Jaws of Darkness

Seventeen

Summer was fading fast in the Naantali district. Fernao had watched that happen before. Setubal, the capital of Lagoas and his home town, didn’t have the best weather in the world. Not even the most ardent Lagoan patriot could have claimed otherwise-not when, in peacetime, COME TO BALMY BALVl! broadsheets sprouted like mushrooms on walls and fences every autumn. But even Setubal looked subtropical when measured against the wastelands of southeastern Kuusamo.

Even before nights turned longer than days, the grass started going from green to yellow. Birds began flying north, first by ones and twos and then in enormous flocks. More and more clouds boiled up from the south, so that even when it was daylight, gloom held sway more often than not.

The worsening weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. The rattle and scrape and bang of hammers and saws and chisels and other tools as Kuusaman construction crews raced to repair the hostel after the Algarvians dropped their steerable egg on it did little to improve his spirits, either.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Ilmarinen told him at supper one evening. “If they aren’t ready before the snow starts falling, I’m sure all of us Kuusaman mages know the ancient art of building snow houses. We’d be happy to teach it to you, so you can stay as warm and cheerful as we do.”

“Thank you so much.” Fernao cast about for a word in Kuusaman, didn’t find it, and switched to classical Kaunian: “Can you quantify exactly how warm and cheerful you will be?”

“Oh, of course,” Ilmarinen said. “Can you provide me with an appropriation to investigate it with all the latest sorcerous techniques?”

Fernao took a tiny copper bit from his belt pouch. “Here you are.”

“Excellent!” Ilmarinen scooped up the coin. “You may expect your answer in about ten thousand years.”

He laughed uproariously. Fernao laughed, too. Glum or not, he couldn’t help it. Ilmarinen worked hard at being outrageous, and was good at what he did.

“What’s funny?” Pekka asked as she sat down at the table with them. Fernao explained. Pekka gave Ilmarinen a severe look. “Snow houses, indeed,” she said. “When was the last time you made a snow house or herded reindeer like our ancestors?”

“Day before yesterday,” he answered, as seriously as if it were true.

Noise from down the hall covered Fernao’s snort and Pekka’s cough. She said, “I’ll tell you what worries me: all those carpenters. I’m sure the Algarvians will have tried to put spies among them.”

“Hard for an Algarvian to look like a Kuusaman,” Fernao said. That gave him an excuse to look at her and to admire the way she looked. When the steerable egg burst by the hostel, all he’d worried about was whether she was all right. The sorcery they were working on hadn’t mattered a bit.

But Pekka and Ilmarinen both shook their heads. “Plenty of masking sorceries,” Pekka said.

“A good many of them used against the Algarvians here and there,” Ilmarinen added, speaking with considerable authority. He had knowledge and sources for knowledge at which Fernao couldn’t begin to guess. “Wouldn’t be too surprising if they tried to get some of their own back.”

“There are ways to look behind such masks, I’m sure,” Fernao said.

“Oh, aye.” Ilmarinen spoke with authority again. “Anything one mage can figure out how to make, another mage can figure out how to break.”

Pekka gave her order to a serving girl even as she nodded. “That’s right. It leaves me with two worries on my mind: that Mezentio’s mages haven’t done something particularly clever that we don’t notice, and that we do our checks on all the workmen and don’t let any slip past unexamined.”

Fernao called for a mug of ale. When it came, he sipped slowly. The ale gave him an excuse to pick at his supper. Ilmarinen, on the other hand, ate as if he were stoking a roaring fire. Rising from his seat just as the girl brought Pekka’s food, he leered down at Fernao. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy,” he said, and went off whistling.

“He’s a nuisance,” Fernao said.

One of Pekka’s eyebrows quirked upward. “You just noticed?” she said, and applied herself to her chop.

Well, you got what you wanted, Fernao thought. You ‘re alone with her, or as alone as you can be inside the refectory with a lot of other people eating, too. Now what are you going to say?

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He felt as callow and nervous as he had when a youth calling on a girl for the first time. He just sat there, still picking at his food, sipping the ale, and enjoying her company as much as he could. After a bit, she started talking shop. He had no trouble doing that, save for the occasional word that, likequantify, came out in classical Kaunian because he couldn’t come up with it in Kuusaman.

He called for more ale and for a mouth-puckeringly tart gooseberry pastry so he wouldn’t have to get up and leave as Ilmarinen had. Then he left the pastry half eaten when Pekka finished her supper faster than he’d expected. Getting to his feet in a hurry wasn’t easy or comfortable, but he did it anyway.

Pekka noticed, of course. “Are you following me?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and alarmed.

“I can’t very well leave the refectory without following you,” he answered, which had the twin advantages of being true and not requiring him to sayaye.

It also got a smile from Pekka, who said, “All right.”

But Fernao, suddenly bold, went on, “Will you come back to my chamber with me?”

“What? Why?” Now Pekka definitely sounded alarmed. “Are you planning on stopping more scandal? Remember what happened the last time. We just started some-and made our lives more… complicated.”

“I know,” Fernao said. By then, they were out in the hall, away from the crowd inside the eating chamber. “Come or not, however you like. I’m not going to try to molest you. I think you know that much. If you don’t, you’d better not come.”

He limped on toward his chamber. He still hadn’t got used to limping. He didn’t know why-he was going to limp for the rest of his life-but he hadn’t. He looked down at his feet and at the rubber tip to his cane. He didn’t want to look over his shoulder to see whether Pekka was following- part of him didn’t want to, anyhow. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from sliding toward where she would be if she was… and she was. He breathed a silent sigh of relief, then wondered if he should have. He was, he knew, liable to make things worse, not better.

After opening the door to the bare little room, he stood aside to let Pekka in before him. “Sit down,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Pekka didn’t. She stood there in the middle of the floor like a nervous bird that would fly away the instant it saw the slightest motion. The comparison, Fernao feared, was liable to be all too apt.

“What is it?” Pekka asked in tones as brittle as her stance. “What did you need to bring me here to say? Should we have anything to say to each other that we can’t say where everyone can hear?”

“I don’t know. By the powers above, I don’t.” But Fernao remembered how they’d clung after the Algarvian egg burst by the hostel, when each had feared the other dead. He took a deep breath and went on in a rush: “By the powers above, though, I do know that I love you. I’ve never felt like this about any other woman before, and I’m not interested in feeling like this about any other woman ever again. There. That’s all.”

Pekka turned and took a long step toward the door. Fernao thought she was going to flee on the instant. If she did… What would he do if she did? Get drunk and stay drunk for a week was the first thing that came to mind.

But she stopped and turned back so suddenly, it was more like a whirl.

Her face was as pale as he’d ever seen it. “Why did you have to go and say a thing like that?” she demanded, and she sounded furious.

“Because it’s the truth, curse it,” Fernao answered stubbornly, hopelessly. “Because I didn’t care whether I lived when that egg came down till I saw you were all right. If that isn’t reason enough, what is?” He sounded angry, too, and he was-angry at the world that wouldn’t let him have what he wanted most.

Pekka stared at him. She’d gone even whiter, and he hadn’t thought she could. Tears glistened in her eyes, as they had after she’d made love with him that first-and only-time. In a tiny voice, hardly more than a whisper, she said, “If I told you I felt the same way, what would you do?”

Fernao’s cane almost slipped from his fingers. Having hoped for words like those, he had trouble believing he’d really heard them. He also had trouble coming up with an answer. Almost too late, he realized words weren’t what he needed. He did let the cane fall, but only because he’d taken Pekka in his arms. He bent down to her at the same time as she was tilting her face up to him.

Not very much later, and without another word between them, they lay down close together on his bed. They had to lie close together; the bed was too narrow for anything else. Pekka sighed as Fernao went into her. But her eyes were shut. Then, though, with what Fernao thought a deliberate act of will, she opened them and looked up at him from a distance of only a couple of inches. And then, for a little while, Fernao stopped thinking at all.

Afterwards, he wondered if she would bolt from his chamber as she had the first time. They’d surprised themselves by becoming lovers then. This time, they’d known what they were doing. And Pekka understood as much, for she asked, “What are we going to do now?” It was a serious question, not the dismay-filled one she’d asked after they joined before.

“Whatever you like,” he answered. “I know you’re the one with the hard choices to make. You need to know I’d be glad to marry you and live with you in Kajaani or Setubal or wherever you please, if that’s what you want to do. I hope it is.”

“I don’t know,” Pekka said. “Right now, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I have to th-”

Fernao knew what he was going to do right then, and he did it: he kissed her. That not only kept her from talking, it kept her-and him-from thinking for some time longer. He hadn’t known he could make love twice in such quick succession, not in his mid-thirties and not after the battering his body had taken.

But, no matter how pleasantly worn he and Pekka were after gasping their way to delight for a second time, Pekka asked her question over again: “What are we going to do now?”

“We’ll just have to see,” Fernao said. Pekka frowned thoughtfully, then nodded.

ColonelSabrinohad never been in Yanina before. When the war against Unkerlant began, he’d been stationed in the north, flying out of Forthweg. He wished with all his heart he weren’t in Yanina now. Had the Algarvians and Yaninans and Grelzers and the soldiers from Plegmund’s Brigade and the Phalanx of Valmiera been able to haltKingSwemmel ’s latest bludgeon of an assault, he wouldn’t have been in Yanina. As things were…

As things were, the tattered remnants of his wing of dragonfliers and the equally ragged remains of MajorScoufas ’ were flying out of a makeshift dragon farm on the outskirts of the town of Kastritsi, north and west of Patras, KingTsavellas ’ capital. The Unkerlanters had paused only a couple of miles outside of Kastritsi; the people there fled east as fast as they could go, on foot or in wagons or on unicorns and horses and donkeys. They clogged the roads, making it harder for the soldiers trying to hold back Swemmel’s men to get where they needed to go.

Some of the men fleeing Kastritsi should have been in Tsavellas’ army. Some of them, almost without a doubt, were in Tsavellas’ army, but had somehow got their hands on civilian clothes.

When Sabrino remarked on that, CaptainOrosio nodded. “Next thing’ll be, they’ll start running without bothering to take their uniforms off first.” He spat. “It won’t be long, I bet.”

“I wish I thought you were wrong,” Sabrino said.

“So what in blazes are we going to do about it?” the squadron commander asked.

Before answering, Sabrino looked toward the center of Kastritsi. The taller buildings-those still standing, anyway-sported strangely painted onion domes that reminded him he was in a foreign kingdom. He sighed. “I don’t think wecan do anything about it except to go on fighting the Unkerlanters as hard as we can for as long as we can. Have you got any better ideas?”

Orosio sighed, too, and spat again. “I was hoping you did, sir. You’ve been right a lot of times before.”

“What if I have?” Sabrino said. “How much good has it done me? How much good has it done Algarve?”

Orosio had no reply for that. Since Sabrino didn’t, either, he didn’t see how he could blame the younger man. From over by the tents where the dragonfliers slept-when they slept-a Yaninan waved to him. He waved back, polite as usual. Then the Yaninan waved again, more urgently this time. CaptainOrosio said, “Sir, I think he wants you.”

“I think he does, too,” Sabrino said with another sigh of his own. “I was hoping he didn’t.”

“MajorScoufas, he want to see you,” the fellow said when Sabrino went over to him.

“Does he?” Sabrino said, and the Yaninan dipped his head in his kingdom’s gesture of agreement. Sabrino headed for Scoufas’ tent. He had nothing against the Yaninan officer. Scoufas made a good dragonflier and a good wing commander. It wasn’t his fault that most of his kingdom’s fighting men were unenthusiastic and that the kingdom lacked many of the tools it needed to do a proper job of fighting.

As often happened with commanders, Scoufas was busy with paperwork whenCountSabrino ducked into his tent. Scoufas shoved the leaves of paper aside with every sign of relief. “I propose that we fly forth and attack the Unkerlanters threatening Kastritsi,” he said.

“You do?” Sabrino said in some surprise. In all the time he’d been associated with the Yaninans over in the Duchy of Grelz, he’d never heard such words from any of them. Scoufas flew more than bravely enough, but he hadn’t been aggressive in seeking out missions.

But now the Yaninan dipped his head. “Aye. We must drive the barbarous invaders from the soil of my kingdom.”

If your countrymen had fought harder in Unkerlant, those barbarous invaders might not be on the soil of your kingdom now. But what point to saying that to Scoufas? He couldn’t change what had already happened, any more than Sabrino himself could.

And, as far as Sabrino was concerned, helping Scoufas defend a Yaninan town now made it less likely that he’d have to try to keep the Unkerlanters from overrunning an Algarvian town sometime in the not too indefinite future. The mere thought was enough to make him nervously glance eastward.

Scoufas not only noticed him doing it but understood why. The Yaninan’s chuckle held more sorrow than mirth. “It makes a difference when it is one’s own kingdom, does it not?” he said.

“Aye,” Sabrino said harshly. “Have we got enough eggs and cinnabar to give the Unkerlanters a proper pounding?”

“Not so much as we would like,” Scoufas answered. “Never so much as we would like, is it not so?” He waited for Sabrino to nod, then went on, “But we must do what we can with what we have-is that not so as well?”

“Aye,” Sabrino repeated, even more harshly than before. “When do you want to fly?”

“Let the dragon handlers load eggs aboard our dragons. Let them give the beasts what meat they have laced with brimstone and with what cinnabar they can find,” the Yaninan wing commander said. “An hour’s time should be plenty, would you not agree?”

Sabrino rose and bowed. “I shall be honored to have your company in an hour’s time, Major.” He bowed again, then strode out of Scoufas’ tent and shouted for his own men to ready themselves for a raid.

They came from their tents with an eagerness that still delighted him after five years of fighting. How can anyone beat us? he thought proudly. But if that question didn’t have an answer, what was he doing fighting here in Yanina and not going after the Unkerlanters in their own kingdom or relaxing back in Trapani following a victorious war?

“Yaninans are a lot happier about fighting now that they’re doing it at home, aren’t they, Colonel?” one of the dragonfliers said.

“As long as theyare happy,” Sabrino said-again, what point to worrying about how things had been before?

He climbed aboard his dragon while the bushy-mustached Yaninan handler was still feeding it chunks of meat yellow with brimstone or scarlet with cinnabar-too few of the latter, though. Brimstone was easy to come by. Quicksilver… He thought about Algarve’s failure in the land of the Ice People and his kingdom’s failure to reach the Mamming Hills, then realized he was worrying about what had gone before whether he wanted to or not.

With a wave, the handler unchained the dragon from its stake. “Luck to you good,” the fellow said in rudimentary Algarvian. Sabrino waved back, then booted the dragon into the air. It rose with a scream of fury and a thunder of wings. Other beasts painted in Algarvian and in Yaninan colors joined it. Between them, they had about forty dragons.

The raid… was a raid. Sabrino wondered how many hundred he’d flown in the course of the war. The dragons dropped their eggs on the Unkerlanters busy digging themselves in west of Kastritsi, then swooped low to flame whatever men and beasts they could catch out in the open. Swemmel’s soldiers had a good many heavy sticks. A couple of Yaninan dragons tumbled out of the sky. Sabrino didn’t see any Algarvian dragons go down. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything. I’ll find out after we fly home, he thought.

His dragon’s flame was shorter than it should have been, and faded faster. All the Algarvian and Yaninan animals had the same predicament. MajorScoufas appeared in one of the crystals Sabrino carried. “We have done what we can do, I think,” Scoufas said.

“I think you’re probably right,” Sabrino agreed.

“We have hurt them,” Scoufas said.

“No doubt of it,” Sabrino said. The raid was a pinprick, a fleabite, nothing more. If it delayed the fall of Kastritsi by so much as an hour, he would have been astonished. Scoufas was no fool. He had to see that, too. But, these days, even delays of less than an hour to the relentless Unkerlanter advance were not to be sneezed at. Sabrino spoke into the crystal attuned to his own squadron leaders. They pulled their men out of the attack and flew back with the Yaninans toward their latest dragon farm.

No Unkerlanter dragons had paid the farm a call while the Algarvians and Yaninans flew on the attack. The bushy-mustached dragon handler chained Sabrino’s mount to its stake once more. He waved to Sabrino as the Algarvian wing commander descended from the beast. Sabrino managed a nod in return.

Not too far away, a Yaninan crystallomancer trotted up toMajorScoufas. They put their heads together. After a moment, Scoufas jerked as if stung by a wasp. He said something loud and pungent in Yaninan, then abruptly fell silent. Sabrino wondered what was going on. He shrugged. It looked to be a purely Yaninan concern, and he had plenty of troubles of his own. With a weary sigh-flying dragons was, by rights, a young man’s game-he trudged off to his tent.

A few minutes later, Scoufas stuck his head through the flap and said, “May I come in?”

“Of course, Major,” Sabrino said in some surprise; he usually visited Scoufas rather than the other way round. “Let me get you something wet and strong.”

“I thank you, but no,” Scoufas replied. “When I am done, you will not care to drink with me, I fear. I have been honored to fight alongside you, Your Excellency-always remember that.”

Sabrino didn’t know just what Scoufas meant, but didn’t like the sound of it. “Have you been transferred?” That was the most innocuous explanation he could find.

“In a manner of speaking, Colonel-in a manner of speaking,” Scoufas replied. “My kingdom, you might say, has been transferred. As of earlier today, I am informed, Yanina finds herself in alliance with KingSwemmel of Unkerlant and at war withKingMezentio of Algarve. I am sorry to be the bearer of such news, but it is something you must know.”

“It certainly is.” It was also one of the best-timed betrayals Sabrino had ever heard of, but that was neither here nor there. Doing his best to gather himself, he asked, “And are you at war with me, Major?”

Scoufas tossed his head. “No. I wish with all my heart thatKingTsavellas had not done this. You Algarvians scorn us, I know, but you did not mistreat our kingdom. What Swemmel will do… It may be better than what he would have done had he taken Yanina by conquest. So Tsavellas hopes. Me…” He shrugged. “I have my doubts, and so you and your men may fly off wherever you would. I will say I am sorry, but I got the order too late to try to stop you. Good luck, Colonel.”

Sabrino bowed. “I thank you. You are a gentleman. Would you care to fly with my men? Believe me, you would be most welcome.”

“Thank you, but no,” Scoufas said. “Whatever else I am, I am a Yaninan.”

“I understand, Major.” Sabrino bowed again. What he didn’t understand was what would happen next-or rather, how anything good for Algarve could possibly happen next.

“It’s another fornicating new kingdom,” Sidroc said as he tramped through a town somewhere in western Yanina. “If this futtering war ever ends and we get back to fornicating Forthweg, we can set up as fornicating tour guides.”

Ceorl barked laughter. “I like that. I’d go on a fornicating tour any day. Best kind of tour to go on, you ask me.” He rocked his hips forward and back.

“Where in blazes are we, anyway?”SergeantWerferth asked. This wasn’t exactly Plegmund’s Brigade any more. It was a collection of men who’d got out of the Mandelsloh pocket in one piece: Forthwegians, Grelzers, blonds from the Phalanx of Valmiera, Algarvians, Yaninans. The Algarvians’ assumption seemed to be that, since they’d managed it when so many hadn’t, nothing could hurt them now. Sidroc hoped the assumption was right.

“All right, maybe I won’t make a tour guide after all,” he said. “The Unkerlanters use one kind of writing I can’t read, and the Yaninans use another one. Wherever it is, it’s the arse end of nowhere, and the fornicating Yaninans are welcome to it. So are the Unkerlanters, if anybody wants to know what I think.”

He and his comrades had spoken Forthwegian, of course. One of the Yaninan soldiers asked, “What you say?” in Algarvian, the only language the men who fought for King Mezentio had in common-when they had any in common at all. “You say of my country the name many times.”

“I wondered what the name of this town was-that’s all, Yiannis,” Sidroc said.

Yiannis looked as if he suspected it wasn’t all, but he didn’t challenge Sidroc on it. “Of this town, the name is Kastritsi,” he said.

“Miserable place, ain’t it?” Ceorl said, but in Forthwegian.

Before Yiannis could ask him what that meant, an Algarvian soldier pointed to the outskirts of town. “Look-there’s a bunch of dragons taking off.”

“Are those the same bastards who flew over us to give Swemmel’s buggers a hard time a while ago?” Sidroc asked.

“Hope so,” the redhead answered. “The more the Unkerlanters get hit, the slower they’ll come after us.”

“They’re flying off toward the east, not back toward the Unkerlanters,” Sidroc said in disappointed tones.

“Must come from this kingdom, then,”SergeantWerferth said-in Forthwegian. He didn’t mention Yanina’s name, so Yiannis and his countrymen, none of whom knew a word of Forthwegian, noticed nothing amiss.

People on the streets of Kastritsi stared at the retreating soldiers with big, dark, round, solemn eyes. If you ‘re retreating, their faces said, the Unkerlanters will come next. They didn’t seem to look forward to meetingKingSwemmel ’s men. A good many of them were getting out of Kastritsi while they could. Sidroc understood that. He wanted to get out of Kastritsi, too.

And he did get out of the town, though the refugees slowed down the couple of regiments’ worth of men of which he was a part. He kept looking anxiously up to the sky. If Unkerlanter dragons appeared overhead, the result would be gruesome.

But the difficulty, when it came, came on the road ahead, not from out of the sky. A company of Yaninan soldiers in very clean uniforms that showed they’d seen little action were letting the refugees from Kastritsi-and from other towns farther west-go through, but they spread across the road and the fields to either side when they saw the armed men heading their way.

Their commander, a skinny little captain, stepped forward and held up his hand, palm out, like a constable halting traffic at a busy street corner. He sounded like one, too, when he spoke in Algarvian: “You are to halt. Who of you is the commander?”

That was a pretty good question. Sidroc wasn’t sure anyone would, or could, answer it. He and his comrades were almost as much refugees as the people fleeing Kastritsi. He had nothing left but his looks to show he was a Forthwegian-and, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why Algarvians were kilts. To him, they were miserable, demonically uncomfortable things.

But the rangy Algarvian major who strode out in front of the motley group of men of which Sidroc was a part wore his ragged kilt with panache. “I guess I am,” he said. “What’s your skirmish line here all about, Captain? It doesn’t look what you’d call friendly.”

“It is not supposed to be friendly,” the Yaninan officer replied. “Yanina is as of today the ally of Unkerlant. Yanina is as of today the enemy of Algarve and of all kingdoms allied with Algarve. You will all of you put your sticks on the grounds and your hands in the air. You are our captives.”

“Oh, we are, are we?” the Algarvian officer said, looking down his nose at the captain who’d called for his surrender. The Yaninan dipped his head, plainly confident the redhead would do as he was told. But the Algarvian had other ideas. He turned back to the soldiers he led and shouted, “Come on, boys-let’s take ‘em! You want to let ‘em hand us over to the Unkerlanters?”

He toppled in the next instant, blazed by three Yaninans at the same time. But nobody who’d fought in the west wanted to fall into Unkerlanter hands. And, while Sidroc didn’t know about anybody else, he was cursed if he wanted to surrender to a bunch of Yaninans who looked as if they’d never done any real fighting in all their born days. He took a blaze at a Yaninan who made a pretty clear target. The man went down with a howl.

And Sidroc wasn’t the only one. The veterans who’d faced everything Swemmel’s hordes had thrown at them weren’t about to let a handful of Yaninans push them around. Shouting, “Mezentio!” they deployed from column into line and rolled over Tsavellas’ men. Some of them did fall, but not very many-the Yaninans who’d been sent out to stop them didn’t really seem to believe till too late that they would fight back.

It was all over in a couple of minutes. Of the Yaninans who didn’t get blazed, some fled and rather more threw their hands high and gave up. Sidroc laughed as he collected the stick from one of those. “Why did they thinkwe’d give up?” he said. “It’s all they’re good for themselves.”

“That may well be why,” a blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera said. “But what do we do now that Yanina has turned against us? It is not just this one company. It is the whole cursed kingdom.”

Sidroc hadn’t thought of that. “Are we going to have to fight our way through this whole cursed kingdom, like you said?”

“Who knows?” The Valmieran shrugged. “I will say this: I would sooner fight Yaninans than Unkerlanters any day.” Sidroc nodded. The fellow from the Phalanx might be nothing but a fornicating Kaunian, but he wasn’t a stupid fornicating Kaunian.

With the Algarvian major dead, the highest-ranking officer left on his feet was a lieutenant who had to be a couple of years younger than Sidroc. When he called out, “Crystallomancer!” his voice broke and squeaked like a youth’s.

Did they have a crystallomancer with them? Sidroc wouldn’t have bet on it, but one of the Valmierans stepped forward. “Aye, sir?” he said.

His blond hair seemed to startle the lieutenant, but the officer told him, “See if you can find out where there’s a garrison we can attach ourselves to.” The man from the Phalanx of Valmiera saluted and went about his business. The Algarvian lieutenant raised his voice-and kept it from cracking: “All you Yaninans who’ve been with us, you have a choice. You can stay with us and go on fighting Swemmel, or you can lay down your sticks and your packs and walk away from the war right now.”

A couple of dozen men who’d fought in Unkerlant did walk away. Sidroc wondered what he would have done had someone offered him the same choice. I’d stay, he thought. Nobody made me sign up for Plegmund’s Brigade. I did it myself. And most of the Yaninans stayed, too.

“We’d better keep an eye on them,”SergeantWerferth murmured in Forthwegian. “No telling what they’ll do if they have to keep blazing at their own people.”

The crystallomancer said, “Sir, we have forces toward the southeast, about ten miles from here.”

“We’ll head that way, then,” the Algarvian lieutenant said. A moment later, he asked, “Did they say what’s going on in Patras? It lies in that direction, too.”

“There’s fighting there, sir,” the crystallomancer replied. “There’s fighting all over Yanina, as best I can tell.”

“How are we supposed to hold off the Unkerlanters if we’ve got these Yaninan whoresons nipping our ankles at the same time?” Sidroc asked.

Ceorl said, “We kick ‘em in the balls a few times, they’ll stop biting.”

“Hope so,” Sidroc said. Along with his comrades, he started trudging toward that other force loyal to Mezentio. He’d been retreating before. Now he was retreating through hostile country. He knew the difference. Unkerlant had taught it to him. Movement now could turn into battle without warning. If a couple of regiments of Yaninans came over that low hill…

They didn’t. Along the road, a few men loyal to Tsavellas blazed at Sidroc and his comrades from whatever cover they could find. Methodically, the Algarvians and Forthwegians and Valmierans and the Yaninans who’d stayed with Mezentio’s men hunted them down and killed them.

When they marched through a village, people called out in broken Algarvian: “Save us from Unkerlanters!” They didn’t know their sovereign had chosen the strategic moment to change sides.

“You’d better get the blazes out of here,” Sidroc called back. “Those bastards will come and eat you for breakfast.” Someone translated that into gurgling Yaninan. The villagers exclaimed in horror. Some of them started fleeing east with no more than the clothes on their backs.

“Curse it, keep your fool mouth shut,”SergeantWerferth snapped. “Now those miserable Yaninans will clog the roads for everybody else.”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” But Sidroc wasn’t sorry. He had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud as he left the Yaninan village. He nudged Ceorl. “Didn’t they look like a flock of spooked chickens?”

“Sure did,” Ceorl said. After another few paces, he added, “You’re not such a bad son of a whore after all.”

“Thanks. You, too.” Sidroc grinned. Ceorl grinned back. In Forthweg, he’d been a ruffian, a robber, probably a murderer. Here, he was a comrade. Sidroc didn’t worry about what he did in his spare time. And Ceorl, evidently, had at last forgiven him for not being rough enough.

Just after sunset, they joined up with the Algarvian brigade the crystallomancer had found. Sidroc wasn’t far from the lieutenant who led his group when that worthy asked the colonel in charge of the brigade, “Sir, what are we going to do now? Whatcan we do now?”

“Fall back,” the colonel answered. “There’s higher ground farther east. They won’t have such an easy time pushing us off it. Wehave to hold there- nothing but Algarve behind.” The lieutenant nodded earnestly. Sidroc nodded, too, in a different way. The lieutenant thought everything would be all right once they got to the high ground, wherever it was. Sidroc had done enough retreating by now to doubt whether everything would ever be all right again.

Pekka had had to beg the Seven Princes to get a few days’ leave from the sorcerous project in the Naantali district. She’d put Raahe and Alkio jointly in charge while she was away. They were solid and steady, not given to wild adventurism. She’d also advised them to smack Umarinen over the head with a rock when and as needed.

Getting from the Naantali district back down to Kajaani was an adventure in and of itself. The carriage ride from the hostel to the nearest ley-line terminal was long and bumpy. Then, thanks to the way the earth’s energy grid in that part of the world ran, she had to go around three sides of a rectangle before finally heading south to her home town.

And she did every bit of it with a smile on her face, which wasn’t like her. Small inconveniences didn’t bother her, while larger ones seemed small. This is what falling in love does, she thought. Iremember. I didn‘t think I’d ever feel this way again. But I do.

It wasn’t that she’d stopped loving Leino. That made what she felt for Fernao seem stranger, but didn’t make it go away. Leino was far away, in time and space, while Fernao… Her whole body felt warm when she thought about Fernao, though the Kuusaman landscape outside looked as bleak and chilly as it always did in autumn.

The ley-line caravan glided over the last low hills and down toward the harbor of Kajaani. “Coming up on Kajaani,” the ticket-taker said as he strode through the cars-as if anyone could doubt where this particular caravan was going. “Coming up on Kajaani, the end of the line,” he added-as if anyone seeing the gray, whitecap-flecked ocean ahead could doubt that, either.

Grabbing her carpetbag from the rack above her seat, Pekka was among the first out the door when the caravan halted under the steep roof of the depot. There stood her sister Elimaki, waving. And there beside Elimaki was…

“Uto!” Pekka squealed, and her son ran to her and squeezed the breath out of her. “Powers above, how big you’ve got!” she said.

“Iam big,” he answered. “I’m nine.” He picked up the carpetbag she’d dropped to hug him. “I can carry this,” he said importantly, and he was right.

Nine, Pekka thought, a little dazed. But he was also right about that, of course. He’d been four when the Derlavaian War started. The world had spent more than half his lifetime tearing itself to pieces.

Pekka had thought she would tear herself to pieces, too, with guilt, when she saw her son. But that didn’t happen, either. She still loved him as unreservedly as ever. Aye, seeing him reminded her of Leino. But it wasn’t that she didn’t love Leino. It really isn’t, she though, as if someone had insisted that she didn’t. She felt as if she loved everybody-except the Algarvians. Them she still hated with a hatred whose cold viciousness astonished her whenever she paused to look at it.

She didn’t have to look at it for long, because here came Elimaki behind Uto. “Good to see you again,” Pekka’s sister said as the two of them embraced and kissed each other on the cheek. “It’s been too long. It’s always much too long between your visits.”

“I’m busy.” Pekka mimed exhaustion and falling to pieces to show how busy she was.

Laughing, Elimaki said, “You must be doing something important.” When Pekka didn’t answer right away, her sister nodded to herself. “I know lots of people who don’t talk about what they’re doing these days.”

“Ican’t talk about what I’m doing,” Pekka said.

Elimaki nodded again. “That’s what they all say. Come on, let’s get up to the houses.” They’d lived side by side for years. “It’s getting dark.”

“Of course it is,” Pekka said. Kajaani lay even farther south than the Naantali district, which meant fall and winter here were even darker and gloomier. As they hurried out of the depot, she asked, “How is Olavin?”

It was, she thought, a harmless question. Elimaki’s husband wore uniform, aye, but he’d been a banker before the war and was a paymaster nowadays-he came nowhere closer to battle than Yliharma. Pekka was astonished when her sister stopped in her tracks and spoke in a low, toneless voice: “Oh. You must not have got my last letter yet.”

“I never get them as fast as you think I should,” Pekka answered. “They always read them and scratch things out first. What’s happened?”

Voice still flat, Elimaki said, “He’s taken up with one of his pretty little clerks, that’s what. He wants to leave. Our solicitors are snapping at each other.”

“Oh, no!” Pekka exclaimed.

“Oh, aye.” Elimaki smiled wryly. “I doubt I’ll ever see him again. Right now, I hope I don’t. He always thought he was too big for a provincial town like Kajaani. Now he gets to try his luck in the capital, and on someone else, or maybe on a lot of someone elses. Heis sending me money for the house. He’s always been scrupulous about money. Other things…” Pekka’s sister shrugged. “And how areyou!”

“I don’t know. I think I’m stunned.” Pekka had intended to unburden herself to Elimaki. If she couldn’t talk about men and life and love with her own sister, with whom could she? The answer to that looked to be, no one.

“UncleOlavinis a louse,” Uto said.

Elimaki laughed a harsh laugh. “I’ve called him a lot worse than that, but I try not to do it where Uto can hear. He picks up enough bad language without learning it from me.” Uto looked proud when his aunt said that. Pekka had to stifle a giggle. Uto had always delighted in the mischief he caused.

They took the local ley-line caravan to the stop where Pekka had got out so often on her way home from Kajaani City College. Then they walked up the hill to the lane with her house and Elimaki’s beside it. By then, full darkness had fallen. Lights were few and far between. Pekka worried more about slipping and turning an ankle than about footpads. Robbers were few and far between in Kajaani: an advantage to provincial towns, though Kuusamans generally were law-abiding folk.

Elimaki’s house lay closer to the opening of the lane than did Pekka’s. “Why don’t you come in with me?” her sister said. “I’ll fix some supper and something for both of us to drink, and we can go on from there.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Pekka said.

“What’s wonderful is to see you,” Elimaki answered. “Now I have someone I can let my hair down to.” She sighed. “I’m jealous of you and Leino. Isn’t that terrible?”

Pekka’s ears heated. “Not really.” She changed the subject in a hurry: “I’ll help in the kitchen.”

Elimaki didn’t let her do much, but she did fix them both stiff drinks. Uto hung around while the halibut steaks cooked. He stared wide-eyed at his mother all through supper. Elimaki, these days, surely felt more like a mother to him than Pekka. After supper, though, he hurried off to play. Before long, a horrible crash came from a back room. “What was that?” Elimaki called as she and Pekka carried dishes back to the kitchen to wash them.

“Nothing,” Uto answered sweetly. Pekka snickered. She knewthat tone altogether too well.

She and Elimaki had a couple of more drinks while they did the dishes, and they took more brandy out to the parlor. Eventually, Elimaki called Uto and told him to go to bed. He sent Pekka the look of appeal she knew too well and hadn’t seen in too long. “Do I have to, Mother?”

“Is this the time you usually go to sleep?” Pekka asked. Powers above! I don’t even know! Reluctantly, Uto nodded-Elimaki would give him the lie if he did anything else. “Then you do,” Pekka told him. “But come give me a kiss first.” He ran to her. They clung to each other. Then, with less fuss than she’d expected, he went off to the back of the house. Pekka glanced over to Elimaki. “He’s growing up.” She emptied her glass.

“Aye-when he feels like it,” her sister said. “He’s probably reading under the covers for a while. Sometimes I let him get away with that.” Elimaki drained her glass, too, then poured it full again and filled Pekka’s with it. “You haven’t said two words about yourself since you got off the caravan car.”

“Well…” Discretion warred with brandy. For the moment, discretion won. Pekka said, “There are a lot of things I can’t talk about.” She could hear the beginning of a slur in her words. Brandy hadn’t lost by much.

“I knowthat,” Elimaki said impatiently. “I don’t care about what youdo. I wouldn’t understand most of it anyway-I’m no mage. I want to know how youare.”

“Do you?” Pekka said. Her sister nodded, the motion exaggerated enough to show she’d had a good deal to drink, too.“Do you?” Pekka repeated. Elimaki nodded again. And Pekka, surprising herself even as the words poured out, told her.

Silence stretched and stretched after she finished. Ishouldn‘t have done that, she thought, and blamed the brandy. But it wasn’t just the brandy, and she knew it. One of the reasons she’d come home was to talk with Elimaki about Fernao. Now she’d done it. If only Olavin hadn’t chosen the most inconvenient possible time to take up with someone else, too.

At last, Elimaki said, “I don’t know what to say. I… never expected anything like this-from Olavin or from you. Especially from you, I think.”

“I didn’t reallyexpect it, either,” Pekka said, and knocked back the brandy Elimaki had poured her. “It just… happened. These things do, sometimes.”

“I know. I ought to know.” Elimaki’s face twisted. She paused again, then asked, “What are you going to do? What are you going to tell Leino?”

“I don’t know,” Pekka answered. “I just don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea in the world. I’ll cross that ice when I come to it.”

“Ididn’t expect it of you,” Elimaki said again. “If anybody in the family was going to go off and take a lover, I thought it would be me. Here I was, sitting at home by myself-except for Uto, and that’s a pretty big ‘except.’ But I… sat here. I was lonely, but it wasn’t that bad. And now this.” Her goggle-eyed look also came only in part from the brandy.

“I know. But-” Pekka stopped, unsure how to go on.

Her sister held up a hand. “Never mind. Your face says it all. If I doused every one of the lamps, you’d still glow.”

“Does it? Would I?” Pekka asked. Very solemnly indeed, Elimaki nodded. So did Pekka. “Well, it’s the truth. It’s how I feel. I know it’s not the way I’m supposed to feel, but I do.”

“I don’t know whether to be green with envy of you or to want to hit you over the head with a brick,” Elimaki said. “These things usually don’t have happy endings, you know.”

“Of course I know,” Pekka said. “At least we aren’t Algarvic people, where they go to knives sometimes instead of solicitors.” And then, even before her sister could say anything, she remembered Fernaowas of Algarvic blood. That gave her something brand new to worry about. As if I didn‘t have enough, she thought.

Behind Garivald-who was getting used to thinking of himself as Fariulf- lay the Twegen River. Behind him also lay a good many artificers frantically repairing the bridges over the Twegen the Algarvians had knocked down with their sorcerously guided eggs. Ahead of him, to the east, were the rest of Forthweg and all the redheads trying to keep his countrymen and him from taking any more of it.

To the north, smoke rose from the burning city of Eoforwic. Garivald supposed the Algarvians could have given this bridgehead even more trouble than they had if they weren’t trying to put down the rebellious Forthwegians in their capital.

That didn’t mean Mezentio’s men were idle here. Garivald wished it would have. Eggs started bursting not far away. They were of the plain, ordinary, unsteered variety, but if one burst in the hole where he crouched it would kill him just as dead as the fanciest product of inventive Algarvian sorcery. The eggs kicked up great, choking clouds of brown dust. Coughing a little, Garivald marveled at that. Down in the Duchy of Grelz, it would have been raining now-the fall mud time-with snow on the way. Here, rain fell mostly in the late fall and winter, and snow was uncommon. So he’d been told, anyhow. He had trouble believing it, but it looked to be true.

“Stay alert!”LieutenantAndelot shouted. “They like to attack after they plaster us with eggs. They think that’s an efficient way to do things. Our job is to show ‘em they’re wrong.”

“That’s right,” Garivald said. From what he’d seen of Algarvian soldiers, they were alarmingly efficient, but he had to back up his officer. That was part of what being a corporal was about. And he spoke the absolute truth when he added, “We’ve got to hold on to this bridgehead, no matter what.”

A moment later, somebody else let out a frightened yell: “Here they come!”

Garivald quickly looked every which way. There were the kilted Algarvians loping forward. Some of them shouted, “Mezentio!” as they ran. They still acted as much like world-beaters as they had when they overran his home village of Zossen. True, they’d been driven out of Unkerlant, but that didn’t seem to be because they were bad soldiers, only because there weren’t quite enough of them to overwhelm the larger kingdom.

Every which way also included behind Garivald. He’d learned as an irregular to know where he would retreat before he had to fall back. He’d had that lesson brutally reinforced in Swemmel’s regular army, too. A soldier who didn’t think ahead wouldn’t get many chances to think at all.

“Mezentio!” Aye, the redheads still knew their business. As soon as the Unkerlanters started blazing at them, some of them dove for cover and blazed back. Others scrambled forward. Then they flopped down in turn, while the troopers in back of them ran past them and toward the Unkerlanter front line.

“Get up there, curse it!” Garivald yelled at a soldier too deep in his hole to fight. “You’ve got a better chance if you blaze at them, too.”

The soldier couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He’d had his father yelling at him back in his home village, not an underofficer with all the savage weight ofKingSwemmel ’s army behind him. His father, losing his temper, might beat him. A corporal, losing his temper, could do or cause to be done far worse than that. Garivald didn’t think he could ever make himself give a man over to the inspectors for sacrifice, but the youngster didn’t need to know that.

And his curses did what they were supposed to do: they got the kid up and fighting. He might want to blaze Garivald along with or instead of the Algarvians, but he was blazing at them. Garivald blazed at one of them, too. The fellow kept running, so he must have missed. He cursed again, this time at himself.

He looked back over his shoulder. If the redheads kept coming, he’d have to scurry back toward that next hiding place. He hoped no one else had marked it-it wouldn’t hide a pair of men.

Just as he was about to jump out of his hole and fall back, what seemed like all the eggs in the world descended on the Algarvians. The Unkerlanters had moved a lot of egg-tossers into the bridgehead. A crystallomancer must have reached the men who served them, and the efficient way they responded would have warmedKingSwemmel ’s heart-assuming anything could.

Whatever such efficiency would have done to Swemmel’s heart, it wreaked havoc on the Algarvians. Their onslaught petered out, smashed under a blizzard of bursts of sorcerous energy. The ground shook under Garivald’s feet-not as it would have when one side or the other started sacrificing, but simply because so many eggs were coming down close to him.

“Take that, you whoresons!”LieutenantAndelot screamed at the redheads. He was only a youngster himself. This probably seemed like a great lark to him.

“We ought to go after the stinking buggers,” somebody said.

But, youngster or not, Andelot knew how to follow orders. “No,” he said. “For the time being, we’re just supposed to hold this bridgehead.”

“When do we break out, sir?” the soldier asked.

“When the generals tell us to,” Andelot answered. Garivald found himself nodding. Sure enough, that was how things worked.

Once driven off, the Algarvians didn’t resume their attack. From what the handful of surviving old-timers Garivald had talked with said, that was a change from the earlier days of the war. Mezentio’s men didn’t have the reserves of strength they’d once enjoyed. As far as he was concerned, they were quite bad enough as they were.

Andelot came over to him. “What’s up, sir?” he asked cautiously. He didn’t like drawing official attention to himself.

“Don’t worry, Fariulf-you’re not in trouble,” Andelot said, which did nothing to keep Garivald from worrying. “I just wanted to say you did a good job of handling that fellow who wasn’t blazing at the redheads.”

“Oh,” Garivald said. “Thank you, sir.”

“I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier-a fine soldier, even,” Andelot said. “Would you like to move up in the army? You might be an officer by the time the war ends. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

Garivald wanted to become an officer about as much as he wanted an extra head. “Sir, I don’t have my letters,” he said, thinking that would dispose of that.

“I’ll teach you, if you like,” Andelot offered.

“Would you?” Garivald stared. “Nobody ever said anything like that to me before, sir. My village didn’t even have a school. The firstman there could read, and maybe a few other people, but not that many. I’d give a lot, sir, to be able to read and write.” /could write down my songs. I could make them better. I could make them last forever.

“It would be my pleasure,” Andelot said. “The more men who do know how to read and write, the more efficient a kingdom Unkerlant becomes. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Corporal?”

“Aye, sir,” Garivald replied. New thoughts crowded in on the heels of his first excitement. If I do write my songs down, I have to be careful. If the inspectors find them, they’ll know who I really am. And if they know who I really am, I’m in a lot of trouble.

He didn’t show what he was thinking. Showing your thoughts could and often did prove deadly dangerous in Unkerlant. He did his best to look interested and attentive when Andelot pulled a scrap of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink from his belt pouch. He wrote something on the paper in big letters. “Here’s your name-Fariulf.”

“Fariulf,” Garivald repeated dutifully, wondering what his real name looked like. He didn’t ask. If he ever got the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.

“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really-all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”

“Those both say ‘f?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”

“Ah,”LieutenantAndelot said. “You usethis form-the royal form, people call it-for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”

“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived underKingSwemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for-what did you say, sir?”

“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.

“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.

To his surprise, LieutenantAndelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead-you can do it. Just copy what I did.”

When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say… Fariulf?” He nearly made the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.

“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”

“No, sir,” Garivald said simply.

Andelot sighed. “You really must have lived in the back of beyond.” Garivald shrugged again. He probably had. Andelot taught him the rhyme, which had a catchy little tune. He learned it quickly enough to please the lieutenant. “That’s good,” Andelot said. “That’s very good. Here, let me give you more paper. You can have that pen, too, and here’s a bottle of ink. Go practice shaping the letters and keep saying the rhyme so you know what each one sounds like. In a couple of days, I’ll show you how to read more things, too.”

“Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. He went back to his own hole, his head as full of that children’s rhyme as it had ever been with his own songs. He wrote the alphabet several times, reciting the rhyme as he wielded the pen. Then-first looking around to make sure no one could see him-he wroteGarivald as, best he could, being certain to use the royal form of the G.

And then he crumpled up that leaf of paper and threw it in the closest fire. He let out a small sigh of relief as he watched it burn. In Swemmel’s kingdom, no one could be too careful. Fariulf he was, and Fariulf he would have to remain.

Istvan raised an axe and brought it down on a chunk of firewood. The chunk split into two smaller chunks. The Kuusaman guards who watched the woodcutting detail stayed very alert-axes were real weapons. A few feet from Istvan, Kun was chopping away, too.

“Anyone can tell you didn’t grow up cutting wood,” Istvan said.

“I do it well enough.”Kun was touchy about everything. That had got him into trouble with the guards at the captives’ camp a couple of times. It would have been worse trouble if he hadn’t managed to talk his way out of most of it.

“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Istvan answered.

“I’ll say that,” Szonyi toldKun with a grin. “You don’t cut as much wood as the sergeant or I do, not even close.”

“You’re both twice my size,”Kun said-an exaggeration, but not an enormous one: by Gyongyosian standards, hewas on the scrawny side.

Even so, Istvan shook his head. “We’d still do more, even if we were your size or you were ours. Anybody can see that. You waste motion.”

“If I were an Unkerlanter, you’d complain I wasn’t efficient enough,”Kun said.

“If you were an Unkerlanter, you’d still be a lousy woodcutter,” Szonyi said. “By the stars, you’d be a lousy woodcutter if you were an Algarvian.”

“Algarvians,”Kun said, and chopped away at the wood scattered before him with great spirit if not with great efficiency.

“They’re strange people.” Szonyi paused for a moment to wipe sweat from his face with a tunic sleeve. Like most early autumn days on the island of Obuda, this one was cool and misty, but cutting wood was plenty of work to keep a man warm. “Even the one who speaks our language is strange, and the other three…” He rolled his eyes. “They’re even worse.”

“Makes you wonder why we ever allied with them,” Istvan said, leaning on his axe. “They’re… foreign.”

Kunlaughed. “Of course they’re foreign. They’reforeigners, by the stars. Did you expect them to be just like us?”

Actually, Istvanhad expected something like that. The only foreigners with whom he’d had any experience up to now were Unkerlanter and Kuusaman enemies-and trying to kill one another hadn’t proved the best way to strike up an acquaintance-and the natives of Obuda, whom he reckoned contemptible because they bowed down to whoever occupied their island. He said, “I expected them to be more like us than they are, I’ll tell you that.”

“Why?”Kun asked.

“Because we’re on the same side, of course,” Istvan answered. Szonyi nodded vigorous agreement.

“We’re on the same side as the naked black Zuwayzin, too,”Kun said. “Do you think they’ll be just like us?”

Istvan had trouble believing there really were people with black skins who ran around with no clothes on all the time. It sounded like one of the stories big boys told their little brothers so those little brothers would look like fools when they repeated them to their parents. He said, “I’ve never seen a Zuwayzi, and neither have you. And we weren’t talking about them. We were talking about Algarvians.”

“Aye, but you were saying that foreigners shouldn’t-”Kun began.

“No to talk!” a guard shouted in bad Gyongyosian. “To work! To chop!”

With something close to relief, Istvan went back to cutting wood. Kun had a way of twisting things till they seemed upside down and inside out. The former mage’s apprentice got back to work, too, but he didn’t stop talking. He never does, Istvan thought, which wasn’t quite fair. Kun continued, “Foreigners shouldn’t be different from us if we’re going to ally with them? I think that’s a silly notion.”

“No to talk!” the Kuusaman guard yelled again. This time, Kun did shut up-for a while.

After what seemed like forever, the wood-chopping detail finished its work. The Kuusamans carefully counted the axes before sending the captives back to their barracks. Istvan didn’t know how anyone could hope to sneak an axe away, but the guards took no chances.

In the barracks, CaptainFrigyes and Borsos the dowser and the Algarvian who spoke Gyongyosian-his name was Norandino, which struck Istvan as a thoroughly barbarous appellation-had their heads together. Istvan didn’t like that. Both Frigyes and, from what he’d been able to see, Algarvians in general were much too fond of blood sacrifice and the sorcerous power that sprang from it to suit him.

By the way Frigyes looked up in alarm, he and Borsos and Norandino had been plotting something. Whether it had to do with cutting some large number of Gyongyosian throats here, Istvan didn’t know. He hoped he wouldn’t ever have to find out.

Norandino said something in questioning tones, too low for Istvan to make out the words. Frigyes answered a little more loudly: “Oh, aye, they’re reliable enough. Nothing to worry about with them.”

Istvan knew he should have felt reassured, complimented, even flattered. What he felt instead was something a man not from a self-styled warrior race would unquestionably have called fear. He had too good a notion of what sort of bloody thoughts went through his company commander’s mind.

Szonyi and the rest of the woodcutters went to their cots and relaxed without the slightest worry-all saveKun, who caught Istvan’s eye. Kun didn’t say anything. He hardly changed expression. But Istvan knew they were thinking the same thing, and that it appalled them both.

Norandino’s laugh rang out. It filled the barracks hall. How could anyone who talked of slaughter sound so cheerful about it? Istvan didn’t know, but the redhead certainly seemed to manage. And it wasn’t a laugh of anticipation of someone else’s trouble, as might have come from a Gyongyosian. By the sound of it, Norandino knew his own neck might be on the line. He not only knew, he thought that was part of the joke.

Or maybe I’m imagining things, Istvan thought as he lay down on his own cot. He stared up at the boards of the ceiling and tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t. Why would Frigyes and a mage of sorts and an Algarvian talk together, if not for purposes of sorcery and sacrifice?

Reliable. CaptainFrigyes thinks I’m reliable. Am I? That he could even ask himself the question left him startled. If I thought he could really do something to win the war for Gyongyos, I might not feel the same. But he can’t hurt anything but Obuda, and the fighting’s moved a long way from here.

Which meant… Istvan knew what it meant. He knew, but he shied away from following the thought where it had to lead. He glanced over towardKun, who sprawled a couple of cots away. Kun was looking in his direction, too. Istvan jerked his eyes away, as if he’d caught the other man doing something disgusting. But he hadn’t. The disgust was all in his own mind, with much of it aimed at himself.

Kundidn’t shy away from logic. Kun would know the choice perfectly well-would know it and know what to make of it. Either you let your throat be cut-or, if you were lucky, your friends’ throats-or you let the Kuusamans know what was brewing. Istvan saw no middle ground.

He’d talked about such matters. Talking about them, he discovered, was one thing. Actually nerving himself to speak to a guard? That was something else again. If I do it, I can never go back. If I do it, I can probably never set eyes on another Gyongyosian as long as I live.

But that wasn’t it, or wasn’t the biggest part of it, anyway. If I do it, will the stars still shine on me? Or will they cast me into eternal blackness once I die?

Then Borsos said something loud enough for him-and for the whole barracks-to hear: “No, by the stars! I’ll have no part of it!” The dowser sprang to his feet and hurried out of the building.

Istvan let out a loud, long sigh of relief. He didn’t care who heard him, not right then he didn’t. The stars be praised! blazed through his mind. They’ve arranged things so I don’t have to betray my countrymen. Truly they are as kindly as people say. Even his cot all at once felt more comfortable than it had.

But he soon discovered the stars intended other things than keeping him happy. CaptainFrigyes called, “Come over here a moment, SergeantIstvan.”

“Sir?” Istvan said, his heart sinking. He would sooner have gone into battle again in the trackless forests of western Unkerlant than climb to his feet and walk over to the corner of the barracks hall where Frigyes and Norandino the Algarvian sat.

CaptainFrigyesnodded to him in a friendly way, which only worried him more. “Now, Sergeant,” the company commander said, “I’ve been telling Norandino here that you’re a man with good sense.”

“He has indeed. His praise of you would make the stars blush in the sky,” Norandino said. That praise made Istvan blush. So did the redhead’s whole manner of speaking. Gyongyosian was a language in which a man said what he meant and had done. The Algarvian turned it into something that sounded flowery and unnatural.

When Istvan merely stood mute, Frigyes pressed ahead: “You’ve said you knowMajorBorsos, haven’t you?”

He knew perfectly well Istvan had said that. Istvan couldn’t deny it now, however much he wanted to. “Aye, sir,” he said unhappily, and said no more.

CaptainFrigyesbeamed at him. “Splendid!” He sounded almost as flowery as Norandino. “Then you won’t mind talking him into seeing what’s good sense, will you?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Istvan answered, more unhappily still. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.” That was a great thumping lie, but how he wished it were the truth!

“We want to do to Kuusamo all we can-is that not true?” Norandino said. “And we see only one way of doing anything at all to Kuusamo on this miserable little island. Is that not also true?” He made everything he said seem not only true but obvious.

Istvan had his doubts about what was true. To him, nothing seemed obvious except that Frigyes was daft. Daft or not, Frigyes was also his superior. And so, instead of saying what he thought, he just shrugged.

Norandino looked disappointed. “Oh, my dear fellow,” he began, as if he were Istvan’s close kin.

“I’ll handle this,” Frigyes broke in. He aimed a forefinger at Istvan as if it were a stick. “You swore an oath. Are you ready to live up to it, or not? Answer me straight out, Sergeant.”

“Sir, I wasn’t a captive then, stowed away where I couldn’t doEkrekekArpad or Gyongyos any good,” Istvan said.

Frigyes eyed him with cold contempt. “Begone, oathbreaker. Believe me, I can find someone else to make Borsos see what needs seeing, do what needs doing. And as for you, Sergeant, as for you… May the stars forget you as you have forgotten them.” Istvan stumbled away, shame and joy warring in his heart.