happen. The papers gave them the excuse they needed for going out into the woods.

As Skarnu tramped those hills and valleys, as he eyed the narrow, winding roads-in the stretches of the landscape where there were any roads at all-he grew to admire more and more what the Algarvians had accomplished by making a thrust through such terrain. “No matter how much you hate them, you can’t ignore them,” he told Raunu.

“No. They’re too dangerous for that-like any other snakes,” Raunu said. Skarnu laughed and nodded, though the veteran underofficer hadn’t been joking.

In all that contorted country, the only straight lines were the ley lines.

The world’s energy grid ran where it would. Once mages learned to exploit the ley lines, men had to hack down trees if caravans were to glide where they needed to go. And so many long, narrow stretches of cleared ground marked the ley lines’ paths through the woods. Algarvian patrols marched along the ley lines, too. The redheads were no fools; they knew the underground would try to disrupt their movements.

But knowing and being able to do anything about it were liable to prove two different things. Here as elsewhere in Valmiera, as elsewhere throughout the east of Derlavai, Mezentio’s men were stretched too thin to do everything that wanted doing. They couldn’t patrol all the ley lines all the time, or even most of them most of the time.

“I think this seems a likely spot,” Skarnu said at last. “The ley-line caravan will be just coming over that rise”-he pointed-”and won’t have the time to stop even if the conductor should notice anything wrong about the line. What say you?”

Raunu considered briefly. “Aye, it suits me.”

“Good enough, then. See how simple it is?” Skarnu suspected-indeed, he was sure-Raunu could have found the spot as readily as he had. But he was here. He took a crystal from his trouser pocket, activated it, and spoke briefly, using code phrases to give the bearings of the stretch of ley line they’d chosen while not calling it that. Then he and Raunu left in a hurry. He didn’t know the redheads had overheard him, but had to act as if they were tracking every emanation around.

“Pity we can’t be here when they do the job,” Raunu remarked.

“Aye.” Skarnu nodded. Somewhere not far away, a team of his countrymen had assuredly heard what he’d said. He didn’t know where; what he didn’t know, Mezentio’s men couldn’t pry from him. “But knowing we helped, knowing we told them where to bury the egg-that counts for something, too.”

“Reminds us we’re still in the war, like,” Raunu said.

“That’s it,” Skarnu agreed. “That’s just it. In fact, when you knocked on my door, I was complaining to Merkela that the Algarvians were going to the powers below everywhere but in Valmiera. It’s still true, more or less, but we’ve helped make it not quite so true.”

“Sooner or later, the redheads’ll get what’s coming to era,” Raunu said.

“I don’t just want them to get it,” Skarnu said. “I want to be the one who gives it to them, and now I am-at least a little.”

Back when the Unkerlanter attack on Algarve in the north was new, MajorScoufas had called it a catastrophe andColonelSabrino had told the Yaninan dragonflier he didn’t think it was quite so bad as that. Since then, KingSwemmel ’s men had pushed the Algarvians out of the north of Unkerlant. They’d pushed them out of western Forthweg and had fought their way to the line of the Twegen River, the river that ran by Eoforwic. If that wasn’t a catastrophe, Sabrino didn’t know what would be.

But catastrophe or no, the wing of dragonfliers he commanded remained here in the south. He had even gone so far as to send a written petition toKingMezentio, begging his sovereign to send him into the urgent fighting. Mezentio hadn’t told him no. Mezentio hadn’t deigned to reply at all. More than anything else, that told him in how bad an odor with the king he really was.

MajorScoufashad stopped twitting him about it. Yaninans were politer, or at least more formal, people than his own countrymen. The officers in his wing hadn’t stopped grumbling about their fate.

At last, Sabrino took asideCaptainOrosio, who’d been with him longer than anyone. He said, “If you want to transfer, I won’t stand in your way. I don’t blame you for wanting to go where the action is. I want to go up north myself, but nobody will listen to me. Nobody will listen to you, either, as long as you serve under me. But if you don’t, I have the feeling you’ll get what you want.”

To his surprise, Orosio shook his head. “No, thank you, sir,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who wants to leave the wing, sir. That’d just be another slap at you. We want the wing to get what it deserves, and we want to give the Unkerlanters what they deserve.”

Touched, Sabrino set his hand on Orosio’s shoulder. “One thing Algarvians are, by the powers above, is loyal to their friends.”

The squadron commander nodded. “Well, of course, sir,” he said, though in the world at large it was anything butof course. “And the king bloody well ought to be loyal to you, too. You gave him the best advice you knew how, and not only that, you were right, too.”

“And much good it did me,” Sabrino said. “I told that to Scoufas: You can get in every bit as much trouble with a king for being right as you can for being wrong. Maybe even more trouble.”

“Scoufas.” Orosio looked around before continuing. The two of them stood off to one side of the dragon farm; from the beginning, this hadn’t been the sort of conversation for which they wanted eavesdroppers. Satisfied no Yaninans were in earshot, Orosio went on: “I wish we were by ourselves and not tied to Tsavellas’ people. It’s like being married to a dead woman.”

“I know,” Sabrino answered, “but I don’t know what to do about it. If we were here by ourselves, we’d be hereby ourselves, if you know what I mean: no Algarvian footsoldiers for miles around. Out here in the west, we’re stretched too thin. We’ve got to use whatever allies we can scrape up.”

“Yaninans.”CaptainOrosio rolled his eyes. “Forthwegians. Powers above, do I hear right? Is there really a Kaunian regiment somewhere down here?”

“I’ve heard that, too,” Sabrino answered. “Kaunians from Valmiera, I think.”

“Those people are crazy,” Orosio declared.

Since Sabrino thought he was right, he didn’t argue. In fact, he waved Orosio to silence: A Yaninan was trotting toward them. In accented Algarvian, the fellow called, “ColonelSabrinoto tent of crystallomancers.”

“I’m coming.” Sabrino hurried after the fellow. He wondered what had gone wrong now. He also had to do his best not to laugh at the way the pompoms on the Yaninan’s shoes bounced up and down. Algarvians always had a hard time taking their Yaninan neighbors seriously.

All but a couple of the crystallomancers inside the tent were Yaninans. For some reason or other, Sabrino had trouble getting Algarvian replacements. He had to admit the little swarthy men did know their business. Their specialists-which also included dragonfliers-were pretty good. Their army as a whole…

He sat down at the crystal to which a Yaninan waved him. “Sabrino here.”

An Algarvian face looked back at him. “Hello, Colonel. I amMajorArdalico. I want to let you know that I am establishing a special camp a couple of miles to the rear of your position.”

“A special camp?” Sabrino repeated tonelessly.

“That’s right.” Ardalico’s voice was bland. Even the Algarvians who slaughtered Kaunians from Forthweg for the sake of their life energy weren’t comfortable about saying that straight out. Special camp was their favorite euphemism.

“Why are you setting up a special camp back there?” Sabrino asked.

MajorArdalico’s image in the crystal gave him a large, hearty, false smile. “Because I’ve been ordered to, sir.”

“Thank you so much,” Sabrino said, and the major’s smile got larger and falser. “Now be so good as to tell mewhy you were ordered to put that camp there.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t care to speculate about that.” Ardalico was smooth. He was so smooth, he was downright greasy. ColonelSabrino hated him on sight.

“Powers below eat you, you miserable little turd,” Sabrino ground out. “You’re going to tell me the truth, or I’ll get my dragons in the air and knock that camp down around your ears. And if you don’t think I’ll do it, you can bloody well think again.”

He’d succeeded in knocking the smug, self-satisfied smirk off Ardalico’s handsome face. “You wouldn’t dare,” blurted the officer in charge of the special camp.

“Sonny boy, you just go ahead and try me,” Sabrino said. “I’m already under a cloud in Trapani. What canKingMezentio do to me? Send me to the west to fight the Unkerlanters? I’ve been here since you were in diapers. Now are you going to talk to me, or do I pay you a visit on dragonback?”

He wasn’t bluffing. Some few of his own men might balk, but the Yaninans would surely follow him. For one thing, it would infuriate Algarve. For another, the idea of sacrificing Kaunians appalled them. They weren’t really hard enough to fight in a war like this, but what choice did they have when they found themselves sandwiched between Mezentio and Swemmel?

MajorArdalicolicked his lips. He wasn’t stupid, except in the particular way that had let him become an officer heading up a special camp in the first place. He had to realize Sabrino meant what he said. But he tried one last delaying tactic: “What was it you wanted to know?”

“Why are you running up that bloody murder manufactory of yours?” Sabrino demanded. Ardalico winced; thinking of it as a special camp probably helped him sleep at night. Sabrino didn’t care. He had his own worries. Most of them-the ones that weren’t centered in Trapani-lay due west of him. He went on, “Are you putting it up because it looks like the Unkerlanters are going to mount an attack in these parts, and we need some way to stop them?”

“I shouldn’t be speaking of this by crystal,” Ardalico said unhappily. Sabrino drummed his fingers on the tabletop. The motion drew Ardalico’s eyes: Sabrino could see as much from his image. More unhappily still, the young major said, “Aye, there is some fear of that.”

Although Sabrino heard the words, he didn’t want to believe them. “How?” he whispered. “With everything they’re doing up in the north, where can they find the men and the beasts to strike another blow against us down here, too?”

“It’s a big kingdom, Unkerlant is,” Ardalico answered, which meant he didn’t know how Swemmel’s men were doing what they were doing, either. The Algarvians hadn’t believed Unkerlant would be able to fight back so strongly when they first launched their attack against Swemmel’s kingdom. Here more than three years later, Sabrino’s countrymen still had trouble believing it, which doubtless went a long way towards explaining why the tide of war flowed against them.

“If they do attack, can we stop them?” Sabrino asked: the one question besides which none of the others mattered.

MajorArdalicosaid, “Having a special camp in the neighborhood will give us a better chance.”

Sabrino’s laugh held knives of bitterness. “Oh, aye, all the Kaunians we’ve killed so far have done just what we wanted. That’s why we marched into Cottbus week before last, isn’t it?” He had the satisfaction of watching Ardalico’s image wince. Instead of shouting, he went on in a small, quiet, deadly voice: “You stupid clot, don’t you see the Unkerlanters will kill as many of their own as they need to to block whatever you do?”

“If the camp weren’t here, Colonel, the Unkerlanters would still kill their own,” Ardalico replied. “And then where would you be?”

That held enough truth to make Sabrino wince in turn. Even so, he said, “If we hadn’t started it, Major, they wouldn’t have.” Every interrogation record he’d seen confirmed that. The Unkerlanters hadn’t imagined using large-scale murder for the sake of life energy as a weapon of war, not till the Algarvians showed them the way. But they hadn’t stepped back from learning, either.

“Which may be true and which may not, sir, but which has nothing to do with what will happen-not with what may happen, mind you, but with whatwill happen-if King Swemmel’s buggers do hit this section of our line,” Ardalico said.

“I suppose that’s true,” Sabrino admitted. “As you know, we’re rather short of footsoldiers hereabouts. Shall I try to see if I can bring in a few companies from the Phalanx of Valmiera to protect your special camp?”

For a moment, he thought Ardalico would nod. But the younger officer only gave him the look any junior officer gives his senior when the latter has just told a joke that is anything but funny. “Good day, sir,” Ardalico said, and broke the etheric connection. Light flared in the crystal before which Sabrino sat. When it faded, the crystal was for all practical purposes inert once more.

With a grunt, Sabrino got to his feet and left the crystallomancers’ tent. He strode over to the nearby tent in whichMajorScoufas made his headquarters. The Yaninan looked up from the papers on his folding table. “Good day, sir,” he said. “I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but you do not look like a happy man.”

“I’m not.” Like any Algarvian, Sabrino had spent a fair amount of time sneering at Yaninans. But he wouldn’t have tradedMajorScoufas for a company of Ardalicos.

“Will this help?” Scoufas produced a jar of the local spirits and a couple of mugs. “Not much for flavor, but it numbs the brain.”

“I could use some numbing, thanks.” But Sabrino went on before he’d had anything to drink: “They’re putting in a special camp in this sector. You know about special camps?”

“I know of them, aye.” The Yaninan dragonflier’s dark eyes were particularly unfathomable. “A filthy business.” He waited to see how Sabrino would respond. When Sabrino nodded, Scoufas continued, “And not a good sign, if one is coming into being here.” Sabrino nodded again. The two officers proceeded to get very drunk.

Ilmarinen came up to Fernao in the hallway and poked him in the chest with a bony forefinger. When the elderly theoretical sorcerer didn’t say anything and did keep poking, Fernao poked back. For a moment, they might have been fencing with fingers. Since Fernao was much younger and had a longer reach, he got the better of the duel. Ilmarinen said, “You deserve it, you cursed Lagoan.”

“What have I done now?” Fernao was only too sure Ilmarinen would come up with something scandalous.

And the Kuusaman mage did: “You turned out to be right, you miserable, unprincipled son of a whore.”

“Oh?” That wasn’t an admission Fernao heard from Ilmarinen every day. “Right about what?”

“About expanding that one series,” Ilmarinen answered. “You really can’t do it the way I tried. I’m not saying my notion is impossible, mind you, but my spell wouldn’t have worked. If you want my thanks for stopping me, you can have ‘em.”

Fernao shrugged. “I’m glad the energy release didn’t happen. That spell would have released… a lot of energy.” He hadn’t tried to calculate how much. Now, in an offhand way, he did. “You know, if we wanted to, we could try to turn it into a weapon, too.”

“Aye, I suppose we could.” Ilmarinen shrugged. “I’d sooner try to turn it into a spell that does what I want it to do.” He was incorrigible. He reveled in being incorrigible. Now he waited for Fernao to pitch a fit.

The best way to frustrate him was not to do what he wanted. With a shrug of his own, Fernao said, “With everything else going on, you probably won’t have time to work on it. If you aren’t busy here, something is badly wrong.”

Ilmarinen grunted. “You only think you’re joking.” Fernao shook his head. He didn’t think he was joking at all. Catching him with his defenses down, Ilmarinen poked him again. As he yelped, the Kuusaman mage added, “One of these days, I may even forgive you.”

“For being right?” Fernao asked.

“For being right,” Ilmarinen agreed. With a last poke-he had a sharp fingernail, too-he went past Fernao and down the hall.

“If you want to thank somebody, thank Linna,” Fernao called after him. “She was the one who let Pekka and me know where you’d gone.”

“I’ve already thanked her,” Ilmarinen said over his shoulder. “Believe me, it was much more fun than thanking you ever could be.” He turned a corner and disappeared. Fernao stared after him, then shook his head and started to laugh. Trying to get the last word against Ilmarinen was a losing battle.

Laughing still, Fernao went back to his own chamber and looked without much warmth on the report he was drafting for Grandmaster Pinhiero. The first Lagoan mages had finally come to the research station in the barren Naantali district. They weren’t doing so well as either Fernao or Pinhiero had hoped. Language problems were part of the reason: they were less fluent in Kuusaman than they needed to be. And, even more than Kuusaman mages, they had trouble accepting that One Law lay under the Two with which they’d long been familiar.

Fernao cast about for a way to say that without making his countrymen sound like imbeciles. Morons, perhaps, but not imbeciles, he thought. He’d just inked his pen when someone knocked on the door. He suspected it would be Ilmarinen, coming back for the word after the last word.

He put the pen down even so. Listening to Ilmarinen’s impudence was bound to prove more entertaining than explaining to the head of the Lagoan Guild of Mages why some of the sorcerers he’d sent weren’t measuring up. But when he opened the door, Ilmarinen wasn’t standing in the hallway. Pekka was. “Oh,” Fernao said in surprise, and then, recalling himself, “Come in.” He stepped aside.

“Thank you.” Pekka’s voice wasn’t quite steady. The small quaver in it alarmed Fernao more than a scream from another woman might have. She sat down on the stool he’d been using to draft his report-sank down onto it, really.

“What’s wrong?” he asked as he sat down on the bed. Something obviously was. One possibility sprang to mind right away: “You told me you weren’t with child. Were you wrong?”

“What?” Pekka’s eyes widened. To his vast relief, she shook her head. “No, it’s not that, powers above be praised. I’m just… upset, that’s all.”

“Why?” he said, and then, before he could stop himself, “Why come to me?”

Pekka chose to answer the second question first: “Because whatever else we are, we’re friends.” He nodded, though his lips tightened. Because that was true, they’re not being lovers any more hurt all the worse. Pekka went on, “I just got a letter from Leino. He’s leftHabakkuk so he can join in the fighting in Jelgava.”

“Has he?” Fernao said. Now Pekka nodded, miserably. Fernao made himself say what needed saying: “I hope he stays safe.” Did he mean it? Part of him did, anyhow, the larger part, the part not centered on his crotch.

“You know the spells the Algarvians use,” Pekka said. “They’ve never used them against ships. They use them on land whenever they can scrape together enough Kaunians to kill. I’m frightened for him. I wish he hadn’t done it.”

“He should be all right.” Fernao want to take her in his arms to comfort her. Did part of her want that, too? Was that why she’d come here? He wished it were, but he didn’t believe it. He also wished he were better at fooling himself. With a sigh, he went on, “If the news sheets are right, Mezentio’s men aren’t putting up much of a fight in Jelgava, so you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

“I don’t trust the Algarvians,” Pekka said, which made good, hard sense. “They can’t just go on retreating through Jelgava. If they do too much more retreating, they lose the war.”

That also made sense. The same thought had crossed Fernao’s mind. If it had crossed the minds of the people who wrote news sheets, they did their best not to let it show. Their best was quite good; the news sheets had a tone of giddy euphoria that sometimes made Fernao want to gag.

Leaning on his stick, he heaved himself to his feet once more and limped over to set a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t flinch, but she didn’t turn toward him, either. He sighed again. He didn’t see a wish coming true. “He’ll be fine,” he repeated.

Pekka rose, too. “Thank you, Fernao,” she said. “Youare a good friend. I shouldn’t have troubled you with this.”

You’re right-you shouldn’t have, went through his mind. But, again, that wasn’t altogether true. Aloud, he said, “It’s all right. Weare friends… whatever else we are, as you said.” Becoming lovers was destructive of friendships. He knew that. He was glad it hadn’t-quite-happened here.

“Do you ever want to go and fight the Algarvians yourself?” Pekka asked. Comparing him to her husband? Then she went on, “Sometimes I have all I can do, just staying here and working on this sorcery. It doesn’t seem enough.”

Fernao lifted his cane into the air. For a moment, he stood on two legs, one good, one bad. The cane was the point of the exercise. Pekka realized as much. As her eyes followed its motion, she turned red. Fernao said, “They already have as much of me as I care to give them, thank you very much.”

“Oh,” Pekka said softly. “I was foolish. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, which made his bad arm and shoulder twinge, but only for a moment. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and then, almost as romantic as an Algarvian, “If Mezentio’s men hadn’t ruined me for anything strenuous, Grandmaster Pinhiero probably wouldn’t have sent me here, and then I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to meet you.”

Pekka blushed once more. Not looking at him, she said, “You’re being difficult again, Fernao.”

“Am I?” He thought about shrugging again, and promptly thought better of it. “Well, maybe I am.”

“I’d better go,” she said quickly, and, as quickly, did. Fernao listened to her fading footsteps in the hall. If she hadn’t gone quickly, what would she have done? Thrown herself into his arms after all? Or found the nearest blunt instrument and hit him with it because he’d chosen to be difficult again?

How much would you give to know the answer to that? he wondered, but he didn’t have to keep wondering very long. Everything I have. Everything I could conjure up or borrow or steal.

He limped over to the desk, and to the report he’d been drafting for Pinhiero. With a grimace, he pushed it away. How was he supposed to pay attention to it when he had really important things on his mind? If Pinhiero had to wait a day or two longer for his answers, the world wouldn’t end, especially since he wouldn’t like them when he got them.

Another knock on the door. Fernao jumped. Inside him, his heart jumped, too. Was that Pekka coming back? At a sort of shambling trot, he hurried across the chamber and opened the door. “Oh,” he said dully. It wasn’t Pekka. It was, in fact, one of the Lagoan mages who’d come to the Naantali district to learn the new sorcery. After so long using Kuusaman and classical Kaunian, he had to make a conscious decision to speak his own language: “Come in, Viana.”

“Thank you,” she answered. She was perhaps a year or two older than he, nicely shaped but on the plain side, earnest, hard-working. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” he answered, limping back to the desk to flip the papers so she couldn’t read them. “What can I do for you? Sit down. Make yourself at home.”

“Thank you,” Viana said again. “I wanted to ask you some questions about what we were doing here and how we would use the sorcery in the field.”

“Go ahead,” Fernao said. Viana did, one question after another. Some of them were things she already should have known, but none was downright foolish. Mechanically, he answered them all.

After what seemed like forever and was in fact something above an hour, she said, “I’ve taken up enough of our time. Things are much clearer now. I appreciate your patience.” She got to her feet.

So did Fernao, using good leg, good arm, and cane to return to vertical. “It’s all right,” he said. After that session, he looked forward to getting back to work on the report for Grandmaster Pinhiero. It would have to be more interesting. With a last polite nod, Viana left.

And Fernao did start writing again. Halfway down the second leaf of paper after he did, his pen abruptly stopped scritching. He looked out the window and scratched his head. Iwonder if Viana came here trying to find out something that didn’t have anything to do with those spells. She must have known-mustn’t she?-the answers to a good many of the questions she’d asked. Was she trying to find out if I were interested in her?

Well, if she was, she had her answer. Fernao had gone on and on about magecraft without the slightest concern for anything else. He supposed he could repair that the next time they met. He supposed he could, but he didn’t really intend to, because the truth was, he wasn’t interested.

He muttered a low-voiced curse, then started to laugh. Life would have been so much simpler if he were.

Summer on Obuda meant long, misty days-it never got very hot-and mild, misty nights. Istvan remembered that from his days on the island as a Gyongyosian warrior. He was, he supposed, still a Gyongyosian warrior in some technical sense, but he thought of himself as a captive of the Kuusamans much more often.

Not everyone in the large captives’ camp on Obuda shared that view. As far asCaptainFrigyes was concerned, for instance, the war remained a going concern. Frigyes was ready to sacrifice himself and all the other captives to loose potent magecraft against the Kuusamans, just as he’d been ready to sacrifice the men under his command back on Becsehely.

“He’s daft, you know,”Kun said one morning as he and Istvan squatted over stinking latrine trenches. “Even if our sorcerous energy knocks this island out of the Bothnian Ocean and up onto the peaks of the Ilszung Mountains, it won’t change how the war turns out by even a copper’s worth.”

“You know that.” Istvan grunted. “I know that.” He grunted again. Kuusaman guards strode the palisade not far away. Having to take care of his needs without privacy had left him badly constipated for a while. He didn’t even notice any more. “The captain doesn’t know it, or else he doesn’t care.” He tore off a handful of grass.

“Aye, well, no doubt you’re right.”Kun grabbed some grass, too. Fortunately, it grew very fast. “But I care. I don’t much fancy having my throat cut for nothing.”

Since Istvan didn’t, either, he just threw the grass down into the trench, got to his feet, and set his clothes to rights. “What are we going to do, then?” he asked. “We can’t very well go and tell the Kuusaman guards. That would get our throats cut, too, and not for nothing-when our friends found out.”

“My dear boy,”Kun said, as if he were Istvan’s father rather than his comrade. “My dear boy, if we ever had to do such a thing, we would also have to make sure our friends never, ever, found out.” That was so obvious, Istvan felt like a fool for not having seen it himself. In the nastier ways of the world if not in years, Kunwas a good deal older than he.

They queued up for breakfast. They queued up for everything in the captives’ camp: The Kuusamans regimented them even more thoroughly than the Gyongyosian army had done, which was saying a good deal. A few of the cooks were Kuusamans; more were Obudans-the occupiers put the natives to work for them. One of the Obudans, a medium-sized, medium-brown man-larger and darker than a Kuusaman-wore a dragon’s tooth on a leather thong around his neck. As Istvan, mess tin in hand, came up to him, the Gyongyosian pointed to the fang and said, “You might have bought that from me, once upon a time.” A lot of Obudan men were eager to get their hands on dragon’s teeth, thinking they reflected well on their virility.

The cook fingered the heavy tooth. “Maybe I did,” he replied. No reason he shouldn’t understand Gyongyosian; Istvan’s kingdom had had a couple of spells of ruling Obuda before the Kuusamans finally seized the island. Plunging his ladle into the kettle of fish-and-barley stew-heavy on the barley, light on the fish-he gave Istvan a bigger helping than usual.

“You lucky son of a goat,” saidKun, who hadn’t got any more than the usual. Istvan only smiled and shrugged. He knew some things about getting along with people that his sour-tempered friend had never figured out.

Once they finished eating, they washed their mess tins in big tubs of water set out for the purpose. Istvan’s spoon clanked in his tray. He had another spoon hidden under the mattress of his cot, the handle scraped down to make a knife blade of sorts. He’d never mentioned that toKun, or to anyone else, but you never could tell when a weapon might come in handy. As he carried the mess kit back to his bunk for the daily inspection, he stole a glance atKun. MaybeKun had a ground-down spoon knife stashed away somewhere, too. That hadn’t occurred to Istvan till now.

A Kuusaman lieutenant strode through the barracks as the Gyongyosian captives stood at attention by their cots. A sergeant would have done a better, more thorough job. So thought Istvan, at any rate, and never once stopped to wonder if his own underofficer’s rank had anything to do with his opinion.

Once the Kuusaman was satisfied, Frigyes pointed to Istvan and the men who’d served in his squad. “Wood-chopping detail,” he said, as if Istvan didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. “This is something that needs to be done properly. Without enough wood, we don’t eat hot food.”

“Aye, Captain,” Istvan said resignedly. Still, he understood what Frigyes meant. Some of the work the Kuusamans gave their captives was designed to keep them busy, nothing more. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to mind the captives’ going through the motions on that sort of job. But firewood, as Frigyes had said, was serious.

It was, in fact, serious in several ways. The Kuusaman corporal who issued the captives their axes kept careful count of just how many he was issuing-no chance of stealing an axe and stowing it under a mattress. If the number turned in at the end of the day didn’t match the number given out at the start, there would be trouble.

Kungrumbled at chopping wood. Kun grumbled at a good many things, but he was particularly vain about his hands, which, for a soldier’s, were soft and fine. “How am I supposed to cast a proper spell with them all rough and bruised and battered?” he complained.

“You couldn’t cast much of a spell any which way,” Szonyi said. “You were only a mage’s apprentice, not a mage yourself.”Kun gave him a look full of loathing and swung his axe as if he would have liked to bring it down on Szonyi’s neck.

To Istvan, chopping wood was just a job. He’d been doing it since he was a boy. Back in his home valley, chopping wood meant staying warm through the harsh winter as well as having hot food in your belly.

He was raising his axe to split another chunk of beech when the gates to the captives’ camp, not too far away, swung open. “More poor buggers coming in,” Szonyi predicted.

“Aye, no doubt.” Istvan lowered the axe without chopping; he was willing to pause for a little while to see some new faces.

And new faces he saw-newer than he’d expected. “Who arethose fellows?” Szonyi’s deep voice cracked in surprise. “They sure aren’t Gyongyosians.”

The Kuusaman guards led in four men who towered over them, as Gyongyosians would have, but who, as Szonyi said, plainly did not come from Istvan’s kingdom. The newcomers were slimmer of build than most Gyongyosians, and their hair was coppery, not tawny. They wore Kuusaman military clothing, which did not fit them well at all.

“I know who they have to be,”Kun said. “They’re Algarvians.”

“Stars above, I think you’re right.” Istvan stared at the redheads, the only real allies his kingdom had. “But what are they doing out here in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean? Algarve is… way over on the other side of the world somewhere.” What he knew of geography would have filled the heads of perhaps two pins-even though, thanks to his army service, he’d seen much more of the world than he’d ever expected (or wanted) while growing up in the little village of Kunhegyes.

“Let’s ask them when we get off our shift,” Szonyi said.

Kunsmiled a sour smile. “And what language will you ask them in?” he inquired.

Szonyi had only one answer for that, which was no answer at all. A typical Gyongyosian peasant, he spoke only his own language. Sheepishly, he said, “I don’t suppose they know Gyongyosian.”

“About as much as you know of Algarvian, probably.” Aye, Kun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool.

The new captives, naturally, noticed everybody staring at them. They waved to the Gyongyosians and bowed from the waist as if they were visiting nobles. “Show-offs,” Szonyi muttered.

Then one of the Algarvians, waving again, called out, “Hello, friends! How are you?” in almost unaccented Gyongyosian.

“So they don’t speak our language, eh?” Istvan said. Just asKun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool, Istvan enjoyed turning the tables on cleverKun. He got fewer chances than he would have liked, but made the most of the ones he did find.

Kun, as usual, looked furious at getting caught in a mistake. Doing his best to discover how such a disaster might have happened, he asked the Algarvian, “Where did you learn to speak Gyongyosian?”

“My father was on the staff of the minister to Gyongyos years ago,” the redheaded man answered, “and I was born in Gyorvar. So you could say I learned your language in your capital.”

That was more than Istvan could say himself. His own upcountry accent sometimes made him feel self-conscious when he spoke to officers or others who had a more elegant turn of phrase-sometimes even toKun, who sprang from Gyorvar. But Istvan knew what he wanted to find out: “Why are you here, so far from Algarve?” Asking the question that way let him disguise his own geographical shortcomings, too.

With a wave to his comrades, the Algarvian said, “We crewed two leviathans that were bringing… oh, one thing and another from Algarve to Gyongyos. We would have brought other things back from Gyongyos to Algarve: the kinds of things you have more of than we do, and that we could use in the war.”

Istvan started to ask what sorts of things those were, but decided not to. Some of the Kuusaman guards were bound to speak his language, and he didn’t want to give them the chance to learn anything interesting. Instead, he said, “And something went wrong, did it?”

“You might say so,” the redheaded man replied. “Aye, you just might say so. Some Kuusaman dragons were flying east to drop eggs on some island or other that belongs to you, and they saw our leviathans and dropped their eggs-or enough of their eggs-on them instead. They hurt the animals too badly to let them go on. After that, it was either surrender or try to swim home by ourselves.” He shrugged. “We surrendered.”

Istvan tried to imagine guiding a leviathan-no, a couple of leviathans- from Algarve all the way to Gyongyos. From one side of the world to the other. He couldn’t very well tell the foreigners that they should have fought to the death, not when he’d wound up in a captives’ camp, too.

Eyeing the barracks and the yard with something less than delight, the Algarvian asked, “What do you people do for fun around here?”

“What do we do for fun?” Istvan returned. “Why, we chop wood. We dig latrines. When we’re very lucky and we haven’t got anything else to do, we sit around and watch the trees out beyond the stockade grow.”

The Algarvian had a marvelously expressive face. Hearing Istvan’s reply, he looked as if he’d just heard his father and mother had died. “And what do you do for excitement?” he inquired.

“If you want excitement, you can try to escape,” Istvan answered. “Maybe you can get out of the camp. Then maybe you can steal a ship. Then maybe you wouldn’t have to swim home.”

“I am always glad to meet a funny man,” the redhead said. Istvan started to puff out his chest, till the Algarvian added, “Too bad I am not so glad to meet you.” His smile took away most of the sting; it might have taken away all of it hadKun not sniggered. Istvan gave him a dirty look, which only made him snigger again, louder this time.

Even when he’d commanded a company as a sergeant, Leudast hadn’t been allowed to attend officers’ conferences. He was still commanding a company, but, thanks to luck andMarshalRathar, he was a lieutenant these days. That entitled him to know what would happen before it happened to him.

Here, he and Captain Recared and a couple of dozen officers commanding units much larger than their ranks properly entitled them to lead sat in a barn that still stank of cow and listened to a colonel who was probably doing a lieutenant general’s job explaining the details of what the Unkerlanter army would try next in the south. “And so,” the colonel was saying, “if we succeed, if all goes as planned, we shall finally drive the cursed Algarvians from the soil of the Duchy of Grelz, exactly as our glorious comrades in arms have driven them out of northern Unkerlant. High time, I say-high time indeed.”

A low-voiced rumble rose from the officers: “Aye.” Leudast joined it, but had other things on his mind. So they’ve driven the redheads out of the north altogether, have they? That means my home village belongs to Unkerlant again. The thought would have cheered him more had he not paused to wonder if any of it was still standing. It would have been fought over at least twice, and, for all he knew, more often than that.

“Have you any questions?” the colonel asked. A couple of majors did, and even a brash captain. Leudast kept his mouth shut. He was without a doubt the most junior officer in the barn, and didn’t want to remind anyone else that he was there at all. The colonel efficiently disposed of the queries; unlike a good many commanders Leudast had known, he actually had some notion of what he was talking about. He finished, “We’ve wanted to pay those whoresons back for years. Now we put them in a sack and then pound the sack to pieces.”

Somebody said, “We’ll find all sorts of strange things in the sack, too.”

“So we will,” the colonel agreed. “Algarvians, Yaninans, Forthwegians, even blonds from out of the far east.” He shrugged. “So what? It only shows the redheads are scraping up everything they can to try to hold us back. But it won’t work. Glory toKingSwemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!”

“Glory to Swemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!” the officers chorused. The meeting broke up.

Leudast and Captain Recared walked back to their position together. Leudast pointed. “Look at all the egg-tossers we’ve got waiting for the redheads.”

“Egg-tossers and behemoths and dragons and men,” Recared said. “The river is running our way now. They’ll try to dam it up-they always fight hard-but we should have our way with them.”

“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “They threw everything they had at the Durrwangen bulge last year. They haven’t done any throwing since. They’ve been catching instead.”

Recared nodded, too. “That’s right. And they’ll catch it good and proper come tomorrow morning.”

And Leudast and Recared passed a stockade. Guards stood stolidly around the perimeter. The stink of long-unwashed bodies wafted over the wall. “Is that what they’re doing with the soldiers they court-martial these days?” Leudast asked. “I thought they just put them in punishment battalions and threw them at the redheads first.”

“They do,” Recared answered. “Those aren’t soldiers in there. Come on.” He walked faster, plainly wanting to get away from the stockade as soon as he could.

“They aren’t soldiers?” Leudast said. “Then who…? Oh.” He walked faster, too. “I wish we didn’t have to do that.” How had the wretches behind the stockade ended up where they were? By being desperate criminals? Maybe. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That struck Leudast as much more likely. He said no more. Those who complained about such things might end up behind a stockade themselves.

When he got back to his own encampment, he feigned cheeriness, whether he really felt it or not. “We’ve got a good plan and plenty of what we need to make it work,” he told his company. Every word of that was true, too. If it wasn’t the whole truth, the soldiers didn’t need to know it. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to make the Algarvians sorry they ever set foot in Unkerlant.”

His men cheered. SergeantHagen, who’d replaced Kiun, said, “We’ll do better than that. We’ll make the cursed Algarvians sorry they were ever born-isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”Hagen was very young, and had a youngster’s terrifying enthusiasm.

“That’s just right,” Leudast said. “You ought to get whatever sleep you can tonight, because all the eggs we’re going to fling will wake you up early.”

The eggs they were going to fling would wake some of his men up early. Others had found a knack for sleeping through anything. Leudast envied them, wishing he had the same knack himself.

As company commander, he didn’t get much sleep. He stayed up late, making sure everything in the company was as ready as it could be. And he had a soldier shake him awake half an hour before the eggs were due to fly so he could be ready to lead the men eastward.

Hissing and whistling noises in the air announced eggs flying toward the enemy. A few moments later, the eastern horizon lit up, as with sunrise a couple of hours early. Leudast thrust his whistle into his mouth and blew a long, piercing blast. It was fun-as much fun as he’d had with toys while a boy-and he suddenly understood why officers enjoyed the privilege of carrying them. “Forward!” he shouted. “ForKingSwemmel and for Unkerlant!”

Other company commanders’ whistles were shrilling, too, and so was Captain Recared’s. “Urra!” the men yelled. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!” They swarmed toward the Algarvian lines. Part of that was eagerness to close with the hated foe. Part of it was knowing that hard-eyed impressers with sticks would follow the advance and mercilessly blaze anyone who wasn’t moving forward fast enough to suit them. Those impressers sometimes met mysterious fatal accidents of their own, but they did help inspire most of the soldiers.

Eggs burst among the advancing Unkerlanters, too-KingMezentio’s men hadn’t been caught altogether by surprise, and the pasting they were taking hadn’t put all their egg-tossers out of action. Shrieks mingled with the cries of, “Urra!” But what the Algarvians gave was only a pittance, a nuisance, compared to what they were taking. Some of Leudast’s men, newly swept into the army, shrieked from terror rather than from pain, but he knew better. He’d been on the receiving end of far, far worse than this.

Pulses of light began flickering in the night ahead-Algarvian sticks, their beams probing for his countrymen. No, the redheads hadn’t been completely fooled, and they hadn’t been completely silenced, either. Leudast cursed under his breath. Why don’t they start killing the poor sods they’ve rounded up? he thought. We could use the help.

He was ashamed of himself a moment later. Algarvian footsoldiers must have felt the same way when their mages first started slaughtering Kaunians back in the dark, fearful days when Cottbus looked as if it would surely fall. If they were wrong to wish for such a thing, how was he right, especially when his kingdom’s sorcerers slaughtered his own countrymen for their effects?

How am I right? It’s my neck, that’s how. Some of the enemy’s beams zipped past him, fearfully close, before the ground ahead shook and violet flames burst up from it. Some of his men whooped with glee as the sorcery struck the foe. Maybe they were naive enough not to know how their mages did what they did. Maybe-more likely-they wanted to live themselves, and didn’t care.

“Forward!” Leudast yelled. “Hit ‘em hard while they’re groggy!” The Algarvians wouldn’t stay groggy long. Three years and more of fighting them had made him all too sure of that. They didn’t have enough men or beasts to hold back the Unkerlanters or drive them as they once had, but the troopers they had left were as deadly dangerous as ever.

And the redheads still had Kaunians left to kill. Leudast had hoped the Unkerlanter bombardment would have slain a lot of the blonds without giving the Algarvians the chance to seize their life energy and turn it into sorcerous energy. No such luck. The dreadfully disruptive and destructive sorcery the Unkerlanter wizards raised now quieted much sooner than it should have, as Mezentio’s mages used, and used up, the Kaunians to counteract it.

Could be worse, Leudast thought. In the old days, we’d’ve been fighting like mad bastards to counter their conjuring, not the other way round.

A column of Unkerlanter behemoths thundered forward. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks the armored beasts bore on their backs battered down surviving Algarvian strongpoints. And once it got moving east, that column kept moving. The only thing that could reliably stop a behemoth was another behemoth. The Algarvians had been short of behemoths ever since losing so many in the enormous battles of the Durrwangen bulge, and most of the animals they did have were in the north, trying to hold the Unkerlanters there.

“Come on, men!” Leudast shouted, almost stumbling over a kilted corpse. “They can’t hold us! We’re breaking them! Their crust is tough, but once we’re past it, what have they got left? Nothing!” He blew the whistle again, exulting in the squeal.

He exulted in what he saw, too, as the sky grew light and true dawn approached. Watching Algarvians run was something Unkerlanter soldiers didn’t get to do often enough. The redheads almost always fought till they couldn’t fight any more. Not here. Hit with overwhelming force, Mezentio’s men fled for their lives. It didn’t help much; the fleeing footsoldiers fell one after another.

Leudast was in the middle of yelling, “Forward!” yet again when an Algarvian who didn’t run-some stubborn whoresons always stood their ground- blazed him in the leg. The word went from a command to an anguished howl. He fell heavily, clutching at his right thigh.

“Lieutenant’s down!”SergeantHagen shouted. Leudast heard the words as if from very far away. He’d heard such cries countless times before, but he’d gone through three years of war and been wounded only once-till now.

How bad was it? He made himself yank up his tunic and look. The beam had gone right through his leg, outside the thighbone. Such wounds often cauterized themselves. This one hadn’t. He was bleeding, but not too badly. He had a wound bandage. Unkerlant didn’t issue such things; he’d taken it off a dead Algarvian. Covering both sides of the wound was awkward, but he managed.

He’d just got the bandage into place when a couple of troopers hauled him upright. He screamed again; the way they manhandled him hurt as much as getting blazed had in the first place. “Sorry, sir,” one of them said. “We’ll get you back to the healers.”

“All right.” Leudast tasted blood; he must have bitten his tongue or lower lip. The men were glad to help him. Why not? It took them away from danger, too. And, he realized, in dull, pain-filled astonishment, he was getting his own second holiday from the war. But the price of the ticket was very high. He bit down on another scream, and then on another still. Before long, he wasn’t biting down on them anymore.

Pekka hadn’t needed long to realize she disliked Viana. The more she knew her, the more she disliked her, too. It wasn’t that the Lagoan sorceress was particularly annoying, or that she lacked the wit to understand the spells she’d come to the Naantali district to learn. For a little while, Pekka had trouble figuring out what it was.

For a little while, but not for long. Viana was tall and straight and high-breasted, with a narrow waist and long, elegant legs the short kilts she wore showed to best advantage. Standing beside her, Pekka felt twelve years old and half-sprouted all over again. Having stood beside Viana once, Pekka made it a point of never doing it again.

She’s a Lagoan. Lagoan women are bigger and rounder than Kuusamans. After Pekka told herself that a couple of times, she suddenly quit. It wasn’t the answer to the problem. Itwas the problem.

It wouldn’t have been, if Viana hadn’t cast sheep’s eyes at Fernao every chance she got-and she made sure she got plenty of them. Just watching her, just listening to her, made Pekka want to retch.

You’re jealous, Pekka thought. He’s not your man -you made a point of telling him he’s not your man-and you’re jealous. You told him to find a Lagoan girl. Here’s one practically throwing herself at his feet, and you want to kill her. You don ‘tjust want to kill her. You want to kill her slowly, an inch at a time, and take days and days to get it over with.

She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink in her room. Jealousy was the green-eyed monster, but her eyes remained brown. “No, Viana’s eyes are green,” Pekka hissed.

She stepped away from the mirror. No, she whirled away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at herself or think about the color of Viana’s eyes. Am I going out of my mind’!

In a way, it would have been easier had Fernao fallen head over heels for his countrywoman. Then Pekka would have known how things were, and she could have gone on with her own life. But, as far as she could see, Fernao was much less interested in Viana than Viana was in him. Which meant..

“Which means trouble,” Pekka said aloud. Which meant Fernao was still interested in her. If that wasn’t trouble, she didn’t know what was.

Going to him to let him know how upset she was at Leino’s jointing the war on the Derlavaian mainland had been a mistake. She saw that now. If she revealed her most intimate feelings about her husband to another man, with whom was she being more intimate? The answer to that was depressingly obvious. The reason for it was pretty obvious, too: Leino was far away, while Fernao was here.

“I was onlyreally intimate with him once,” Pekka said. As long as she could keep on saying that… As long as I can keep on saying that, what? she wondered. As long as I can keep saying that, I’m going to be sick-jealous ofViana whenever I see her or even think of her.

And what if I werereallyintimate with Fernao more than once? She didn’t see Leino’s face in her mind when she asked herself that. She saw Uto’s. Thinking about her son made Pekka raise a hand to her cheek, as if someone had slapped her in the face.

After that, Pekka couldn’t make herself stay in her chamber another instant. For that matter, she couldn’t make herself stay in the hostel any more. Instead of going into the refectory to gab with her colleagues, she fled the place as if it were full of demons. And so it was, but the demons were her own.

Outside, things felt easier somehow. The day was mild, not warm: the Naantali district got warmer in summer than her southern seacoast home town of Kajaani, but not a lot warmer. White clouds drifted slowly from west to east across a watery blue sky. Grass and shrubs remained green, but they would start turning yellow in only a couple of months. Before long, winter would reclaim this land and hold it for a long, long time. A lapwing flew by, peeping. Before long, it would fly north. It could flee. She was stuck here.

The lapwing’s motion made her notice other motion in the sky, far, far higher. Something up there circled lazily, right at the edge of visibility. A hawk? she wondered, and shook her head. It was bigger than a hawk, and higher than a hawk, too. A dragon.

But what was a dragon doing up there? How long had dragons circled over Naantali? She didn’t remember seeing one before. Had the Seven Princes taken to warding the hostel and the blockhouse and the land in between? It wasn’t the worst idea in the world. If they had, though, why hadn’t they told her about it? This washer project. She was supposed to know about such things.

She watched the dragon. It continued to wheel, far too high up for her to tell anything about it except what it was. Then something fell away from it. Pekka let out a gasp of horror, fearing the dragonflier had somehow fallen off. But the dragon didn’t change course, as it would have if suddenly deprived of intelligent control. It kept right on circling, as the the speck tumbled down to earth.

Pekka had a while to watch that speck fall, to watch it grow larger, to wonder what it was. She didn’t wonder long. If it wasn’t a dragonflier, it almost had to be an egg. But if it was an egg, either something had gone dreadfully wrong up there or…Or the Algarvians have managed to sneak a dragon south from Valmiera, the way we pound their kingdom. The thought formed, blizzard-cold, in her mind.

One egg, though? The dragon had flown a long, long way. It couldn’t possibly have carried more than one. What were the odds the fellow flying it could hit anything worth hitting with a single egg? Good enough to risk a dragon and a highly trained man? Pekka couldn’t see how.

Unless… She had to keep her eye on the plummeting egg now; had she glanced away, she would have lost it. It looked as if it would fall some little distance behind the hostel-but then, at the last instant, the direction in which it fell suddenly shifted, bringing it back toward the building.

Magecraft! flashed through her mind just before the egg burst. She knew of no spell that could catch a quickly falling object like an egg and swing it back toward its target, but she didn’t know everything there was to know, either. The Algarvians had talented mages of their own. If they’d concentrated on this kind of magic, they might be as far ahead with it as her group was with its special spells.

Even as she realized that, the egg released its sorcerous energy with a great roar and a flash of light just behind the hostel. Although she’d wandered a couple of hundred yards away before she saw the dragon, the noise was terrific, a hammer-blow against the ears. Part of the hostel sagged down toward the back, like a tired old man sagging into a sofa. Smoke began to rise.

“No!” Pekka screamed, and dashed back to the battered building. As she ran, she looked up into the sky. She couldn’t spot the dragon at first. Then she did. It wasn’t circling any more. It was flying off toward the north, as if the man aboard it knew he’d done what he was supposed to do. And so, no doubt, he did.

Pekka cursed him with all her heart. She doubted the curse would bite; her own countrymen were warded against such, and the Algarvians were bound to be, too. She cursed anyhow.

People started spilling out of the hostel, some bleeding, some limping, some helping others who had trouble moving on their own. There was Ilmarinen, with blood running down his face from a cut cheek-and with the plate of smoked salmon from which he’d been eating still in his hand. He waved to her, calling, “They managed to sneak one in on us, the stinking whoresons.” Was he angry, or did he admire the Algarvians’ professional skill? Pekka couldn’t tell.

She waved back and said, “Aye.” She was glad to see Ilmarinen not badly hurt, but he wasn’t the one who’d made her come tearing back the way she had. “Where’s Fernao?” she cried.

In the midst of death and destruction, Ilmarinen laughed at her. But the laughter cut off. “He’s in there somewhere,” he answered, “one way or another.” He took the last bite of salmon off the plate and ate it.

More smoke poured from the hostel and more of it slid toward ruin. More people came staggering out, too, mages and servants and cooks all mixed together. Pekka’s heart leaped when she saw a tall, redheaded man with a ponytail-but it wasn’t Fernao, only one of the Lagoan mages who’d come here to learn the sorceries he’d helped shape.

Fernao had rescued her when the Algarvians assailed the blockhouse. Could she do anything less for him? She started into the hostel. A couple of men caught her and held her back. “Don’t go inside, MistressPekka,” one of them said. “The whole thing is liable to fall down.”

“I don’t care.” She kicked out at them. “Let me go!”

“No, mistress,” the man replied. “We need you safe. Plenty of other people to go in there and get out the hurt and the dead. You’re staying right here.” Between them, he and his friend were much stronger than she.

She struggled anyhow, and had to bite her tongue to keep from cursing them as savagely as she had the Algarvian dragonflier. And then, all at once, she went limp in their restraining arms. There was Fernao, staggering out through the door Ilmarinen had used. He’d lost his stick and made heavy going without it, but didn’t seem badly hurt.

“Pekka! Where’s Pekka?” he shouted in his accented but now fluent Kuusaman.

“Here I am,” Pekka called. When she said, “Let me go,” this time, the men who had hold of her did. She hurried over to Fernao. “Are you all right?” she demanded.

“Not too bad,” he answered. “How in blazes did the Algarvians manage to do this to us?” His face went thoroughly grim. “If one of the Lagoan mages I brought in turns out to be a spy, you can do whatever you please with me. I’d deserve it.”

“No,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you or any of the other Lagoans.” She explained how she knew.

“Guiding falling eggs by sorcery?” Fernao said when she was through. “I wouldn’t want to try that. But I won’t argue with you-you saw it, and I didn’t. I’m just glad you’re all right.”

“I’m gladyou‘re all right,” Pekka said. They clung to each other. Now that she knew he was hale, Pekka’s wits started working again. “I’ve seen Ilmarinen. Now we have to find out if the rest of the theoretical sorcerers are safe.”

“There’s Palis.” Fernao pointed. “And who’s he dragging out?… Oh, powers above, it’s Viana.”

The Lagoan sorceress’ neck bent at an unnatural angle. She was plainly dead. Piilis let her rest on the grass and hurried in after someone else before Pekka could tell him to stop. She stared at Viana’s corpse, which looked skyward with blank eyes. In an odd way, her jealousy of the Lagoan might have saved her life. Shame filled her. She began to cry.