Jaws of Darkness

Eighteen

A sharp, peremptory knock on the bedchamber door woke Krasta in the middle of the night. “Who is it?” she asked muzzily, though only one person was likely to presume on her so. And even he had his nerve, waking her out of a sound sleep.

Sure enough, ColonelLurcanio spoke from the hallway: “I am a commercial traveler, milady. Can I interest you in a new laundry soap?”

With a snort, Krasta got out of bed and walked to the door. The waistband of her pyjama trousers was getting tight. Her belly had finally started to bulge. Before long, she would have to start wearing a larger size-and then do it again and again, until I finally have this baby, she thought with more than a little annoyance.

She’d opened the door before she realized she could have told Lurcanio to go to the powers below. If he suddenly took it into his head to want her at whatever ghastly hour this was, she was ready to give herself to him, no matter how much she might resent it later. Till she knew him, she’d never imagined a man could intimidate her so. No one else had ever come close.

There he stood in full uniform, from boots to jaunty hat complete with jaunty plume. Instead of taking her in his arms, he swept off the hat and bowed. “Good-bye, my sweet, and as much good fortune to you as you deserve, or perhaps even a little over that. Because of you, I have enjoyed Priekule a good deal more than I thought I would.” He bowed again.

Krasta swallowed a yawn instead of yielding to it: another measure of how much of an edge Lurcanio had on her. Her wits were still working slower than they might have, whether she showed the yawn or not. “What do you mean, good-bye?” she asked.

Lurcanio smiled. “What most people mean when they use the word. ‘Farewell’ is a synonym, I believe.” But his amusement slipped then, and he defined himself more precisely: “I mean that I am leaving Priekule. I mean that Algarve is leaving Priekule. Perhaps I will come back one day, if the fortunes of war permit.”

“You’re… leaving?” Krasta said. “Algarve is… leaving?” He’d warned her that might happen, but she hadn’t believed it, not down deep.

“I said so. It is the truth,” Lurcanio answered. “Long before the sun rises, I shall be gone.”

“But what am I going to do?” Krasta exclaimed-as usual, she came first in her own thoughts.

Her Algarvian lover shrugged. “I expect you will manage. You have a knack for it-and you are pretty enough to let you get away with a lot that would be intolerable from some other woman.” He stepped forward and slid his hand under the waistband of her trousers. Instead of fondling her as he’d done so many times, though, he let his palm rest on her belly. “If by some accident the baby does turn out to be mine, try not to hate it on that account.” He brushed his lips across hers, then hurried down the stairs without a backward glance.

Krasta took a step after him, but only one. She recognized futility when it hit her in the face. Lurcanio wouldn’t stop for her or for anyone else. She turned around and went to the bedchamber window. A small swarm of carriages waited there. Lurcanio came out and said something in his own language as he got into one. The Algarvian drivers flicked their reins. The carriages rattled away. Krasta watched till the last one vanished into predawn darkness.

How many Algarvians were leaving Priekule now, by carriage and on horse- and unicornback and aboard ley-line caravans gliding west? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Krasta couldn’t begin to guess. The question nonetheless had an answer. All of them. Lurcanio had said so.

What would Priekule be like without redheads strutting through it?

Krasta could hardly imagine. It had been too long. More than four years, she thought with sleepy wonder. She lay down again. Of itself, her own hand went where Lurcanio’s had lain only moments before.

Only a little bulge under there-no sound at all, of course. No movement, either, or none to speak of. She thought she’d felt the baby stir once or twice, but she wasn’t sure. “Why aren’t you Valnu’s?” she whispered to her belly. “Maybe youare Valnu’s. He had the first chance that day, after all.”

By the time she’d fallen asleep, she was more than halfway to convincing herself the Valmieran viscounthad to be the baby’s father.

Rain on the roof woke her-rain on the roof and the sounds of a raucous celebration downstairs. She muttered something vile under her breath. Since she’d started carrying that baby-ViscountValnu ’s baby; of course it wasViscountValnu ’s baby-she’d needed all the sleep she could get, and an extra hour besides. She started to shout for Bauska, then checked herself. She could hear her maidservant making a racket along with the rest of the help, and Bauska wasn’t likely to hear her.

Muttering more unpleasantries, she got out of bed, threw on some clothes (the trousers weren’t stylish, but they weren’t tight, either, which counted for more), and emerged from her bedchamber. Having emerged, she slammed the door behind her. That should have been plenty to make the servants downstairs grow quiet on the instant.

It should have, but it didn’t. Somebody-was that, could that possibly have been, her driver?-howled out a suggestion for King Mezentio that had to be the foulest thing she’d ever heard in her life, and she’d heard a good deal. A moment later, one of the cooks topped it. Everyone down there roared laughter.

Hearing that laughter, Krasta shivered a little. That laughter didn’t hold mirth-or rather, not mirth alone. A hunger for vengeance lived there, too. With the Algarvians gone like so many thieves in the night, where would that hunger feed?

“And the same to the twat upstairs!” someone else yelled, which brought more laughter and several cries of agreement. Krasta shivered again. She’d just had her question answered for her. She wished she knew who’d shouted that last. She would have dismissed him at once, and with a bad character, too.

A moment later, though, she squared her shoulders and marched down the stairs. Those wereservants down there, after all, and who of noble blood could take servants quite seriously?

They were sitting-some sprawling-around the big dining-hall table, eating her food and swilling down her ale and brandy. Abrupt silence fell when they saw her standing in the doorway. “Here is the twat upstairs,” she said crisply. “Now, what do you intend to do about it?”

That should have cowed them. Before the war, it surely would have. Even now, it almost did-almost, but not quite. After that silence stretched, it tore. One of the women pointed at her and said, “Filthy whore! She’s got an Algarvian baby growing in her belly!”

Those weren’t roars that rose from the servants now. They were growls- fierce, savage growls. Krasta wondered if she should have left Priekule with Lurcanio. She wondered if he would have taken her. Too late to worry about any of that. If she didn’t face down the servants this very minute, she would never get another chance. She might never get a chance to do anything else, ever again.

“Smilgya, you’re sacked,” she said. “Take whatever you have and go.”

“You can’t tell me what to do any more,” Smilgya screeched, “not when you’ve been spreading your legs for the redheads all this time. Whore! Traitor!”

There sat Bauska, gulping ale and nodding vigorously. Krasta almost sacked her, too, but came up with something better instead: “How is Brindza this morning, Bauska? And what do you hear fromCaptainMosco?”

Bauska flushed scarlet. Her half-Algarvian bastard daughter was almost three years old now. The other servants-some of them, anyhow-stared at her, not at Krasta. They’d come to take Brindza for granted. Suddenly they had to remember her mother had had a redheaded lover, too.

And she wasn’t the only one, either. Smiling spitefully, Krasta said, “How many women here haven’t bedded an Algarvian or two? You all know the truth.” She didn’t know the truth herself, but she’d heard a lot of gossip.

When no one came back with an immediate sharp retort, her smile got wider and more spiteful still. Then, in a shrill voice, Smilgya said, “Inever did, by the powers above!”

“I believethat,” Krasta replied with flaying contempt: Smilgya was chunky, fifty-five or so, and homely. She let out a shriek of fury, but some of the other servants-mostly men-laughed at her. Krasta pressed an advantage she knew she might not keep for long: “I told you-you’re dismissed. Get out of my house.”

Smilgya looked around for support. She didn’t see so much as she’d expected. Springing to her feet, she cried, “I wouldn’t work for anyone who sucked up to the redheads-who sucked off the redheads-like you did, not any more I wouldn’t.” She stormed away, adding, “I hope your Algarvian bastard is born with the pox, and I hope you’ve got it, too.”

Krasta set a hand on her belly again. This time, she tried to forget Lurcanio’s hand resting there in the middle of the night. “That’s not an Algarvian bastard in me,” she said. Ihope it’s not. Doing her best to ignore her own thought, she went on rapidly: “It’sViscountValnu ’s, and you all know what he did to the redheads, and how they almost killed him for it.”

“That’s not what you’ve been saying,” Bauska pointed out.

“Well, what if it isn’t?” Krasta tossed her head. “Wouldyou have told Lurcanio you’d been with another man, and a Valmieran at that? Or told yourCaptainMosco, when you were riding his prong? I doubt it very much, my dear.”

Bauska looked daggers at her. She didn’t care about that. She cared about stopping what felt like a peasant uprising from years gone by. Someone chose that moment to hammer on the front door with the old bronze knocker there. That helped distract the servants, too.

“Be so good as to answer that, Valmiru,” Krasta said, almost-but not quite-as imperiously as she might have before the war.

The butler got to his feet. Two or three servants shook their heads. One reached out to try to stop him. Valmiru just shrugged and headed for the door. A moment later, surprise filled his voice as he called back, “It’s Viscount Valnu, milady!”

“There, you see?” Krasta said triumphantly. The servants blinked and gaped. Bauska’s eyes looked big as saucers. Krasta had hoped it might be Valnu, but hadn’t dared expect it. She started to hurry to the front door, but changed her mind and took her time. A gaggle of servitors trailed after her, as if wanting to see the viscount for themselves before believing Valmiru.

Valnu’s smile lit up his bony face when Krasta strode into the entry hall. “Hello, sweetheart!” he said, and hurried up to plant a kiss on her mouth. “They’re gone at last. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It certainly is,” Krasta answered, that seeming a better choice of words than a grudging, I suppose so. Asking whether Valnu missed certain handsome Algarvian officers didn’t strike her as the best idea at the moment, either. Instead, she set a hand on her belly and said, “I’m so glad you came to see us.”

ViscountValnu’s smile only got brighter. “Life is full of such interesting possibilities, isn’t it?” he murmured, and slipped an arm around Krasta’s waist. The staring servants sighed-relief? disappointment? Krasta couldn’t tell. She didn’t care, either. I got away with it, she thought.

Every time Ealstan came home to her and Saxburh, Vanai praised the powers above. These days, he had to sneak back to their block of flats, for the Algarvians had retaken this part of Eoforwic. While Vanai was about her praises, she squeezed in some gratitude that their block of flats remained standing. Two on the other side of the street were nothing but debris.

“What is the point?” she demanded of him one evening. The flat was a grim, dark place; the Algarvians blazed without hesitation or warning at any light that showed, and the shutters weren’t all they might have been. It was also chilly-none of the windows had any glass save a few knifelike shards left in it. When the rains came in earnest… She didn’t want to think about that. So far, the autumn had stayed dry.

Ealstan spooned up the stew of barley and peas and almonds she’d cooked with wood taken from the ruins across the way. He’d brought back a couple of jugs of wine; they both sipped from them. The water still wasn’t working here. Vanai had to carry water back from a fountain on a street corner a few blocks away.

“We’ve got to keep trying,” Ealstan said stubbornly.

“Why?” Vanai demanded. “Can’t Pybba see you’ve lost? You’ll only get more men killed if you go on fighting.”You might get killed yourself, she thought, and made a gesture older than the Kaunian Empire-or so Brivibas had told her, at any rate-to turn aside the evil omen. Iwouldn‘t want to go on living if anything happened to you. What would I do without you? How would I go on living? Why would I care to?

But Ealstan shook his head. She could hardly see the motion, there in the gloom. “We have to go on now, and hope for the best. When the redheads catch us these days, they kill us. They won’t let us surrender. If Pybba tried to give up, they’d slaughter all our fighters.”

“Oh.” Vanai hated the weakness and fear she heard in her own voice, hated them but couldn’t help them. She was relieved when Saxburh woke from a nap and started to cry.

As she went to get the baby, though, her husband’s voice pursued her: “Now the Forthwegian fighters are starting to understand what being a Kaunian in this kingdom was like. They don’t much care for it.” He laughed without mirth.

Vanai brought her daughter out to the kitchen. As she undid her tunic so Saxburh could nurse, she said, “Stay here with me, then. Don’t go back to it at all. You’ve done enough-can’t you see that?”

“If we can drive the redheads out of Eoforwic ourselves, we have a better chance of dealing with the Unkerlanters afterwards,” Ealstan insisted.

“So what?” Vanai said. “So fornicating what?” Even in the darkness, she could see his mouth fall open. She went on, “What difference does it make? Between you and Mezentio’s men, you’ve wrecked the city. It won’t be the same for the next fifty years. And the Unkerlanters are going to take it away from you or the Algarvians sooner or later anyhow.”

“We have to try,” Ealstan said again, and Vanai knew argument was useless. Forthwegian patriots were some of the bravest men on the continent of Derlavai. No one would have quarreled with that. They were also some of the most blockheaded men on Derlavai. Vanai expected she would have got quarrels there. But she knew what she knew, and Ealstan gave her all the evidence she needed to prove it.

She thought about seducing him to get him to stay here instead of going back to the fighting. Spinello had taught her everything she ever needed to learn about trading favors for something she wanted. But she’d never done that sort of thing with Ealstan, and the idea of starting sickened her. She hadn’t married Ealstan, she hadn’t borne his child, to prostitute herself with him.

Besides, and even more to the point, she didn’t think it would work. Unlike Spinello, Ealstan wasn’t one to change his mind because a woman did or didn’t go to bed with him. In fact, the next thing she found that would make him change his mind once he’d made it up would be the first.

Even though it was dark, Saxburh felt like playing once she’d been fed and changed. She’d learned how to roll over not too long before, and would do it again and again, laughing each time. Her joy made Ealstan laugh, too, something Vanai hadn’t been able to manage.

Eggs burst, not too far away. Saxburh had heard those roars so often, they hardly bothered her any more. She remained intent on what she’d been doing. Vanai envied her. Unlike the baby, she knew the havoc eggs could wreak.

“By the time this is over, there won’t be much left of Eoforwic-you’re right about that,” Ealstan said.

“Pybba should have thought of that before he raised his rebellion,” Vanai answered. Saxburh just kept laughing. The pure glee in the sound made Vanai wish she were four months old, too.

“Who would have thought Mezentio’s men would fight back likethis?” Ealstan said bitterly. “And who would have thought the Unkerlanters would sit quiet on the other side of the Twegen and let the Algarvians smash us?”

“Algarvians are Algarvians,” Vanai pointed out. “We’ve known for years how they’re fighting this war. And the Unkerlanters are no bargain, either, except when you compare them to the redheads.”

“True. Every word of it’s true.” Ealstan slammed his fist, hard, into the palm of his other hand. “But seeing it…” He hit himself again, harder yet. Maybe he was hoping he could hurt himself.

“You couldn’t have done anything to change the way it happened,” Vanai said, guessing what was troubling him. “Pybba wouldn’t have listened to you even if you tried. Pybba doesn’t listen to anyone but himself.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Ealstan said. “Still-”

“No.” Vanai did her best to make her voice firm and unyielding. “You’ve done everything you could. You’ve done more than anyone could have expected, including yourself. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you wish they would have, and that’s all there is to it.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong,” Ealstan told her. “You don’t know how much I wish I could say that.”

“Oh, I think I might,” Vanai said. He thought about that, then nodded. As if to stop thinking for a little while, he picked up Saxburh and cuddled her. She promptly fell asleep. She seemed to do that faster for Ealstan than she did for Vanai. It sometimes annoyed Vanai-she did most of the work of taking care of the baby, so why should Saxburh go to sleep more easily for Ealstan?

When Ealstan set Saxburh in the cradle, she woke up with a yowl. Vanai, feeling vindicated, scooped her out and rocked her till she quieted down again. It didn’t take long; the babywas sleepy. Vanai got her back into the cradle without waking her.

Ealstan sighed. So did Vanai. “Let’s go to bed,” she said. With the lights working, it wouldn’t have seemed so late. As things were. ..

As things were, Ealstan chuckled and asked, “How do you mean that?”

Vanai considered. Giving herself to him now wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the hope of keeping him from going out to try to kill more Algarvians. And if we don’t do it now, we may not get another chance. She did her best to suppress that thought, as she did whenever ones like it crossed her mind.

After a pause almost surely too short for Ealstan to notice, she said, “However you like. If you’d rather just sleep, that’s all right.”

He snorted. “I’m so far behind on sleep, I don’t think I’ll ever get even. Come to think of it, I’m pretty far behind on the other, too.” He caught her to him. They hurried into the bedroom, each with an arm around the other’s waist.

Afterwards, Vanai lay awake for a while, listening to the sounds of war in Eoforwic. Ealstan sprawled beside her, not moving, hardly seeming to breathe. He didn’t usually roll over and go to sleep right after making love, but he didn’t usually set his life on the line every time he left the flat, either. Jokes about men who rolled over and fell asleep went back at least to the days of the Kaunian Empire, but Vanai couldn’t begrudge Ealstan the rest he needed so badly.

Pybba, on the other hand… She wished something unfortunate would happen to Pybba. He couldn’t have known ahead of time how things would turn out. Who could? All the same, his miscalculation had brought Eoforwic down in ruins, along with his hopes.

All this death, all this wreckage-and even if they had thrown Mezentio’s men out of Eoforwic for good, how much difference would it have made to Swemmel of Unkerlant? Even a copper’s worth? Vanai didn’t think so. Forthwegian pride had done nothing more than leave a lot of Forthwegians dead.

And the Algarvians are killing any fighters they catch. Have they finally run out ofKaunians? Vanai shivered. She moved closer to Ealstan, for warmth and because she didn’t want to be alone even if he was dead to the world. Couldn’t Mezentio’s men take blonds out of Valmiera and Jelgava? Vanai shrugged. Since the Forthwegians in Eoforwic rose up against the Algarvian occupiers, she’d heard little about how the war was going in other corners of Derlavai. If Ealstan hadn’t been close to Pybba, she wouldn’t have heard anything at all.

She started to set a hand on Ealstan’s shoulder, but quickly drew back before touching him. She’d made the mistake of doing that once, and only once. He might be asleep to the point of unconsciousness, but he woke instantly and struck out, as if someone were trying to kill him. Maybe someonehad tried to kill him while he was asleep. If so, the redhead hadn’t managed it-and Ealstan had never said a word about it to Vanai.

Time was, when I had secrets from you, but you had none from me, Vanai thought. It’s not like that anymore. When they’d first come together, the year or so she had on him had often seemed like four or five. It wasn’t like that anymore, either. Ealstan was a man, with a man’s silences hanging about him. The thought made Vanai, at twenty-one, feel very old indeed.

She fell asleep at last without noticing she’d done it. Saxburh let her sleep through the night. Sometimes the baby did, sometimes she didn’t. When Vanai woke, gray, gritty light was sneaking through the slats of the shutters. She rolled toward Ealstan, and discovered he wasn’t lying beside her.

She cursed in both classical Kaunian and Forthwegian as she got out of bed. He’d gone off to fight again, and he hadn’t even said good-bye. He’d done that before, and it never failed to infuriate her. She went out to the kitchen to build up the fire in the stove.

Ealstan had left a note on the table there. That was something: not enough, but something. I love you, he’d written in classical Kaunian. Because I love you, I will be careful.

She hoped he wasn’t lying to make her feel better. And she wished he didn’t love Forthweg quite so much. A lot of good that wish does me, she thought, and fought back tears.

“Come on!” Skarnu said. “We’re going home, by the powers above. I’ve been waiting more than four years for this day.”

But Merkela, instead of scrambling up into the seat of the worn-out old carriage the Valmierans had scrounged up for them from who could guess where, hung back, little Gedominu in her arms. “I don’t know,” she said, and Skarnu could indeed hear the doubt in her voice. “I never thought I’d go to Priekule, and I’m not so sure I want to.”

“Dadadadada!” Gedominu said cheerfully. He might even have known what it meant; he sometimes said, “Mama,” too, although, to Merkela’s annoyance, less often than the other.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Skarnu said. “Priekule’sour city again, Valmiera’s city again, and we’re going back to settle accounts with all the traitors and collaborators. You weren’t afraid to take onCountSimanu, in the days when the kingdom had hardly any hope at all. Now we finally get to pay my sister back for sleeping with that redhead all these years.”

That made Merkela brighten, but less than Skarnu had hoped it would. At last, she came out with what was really bothering her: “When we get to Priekule, you’ll be a marquis again, and I’ll just be a peasant wench.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Skarnu said, or something rather earthier than that.

“When we get to Priekule, you’ll be the woman I’m going to marry and spend the rest of my days with. And if any fancy bitch toting a sandy-haired baby instead of a proper blond”-he reached out and ruffled Gedominu’s fine, white-gold hair; the baby squealed with glee-”says anything different, I do believe I’ll break her pointy nose.”

“That won’t make the bluebloods like me any better,” Merkela said.

She was probably-almost certainly-right. Skarnu was cursed if he would admit it. And he had a point of his own to make: “You’re coming into Priekule with an underground leader. You’re coming into Priekuleas an underground leader. If anybody doesn’t like it, blaze her.”

That got a smile from Merkela. Rather more to the point, it got her to climb into the carriage. Gedominu tried to throw himself out of her arms. He could crawl and pull himself upright, and thought he could do everything. He was wrong, but he didn’t know it. Plenty of people older than ten months had the same problem.

Skarnu flicked the reins. The horse, a gelding almost as decrepit as the carriage it drew, let out a resentful neigh but then got moving. Something felt wrong along the roads leading north toward the capital. Skarnu needed a little while to figure out what it was. When he did, he felt like whooping for joy. All he said was, “No Algarvian patrols!”

“I should hope not,” Merkela said.

“I’ve been hoping not ever since the king surrendered,” Skarnu answered. “Now the wish has finally come true.”

They did run into a patrol after a while: half a dozen armed Valmierans, most of them looking like farmers, four carrying Algarvian-issue sticks, the other two lighter weapons intended for blazing for the pot, and two unarmed men with hands high. When Skarnu spoke the wordPavilosta, he might have unleashed a potent spell. “Pass on, sir,” one of the poorly shaven irregulars said. “It’s our kingdom again, or most of it is.”

“We’ll get the rest before too long,” Skarnu said confidently, and the other irregulars nodded in unison. After the carriage bumped around a corner, Skarnu turned to Merkela. “I wonder what they were going to do with those couple of captives they had with them.”

“Nothing good, I hope.” No, there was no compromise in Merkela, not when it came to people who might have collaborated with the redheads. And Skarnu only nodded; when it came to such people, he felt very little compromise inside himself, either.

Getting to Priekule took three days. By the way the horse complained, Skarnu might have made it gallop all the way instead of taking it at the slow walk that seemed to be the beast’s only gait this side of a dead stop. Little Gedominu was complaining, too, even more loudly than the horse. He didn’t like being held so much. He wanted to get down and make trouble.

Another patrol, this one of men in actual Valmieran uniform, halted the carriage on the southern outskirts of Priekule. Again, Skarnu had no trouble convincing them who and what he was. One of them said, “Oh, aye, sir, we know about you. You’re theMarchionessKrasta ’s brother, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” Skarnu agreed sourly. “What about it?”

“Well, sir, if what we hear tell is right, she’s friendly withViscountValnu,” the fellow answered. “Valnu, he’s been a big blaze in the underground since dirt, or so they say. Good man to be friendly with, if you ask me-and if that’s how things really go.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Skarnu didn’t say anything. He drove past the checkpoint and on into Priekule. “Friendly withViscountValnu?” Merkela said. “With an underground leader?”

Skarnu spread his hands helplessly. “I heard the same thing you did. Who knows? Maybe Lurcanio was lying to me when he said what he said. I wouldn’t put it past an Algarvian.” He flicked the reins. “Or maybe this fellow didn’t know what he was talking about. I can’t tell you. AllI know is, she’s been with Lurcanio since the redheads marched in, and she never seemed unhappy about it that I heard.”

So I have been given to understand. That was how Lurcanio had answered when Skarnu asked if Krasta’s baby was his: not a ringing endorsement of her fidelity. Krasta had collected lovers like beads on a string in the days before the war. Who hadn’t, back then? Why would she have changed since? She was constant, even in things like inconstancy.

As they went deeper into Priekule, Merkela’s eyes got bigger and bigger. “It’s so huge,” she said. “I never believed a city could be this size.”

She’d thought the provincial towns in which they’d stayed were a match for the capital. Now she was finding out otherwise. Skarnu kept looking around, too; he hadn’t been here for a long time. Something was wrong. At last, he put his finger on it: “The Kaunian Column of Victory is gone! You could see it from almost anywhere in the city.”

“You already knew the redheads knocked it down,” Merkela pointed out.

“I knew,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen it.”

A bonfire blazed on a street corner. Skarnu could still see some of the Algarvian signs burning there: signs that had directed Mezentio’s soldiers to theaters and eateries and, no doubt, brothels as well. No longer, Skarnu thought. Never again.

But then another thought went through his mind. My sister is a whore, no matter what that fellow said. He shook his head. I have no sister.

A downcast woman who’d been shaved bald walked by. People whistled and jeered at her: “Mattressback!” “Algarvian slut!” “Stinking bitch!” She seemed to shrink in on herself even more, trying to become invisible.

“She deserves worse than that,” Merkela said, her voice and eyes cold as the land of the Ice People.

“Maybe she’ll get it, too,” Skarnu said, which seemed to satisfy her.

After what seemed both a very long time and hardly any time at all, they came to the mansion on the outskirts of town. An Algarvian signpost still stood at the entranceway, directing Mezentio’s men, Skarnu supposed, toColonelLurcanio and whatever he’d done. But then he forgot about that, for Merkela whispered, “You… lived here?”

“Aye,” Skarnu answered, and saw the astonishment on her face. “And will again-and so will you, if you want to. If you don’t, we’ll live somewhere else. But first we have some business to finish.” He heard his own grimness.

He hitched the carriage in front of the house and handed Merkela down. Then he strode to the door. She followed, little Gedominu in her arms. He hammered at the door with the knocker.

A maidservant opened. She looked half nervous, half haughty. Haughty won. “What do you want?” she demanded, almost as sharply as Krasta might have.

Skarnu knew what she saw: a weatherbeaten man in the clothes of a farmer, with a peasant woman and a brat in tow. What she didn’t see washim. “Hello, Bauska,” he answered, making his voice milder than he’d first intended. “I want to see my sister.” He said the words once more, even if they felt like a lie in his heart.

Bauska’s eyes kept widening till they seemed to fill her whole face. “My lord Marquis,” she whispered, and dropped a curtsy of the sort Skarnu hadn’t seen since the Algarvians overran Valmiera. “Come with me sir, and-?” She looked a question toward his companions.

“Merkela, my fiancee,” Skarnu said. “Gedominu, my son and heir.”

Bauska’s eyes got wider still. Skarnu hadn’t thought they could. The servant led him inside. He’d forgotten how big the place was. What had he done with all this space? Merkela’s eyes were almost as wide as the maidservant’s.

A pretty little girl, perhaps three years old, ran by with a doll under her arm. Pretty, aye-but with hair closer to bronze than to gold, and with cat-green eyes. Merkela hissed something under her breath. Harshly, Skarnu asked, “Is she Krasta’s, too?”

“No, my lord,” Bauska answered quietly. She went pale first, then red. “She’s mine. Her name is Brindza.”

Merkela started to snarl something. Skarnu shook his head. “Later,” he said. “First things first.” A little to his surprise, she nodded. They followed Bauska into a drawing room. There sat Krasta and, to Skarnu’s surprise, ViscountValnu. The man from the patrol had known whereof he spoke after all. And Valnuwas a big blaze among the underground leaders in Priekule, playing the most dangerous of double games with the redheads.

“Skarnu!” Krasta exclaimed, springing to her feet. She knew him, at any rate. Her belly bulged, just a little. “Welcome home!” She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she pointed to Merkela. “Who is your… friend?”

“My fiancee,” Skarnu corrected, and gave Merkela’s name again, and Gedominu’s. His voice like iron, he went on, “I stayed with my own kind, you see.”

Krasta glared at him. He looked back stonily, expecting a tantrum from her and not about to put up with one. But she surprised him. One hand went to that bulging belly; the forefinger of the other pointed at Valnu. “Nothing wrong with the blood of my child, not with him as the father.”

“Him?”Skarnu’s eyes swung to Valnu in astonishment. The fellow with the stick had said friendly, butthat friendly? “You?”

“So I have been given to understand,” Valnu said-the exact same words Lurcanio had used. Where Lurcanio had sounded bedeviled, though, he merely seemed amused.

“But… But…” Merkela seemed about to burst from the outrage trapped inside her that now, against all expectations, couldn’t escape.

“I will add that there have been times when the marchioness proved most useful to those opposing Algarve,” Valnu said.

Which means there were also times when she wasn‘t, Skarnu thought. But, plainly, he couldn’t just throw Krasta out of the mansion into the cold, perhaps with her head shaved, as he’d intended doing. She saw as much, too, and looked as smug as a mouse with a hole too deep for the cat’s paw. That made him want to slap her all over again. We’ll find out, he thought, but couldn’t help sighing. We won’t find out for quite a while, curse it.

If Ealstan could have blazed the Algarvian major with his eyes, the man would have fallen over dead. The redhead ignored him and all the lesser Forthwegian rebels who stood behind Pybba. He bowed to Pybba, as he might have bowed to a fellow noble in Trapani. “My superiors have agreed to the terms you propose, sir,” he said in good Forthwegian.

“All right,” Pybba answered heavily. “All right, powers below eat you. We give over the fight, and you treat the men who surrender as proper captives.”

“Better than you deserve, in my opinion,” the Algarvian said. “My superiors feel otherwise, however, and so…” He shrugged one of his people’s theatrical shrugs. “The truce will hold till tomorrow noon. At that time, you shall come forth from your holes-those you have left. Anyone who does not yield himself up to us at noon tomorrow shall be reckoned a bandit, and we shall treat him as one when we catch him.” He sliced a thumb across his neck.

They’d been doing that all along. Maybe they’d decided it made the rebels fight harder. If treating the Forthwegians as war captives let Mezentio’s men regain their grip on Eoforwic, that must have seemed a worthwhile bargain to them.

“Curse you,” Pybba said. The Algarvian only bowed again. Then he turned his back and marched away through the wreckage of the Forthwegian capital.

“It’s over,” somebody said in a dull voice. “Everything’s over.”

Pybba shook his head. “It’s not over till noon tomorrow, when I get to hand myself to the Algarvian general and thank him kindly for not murdering all of us-only most of us. The rest of you”-he looked from one shabby, filthy, disgruntled Forthwegian to the next-”you can surrender, or you can try and disappear. Of course, the redheads will kill you if you try and disappear and don’t quite make it.”

“Odds are they’ll kill us anyhow,” Ealstan said. “The ordinary fighters will probably do all right, but us? Why would the Algarvians want to let us live?”

“I’m not telling anybody what to do, not anymore,” Pybba said. “Look what that already got us. Maybe I’ll see some of you here tomorrow, and maybe I won’t.” Broad shoulders slumped, he strode off.

“I’ll be here with you, if they don’t blaze me first,” Ealstan called after him. Then, stick in hand, he too left the square where the arrogant Algarvian major-as if there were any other kind-had delivered the surrender terms his kingdom would deign to accept.

As soon as he was out of sight of his comrades, he gently set the stick on some rubble, then took off his armband and tossed it down on top of the stick. He didn’t like lying to Pybba, but a lie here might help cover his trail. If he failed to come in to surrender after saying he would, people might think he’d been killed between now and then. Who wanted to search for a dead man?

Of course, if he wasn’t careful, people might be right. The block of flats he shared with Vanai and Saxburh lay in a district the redheads had already reconquered. He still had to get there without drawing their notice. They couldn’t cover every inch of Eoforwic… could they?

He began to wonder in earnest before he’d gone very far. Like cockroaches and lice and fleas, Algarvian soldiers seemed to be everywhere, and seemed intent on making sure none of the Forthwegian fighters got out of the small part of Eoforwic they still held. The Algarvians had mages and ferociously barking dogs to try to keep their foes penned up.

Mages or no mages, dogs or no dogs, Ealstan wouldn’t have worried back in Gromheort. He’d known the town his whole life, and felt sure he could have gone anywhere there without having foreigners notice. But he was a relative stranger in Eoforwic himself. Some of Mezentio’s men might have been here as long as he had. He didn’t know the secret ways a local would.

And even had he known those ways, how much good would it have done him? Not much was left standing in Eoforwic, and most of what might have been secret was now buried. He didn’t want to climb over rubble, so he had to skirt it as best he could.

Somewhere close by, a dog growled a warning. Ealstan froze. He wished he hadn’t left his stick behind. Without it, though, he could hope to pass himself as somebody who’d never been a fighter. Then a Forthwegian cried out in fright. The dog snarled and barked. An Algarvian shouted, “Halting!” in accented Forthwegian. “Halting or blazing!”

By the sound of thudding feet, the other Forthwegian didn’t halt. By the Algarvian’s curses, he missed his blaze. “To me! To me! After the whoreson!” he yelled in his own language. More thudding feet told of other redheads rushing to his aid.

Ealstan huddled against the wreckage of what had been a butcher’s shop.

There’d been plenty of butchery in Eoforwic since the place went up in flames. Three Algarvian troopers ran right past him. None gave him a second glance, or even a first. They knew he wasn’t the man their shouting comrade was after.

Whoever the other fellow was, he led Mezentio’s men on a long chase, and one that took them away from Ealstan. Seizing his luck, he hurried toward his block of flats. What better time than when all the redheads nearby were going after someone else?

Before long, I’ll be in the part of town they’ve held for a while, and then they won’t pay any attention to me. But that thought had hardly crossed Ealstan’s mind before another redhead barked out, “Halting!”

Feet skidding on broken bits of brick, Ealstan did halt. The Algarvian had a stick aimed straight at him. If he tried to run, he was a dead man. He smiled a broad, foolish smile, trying to look anything but dangerous.

The Algarvian, a plump fellow, came cautiously toward him. Ealstan noticed the redhead wore the uniform of a constable, not a soldier. Some small hope blossomed in him; Mezentio’s soldiers had proved much more brutal in Eoforwic than the Algarvian constabulary. The plump redhead tried to say something more in Forthwegian, made a complete hash of it, and, to Ealstan’s surprise, started over again in slow, bad, but understandable classical Kaunian: “You following me?”

“Aye, I follow you,” Ealstan replied in the same language.

“Good.” The Algarvian seemed unaware of the irony of his using the speech of the folk his own people killed. Even so, that he knew enough of it to use kept Ealstan’s hope alive. Then the constable gestured with his stick, and Ealstan wondered how long his hope-and he-would live. “What you doing here?” the redhead demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.

“I am going home,” Ealstan said, which had the advantage of being literally true. “I mean no one any harm.” For the moment, that was true, too.

“Likely telling,” the constable sneered. “Why youout? You being fighter?”

“No, I am not a fighter,” Ealstan said carefully. But if I’m not a fighter, what amIdoing out and about? Inspiration struck, in the form of a couple of worthless toadstools sprouting from the dirt next to the bottom couple of courses of a wall. Moving slowly so as not to alarm the constable, he bent, picked them, and held them out. “I was gathering mushrooms, sir. These are very good. Would you like them?”

“No! Not liking!” The Algarvian made a horrible face. “You Forthwegian crazy. Mushrooms? Faugh!” The last was a guttural noise of disgust.

But he didn’t call Ealstan a liar. That meant he’d been in Forthweg a while, and knew of the passion Forthwegians-and Kaunians in Forthweg- had for mushrooms, a passion Algarvians emphatically didn’t share. “May I go now, sir?” Ealstan asked.

With an elaborate Algarvian shrug, the constable shook his head. “How I knowing you not being a fighter, eh?” he said. Ealstan’s heart sank. Then the fellow did a very Algarvian thing: he stuck out his hand, palm up.

Trying not to shout for joy, Ealstan dug into his belt pouch and gave the redhead silver. “This is all I have, sir,” he said. It wasn’t; he wanted to keep some in reserve in case he had to pay off another venal constable or soldier. But he thought it would do.

And it did. The redhead had a belt pouch, too. The coins vanished into it. “Going on,” he told Ealstan.

“I thank you,” Ealstan said gravely. He thought he remembered seeing this fellow around Eoforwic for a while, and also thought him a human being, or as close to a human being as an Algarvian constable was likely to come.

By the time another Algarvian noticed him, he was well inside the territory the redheads had retaken. The soldier paid him no particular attention; plenty of Forthwegians trudged through the wreckage of Eoforwic, or else scrabbled through it, looking for whatever they might find.

A couple of Algarvians were pasting broadsheets on walls that hadn’t been knocked down. Ealstan hadn’t seen these before. They showedKingSwemmel as a bleeding hog, with his blood spilling out of Unkerlant and pouring over eastern Derlavai toward Algarve and even the lands beyond. Facing the hog stood an Algarvian with a butcher’s apron and an outsized cleaver. The legend read, help us stop the flood!

He’d seen worse broadsheets. He liked the Unkerlanters only a little better than the Algarvians. Plenty of Forthwegians liked them less than they liked the redheads. Plegmund’s Brigade might get some new recruits. Of course, with the Unkerlanters already having overrun half of Forthweg, and with them rampaging forward in the south, too, how much good would a few new Forthwegian footsoldiers doKingMezentio ? Not much, or so Ealstan hoped.

An Algarvian colonel, a short, handsome fellow with the jaunty ferocity of a fighting cock, was giving orders to some of the men he led: “Come on, my dears. Don’t just stand there now that the fornicating Forthwegians have thrown in the sponge. The Unkerlanters are sitting on their arses just across the Twegen. Pretty soon they’ll decide they’re done with their holiday and get around to fighting us again. We’d better be ready for them, right?”

“Right, ColonelSpinello,” one of the redheads said, in the indulgent tones soldiers used when they were fond of an officer.

“We’d better dig in, then,” Spinello said. “We’d better do it deep and tight, as deep and tight as I was into that Kaunian girl of mine back when the war was new.” He sighed. His men laughed. Ealstan’s hands folded into fists. With a deliberate effort of will, he made them relax. Don’t give yourself away. The Algarvian colonel kissed his bunched fingertips. “That Vanai, she was a special piece, she was. I trained her myself.”

Ealstan stumbled and almost fell, though he hadn’t tripped on anything. Mezentio’s soldiers laughed, as if they’d heard this colonel’s stories a great many times before. They probably had. Ishouldn‘t have left my stick behind after all, Ealstan thought. Even without it, I’ll find a way to kill him. But that vow still left his feet unsteady beneath him, as if he were drunk or stunned. I amstunned. What do I do when I set home to Vanai? What do I say? What can /do? What canI say? Good questions, all of them. He had perhaps five minutes to find good answers.

Bembo’s belt pouch was nicely heavy with silver these days. As he strutted through the streets of downtown Eoforwic-or what was left of them-he was even acting as a constable again, not as a soldier any more. He should have been happy, or at least happier. He should have been, but he wasn’t.

Some of the constables had gone back to business as usual the minute the Forthwegian rebels finally surrendered and marched off to captives’ camps- those who hadn’t tried fitting back in among the ordinary people of Eoforwic, or the survivors thereof. Up in the tropical continent of Siaulia, there were supposed to be big birds that hid from danger by sticking their heads in the sand. Bembo’s complacent comrades reminded him of those big birds.

“They won’t look across the river,” he told Oraste-he had his old partner back, for Delminio had been badly wounded at the start of the fighting. “It’s going to happen, but they don’t want to think about it.”

“Shut up,” Oraste said. “I don’t want to think about it, either.”

“But you never want to think about anything.” Bembo was still no braver than he had to be, but before his spell as a soldier he would never have dared say anything like that to Oraste. “It’s different with those other buggers. They want to forget about the Unkerlanters, and how can we?”

Oraste looked west, toward the Twegen. “We’ll fight like mad bastards when they cross the river,” he said.

“Of course we will,” Bembo agreed. “But how much good will it do us?”

His partner’s shrug was not the usual Algarvian production. “How much good has fighting the stinking Unkerlanters done us so far?” Oraste asked bleakly. “Sometimes you go into something and you figure you won’t come out the other side, that’s all. You’re futtering stuck, that’s all.”

Bembo shivered, though the day was mild enough. He watched soldiers methodically preparing defenses against the attack they too knew was coming. One of the soldiers looked up from his pick-and-shovel work and called, “Hey, constable! When they come, you think they’ll pay any attention to which uniform you’re wearing?”

His laugh, Bembo thought, was singularly unpleasant. His question was singularly unpleasant, too, especially since the obvious answer wasno. Bembo stuck his nose in the air. That only made the soldier laugh harder.

Forthwegian civilians with hods hauled rubble from hither to yon under the sticks of Algarvian guards. “They might as well be Kaunians,” Bembo remarked.

With another one of those businesslike shrugs, Oraste answered, “Better they get their throats cut than I get mine.”

“Better nobody gets his throat cut,” Bembo said, but Oraste looked at him as if that were beyond the realm of possibility. Given the sorry state of the world these days, it probably was.

Oraste walked on for a few paces, then nudged him in the ribs. Oraste being who and what he was, the nudge sent Bembo staggering sideways and almost knocked him flat. Oraste grabbed him and held him up. “Come over here with me,” he said, steering Bembo away from the Forthwegian laborers.

“Why?” Bembo asked. “Do you want to murder me in privacy?”

“Only sometimes,” Oraste said patiently. “Not right now. Now I want to make a bet with you.”

“Ah?” That got Bembo’s notice, all right. “What do you have in mind?”

Before answering, Oraste looked around to make sure nobody but Bembo was in earshot. Then he said, “Name however much you want, and I’ll lay you two to one that none of those Forthwegians who gave up ever comes home again. I figure it serves ‘em right if we use ‘em just like Kaunians.”

“We said we’d treat ‘em like war captives,” Bembo reminded him.

“I know what we said,” his partner answered. “And if you think we’ll really do it, put your money where your mouth is.”

Bembo thought it over. Oraste suggestively jingled his belt pouch. But Bembo hesitated only a couple of seconds before shaking his head. “Find another sucker, Oraste. I won’t touch that one. I think you’re too likely to be right.”

Oraste snapped his fingers. “There, you see? You’re not as dumb as you look, and all this time I thought you were.”

“Funny,” Bembo said. “Ha, ha. Very funny.” He paused. “What do you want to bet that the Unkerlanters are getting rid of all the Forthwegians they don’t like, too?”

“I’ll bet on it, if you want,” Oraste said. “Will you bet against it?”

“Me? Are you crazy?” Bembo shook his head again, even more decisively this time. “That’s not a sucker bet. That’s an idiot bet.”

“Never can tell,” Oraste said. “Plenty of idiots running around loose in Algarve. A lot of em wear fancier uniforms than we ever will.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bembo agreed. “The way things are these days, I don’t care if I ever get promoted. All I want to do is get back to Tricarico in one piece.”

“Why not wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Oraste waved toward the west. “You suppose the Unkerlanters want any of us to get home?” He seemed to have forgotten saying he didn’t want to think about Swemmel’s men.

Instead of answering, Bembo just sighed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort. He wished he did. He said, “I never wanted to meet those Unkerlanter whoresons up close like this.”

“You haven’t met ‘em up close yet-they’re still on the other side of the Twegen,” Oraste said. “Well, most of them are, anyway. When they’re close enough to yell, ‘Swemmel!’ and blaze at you, that’s up close. By all the stories, they do worse than that if they catch you, too.”

Bembo’s shiver was no littlefrisson of horror, such as he might have known while hearing a scary story at an evening’s entertainment with plenty of food and good northern wine around. It was too large, too robust, for that. And it had nothing to do with the weather. It was plain, honest fear. If the Unkerlanters caught you, bad things happened. That, to Algarvians in the west, was an obvious truth.

And the Unkerlanters did not have to catch Mezentio’s men to make bad things happen to them. Bembo grabbed Oraste’s arm. “Dragons!” he shouted. They both dove for cover as the rock-gray beasts swooped down on Eoforwic from Unkerlanter dragon farms on the far side of the river.

“Powers below eat them,” Oraste said, his face buried in the dirt. Bembo lay perhaps a foot away from him. Between them, some sort of nasty mushroom thrust up from the ground. Bembo was amazed some Forthwegian hadn’t picked it and taken it off as a prize.

A moment later, as eggs began bursting uncomfortably close by, he found more urgent things about which to be amazed. “The whoresons pretty much left us alone while we were fighting the Forthwegians here,” he said. “Why in blazes are they bothering us now?”

“Of course they left us alone then-we were doing them a favor,” Oraste said. “Now we aren’t killing Forthwegians who might cause ‘em trouble further down the ley line, so they don’t have to bother being nice to us anymore.”

That exercise in cynicism might have upset Bembo more if he hadn’t come to a similar conclusion himself. “We need to get to a shelter,” he bawled.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” Oraste said. “Me, I think you’ll get your stupid self killed if you stand up.”

Again, he had a point. Bembo stayed where he was. Enough piles of wreckage lay around to do a good job of shielding him and Oraste unless an egg burst right on top of them. Somebody much too close by started screaming. Bembo couldn’t tell if he was Algarvian or Forthwegian. Agony, the constable had discovered, sounded the same in any language.

Bembo rolled from his belly to his back. He saw no dragons, but eggs, more of them than ever, kept bursting all over Eoforwic. “They’ve got their tossers limbered up, too,” he said in dismay.

“Well, if they’re going to pound on us, odds are they’ll pound on us with everything they’ve got, eh?” Oraste said.

“There won’t be anything left of this place by the time they’re through with it,” Bembo said. “There wasn’t much left of it before they started.”

“Aye, we took care of that,” Oraste said. “And I’m sure it breaks the Unkerlanters’ hearts to knock the capital of Forthweg flat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bembo asked, punctuating the question with a yelp as a brick or a stone bounced off his belly. He rolled back over onto his back.

“Don’t you remember?” Oraste said. “Back before the Six Years’ War, we split Forthweg with the Unkerlanters. Eoforwic used to belong to them. As far as old Swemmel’s concerned, there shouldn’t ought to be any such thing as a Kingdom of Forthweg.”

“Well, there won’t be if his men keep doing this to Eoforwic,” Bembo said. “Or if there is, there won’t be any Forthwegians left alive in it.”

“After what they put us through, who’d miss ‘em?” Oraste said.

“A point,” Bembo said. Then new fear ran through him, fear different from the simple, elementary terror caused by knowing that sorcerous energy might sear him at any moment. The only way he could find to exorcise it was to name it aloud: “You don’t suppose Swemmel’s men are pounding us like this because they’re getting ready to cross the Twegen, do you?”

“How in blazes should I know?” Oraste answered crossly. “If you want to find out something like that, why don’t you swim across the river and askMarshalRathar? He’s over there somewhere.”

“Oh, good idea. Really good idea.” Bembo’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Maybe I should ask for leave again. Then I wouldn’t be here when the avalanche came down on our heads.”

“Futter you,” his partner told him. “Everybody in Gromheort wanted to kill you when you got leave once. If you got it again, somebodywould up and murder you. And besides, by the time you got to Tricarico, how do you know the stinking Lagoans and Kuusamans wouldn’t be holding it?”

“I don’t,” Bembo admitted. “But if you had to get captured, who’d be your first choice to nab you: one of the islanders or an Unkerlanter?”

“My first choice to capture me? A redheaded gal with big tits,” Oraste said. “Second choice’d be a blond wench with big tits. It’s all downhill from there.”

That wasn’t what Bembo had meant, which didn’t stop him from laughing. Anything that could make him laugh when the world was coming to pieces all around him was something to be cherished. Only later did it occur to him to wonder just how far his standards had fallen. When it did, he wished it hadn’t.

MarshalRathar, as it happened, was not right across the Twegen River from Eoforwic at that moment. He’d been summoned back to Cottbus, and left the fight in the north inGeneralGurmun ’s capable hands. “Don’t strike till everything is ready,” he’d warned the general of behemoths. “The worst mistakes we’ve made in this war, we’ve made by hitting too soon.”

“Aye, lord Marshal,” Gurmun had said. Rathar had wondered if he could trust the younger man to hold himself in. IfKingSwemmel ordered Gurmun to attack, he would, whether the situation called for it or not. Gurmun had also said, “I envy you.” He assumed Swemmel was recalling Rathar to confer some new high command on him.

Going through papers as the ley-line caravan glided west, Rathar hoped Gurmun was right. He hoped so, but he had no guarantee of it. For all he knew, the king was summoning him to have him blazed outside the royal palace as a warning to others. You never could tell with Swemmel.

Mile after mile of plain, first Forthwegian and then Unkerlanter, slid past before Rathar’s eyes. Every time the ley line took him through or past a village, he winced. No village remained intact. Hardly any buildings remained intact. What the war hadn’t wrecked, the Algarvians had often deliberately smashed in their long, slow, stubborn withdrawal toward the east. If we can’t keep it, you won’t get any use from it, either, they seemed to say.

And the villages-the whole ruined landscape-looked the same from early morning, when Rathar left the western suburbs of Eoforwic, till the sun set. It would have gone on looking the same, too, had he been able to see longer. All the way to the suburbs of Cottbus, the devastation would have continued-did continue, though shrouded now in darkness. How many years, how many generations, will Unkerlant need before she is again what she was? But that was a question beyond the ken even of marshals.

Rathar’s caravan car boasted a couch. He fell asleep on it. An aide shook him awake, saying, “Sir, we’re in the capital.”

“Are we?” He yawned, stretched, and sat up. The ley-line caravan depot remained dark. No Algarvian dragon could reach Cottbus these days-or so Rathar hoped with every fiber of his being-but the fear remained. Unkerlanters had always feared and suspected and admired the energetic redheads from the east. These past three and a half years, the Algarvians had given them fresh reasons for all three.

Descending from the caravan car gave Rathar another anxious moment. Who would be waiting for him down on the ground? His adjutant, Major Merovec? Or some of Swemmel’s hard-eyed, dead-souled guards, there to haul him away to torment or death for some slight the king had imagined? Again, you never could tell.

“Good evening, Marshal.” The voice was thin and high and would have been inconsequential, but… “We have a new task for you.”

Of all the things MarshalRathar had expected, thatKingSwemmel himself would meet him at the depot was among the last. He wasted no time in going flat on his belly before his sovereign. The slates of the floor were chilly. So was the air; autumn in Cottbus was a different business from the mild days he’d enjoyed outside of Eoforwic.

“Your Majesty!” he cried, and poured out Swemmel’s required praises, with his forehead knocking the cold stone again and again. Failure to give the king his due would have been as immediate and thorough a disaster for Rathar-though not for the kingdom-as losing Cottbus in the first desperate winter of the war.

“Arise,” Swemmel said when the ritual was done. Rathar got to his feet. The king went on: “Marshal, we are well pleased in you.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Rathar said. If the king praised him in public, he probably wouldn’t get knocked over the head.

“Come with us to the palace,” Swemmel said. “We have a good many things to discuss with you, and they will not wait.”

“As you say, your Majesty, so shall it be.” Swemmel was a notorious insomniac, and if he felt comfortable staying busy half the night, his subjects had to accommodate themselves to his rhythms and his whims. He would not accommodate himself to them. He’d proved that, again and again.

Rathar had wondered if he would ride in the royal carriage. Swemmel had granted only a handful of men that privilege throughout his reign; he’d executed about half of them shortly thereafter. Getting a carriage of his own did not unduly upset the marshal.

Back at the palace, KingSwemmel said, “In the matter of Eoforwic, you have done as we desire in all particulars.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Rathar said. Had he not done as the king desired, Gurmun would have gone into command in the north long before this. And if Gurmun dared go off and try things on his own and had something go wrong, none of his past accomplishments was likely to save him from the royal wrath.

But now Swemmel seemed in as benign a mood as Rathar had ever seen him. Even the king’s smile held little of the malice that usually informed it. Swemmel said, “That being so, we purpose transferring you to the south, that you may lead our armies there as they drive into Algarve and drive toward Trapani. When you take Mezentio’s capital, it is our desire that you leave not a single stone piled upon another. Do we make ourself clear?”

“Aye, your Majesty.” Rathar bowed low. “Thank you, your Majesty. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” He’d thanked Swemmel a moment before, too. This time, he really meant it. “Mezentio started this fight. I want to be there when we finish it.”

“You shall have your chance, Marshal,” the king said. “For all your hesitation early in the campaign, you have served us well since, and we are willing to acknowledge that.”

For Swemmel to acknowledge service to anyone else was no small step, as Rathar knew full well. Swemmel was convinced hewas Unkerlant, and all his officers and servitors merely extensions of his will. Rathar didn’t even feel particularly aggrieved at the king’s slighting comment. Ashe remembered things, he hadn’t been hesitant-Swemmel had been too eager. But he wasn’t surprised his sovereign recalled those days differently. Even an ordinary man often remembered things to his own best advantage. How not a king, especially one to whom nobody dared say no?

I dare, every now and again, Rathar thought. Aye, I dare -and every time I dare, I come away shaking, and with my armpits soaked with the stinking sweat of terror. Telling Swemmel anything he didn’t want to hear was no work for the faint of heart.

“How long?” the king asked suddenly.

“Your Majesty?” Rathar said: whateverKingSwemmel was talking about, he hadn’t been able to follow the sudden leap.

“How long?” Swemmel repeated in sharp, impatient tones. Then, grudgingly, he explained: “How long till we get to useKingMezentio as we desire? And of how much of our victory will Lagoas and Kuusamo rob us?”

“Your Majesty, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess about the first,” Rathar replied, which madeKingSwemmel glare at him. “It does not depend on us alone, you see. It also depends on the Algarvians, as you say, and on our allies. Mezentio, right now, faces choices we never had to make, for which I praise the powers above.”

“Never?” Swemmel said. “Not even when we had to choose how much of our kingdom we would yield to the redheads and how much to the Gongs?”

“Not even then,” Rathar said. “The Gyongyosians were never-well, hardly ever-more than a nuisance to us. The Algarvians were the deadly threat. But Mezentio faces dreadful danger from both west and east: if we don’t move on Trapani, the islanders-and, for all I know, the Jelgavans and the Valmierans-will.”

He thought that was obvious. But, by the alarm flaring in Swemmel’s eyes, it hadn’t been obvious enough. “No!” the king said hoarsely. “They mustn’t! They can’t! Trapani shall be ours. Ours, do you hear me?” His voice rose to a frightened shout. A bodyguard peered into the audience chamber to make sure he was all right. Cursing, he waved the man away.

MarshalRathardid his best to calm the king: “As I say, your Majesty, we have only so much control over all this. If Mezentio’s men fight us with everything they have but go easy in the east…” Had he been King of Algarve, he might have given orders like that. Fighting the Lagoans and Kuusamans remained a polite, civilized business. But the war between Algarve and Unkerlant had seen no quarter asked or given since the moment it began.

“If they steal our victory so…” Swemmel’s voice was low, low but full of deadly fury. “If they think they can batten on the blood we spill, we shall show them they are wrong even if it takes us a thousand years.”

Rathar wasn’t worried about what would happen a thousand years from now; he couldn’t do anything about that. What would happen in the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, was his province. He said, “Your Majesty, always remember: the Algarvians are our greatest danger. Once we crush them, we can worry about other things. Until we crush them, we have to keep them first in our thoughts.”

“A thousand years,” Swemmel muttered. But then, to Rathar’s vast relief, he nodded. “Algarve first, aye. But we do not forget anything else. Lagoas and Kuusamo may steal some of our glory, but we shall take it back.”

“When the time comes, your Majesty,” Rathar said soothingly. Then he changed the subject: “Er, your Majesty-is it true the islanders have some new strong sorcery, of a different sort from what the redheads-and we- have been using? The reports I’ve received haven’t been clear.” He hoped it was true; he loathed the murderous magecraft the Algarvians had devised and Unkerlant had had to copy.

“We are not surprised the reports have been unclear,” the king said with a scornful sniff. “We doubt whetherArchmageAddanz understands everything he hears of these matters. We often doubt whether he understands anything he hears of these matters, come to that. There is some new sorcery, and it has been used in Jelgava and perhaps on the sea. Past that, we know little- but we are working to learn more.”

“Good,” Rathar said. Worried about everyone around him, Swemmel had built up a highly efficient corps of spies.

“Not so very good,” Swemmel grumbled. “Addanz should have seen to this some time ago, without our urging.” Rathar only shrugged. Addanz was a fine courtier, but no great shakes as a mage. Expecting him to act like what he wasn’t asked too much. After a moment, Swemmel went on, “You should also know that Hajjaj of Zuwayza has come to Cottbus.”

“Has he?” Rathar said. “Aye, your Majesty, you’re right-Ishould know that. For what purpose has he come?”

“For what purpose would you think?”KingSwemmel demanded. “To yield himself to us, of course.”