Jaws of Darkness

Seven

Bembo swaggered through Eoforwic exactly as he’d swaggered through Gromheort farther east. Thanks to Delminio, his new partner, he’d already made the acquaintance of a good many taverns and eateries and bakeries where a hungry man could get what he needed to sustain himself through a long, hard, wearying shift on the beat. He was sustaining himself so much, he was thinking of letting out the belt that held up his kilt another notch.

He didn’t enjoy going into the Kaunian quarter when his partner and he drew that duty, but he didn’t shrink from it. And it had compensations patrolling the rest of Eoforwic didn’t offer. As Delminio put it, “The blond women throw themselves at our feet or on their knees or however we want them.” By the smug smile on his face, he’d had no trouble getting at least one exactly how he wanted her.

“Aye, no doubt about it,” Bembo agreed. He’d had good luck with Kaunian women, too. As an Algarvian constable, one could hardly help having good luck with Kaunian women. “Hardly seems sporting, does it? They’ll do anything, or a lot of ‘em will, on account of they think we can keep ‘em alive if we want to.”

“Sporting?” Delminio shrugged. “Who cares about sporting? What I care about is getting my ashes hauled.”

“Sounds right,” Bembo said. Delminio didn’t hate Kaunians the way Oraste, his old partner, had. But Delminio didn’t hesitate in taking advantage of the blonds whenever he saw the chance, either. Since Bembo rarely hesitated himself when he saw that kind of chance, they got along fine.

After walking on for a few paces, Bembo said, “There are times I wish we hadn’t started sending ‘em west. I don’t know what in blazes it’s got us. The Unkerlanters are doing their own dirty work, and it pretty much cancels ours out.”

With another shrug, Delminio said, “I don’t worry about stuff like that. If it’s good enough forKingMezentio, I figure it’s good enough for me, too.”

“You’ve got a sensible way of looking at things,” Bembo said. That was plenty to make Delminio strut and preen as if he’d just been named a duke. Bembo wished he could take the whole Kaunian business so lightly. He could sometimes, as when he was getting a blond woman to go to bed with him. But he had more trouble shutting down his mind the rest of the time than Delminio seemed to.

A Kaunian woman came out of a block of flats. As soon as they saw her golden hair shining in the sun, Bembo and Delminio both swung their heads toward her, a motion as automatic as breathing to them. And then, when they noticed she was very pregnant, they both looked away again, too.

As for her, she looked through them as if they didn’t exist. That was the common reaction among Kaunian women who didn’t care to give themselves to the Algarvians. “Wonder if one of us stuck that baby in her,” Delminio remarked.

“I doubt it,” Bembo said, as the young woman waddled around a corner. “She doesn’t look like she hates us enough for that.” He fancied himself a connoisseur of such reactions.

“Mm, you’re probably right,” Delminio said. Either he agreed with Bembo or he didn’t feel like arguing. Odds are he thinks I’m right, Bembo thought. We Algarvians, we’re an argumentative bunch.

Bells began ringing, not just in the Kaunian quarter but all over Eoforwic. Blonds started running. Delminio started cursing. So did Bembo. “Stinking Unkerlanter dragonfliers,” he snarled. “Over in Gromheort, we didn’t have to worry about this much.”

“Over in Gromheort, you were a lot farther east,” Delminio pointed out. “Just thank the powers above that our dowsers are getting better at spotting Swemmel’s dragons before the whoresons are right on top of us.”

“Even if they weren’t, I suppose we could always duck into a cellar with the Kaunians,” Bembo said.

“Go ahead if you want to,” Delminio said. “Me, I’d sooner take a chance on Unkerlanter eggs. Not long before you got here, a couple of constables went into a cellar full of blonds. They didn’t come out again-not alive, I mean. And of course the cellar was empty by the time anybody found ‘em. They weren’t pretty,” he added in meditative tones, “and we still don’t know just who did for them.”

“Oh.” Bembo kicked at the slates of the sidewalk. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Delminio agreed. “They don’t go out of their way to talk about it, if you know what I mean.” The clanging of the bells grew more urgent. “But we ought to look for a cellar ourselves right about now, and that means one outside the Kaunian quarter.”

“Oh,” Bembo said again. “Right.” He pointed to his partner. “Well, lead the way. You’re the one who’s supposed to know what’s where in this town. If you don’t know where the closest handy cellar is, what good are you?”

Neither of them ran from the Kaunian district. But neither of them dawdled, either. They ducked into a cellar already rapidly filling with Algarvian constables and soldiers and a few trusted Forthwegians just as the first eggs fell on Eoforwic. The floor beneath Bembo’s feet shook. Lanterns swung on their mounting brackets. Shadows swooped and danced. Bembo tried not to think about what would happen if an Unkerlanter egg landed right on top of the cellar.

Savagely, someone said, “I hope we’re paying the Unkerlanters back ten for one.”

Someone else spoke in reassuring tones: “Of course we are.”

Bembo wished he knew where thatof course came from. Blind optimism, probably. Had the war been going altogether in Algarve’s direction, the Unkerlanters wouldn’t have been able to drop eggs on Eoforwic. Had the war been going altogether in Algarve’s direction, Unkerlant would long since have been conquered.

And so Bembo decided there were worse things than huddling in a cellar while dragons painted rock-gray flew overhead. He could have been huddling in a trench, waiting for soldiers in rock-gray tunics to swarm over him. After a while, the dragons above Eoforwic would be gone. In a trench, the danger never went away.

“We ought to have more dragons and heavy sticks around Eoforwic,” Delminio said. “This is an important place. Do we let the Unkerlanters knock chunks of it flat whenever they please?”

“If we put more dragons and heavy sticks back here, pal, we wouldn’t have ‘em at the front,” a soldier said. “There’s not enough to go around as is, in case you haven’t noticed. Having Swemmel’s whoresons tear a hole in the line is a bigger worry than anything else, believe you me it is.” That echoed Bembo’s thought too closely for comfort.

After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been much above half an hour, the eggs stopped falling on Eoforwic. Bembo could barely hear the bells announcing that the Unkerlanter raiders had flown back toward the west. All through the cellar, people sighed and stretched, getting ready to resume their interrupted lives. Somebody put it pretty well: “We got through another one.”

“Now let’s go see how many pieces need picking up,” Bembo said to Delminio.

“There’ll be some,” Delminio predicted. “There always are.” He did his best to sound like a jaded veteran. As far as Bembo was concerned, he succeeded. But then a soldier let out a snort. Delminio gave the fellow a dirty look, but the damage was done.

When they came out into the fresh air, it didn’t seem so fresh any more. The stink of smoke made Bembo cough. Looking around, he saw several plumes rising into the sky. More bells jangled as crews hurried to try to cope with the fires. “Looks like they hit us a good lick,” he remarked.

“They’ve done worse,” Delminio said. But his bravado didn’t last. With a sigh, he went on: “They are hitting us harder and more often than they were a year ago. We have to carry on. I don’t know what else we can do.”

At the edge of the Kaunian quarter, Algarvian constables eyed Bembo and Delminio’s kilts and reddish hair, making sure of who and what they were before waving them on into the district. Bembo looked around in disgust. “Hardly seems like anything fell here.”

“Swemmel’s whoresons don’t usually hit the Kaunians hard,” Delminio answered. “They know the blonds give us trouble, and they know what we do with those blonds, too, so they don’t see much point to dropping eggs on em.”

“Stupid, if you ask me,” Bembo said. “If the Unkerlanters know we’re killing Kaunians to give ‘em grief, they ought to do their best to kill ‘em before we get the chance.”

“Why don’t you write a letter toMarshalRathar?” Delminio said. Bembo made a horrible face at him. They both laughed.

Just as they were rounding a corner, another redheaded fellow in constabulary uniform hurried into a block of flats. “Boy, he didn’t waste any time getting back here, did he?” Bembo said.

Delminio chuckled. “He’s probably got himself a sweet little Kaunian tart stashed in there.” His hands, expressive as any Algarvian’s, shaped an hourglass in the air. “Has to make sure his darling is all right, don’t you know.”

“Makes sense,” Bembo agreed. “You want to know what I think, though, what doesn’t make sense is getting that stuck on any one blond girl. How long is she likely to last before they ship her west?”

“You know what your trouble is?” Delminio said. He waited for Bembo to shake his head, then continued, “Your trouble is, you’ve got your head on too straight. A lot of fellows, they screw a girl a few times and then they decide they have to be in love with her. You know what I mean?”

Bembo nodded. “Oh, sure. I’ve seen that. Powers above, back when I was a kid I’d do it myself. But it’s especially stupid here.”

“I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” Delminio said. “Back before you got here, a couple of constables got caught tipping off their Kaunian girlfriends that roundups were coming, or else hiding them so they wouldn’t get shipped out.”

“Officers do that kind of stuff all the time,” Bembo said.

“If these had been officers, they would’ve got away with it,” Delminio said. “But they were just ordinary sods like you and me. The wenches went out on the next ley-line caravan west, and the bigwigs decided those constables had volunteered for the infantry, so they’re somewhere off in Unkerlant, too-if they’re still breathing they are, I mean.”

Bembo grunted. “That’s… probably worth knowing,” he said at last. What went through his mind was, You can enjoy yourself with these Kaunian gals, but don’t -by the powers above, don’t!-do anything stupid. He didn’t expect he would. His mother hadn’t raised him to be a fool.

Delminio had been eyeing him. After a moment, his new partner nodded. “I said you had your head on straight.”

“You’d best believe it,” Bembo boasted, which made Delminio snort.

That pregnant Kaunian woman emerged from her cellar and made her way back to the block of flats next door to the one the Algarvian constable with the blond girlfriend had entered. Delminio pointed to her. “What do you suppose she’s thinking right now?”

“When you get right down to it, that doesn’t make much difference, does it?” Bembo pointed in the direction from which the Unkerlanter dragons had come, the direction in which so many Kaunians were going. Delminio thought it over. He didn’t need to think long. After only a couple of heartbeats, he nodded.

“How are you this morning, milady?” Bauska asked.

“Sleepy,” Krasta said around a yawn. “Very sleepy.” She gave the yawn full rein. “Funny-I didn’t get to bed all that late last night, or the night before, either.” She yawned again. If she wanted to go back to bed, who would stop her?

But her maidservant, annoyingly, persisted: “How are you feeling today?”

Bauska’s question had a certain eager avidity to it. No matter how tired Krasta felt, she noticed that. “I already told you,” she snapped. “Why don’t you go away and leave me alone?”

“Aye, milady. Shall I bring you some tea, to help you wake up?” the serving woman asked.

“No.” Krasta shuddered. “The cup I had yesterday tasted most shockingly bad. I know there’s a war, but the blenders will simply have to do better than that, or they shall hear from me.”

“Aye, milady. Of course, milady.” Bauska’s nod was obsequiousness itself-or so Krasta thought, till her maidservant asked the next question: “When the baby comes, do you hope for a boy or a girl, milady?”

Krasta’s jaw fell open. All at once, she wasn’t sleepy any more. She’d just begun admitting that possibility to herself, and she still didn’t care to think of it as more than a possibility. “How did you know?” she blurted.

“Milady, I handle your clothes,” Bauska said patiently, as if to a foolish child. “Do you think I don’t notice what happens-and what doesn’t?”

“Oh.” Krasta couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to Bauska in such a small voice. She hated the feeling that Bauska had the advantage of her, but couldn’t very well escape it.

Her maidservant went on, “Does Colonel Lurcanio know yet?”

“Of course not!” Krasta exclaimed. Bauska raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Krasta’s face heated. She hated the idea that other people knew more about her life than she wanted them to or than she thought they did. But then, still unusually subdued, she changed her answer: “I don’t think so.”

Bauska’s nod was businesslike. “I’m sure he’ll look after you and the baby very well,” she said, “as long as he’s in Priekule.” Krasta glared at her for that addition. Bauska’sCaptainMosco had been very attentive to her-till he got sent to Unkerlant not long before her little bastard was born. From that day on, Bauska had never heard a word from him.

“I’m sure he will, too.” Krasta did her best to sound sure. It wasn’t so easy as she wished it were. Conceiving by her Algarvian lover would prove inconvenient any which way; she was already sure of that. What she wasn’t altogether sure of, and what could prove worse than inconvenient, was whether she’d conceived by Lurcanio or byViscountValnu. She’d thoroughly enjoyed her infidelity, and hadn’t worried in the least about consequences. But if she had a consequence growing somewhere behind her navel-she was vague about such details, although she supposed she wouldn’t be able to stay vague much longer-that could end up complicating her life more than she wanted.

Whatwould Lurcanio do if she bore a child who looked nothing like him, nothing like any Algarvian? It was a mild spring morning, but Krasta shivered anyhow. She didn’t want to think about that.

To keep from thinking about it, she said, “I’m going down to breakfast.” And, to keep Bauska from nattering at her any more, she chose a tunic and trousers without any help from her maidservant. Bauska seemed content to stand back and let Krasta do things for herself. Of course she does, the lazy slut, Krasta thought. If I do the work, it means she doesn‘t have to.

When she got down to the breakfast table, Lurcanio was already there. He sat sipping tea, nibbling on a roll he kept dipping in honey, and reading a news sheet written in Algarvian-Krasta couldn’t make out a word of it. Punctilious as usual, he got to his feet and bowed. “How are you, my sweet?” he asked.

“Still sleepy,” Krasta answered, yawning yet again. She sat down and accepted a cup of tea from the hovering servitor. Even if it didn’t taste good to her, it would help her wake up.

“What else would you care for, milady?” the fellow asked.

“Something that will stick to my ribs,” Krasta answered. Valmierans ate more heartily than Algarvians were in the habit of doing. “A ham and cheese and mushroom omelette, I think.” She nodded. “Aye, that will do splendidly.”

“Just as you say.” Bowing, the servant took Krasta’s request back to the kitchen.

“Is the news good?” she asked Lurcanio, pointing to the sheet she couldn’t read.

“I’ve seen it better,” he answered. “But, on the other hand, I’ve also seen it worse. These days, one takes what one can get.”

Krasta could hardly disagree with that. She’d taken what she could get- and had got more than she’d bargained for. Thinking of Captain Mosco and his journey to Unkerlant-did he even remain alive these days, or had he given everything he could give for King Mezentio?-she asked, “How does the war against King Swemmel go?”

Lurcanio shrugged. “Largely quiet right now. The good news is that we aren’t losing any ground. The bad is wondering why it’s quiet and what the Unkerlanters are building up for.”

“And what you’re building up for yourselves-you Algarvians, I mean,” Krasta said.

“Of course.” Lurcanio seemed a little taken aback at the suggestion, but he nodded. Then he said, “Here comes your breakfast. How you Valmierans can eat such things day after day and not turn round as balls is beyond me, but you do seem to manage, I must admit.” He dipped his roll in the honey and took a small, deliberate bite.

Krasta was not in the mood to be deliberate, especially since the tea hadn’t tasted right despite more sugar than usual. No matter what the dealer says, the blend is off, she thought. It’s on account of the war. Everything is on account of the war. Without the war, Lurcanio wouldn’t have shared a breakfast table with her, that was certain. He wouldn’t have shared a bed with her, either. And certain other consequences… might not have ensued.

Not caring to dwell on that, Krasta attacked the buttery omelette. She gobbled down three or four bites before she paused to listen to what her body was telling her. She gulped. Spit flooded into her mouth. The room seemed to spin.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Lurcanio asked. “You look a little green.”

“I’m fine,” Krasta said. More cautiously than she had before, she ate another couple of bites of egg and ham and cheese. That was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake as soon as she finished-which was a bit too late. She gulped again. This time, it didn’t help. “Excuse me,” she said in a muffled voice, and bolted from the table.

She got where she was going barely in time to keep from making the disaster worse. When she returned to the table, her mouth still burned and tasted nasty in spite of her having rinsed it again and again. She looked at the omelette and shuddered. She wouldn’t have one again any time soon.

ColonelLurcaniogave her another bow. “Are you all right?” he asked again, this time with more concern in his voice. Krasta managed a wan nod. Lurcanio waved to the servant. “Bring your lady some plain bread.” The man hurried off to obey. Lurcanio’s gaze swung back to Krasta. “I take it thisdoes mean you will be having a child?”

“Aye,” she said dully, and then, “You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not,” he answered. “Not after I noted the way the veins stand out so much more than usual in your breasts the other night.”

“Did you?” Krasta said-after letting out a small, indignant squeak. Everyone around her paid more attention than she did. She hadn’t noticed any changes in her breasts, except that they were more tender than usual.

“I did indeed.” Lurcanio raised an eyebrow. He waited for the servant to give Krasta the bread and depart, then said, “Tell me-is it mine?”

“Of course it is!” Krasta said indignantly, doing her best not to show the alarm that blazed through her. Taking a wary bite of bread helped. She gulped again as she swallowed, but the bread, unlike the omelette, seemed willing to stay down. “Whose else could it be?” she added, in tones suggesting the only possible answer wasno one.

“That scrawny viscount we should have executed comes to mind.” Lurcanio smiled at Krasta. She wished he hadn’t; the curve of his lips reminded him how little luck she’d ever had trying to outmaneuver him.

“Nonsense!” she said. “I never did!”I’m only off by one, she thought. That’s hardly worth noticing. True-under most circumstances. Here, though, the difference betweennever andonly once might prove all too noticeable.

Lurcanio sipped his tea. It evidently tasted fine to him. He shrugged an elaborate, ever so Algarvian shrug and made a steeple of his fingertips. “I am a patient man,” he said. “I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. For nine months, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. After that, I will know, one way or the other. If the baby bears some passing resemblance to me, well and good. If not, milady, you will be sorry. I am not one who appreciates a cuckoo’s egg being raised in his nest. Do I make myself clear?”

“Unpleasantly so,” Krasta said. “Most unpleasantly so, in fact.” She ate more bread. Sure enough, it sat quiet in her stomach. That made it easier for her to sound like her usual haughty self as she went on, “I assure you, I have told you the truth.”Some of it -I hope.“If you are going to be boring about this business…”

Lurcanio threw back his head and laughed: guffawed, in fact. “Not at all, milady. By no means.” To Krasta’s amazement, he sounded as if he meant it. “I told you I would give you the benefit of the doubt, and so I shall. If I say even a word to you between now and the day, you may bring me up as sharply as you like.”

“I’ll remember that,” Krasta said. “I’ll hold you to it, too.”

“Fair enough.”ColonelLurcanio nodded. “But you must also remember the rest of what I said, because I am going to hold you to that. And I think I shall give you one more thing to remember.”

“Which is?” Krasta did her best to keep on sounding haughty. The alternative was sounding frightened, which would not do at all.

The Algarvian officer pointed at her, aiming his right forefinger as he might have aimed a stick, “Nothing is to happen to the child until such time as we are able to know what needs to be known. If anything should happen before that time, I shall make all the assumptions you least wish me to make, and I shall act on them. Isthat plain, milady?”

Curse you, Lurcanio, Krasta thought. What he’d just forbidden would have been the most convenient arrangement all the way around-except that he’d just forbidden it. “Aye,” she said coldly. “And will you let your wife know you’ve sired a brand new bastard?”

“I may,” Lurcanio replied, “if it turns out I have. And now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.” He rose, bowed once more, and departed.

Krasta quietly cursed him again, this time for being so invulnerable, so impenetrable. A moment later, she started to giggle. If only I’d been impenetrable myself. I wouldn‘t have anything to worry about then. She wanted to call Lurcanio back so she could tell him the joke. Even as things stood, he would have laughed. She was sure of it. But she sat where she was and didn’t say a word.

Kolthoum looked at Hajjaj and slowly shook her head. With a sigh, she said, “You really are going to have to do something about this impossible situation, you know.”

“Of course I am,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister agreed. “But I have no idea what. I am most open to suggestions.”

He hoped his senior wife would have some. He and Kolthoum had been together for half a century. He told anyone who would listen that she was wiser than he. Few Zuwayzin seemed to want to hear that. As happened so often, the truth made people nervous. They dealt with him, so they wanted to think he had all the answers.

“As I see it,” Kolthoum said, “you have four choices.”

“Really?” Hajjaj said, his surprise altogether genuine. “Try as I would, I could find only three. Tell me, my dear, by all means tell me. Now you truly have my interest.”

His wife laughed. Her body shook. She’d never been a famous beauty, and she’d put on flesh over the years. Hajjaj didn’t care. He’d never cared. She understood him perfectly. He couldn’t say that about anyone else in the world. She began to tick off points on her fingers: “First, you could send Tassi back toMinisterIskakis. That would make him stop screaming at everyone fromKingShazli down to the Zuwayzin who walk past the Yaninan ministry.”

“Well, so it would,” Hajjaj said. “It would also probably be dangerous for Tassi. She didn’t show up on my doorstep-she didn’t show up naked on my doorstep-because she was madly in love with Iskakis. You know that as well as I do. She was just a bauble to him. And how will he use her, now that she’s offended him by running off and showing the world a side he wanted hidden away?”

“Every word of that is true,” Kolthoum said. “Which brings me to the next possibility-sending her to Marquis Balastro. He would take good care of her.”

“For a while-till he got bored,” Hajjaj said. Kolthoum laughed, though neither of them thought it was funny. “But he and Tassi have already quarreled. And if he flaunts her to infuriate Iskakis-and he will, being an Algarvian-he’ll just make things between Algarve and Yanina worse than they are already. They’re both supposed to be our allies, you know. I can’t think of anything Yanina can do to hurt our kingdom, but I can think of plenty of thingsKingTsavellas might do to hurt Algarve.”

“Would Tsavellas do them?” his senior wife asked. “In the war against Unkerlant, anything that hurts Algarve hurts Yanina, too.”

“When Yaninans go after revenge, they’re even worse than we are,” Hajjaj said. “They don’t care what happens to them as long as something worse happens to their foes.”

“That does make things harder,” Kolthoum admitted. “And you are right-Balastro wouldn’t keep her. Next choice is to bestow her on some Zuwayzi noble, then, wouldn’t you say?”

“I might do that. I’ve been trying to do that,” Hajjaj replied. “But there are only so many nobles who might be interested in a foreign woman, and it’s not obvious that Tassi would be interested in any of them. Which leaves, as far as I can see, nothing.”

“No?” Kolthoum looked amused. “You could just keep her here, you know, for your own pleasure. She’s young and pretty, and you haven’t had a woman like that since you sent Lalla back to her clanfather.”

“Do you know, I haven’t thought about that in any serious way,” Hajjaj said slowly. He looked down at his hands, at the dry, wrinkled skin and prominent veins. “And if my not having thought about it seriously doesn’t prove I’ve got old, I don’t know what would.”

“You’re not so old as all that,” Kolthoum said.

Hajjaj smiled. “You’re sweet to say so, my dear.” The two of them hadn’t bedded each other in something close to a year-but then, they needed less physical reminding of what they shared than they had when they were younger. He went on: “Things do still work… occasionally.”

“Well, then,” Kolthoum said, as if everything were all settled.

But Hajjaj shook his head. “It’s not so simple, you know. Where I might see Tassi as my reward, she’s more likely to see me as her punishment.”

“No.” His senior wife shook her head, too. “Not when she came here to your house and showed herself off to you without her clothes. I know what that means for people who aren’t Zuwayzin.”

Hajjaj grunted. The same thought had crossed his mind when he saw the young Yanina woman naked. Tassi hadn’t done anything to discourage it, either; on the contrary. Were he younger himself, he supposed-no, he knew-he would have done more to explore her half-promises. As things were… As things were, he shook his head again and said, “I don’t think I’m in urgent need of a pet, even one of the two-legged sort. Besides, I would feel as if I was taking advantage of her.”

“As if you were,” Kolthoum corrected.

“As if I was,” Hajjaj repeated. “I don’t think the condition would be contrary to fact, and so it doesn’t need the subjunctive.” He grinned at Kolthoum. Not even Qutuz, his secretary, quibbled with him over grammar.

She grinned back, unabashed, and stuck out her tongue at him as if she were a cheeky young girl herself. “You don’t know whether the condition is contrary to fact or not, because you haven’t bothered finding out,” she said.

“True-I haven’t,” he said. “And doesn’t that tell you something all by itself?”

“It tells me you are an old-fashioned gentleman,” Kolthoum answered, “which is nothing I haven’t known for a good many years. But, if you are going to make choices for this woman, don’t you think you ought to know what she wants for herself?”

“Now I know why you let me win the grammatical arguments,” Hajjaj said. Kolthoum made a small, questioning noise. He explained: “So I won’t feel too disappointed when you win the ones that matter.”

His senior wife hid her face in her hands. “My secret’s out. What shall I do?” she asked, her voice muffled behind her palms.

Slipping an arm around her shoulder, Hajjaj said, “When we have this between us, why do I need a young woman, a stranger?”

“Why?” Kolthoum reached out and gently stroked him between the legs. “That’s why.”

“There. You see? I already have a shameless woman, too.” Hajjaj kissed her. More than a little to his own surprise, he found himself rising to the occasion. He and Kolthoum made love slowly, lazily; somehow, the lack of urgency, the lack of fuss, added to his enjoyment-and, he hoped, hers-rather than taking away from it. Afterwards he said, “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

“Neither did I.” Kolthoum wagged a forefinger in front of his nose. “But you’re not going to use it as an excuse to keep from asking Tassi what she wants.”

“Aye, my dear,” Hajjaj answered. Under the circumstances, he could hardly say no.

Having made the promise, he had to keep it. A couple of days later, he askedTewfik to bring Tassi into his study. The majordomo nodded. “Just as you say, your Excellency.” His wrinkled, jowly face gave no hint of what he thought. He shuffled off and returned a few minutes later withMinisterIskakis ’ runaway wife.

“Good day, your Excellency,” she said in her careful Algarvian, dipping her head to Hajjaj. She was still bare, and still seemed barer than any Zuwayzi would have-but then, she would also have seemed out of place in his house had she chosen to wear clothes.

“And a good day to you,” Hajjaj replied in the same language. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Would you care for tea and wine and cakes?” When she dipped her head in Yaninan-style agreement, Hajjaj nodded toTewfik, who waited in the doorway. The majordomo left and returned with a silver tray bearing the essentials of Zuwayzi hospitality.

While Tassi and Hajjaj ate and drank, they stuck to small talk. He wondered if she knew the social rules of his kingdom. He had, from time to time, used them to annoy foreigners. Now she seemed as content with delay as he was.

But, at last, he could avoid things no longer. “Tell me,” he said, “what am I to do with you?”

“Whatever suits your kingdom best, of course,” Tassi answered. “That is the way of such things, is it not so?” She spoke with a curious bitter resignation.

Hajjaj shook his head. “Not necessarily. Not entirely. If I thought only about what suited my kingdom best, I would have sent you back to your husband at once. Do you doubt it, even for an instant?”

“No,” she said in a small voice.

“All right, then,” Hajjaj said. “We understand each other, at least so far. If you had your choice, what would you do?”

“Blaze my father when he made the match with Iskakis,” Tassi replied without hesitation. “He could not have done worse if he tried for a hundred years.”

“You cannot do anything about that now. Of the things you can do, what would you do?”

“I have no good answers for you,” Tassi said, and Hajjaj nodded: he hadn’t expected her to have any good answers. She went on, “If you are willing to let me stay here, I would like to do that. No one bothers me here. Until now, I have never been in a place where no one bothers me.”

Well, Hajjaj thought with wry amusement, this is hardly the time to ask if she wants to keep my bed warm. Not even Kolthoum could argue with me about that, not after what she just said. Even so, his eyes traveled the length of her. Maybe it was the way her nipples and the hair between her legs stood out against her light skin that made her seem more naked than a Zuwayzi woman would have. That was the closest he’d come to an explanation that made sense, anyhow.

She mistook his silence for one of a rather different sort. Or perhaps it wasn’t so different after all. As she had when she dropped to her knees in the doorway, she said, “I would do anything to be able to stay here, anything you might ask me.”

That could mean only one thing. Hajjaj said, “If I took you up on that, you would not be able to say that no one here bothered you.”

“I do not think it would be much of a bother,” Tassi said.

And what is that supposed to mean? Hajjaj wondered. That she wouldn’t mind doing whatever he wanted or that she didn’t think he would want anything very often? He didn’t ask the question. Not asking was better when he didn’t really want to know the answer. Instead, he said, “You are welcome to stay here for as long as you like, but I do not think you can make this your true home. You are a young woman. One day, very likely, you will want to start a family of your own, and you will need to meet a man whose family is of a rank to match yours.”

Tassi tossed her head so vigorously, her dark curls flew. Yaninans used that gesture when they meantNo. She said, “Bloodlines are splendid-in a horse or a unicorn.” A Zuwayzi would have spoken of camels. “But Iskakis has some of the best blood in Yanina, and how much joy did my marriage to him bring me?”

“Iskakis also has some… special tastes,” Hajjaj pointed out, as delicately as he could.

“I know.” She grimaced. “He tried them with me a few times. They hurt, if you must know. But even so, I did not much interest him that way.”

Then he was a fool. But Hajjaj did not say that aloud. Tassi was too likely to judge he wanted pleasure from her body. And he knew he might, though taking it seemed more trouble than it was worth. “You may stay here- unbothered-for as long as you like,” was what he did end up saying.

“Thank you,” Tassi said softly.

“You are welcome,” Hajjaj replied, “and you may take that however you like.”

The ley-line ship slid to a halt. Since it wasn’t moving any more, it settled down into the water instead of gliding above all but the worst of the waves. “Well, we’re here,” Istvan said, “whereverhere is and whatever the Kuusamans are going to do with us now.”

“They don’t dare treat us too badly,”Kun said. “Gyongyos has plenty of Kuusaman captives, and our people can take revenge on them.”

“They haven’t done anything too horrible yet,” Szonyi said. “They’ve given us plenty of food, even if it is accursed fish all the time. If I eat any more fish, I’ll grow fins.”

CaptainFrigyessaid, “They are islanders. They eat fish themselves. They give us the same rations they give their own warriors. That is honorable.” No matter how honorable it was, Istvan’s company commander had been sunk in gloom ever since the Kuusamans captured him on Becsehely. He’d been ready to lay down his life to power the sorcery that would help drive the enemy off the island. He’d been ready, aye, but he hadn’t got the chance-and Becsehely had fallen, as so many other islands in the Bothnian Ocean had fallen to Kuusamo.

“We did all we could, Captain,” Istvan said, not for the first time. “The stars will still shine on us. We didn’t do anything to make them want to withhold their light.”

“We failed,” Frigyes said. “We should have held Becsehely, and we failed.”

“Too many Kuusaman ships,”Kun said, reasonable and logical as usual. “Too many Kuusaman dragons. Too many Kuusaman soldiers. Once they got ashore, sir, how could we hope to hold the island?”

“With our life’s blood,” Frigyes answered. “But we had no chance to give it.” He held his head in his hands, not bothering to hide his misery.

The iron door to the compartment housing the captives came open with a nasty squeal of hinges-even a lubber like Istvan could tell this ship had seen better years. A couple of Kuusaman troopers aimed sticks at the Gyongyosians. “To come out,” one of them said, speaking Istvan’s language very badly. “To go off this ship. To move-now.”The last word held the snap of command.

One by one, Istvan and his countrymen got to their feet and filed out of the compartment and into the corridor beyond. The Kuusamans stepped back. If anyone thought of seizing a stick and raising a revolt, he never got the chance. Istvan didn’t even think of it. He walked along the corridor and up the narrow iron stairway to the deck of the transport. It was the first time he’d seen the sky since going aboard the ship after Becsehely fell.

Then he saw the skyline-and started to laugh. A Kuusaman guard on deck swung his stick toward him. “Why you to laugh?” the little, slant-eyed fellow asked. By his tone, no captive had any business laughing.

Istvan didn’t care. “Why? Because this is Obuda, that’s why,” he answered. He knew the shape of Mount Sorong-not much of a mountain by his standards, but still a peak of sorts-as well as he knew the shape of his own foot. “I fought here. I didn’t expect to see the place again, I’ll tell you that.”

“You soldier here?” the guard said, and Istvan nodded. The guard shrugged. “Soldier no more. Now you to be captive here.”

Kunsaid, “This harbor wasn’t here when we were fighting on Obuda.”

Istvan nodded. Since the island fell, the Kuusamans had run up an enormous number of piers-and all of them looked to have ships tied up at them. Gyongyos and Kuusamo had fought over Obuda not least because several ley lines converged there, making it important for one navy or the other to hold the place. The Kuusamans weren’t just holding it these days-they’d taken it and made it their own.

“They couldn’t have got this much work out of the Obudans,” Istvan said as the guards marched him and his comrades toward the gangplank. “There weren’t that many of them, and they’re lazy buggers anyhow.” He never had thought much of the islanders.

“They didn’t even bother,”Kun said positively. “Most of this port was hammered together by sorcery.”

“How can you tell?” Istvan asked.

“Because all the piers and all the pilings are just alike,”Kun answered. “That means they used the law of similarity a lot-it can’t mean anything else.” He scowled. “I wishwe could afford to throw magecraft around like this. We’d stand a lot better chance in the fight, I’ll tell you.”

Under the sticks of the Kuusaman guards, the captives marched off the pier and onto the beach of Obuda. More Kuusamans waited for them there. One of the little men turned out to speak pretty good Gyongyosian. “I amColonelEino,” he said. “I am the commandant of the captives’ camp here. I want you to understand what that means. What that means is that, as far as you are concerned, I am the stars above. If anything good happens to you, it will happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to please me. And if anything bad happens to you, it will also happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to make me angry. Do not make me angry. You will be very sorry if you do.”

“Blasphemous, goat-eating son of a whore,” Istvan muttered. The captives around him-evenKun, that hard-boiled city man-nodded. ColonelEino might know the Gyongyosian language, but he didn’t know Gyongyosians.

Istvan’s close comrades weren’t the only ones to be appalled. More mutters rose from other soldiers captured on Becsehely-several hundred of them had filed off the transport. Some of them shouted instead of muttering.

Those shouts bothered Eino not at all. “I care nothing for what you think of me,” he said. “I care only that you obey me. When the war is over-when we have won it-you will go back to Gyongyos again. Until then, you belong to Kuusamo. Remember that.” He turned his back, ignoring the new shouts that rose from the captives.

The Kuusaman guards didn’t speak so much Gyongyosian. Of course, they didn’t need to, either. They shouted, “To march!”-and march the captives did.

“Somewhere not far from here, we beat these buggers back from the beaches.” Istvan heaved a sigh. “But they’re like roaches, seems like. Stomp ‘em once and they just come back again.”

He’d expected to have to march all the way to the captives’ camp, wherever on the island it turned out to be. He looked toward the forest that grew almost down to the beach. Parts of it were still battered from the fight his countrymen had put up before the Kuusamans finally seized Obuda. His own memories of that losing campaign were of hunger and fog and fear.

To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.

Kunkept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”

“Silence, there,”CaptainFrigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”

“Aye, Captain,”Kun answered, the only thing he could say-out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”

“We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere betweenKun ’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so

… “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:

Kunjust grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.

The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.

When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.

“Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.

Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.

“What to be funny?” a guard demanded.

“This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?

That was a chilly thought with which to enter the captives’ camp.

Some of the Gyongyosian barracks still stood. The guards took Istvan and his comrades to a newer, less weathered building. He turned out to have a better cot and more space as a captive of the Kuusamans than he’d had as a Gyongyosian soldier on Obuda. He didn’t know what that said about the relative strength of the two warring kingdoms. Nothing good, probably, not from a Gyongyosian point of view.

“I wish to speak toColonelEino,” Frigyes told a guard. The Kuusaman went off to see if the camp commandant cared to speak with a captive captain.

To Istvan’s surprise, Eino came to the barracks. “What do you want?” he asked. “Whatever it is, it had better be important.”

“It is,” Frigyes said. “I want your word of honor as an officer that you do not abuse us by feeding us the filthy, forbidden flesh of goats. We are in your power. I hope you are not so vile as to make us either starve or become ritually unclean.”

Alarm blazed through Istvan. He glanced atKun and Szonyi. They looked alarmed, too. The scar on his hand seemed to throb. His gaze swung back toColonelEino.

The camp commandant laughed. “Many of your people ask this. I give you my word, it does not happen.” He laughed again, less pleasantly. “You may ask, what is a Kuusaman’s word worth?” Off he went, leaving appalled silence behind him.

ColonelSpinellowas bored. He’d been a great many things since the war took him to Unkerlant-wounded, hungry, freezing, terrified-but never bored, never till now. He yawned till his jaw creaked. He felt like ordering another attack on Pewsum, just to give his men-and himself-something to do.

No matter what he felt like, he refrained. He had no doubt whatever that his brigade was glad about the lull in the fighting. It didn’t break his heart, either. He’d more than half expectedKingSwemmel ’s men to have laid on an attack against Waldsolms by now. Maybe the Unkerlanters were enjoying the lull, too.

If I want something to do, I ought to get Jadwigai into bed with me, he thought, not for the first time. Not for the first time, he turned the thought aside. Tampering with the brigade’s luck would only be bad for his own. He even believed that, which made it easier for him to resist temptation-but not a great deal easier.

Then a shout rang out that sent him springing to his feet: “Field post! The field post’s here!”

Spinello hurried out of the Unkerlanter hut where he’d been brooding. He hadn’t even reached the unpaved street before turning into his usual jaunty self. “Come on, boys,” he called to the other soldiers also hurrying toward the wagon that brought letters from home. “Time to find out how much your girlfriends are trying to squeeze out of you this time.”

The men in the wagon started calling out names. Spinello’s clerks took care of most of them, sorting the envelopes and packages by regiment and company so they could go on up to the front. Every so often, one of the clerks said, “He’s wounded,” or “He’s dead,” or, “He got transferred six months ago. Anybody who’s looking for him here is out of luck.”

“Here’s one forColonelSpinello,” one of the field postmen called.

“That’s me.” Spinello happily reached for it.

Before giving it to him, the fellow in the wagon held it under his nose. “Perfumed!” he exclaimed, which made all the Algarvians in the muddy main street whoop and sigh and roll their eyes and pretend to swoon.

“Powers below eat every bloody one of you,” Spinello said. “You’re just jealous, and you bloody well know it.”

None of the soldiers argued with him. They probablywere jealous, but not in a bad way. Any officer in the Algarvian army who got a perfumed letter only saw his prestige rise-it made his men think he was good at some of the things that made life worth living.

“You going to read it to us, Colonel?” somebody called. A chorus of baying whoops followed that suggestion.

“Read your own letters-if you know how to read,” Spinello replied with dignity. “I’m going to enjoy this one myself.” It came from Fronesia; if the scent, the same one she used herself, hadn’t been enough to tell him as much, her flowing script would have. He smiled. He’d had a splendid time with her back in Trapani, the sort of time that would have made his men whoop even more than they were already whooping if he’d chosen to tell them about it.

Before he tore the envelope open, he glanced up and saw Jadwigai peering out through one of the small windows in the peasant hut she used as her own. She rarely come out onto the street when Algarvians from outside the brigade could see her. One more proof she knows what happens to most Kaunians, Spinello thought, something that hadn’t occurred to him before.

He took out the letter from his mistress, unfolded it, and began to read. The first part was all conventional enough. Fronesia missed him, she hoped he was safe, she hoped he got leave soon so she could see him, she suggested several things she might do to make his leave more entertaining if he got it. A couple of the things she suggested sounded entertaining enough to make him want to head back toward Trapani whether he had leave or not.

And then, three or four paragraphs into the letter, Fronesia got down to business.

Someone has been ungenerous enough to slander or libel me toColonelSabrino, and he, in his ingratitude, has seen fit to cut off the allowance he used to give me. While I know I can rely on your kindness, I wonder if you might be sweet enough to send me just a little more than usual over the next couple of months, to help me wean myself away from Sabrino for ever and always. I promise you, dear, that I will show you just exactly how glad I am to have finally fallen into the arms of a true man, not a cold-hearted calculator who holds the least little thing against me.

Spinello read that several times. No matter how many times he read it, it always added up to the same thing. “Why, you little tramp!” he said, half annoyed, half admiring. Squeeze indeed, he thought. Mistresses, of course, were and had to be mercenary. They had custom on their side, but the law had never heard of them. Fronesia, though, managed to turn greed into something uncommonly like art.

To how many other officers was she sending similarly artful letters? In peacetime, having multiple protectors was almost impossibly difficult for a mistress. But the war made it easy. What were the odds that two… friends would come into Trapani wanting to see a woman at the same time? Slim, no doubt about it. A canny woman, or a grasping one, could do very well for herself.

He had no proof, only the tone of the letter. In his own prewar days, though, he’d studied the Kaunian classics, which left him uncommonly sensitive to tone. If Fronesia didn’t have more than one protector, it wasn’t solely because of love for him. He was sure, very sure, of that.

Instead of crumpling up the letter and tossing it into the mud, he took it back to his hut. He kept his head up and his stride brisk. He wouldn’t let the men see that Fronesia had written anything to upset him.

When he got inside, though, he tossed the letter on the embers of the fire. Those were plenty to make it char and crackle and flare and burn. For a moment he smelled, or imagined he smelled, scorched perfume. Then the sharp odor of burning paper overwhelmed it, and then that too was lost in the usual smoky stink of the hearth.

He sat down at a folding table-Algarvian army issue; Unkerlanter peasant huts didn’t boast such amenities-inked a pen, and began his reply. Halfway through the first paragraph, he set down the pen, shaking his head. If he wrote while angry, he would regret the letter as soon as he posted it. Fronesia didn’t need to hear from him right away. If she didn’t hear from him right away, she might worry a little. That wouldn’t be so bad.

After a bit, the field-post wagon rattled off to deliver letters and packages to some other brigade. Half noticing the noise, Spinello nodded to himself. The military postmen were good, solid fellows; even footsoldiers respected them. They carried sticks when they got near the front, and they knew what to do with them, too.

Someone knocked on the door. ColonelSpinello started. He wished one of his regimental commanders would have picked a different time to bother him. He also sniffed a couple of times before going to the door. No, he couldn’t smell the perfume from Fronesia’s letter. That was something, anyhow.

But when he opened the door, no grimy, poorly shaved Algarvian officer stood there. Jadwigai did. “Oh,” Spinello said in surprise. He managed a bow. “Come in, milady. What can I do for you?”

He intended to leave the door to the hut open, so the men in the brigade could see he was up to nothing nefarious with their mascot. Jadwigai, though, closed it after herself as she walked in. “Are you all right, Colonel?” she asked in that disconcertingly fluent Algarvian of hers.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Spinello asked in return, more surprised than ever.

“When the field post came, I saw you didn’t like the letter you got,” the Kaunian girl answered. “I was afraid it might be bad news from your family. This is a… very large war.”

If it hadn’t been a very large war, a Kaunian girl from Forthweg would never have found herself in the wilds of northern Unkerlant. But that wasn’t what Jadwigai had meant. Touched, Spinello said, “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”

“Really?” She didn’t sound as if she believed him. Maybe she’d heard other Algarvian officers making light of losses.

But, very firmly, Spinello said, “Really. My father and uncles are too old to fight. My brother and my cousins are all fine, so far as I know. So are my aunts and my sister, for that matter.”

“All right,” Jadwigai said-actually, the soldiers’ expression she used had a literal meaning a lot more pungent than that. “I’m glad. Even so, though, you can’t tell me that letter made you happy.”

“No, it didn’t,” Spinello admitted. The Kaunian girl’s face bore anI-told-you-so expression. Hoping to cure her of it, he went on, “If you really must know what the trouble is, my mistress back in Algarve is trying to squeeze more money out of me.”

“Oh.” She turned red. For a moment, he thought it was embarrassment. Then he realized it was outrage. “The nerve of her, doing something like that when you’re out here where you’re liable to get killed.”

“That did cross my mind, aye,” Spinello said. “Of course, from Fronesia’s point of view my being out here only makes me a poor long-term investment.”

Jadwigai said something inflammatory in Algarvian-she’d learned it from soldiers, sure enough. Then she said something even more inflammatory in classical Kaunian. It was the first time Spinello had heard her use her birth-speech.

He answered in classical Kaunian himself: “Letting such small things pierce one to the heart merely burdens the spirit to no purpose.”

Jadwigai looked astonished. “I didn’t think you knew my language, not when…” She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to go on. She had to know what happened at the camps the Algarvians politely termedspecial, sure enough.

Spinello grimaced. How was he supposed to respond to that? At last, after some thought, he said, “A kingdom will do what it thinks it has to do to win, to survive. Afterwards, maybe, it will look back and count the cost of what it did.”

To his surprise, and more than a little to his relief, Jadwigai nodded. “Or, if it wins, it won’t bother to count the cost at all.” That jerked a nod from Spinello. The Kaunian girl went on, “It’s the same for people, you know: you do what you have to do first, and then you count the cost later.”

He nodded again. “Any soldier who’s ever been blazed at, will say the same thing.”

“Not just soldiers.” Jadwigai stepped up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. She was, if anything, an inch or two taller than he. “You can have me if you want me, you know.”

“And you’ll count the cost later?” he asked.

Quite seriously, she nodded. “Of course. If there is a later.”

Sleeping with you would improve my chances of having a later. Spinello had had no compunctions whatever about making Vanai bribe him with her body to keep her miserable grandfather alive. He hesitated now, and wondered why. The answer wasn’t long in coming, not least because he’d seen so much more soldiering than he had when he was stationed in Oyngestun.

Gently, he kissed her. She stiffened in his arms. That had excited him with Vanai. Here, it just left him sad. He said, “I’m afraid you’re not my pet-you’re the brigade’s pet.” She stared at him, then started to cry. “Stop that!” he exclaimed, and he wasn’t acting at all. “If the soldiers think I’ve done something to you that you didn’t want, I’m a dead man.”

Too late, he realized he’d just handed her a weapon. But she didn’t seem interested in using it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

“For what? For being a fool?” he said, and was relieved again when that made her laugh. She was still smiling when she left the hut. Later, he thought, standing there all alone. You count the cost later.

Skarnu turned to Palasta. “If we go much farther, we fall off the edge of the world,” he said.

The young mage smiled at him. She looked as if a strong breeze would blow her away. Here at the southeasternmost reach of Valmiera, there were plenty of strong breezes, most of them off the Strait of Valmiera that separated the Derlavaian mainland from the great island holding Lagoas and Kuusamo. The wind didn’t stagger her, but it did blow her long blond hair into a mare’s nest of tangles. Brushing a strand that escaped her flat knitted wool hat back from her eyes, she said, “Back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they really thought they would.”

“I suppose so, sis,” he said, which made Palasta smile again. They’d decided to travel as brother and sister; he would have had to have startedvery young to claim her as a daughter. He wished shewere his sister-he vastly preferred her to the one he really had. Palasta would never have given herself to the Algarvians, not for anything.

She said, “If we go to the top of that little hill there”-she pointed-”we might be able to see something interesting.”

“Maybe,” Skarnu said. Up to the top of the hill they went. The path was muddy; Skarnu almost slipped. Once they did get to the top, he shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand and peered south and east toward the beach where the Algarvians had murdered their Kaunian captives to assail the Kuusamans, and where something-no one on this side of the Strait of Valmiera seemed to know what-had gone wrong for the redheads. Even shading his eyes against the wan southern sun, he couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. “I wish I had a spyglass,” he muttered.

“Not safe,” Palasta said, and he could hardly disagree.

Shaggy green fields, rich and lush, stretched down toward the sea. A circle of tall, crudely shaped stones stood in one of those a few hundred yards away: a monument a thousand years older than the Kaunian Empire, maybe more. Lichen scrawled red and yellow-green patterns up the sides of the stones.

Palasta pointed toward the monument. “That’s a power point. Even all those years ago, they knew about such things.”

“Whoeverthey were,” Skarnu said; that was another riddle archaeological mages still labored to unravel. Some ofthem, at least, had not been of Kaunian stock. That much seemed plain. Even nowadays, a few folk here showed signs of blood more like that of the Kuusamans than of Valmiera’s Kaunian majority. Southeasterners had a way of staying on their land. Skarnu hadn’t seen many before coming to this part of the kingdom. Dark hair, slanted eyes, and high cheekbones showed up often enough to disconcert him: they were certainly more common than he’d thought.

Between him and Palasta and the monument, a woman drove a couple of goats toward a farmhouse. She was a Kaunian; her yellow hair peeped out from under the white lace cap she wore. But that cap set her apart from most Valmierans. Every tiny district here in the southeast had its own particular style, each striving to be more ornate than its neighbors. The goats were of a peculiar breed, too-shaggier than the ones he’d known around Pavilosta, and with thicker, more twisted horns.

But he couldn’t keep eyeing the local landscape forever, even if he wanted to. His eyes rose to the gray beach and the gray-green, rock-studded sea beyond, and to what had been the camp where the Algarvians housed their Kaunian captives before killing them to capture their life energy.

Some of the fences that had surrounded the camp still stood. Others were flat, or had been hurled some distance away by the force of the magic that had come back from Kuusamo. As far as he could see at this distance, none of the buildings inside the perimeter still stood, neither those that had housed the redheads nor those where their victims had dwelt.

“What do you see?” he asked Palasta. The young mage was the one who’d needed to make this journey. Skarnu was along because he’d been fighting for a long time to keep Mezentio’s men from massacring Kaunians from Forthweg, and because sending a girl on her own-even a girl who was also a mage-had risks the underground hadn’t felt like facing.

“Power,” she answered absently. “Great power.”

“The kind the Algarvians get from killing?” Skarnu asked.

“Oh, that, too,” Palasta said, though she sounded as if she needed to be reminded of it. “Aye, that, too. But something else, something brighter… cleaner.” She frowned, groping for the word she wanted.

“Can you tell what it is?”

Palasta shook her head. “It’s nothing I’ve run into before. I don’t think it’s anything anybody ever ran into before.”

She seemed very certain. Skarnu studied not the camp where the Kaunians from Forthweg had been but Palasta. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. How could she know about what trained mages had run into over the years, over the centuries, over the millennia? (Those lichen-splashed standing stones made Skarnu think in longer stretches of time than he might have otherwise.) Carefully-he didn’t want to offend her-he asked, “How can you be sure of that?”

“Suppose you’ve eaten beef and pork and mutton and chicken,” Palasta said. “If someone serves you fresh oysters, will you be sure you’ve never had them before?”

“Aye.” Skarnu nodded. “But I won’t be sure no one’s eaten them in all the history of the world.”

“Ah. I see what you’re saying.” Palasta looked at him as if he were a bright pupil in primary school. Absurdly, that affectionate, forgiving glance made him proud, not angry. The young mage said, “I know what I know. What I know is based on what all the sorcerers before me have known, all the way back to the people who raised those stones, whoever they were.” They were on her mind, too. She went on, “I can tell what’s new and what isn’t. Whatever did that”-she pointed to the ruined camp-”is something new.”

“All right. And I see what you’re saying, too.” Now Skarnu believed her. She sounded as sure about what she knew and what she didn’t asSergeantRaunu ever had. As it had with the veteran underofficer, her conviction carried weight with Skarnu. He asked, “Do you want to get closer, if we can? Do you think it would do any good?”

“I’d like to try,” Palasta answered. “I don’t see any Algarvians around there right now, or sense any of their wizards, either. If we spot soldiers when we come up to the camp, we can always walk off in some other direction.”

“Fair enough.” Skarnu started down the slope that led to the camp.

Palasta stayed at his side. After a few steps, she said, “We may not need to do this, after all, now that I think about it. The answers I’m looking for are probably on the other side of the Strait of Valmiera. So if you want to go back…”

Skarnu kept walking. “Let’s try it. We’ve come all this way”-”Tytuvenai” yanked me away from my wife and son-”to try to find out what happened here, and whether we can use it against the redheads, too. It would be a shame to stop half a mile short.”If we do stop half a mile short, I’ll wring “Tytuvenai’s” neck the next time I see him.

“That makes good sense.” Palasta sent him a speculative look. “You seem to have a very logical mind. Why didn’t you ever think about becoming a mage?”

“I don’t know,” Skarnu answered. “I never did, that’s all. I’ve never seen any signs I’d have the talent for it, either.” As a marquis, of course, he’d never had to worry about making a living. Since his parents’ untimely death, he’d never had to worry about anything till he took command of his company when war broke out. He’d done that as well as he could, and done a lot of other things since. Krasta, now-Krasta hadn’t worried about anything but shops and lovers her whole life long. The corners of his mouth turned down as he thought about his sister’s latest, Algarvian, lover.

“Talent does count,” Palasta said, “but only so much.”

“As may be,” Skarnu said. “It’s too late for me to worry about it now.” Palasta looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Unkerlanter. Too late meant little to her: a telling proof of how young she was. More roughly than he’d intended to, Skarnu continued, “Come on. Let’s see how close we can get you.”

Palasta didn’t say anything as they walked on toward the ravaged camp. She didn’t have to. Watching her face was fascinating. She either didn’t know how to or else didn’t bother with hiding anything she thought or felt. She seemed to grow more astonished, more interested, more excited with every step they took. She also grew more puzzled. “I don’t know what they did,” she said. “I don’t know how they did it. But I don’t think magecraft will ever be the same.”

Skarnu wanted to laugh at her. She was much too young to speak with such self-assurance. But she was also too self-assured for him to dwell too much on her youth. She’d shown him she knew what she was talking about. What would she sense, what would she learn, if she could walk through the heart of the shattered camp?

He didn’t get to find out. About a quarter of a mile short of the camp, an Algarvian soldier popped out of a hole in the ground so well hidden by bushes that Skarnu had no idea he was there till he emerged. “No going farther,” he said in accented Valmieran. “Forbidden military area, by ordering ofGrand DukeIvone.”

Ivone was the highest-ranking Algarvian in Valmiera. As a man of the underground, Skarnu knew that. Would he have known it if he were as ordinary as he wanted to seem? Maybe-but maybe not, too. He said. “My sister and me, we just want to go on down to the beach to hunt for crabs.” He deliberately tried to sound none too bright.

The soldier shook his head. “Not here. Forbidden. You wanting crabs, you going back to town, finding wrong girlfriend.” He guffawed at his own wit.

Try to bribe him? Skarnu wondered. He decided against it. More redheads were surely lurking around the camp. “Plenty of good crabs on this beach,” he grumbled, for the Algarvian’s benefit. “Lobsters, too.” When the soldier shook his head again, Skarnu took Palasta’s arm. “Come on, sis. We’ll find ‘em somewheres else.”

“You leaving her with me, you go looking,” the Algarvian suggested. That made Skarnu retreat in a hurry. The redhead had thrown out the notion in a casual way. Skarnu hustled Palasta away from him before he decided she ought to be his because he was an occupier and he had a stick in his hands.

To Skarnu’s relief, she waited till they’d got out of earshot of the guard to ask, “Can we sneak around to the camp some other way?”

“I doubt it,” he answered regretfully. “They’re bound to have more than one man keeping an eye on it. If they send us away from it once, that probably won’t mean much to them. If they catch us trying to get there once they’ve told us no, that’s liable to be a different story.” He hesitated. “Unless you think you really have to get inside. If it’s that important, I’ll do my best to get you past the guards. You might have to use some of your magecraft, too.”

“No,” Palasta said after brief thought. “I’ve learned enough-and perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned is how much I don’t know.” She spoke in riddles, but she sounded pleased doing it, so Skarnu supposed he should be pleased, too. And he was, for his own reasons: now he could go back to Merkela and little Gedominu.

Eight

Not for the first time, MarshalRathar reflected on how glad he was to get out of Cottbus, to get away from the direct influence ofKingSwemmel. Away from the capital, he was his own man. Inside Cottbus, inside the palace, he might have been fitted for strings at the wrists and ankles, at the elbows and knees, for he knew himself to be nothing more than the king’s puppet.

Even in getting away from Cottbus, though, Rathar followed Swemmel’s will rather than his own. He would sooner have gone back to the Duchy of Grelz, to finish driving the Algarvians from it. But Swemmel was convinced Unkerlant had the battle in the south well enough in hand to entrust it toGeneralVatran. Vatran was a capable commander; he and Rathar had worked well together down in the south for a couple of years. Still, Rathar wanted to finish what he’d started.

As usual, KingSwemmel cared nothing for what his subjects wanted. He’d sent Rathar up to the north, to a region where he hadn’t laid his hand on the fighting. And he’d sent with himGeneralGurmun, who’d proved himself the best commander of behemoths Unkerlant had.

The two of them rode horses east toward Pewsum, a town the Unkerlanters had taken back from Algarve and then held in spite of counterattacks delivered with the redheads’ usual skill and ingenuity. Looking around at the devastation through which he rode, Rathar said, “Nothing comes easy fighting Mezentio’s men. It never has. By the time we drive them off a piece of ground, it’s not worth having any more.”

Gurmun pondered that. He was younger than Rathar-in his early forties-with hard, blunt features and cold, cold eyes. He’d risen through the ranks despite, or perhaps because of, KingSwemmel ’s purges. He said, “They’re tough, aye, but we can whip them. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again. And every time we do whip them, we leave them that much less to fight back with.”

Ten months ago, his behemoths had stopped the Algarvians’ last desperate push in the Durrwangen bulge, the push that might have torn the whole position open had it succeeded. Hundreds of the great beasts from both sides were left dead on the field. Unkerlant had been able to make good its losses. The Algarvian behemoth force hadn’t been the same since the battles by Durrwangen.

Rathar said, “I just wonder how much of our kingdom will be standing by the time the war ends.”

Gurmun shrugged. “As long as some of it’s standing and there’s nothing left of Algarve.” That was also Swemmel’s attitude. Rathar could hardly disagree with it.

In fact, he didn’t disagree with it. But he did say, “The more we have left standing, the better.”

“Well, of course,” Gurmun said. “The better we keep our secrets, the more we’ll be able to manage there. The redheads couldn’t have been plainer about what they had in mind around Durrwangen if they’d hung up a sign-we’re going to attack here. Stupid buggers.” He spat in the muddy roadway.

His scorn madeMarshalRathar blink. To Rathar, the Algarvians were the touchstone of the military art. He’d spent the first couple of years of the war against them learning how they did what they did well enough to imitate it. Had he failed, Unkerlant would have gone under. That Gurmun could show contempt for the redheads proved he’d succeeded. It still disconcerted him, though.

Ropes dyed red warned soldiers and surviving locals away from a field by the side of the road. Rathar said, “One of these days, we’ll have to clear out all the eggs we and the Algarvians have buried.” The red ropes said that field was sown with Algarvian eggs. A crater not far from the road said some luckless fellow had discovered at least one of them the hard way.

Gurmun spat again. “It can wait. Right now, we haven’t got the dowsers to spend clearing the buried eggs we’ve already passed. We’ve hardly got enough dowsers to clear the ones that are still in front of the redheads.”

“I said, one of these days,” Rathar answered. As far as Gurmun was concerned, the waste of having dowsers go up in bursts of sorcerous energy while clearing unimportant fields made that not worth doing. As long as they died doing something important, he didn’t worry at all. A lot of the younger officers, the men who’d lived their entire adult lives duringKingSwemmel ’s reign, thought the same way. Since Swemmel thought that way, too, Rathar knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but every so often he still was.

“If we had more dowsers,” Gurmun went on, “I wouldn’t have to run peasants across fields ahead of my behemoths, the way I’ve done a couple-three times. That doesn’t always work as well as you’d like-sometimes the Algarvian mages make their buried eggs sensitive to behemoths, not people.” His horse walked on for a few paces before he added, very much as an afterthought, “And it’s wasteful, too.”

“So it is.” Rathar had used such tactics himself; he didn’t know many Unkerlanter generals who hadn’t. But he didn’t take them for granted, the way Gurmun did. With a sigh, he went on, “I wonder if the kingdom will have any peasants at all left by the time this war finally ends.”

“It doesn’t matter if we only have a few, so long as Algarve hasn’t got any,” Gurmun said once more. Aye, those words might have come straight fromKingSwemmel ’s lips.

At the outskirts of Pewsum, a sentry stepped into the roadway, stick in hand, and snapped, “This is a forward area. Show me your pass.”

GeneralGurmunundid the top couple of buttons on his rock-gray greatcoat, so that the general’s stars on his collar tabs showed. “Are these pass enough?”

The sentry deflated like a pricked pig’s bladder. He lorded it over those beneath him and groveled to those above. Such was life in Unkerlant. “Aye, sir,” he muttered, and got out of the way in a hurry.

“Powers above help the next couple of common soldiers he lands on,” Rathar remarked as he and Gurmun rode past. Gurmun laughed and nodded. He was on top almost all the time, so he found such things funny.

Inside Pewsum, Unkerlanter artisans and mages still labored to repair the ley-line caravan depot. Before pulling out, the Algarvians had done their ingenious best to make sure their foes would get as little use from the town as possible; and that best, as usual, proved quite good. “Stinking redheads,” Gurmun growled. “That depot had better not slow us down, come the day. If it does, some of those worthless wizards will join these beauties here.”

He pointed to a couple of corpses hanging from a gibbet in the market square. They’d been hanging for some time. By now, they were more bone than meat, and didn’t stink too badly. Each was draped with a placard reading, collaborator. Soldiers and civilians walked past them without so much as a glance.

“They caught two,” Gurmun said. “I wonder how many are still running loose.”

“A good many, odds are,” Rathar answered. “The inspectors will root them out.”GeneralGurmun nodded, as Rathar had been sure he would. Swemmel’s inspectors were trained to sniff out treason whether it was there or not. When it really was…

A soldier was reading a news sheet, one prepared by the local army headquarters. He started to wad it up and throw it away. Gurmun called, “Here, fellow, let me have a look at that.”

“Sure, pal,” the trooper said agreeably. His rock-gray tunic had faded almost to white. A scar seamed his cheek, another his leg below the hem of the tunic. More than any of that, though, his eyes marked him as a veteran. They never stopped moving. Had the Algarvians flown dragons over Pewsum, he would have known exactly where to dive for cover.

Gurmun reined in to look at the news sheet. Rathar also stopped, and leaned toward him so he could see some of it, too. Gurmun read aloud: “ ‘In the north, the strong defense the brave soldiers of Unkerlant have shown under the glorious leadership of King Swemmel against the savage Algarvian invader has kept the enemy from making progress, and has tied down his forces so that he cannot move men to the south to hold off our victorious thrusts there.’ “

“That’s good,” Rathar murmured. “That’s very good.”

GeneralGurmunnodded. “I’ve seen worse. Here, wait-there’s more. ‘Constant vigilance is vital in these hard defensive struggles. Although we often fight with the odds against us, our sacrifice ensures victory elsewhere. Always remember that a victory in the south is a victory for the whole kingdom.’ “

“Someone should get a commendation for that,”MarshalRathar said. He called up the map in his head. “Headquarters should be-over there.” He pointed. He and Gurmun rode in the direction he’d chosen. His gift for turning map into terrain didn’t let him down.

At the headquarters-a battered building that had once been a greengrocer’s-another officious sentry tried to stop Rathar and Gurmun. This time, Rathar was the one who flashed his collar tabs. At the sight of the big stars he wore, the sentry turned pale. He couldn’t step away, as the one on the road had, but he did his best to disappear in plain sight.

Inside, Brigadier Sigulf saluted. “An honor to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve done great things for the kingdom.”

“More needs doing,” Gurmun said, his voice flat, almost hostile.

Sigulf looked alarmed, though he made a good game try at holding his face still. He was some years younger even than Gurmun. Except for Vatran, all our generals are years and years younger than I am, Rathar thought. The war had killed some of his contemporaries. KingSwemmel had killed many more.

He took the news sheet from Gurmun and waved it. “This is a fine piece of work.”

“Thanks, lord Marshal,” Sigulf answered. “We’ve done our best to follow the directives we got from Cottbus. We’ve followed all the directives from Cottbus as closely as we could.” That too was the Unkerlanter way.

“Good,” Gurmun said. Like Sigulf, he was steeped in the idea that orders should always be followed exactly. Rathar sometimes wondered. One of the reasons the Algarvians got better results with fewer men was that their officers thought for themselves, and didn’t feel paralyzed when they had no one above them telling them what to do. But that was how they were trained. Rathar wished his commanders were better at seizing the initiative, but that seemed beyond the mental horizon of most of them.

Sigulf went on, “We are making sure we move only at night. And our crystallomancers are sending more messages to regiments that aren’t in place than to ones that are. It gets confusing sometimes, but we’re doing our best.”

“Those are important orders to follow.” Rathar meant every word of it. “You can bet anything you care to name that the Algarvians are stealing as many of our emanations as they can. If your men are confused, think what it must be like for the redheads.”

“Aye, sir,” Brigadier Sigulf said earnestly. “I do think about that. I think about it all the time. If it weren’t for confusing the redheads, all this would be more trouble than it was worth.”

“Don’t say that,”GeneralGurmun growled. “Don’t even think it. You’ve been told what to do, and you’ll bloody well do it. If you don’t feel like doing it, there are plenty of penal companies that can always use one more stupid fool with a stick. Have you got that?”

“Aye, sir,” Sigulf repeated, this time with a distinct quaver in his voice. He sentMarshalRathar a look of appeal.

Rathar stared back stonily. Gurmun was an iron-arsed son of a whore, no doubt about it. But he got results. In war, that counted for more than anything else. “This is important, Brigadier,” Rathar said. “If everything goes well, it may prove as important as Sulingen. Have you gotthat?” Wide-eyed, Sigulf nodded. So did Rathar. “Good. See that you do. Gurmun’s right- you’d better not get in the way of this. Nothing and nobody will get in the way of this.”

Garivald kicked at the dirt. He was worn and sweaty and filthy and more frustrated than he’d ever been in his entire life. “It’s no good,” he said. “It’s just no cursed good.”

“We’ve done a lot,” Obilot said. She was every bit as tired and grimy as he was. “We can do more. Every day is longer than the one before. Planting time is always like this.”

“No.” Garivald shook his head. “I don’t care how much we do with hoes and spades and such. We’ll never get enough planted to bring in a crop we can live on-not all by ourselves, we won’t. We’ve got to have a donkey or an ox to pull a plow.”

“That means going into a village,” Obilot said. “Going into a village means getting noticed. And getting noticed means trouble for you. It’s liable to mean trouble for me, too. You’re higher up on the inspectors’ lists, aye, but who’s to say I’m not on ‘em with you? After all, I was fighting against the Algarvians without taking orders from any ofKingSwemmel ’s precious soldiers just the same as you were.”

“Every word of that is true,” Garivald said, “but none of it matters. If we’re going to starve for sure, then we have to take our chances with the villagers and with the inspectors, powers below eat ‘em all. They might recognize us, but they might not, too, and that’s the gamble we’re stuck with.”

He waited for her to tell him he was wrong, and for her to tell him exactly how he was wrong. They’d had this argument several times before. Obilot had always stayed dead set against stirring from this hut in the middle of nowhere. Now…

Now, with a long sigh, she said, “Maybe we do have to try. I still wish we didn’t. For one thing, we haven’t got much money-not enough for an ox, sure as sure.”

“We’ll make some,” Garivald said. “I was doing odd jobs in Tolk before Tantris, curse him, came sniffing around. Chopping wood, mucking out barns-there’s always work people would sooner pay somebody else to do than do inemselves. And you’re a fine hand with a needle. I saw that in the wood, where you had next to nothing to work with. If you have decent cloth, proper thread…”

Obilot sighed again. “All that helps, aye. But do you know what will help even more?”

“Tell me.” Now that Garivald had talked her around, or thought he had, he was more than willing to yield on as many of the little details as he could. Obilot wasn’t pleasant to be around when she was brooding about losing an argument.

“Remembering the names we’ll be using,” she said. Garivald laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. The less his own name was heard these days, the better off he would be. And the same was liable to be true for Obilot as well; without a doubt, she was right about that.

They took such silver as they had and headed for Linnich, the nearest surviving village. It was three or four hours away. Garivald discovered he’d lost the knack for marching. “Not like it was when we’d go out of the woods to pay a call on some village that got too friendly with the redheads,” he remarked as he sat down on a stump to rest.

“No. Not even close.” Obilot sat down beside him. She looked glad to take the weight off her feet, too. Suddenly, though, she snapped her fingers in alarm. “The redheads! We’ve still got some of falseKingRaniero ’s money. If we pass it…” She slashed a finger across her throat.

“Maybe-but maybe not, too,” Garivald answered. “Some people will still take it: some people figure silver is silver. Aye, we have to be careful; I know. I brought it along, but I’ve got it wrapped in a rag so it’s not mixed in with Swemmel’s money.”

Obilot pursed her lips, then nodded. Garivald grinned. He seldom got the chance to feel he was one step ahead of her, and enjoyed it when he did.

Like almost every peasant village in the Duchy of Grelz that Garivald had seen-and he’d seen more villages than he’d imagined he would back in Zossen before the war-Linnich was battered. Neither the Unkerlanters nor the Algarvians had dug in there, or the village wouldn’t hive still stood. But craters showed where eggs had fallen, and ruins or sudden empty places like missing teeth in a jaw marked what had been houses.

A lot of the peasants were already in the fields; it was planting season for them, too. When Garivald walked up to a fellow guiding a plow behind an ox, the other peasant seemed glad enough to stop. He shook his head though, when Garivald asked if anyone had a beast he might sell. “Don’t know about that, stranger,” he said. “Them as still has ‘em left alive are mighty glad to be using ‘em, you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear,” Garivald answered. Stranger. He would have used the word back in Zossen. Then, though, he wouldn’t have known how being on the wrong end of it burned. He let coins jingle. “I can pay.” He didn’t say he couldn’t pay enough. He wouldn’t say anything like that till he had to.

“Like I say, money’s not the only thing going on,” the other peasant told him. Then he snapped his fingers, as if reminding himself of something. “Dagulf s got a mule, though. He’s been hiring it out and drinking up the money he makes. Maybe he’d sell.”

“Dagulf,” Garivald echoed. It wasn’t an unusual name, but… He pointed at the peasant from Linnich. “Is this Dagulf a short, skinny fellow with sort of a sour smile and with a scar on his face?”

“Aye.” The local nodded. “You know him?”

“Never heard of him,” Garivald said solemnly.

The other peasant stared, scratched his head, and at last decided it was a joke and laughed. Then he nodded. “So you know him, do you? He’s some of the riffraff that’s been coming through here ever since the war stirred things up.” That he’d just, in effect, called Garivald and Obilot riffraff, too, never entered his mind. Garivald gave a mental shrug. He’d been called worse than that.

He said, “So Dagulf drinks up his money, does he? Would I find him in the tavern?”

“It’s a good bet.” The man from Linnich flicked his ox’s back with a long springy branch and started it down the furrow. He’d done all the talking he intended to do.

“This Dagulf is from your village?” Obilot asked as she and Garivald started off toward Linnich itself.

“That’s right. He’s a friend of mine.” Garivald checked himself. “He used to be a friend of mine, anyway.”

Obilot thought about that, then nodded. “Do you want him to know you’re still alive? Is it safe for him to know you’re still alive?”

“Before the war, it would have been,” Garivald answered. “Before the war, though, he wouldn’t have spent all his time in the tavern.” But he kept walking toward the village. For one thing, any Unkerlanter man was likely to spend a good deal of time in a tavern. For another. ..

“It he’s from your village, he’ll know what happened to your family, won’t he?” Obilot said.

“Maybe.” That thought had been uppermost in Garivald’s mind, too. Almost apologetically, he went on, “I do want to find out, you know.”

“Do you? Are you sure?” Obilot’s voice was harsh, her eyes bleak and far away. “Sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Believe me, you are.”

That was as much as she ever said about what had happened to her before she joined Munderic’s band of irregulars. “I want to find out,” Garivald repeated. Obilot only shrugged, as if to say she’d done her best to warn him. By then, they were walking into Linnich. Eyes bright with suspicion, women looked up at them from their vegetable plots. Dogs barked. Garivald stooped and picked up a stone, ready to throw it in case any of the dogs did more than bark. None did. The whole scene achingly reminded him of Zossen; only the faces were different.

He had no trouble finding the tavern. It stood by the village square, and was one of the two biggest buildings in Linnich, the other being the smithy across the square from it. The drunk passed out a few feet from the entrance was another strong clue. Garivald could have seen men drunk into a stupor in Zossen, too.

“Do you want me to go in and try to get the mule?” Obilot asked once more. “That way, he wouldn’t have to see your face.”

Garivald shook his head. “No. It will be all right.” Obilot looked at him, then shrugged and let him walk into the tavern ahead of her.

His eyes needed a moment to adjust to the gloom and to the smoky air- not all the smoke from the hearth went up the chimney. Four or five men and a couple of women looked up from their mugs to give him and Obilot a onceover. Sure enough, one of them was Dagulf.

Garivald walked up to him, hand outstretched. “You recall your old friend Fariulf, don’t you?” He bore down heavily on the false name he was using; he didn’t want his real one blurted out for everybody to hear.

Dagulf had never been a fool. His eyes narrowed now, but then he smiled and nodded. “Fariulf, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “It’s been awhile. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.” He pointed to Obilot. “Who’s your friend?”

She answered for herself: “I’m Bringane.”

“Bringane,” he repeated. Waving to the fellow behind the bar, he called, “Spirits for my friends here.” The tapman nodded and waved back. Dagulf eyed Garivald. “I really thought youwere dead. What do you want?”

As he sank down onto a stool by Dagulf, Garivald answered, “Somebody told me you’ve got a mule you hire out or that you might sell. I could use one.”

“Could you?” Dagulf said. “Ever since I got out of Zossen, that mule’s helped keep me alive. You have a plow?” He took it for granted that Garivald was working an abandoned farm somewhere.

“No, but I can slap something together,” Garivald answered. “I’ve got enough iron to hammer something into a plowshare, or I could have the smith here do a better job for me. The woodwork is just woodwork; I can handle that. But I can’t plant enough ground to get a decent crop without a mule or an ox.”

“I might hire him to you,” Dagulf said. “I won’t sell him. I make more letting him out for a few days at a time.”

He slid silver across the table to the taverner when the man brought mugs for Garivald and Obilot. “Thanks,” Garivald said, and Obilot nodded. After sipping the fiery stuff, Garivald asked, “Whatdid happen in Zossen?”

He phrased it no more directly than that, but Dagulf understood what he meant. “The redheads dug in, that’s what. They had a few behemoths and maybe a company’s worth of men, and they made a stand. I was lucky: I was out chopping wood when our heroes hit ‘em.” He sounded patriotic, not sarcastic-that was the safe way to sound. “I had the mule along to haul the wood back, but I got the blazes out of there instead. From what I hear, nothing’s left of the old village.”

“That’s true. I’ve seen it.” Garivald gulped his spirits and then slammed a fist down on the table. Obilot set a hand on his shoulder. He wanted to shake her off, but he didn’t. Scowling at Dagulf, he said, “Curse it, I was hoping you knew more.”

“Sorry, Gar-Fanuli,”Dagulf said. “I don’t think the news is good, though.” Garivald scowled again, both at the slip and because he didn’t think the news was good, either. Unperturbed, Dagulf went on, “Now, do you want to hire the mule or not?”

They haggled for a while. Garivald let Obilot take most of the burden. She was better at dickering than he was, anyhow. And his heart wasn’t in the haggle. To have his hopes of learning what had happened to his wife and children raised, raised and then not fulfilled… it was very hard indeed. Obilot got a bargain with Dagulf. Garivald knew he should have been pleased, but all he wanted to do was drink himself blind.

But that is not possible!” the Kuusaman mage said in classical Kaunian rather less fluent than Fernao’s. Plainly, he wasn’t so used to speaking the international language of sorcery and scholarship. A practical mage out in the provinces wouldn’t have to use it very often. Gathering himself-and perhaps also gathering the vocabulary he needed-he went on, “It violates every known law of magecraft.”

Six or eight other Kuusaman wizards in the class of twenty nodded in solemn agreement. Most of the rest looked as if they agreed, too, even if they were too polite to say so. A class full of Lagoan mages hearing similar things would have been an argument. A class full of Algarvian mages hearing similar things would have been a riot.

Fernao was glad, then-mostly glad, at any rate-to be teaching stolid Kuusamans. Smiling, he said, “Some of the laws now known are not the ones you learned when you were training.” Since gray streaked the Kuusaman’s hair, he might well have trained back before the Six Years’ War.

He looked indignant nonetheless. “If what you say is true, why has none of this been published? It is too important to be kept a secret.”

“No, sir.” Fernao shook his head. “It is too important to be published. What would the Algarvians have done, had they got their hands on a couple of journal articles?”

To his astonishment, the Kuusaman got to his feet and bowed. “You are correct. I was mistaken. Please go on.” He sat down again.

Iwould never have heard that from Lagoans, Fernao thought. No one has heard that from Algarvians since the beginning of the world. They’re always right. If you don’t believe it, just ask them.

He brought himself back to the business at hand. “Gentlemen, ladies”- not quite half the sorcerers in the class were women-”you do not need to learn much of the theory behind what you will be doing. In fact, if would be better if you did not, because what you do not know, you cannot tell the enemy if captured. You will need to know how to cast the spells as given to you, how to protect yourself from the things likeliest to go wrong, and how to teach these same things to classes of your own. You are the first cadre. Many more will come after you.”

Some of the mages dutifully wrote that in their notebooks. The notebooks stayed in the lecture hall-a part of the hostel of whose existence Fernao had been ignorant till the classes began, and one that showed good planning on the Kuusamans’ part. No one took anything in writing out of that hall.

“We shall try small demonstrations today,” Fernao continued. “Even the smallest will show the large amounts of sorcerous energy that can be liberated by exploiting the inverse relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.”

He went through the chant and passes in the demonstration, working slowly and carefully to show the students how the spell operated and also to make sure he didn’t slip up. Even with this toned-down spell, a mistake could be dangerous.

A glass beaker of water suddenly began to boil. A couple of the Kuusamans applauded. Fernao felt he ought to bow, as if he were a stage conjurer rather than a real wizard. Instead, he said, “As you see, I produced the desired result with much less effort than I would have had to use with more conventional sorcery. Now each of you will try it. Kaleva, please come forward.”

As the woman rose and walked up behind the counter, Fernao set up the sorcerous materials she would need, and also put a fresh beaker of water on the stand for her. She went through the spell competently enough, and set the water boiling about as fast as he had. “Very good,” she said. “However strange the theory, itdoes work.”

She’d spoken Kuusaman. “So it does,” Fernao agreed in the same tongue. She gave him a surprised look. “I know some of your speech,” he said, “but this teaching needs me to be precise, so I use classical Kaunian-except for the spells themselves, of course. You did very well.” Switching back to the classical tongue, he went on, “Next, please.” He pointed to the man in the chair next to Kaleva’s.

Everything went well till the seventh mage, another woman, turned the water to ice instead of boiling it. “What did I do wrong?” she asked anxiously.

“I think it was your pass in the second versicle,” Fernao answered. “The motion needs to be across and then under, and I believe you went over with your left hand. Try again, please.” The woman did, and succeeded. After all had gone through the demonstration, Fernao dismissed them and went looking for Pekka.

He found her in the refectory, eating a sandwich made of a round, chewy roll, smoked salmon, a sliced gherkin, and onions. She looked tired. She was teaching practical mages, too, as well as doing the administrative work for the project. She nodded to him as he came up. “Hello,” she said. “You have something on your mind. I can see it.”

“So I do.” Fernao nodded. He looked around. The refectory was crowded with practical mages, a lot of whom he’d never seen before. “When you’re done here, can we go someplace quiet and talk?”

Pekka hesitated. Fernao winced. She hadn’t come knocking at his door after they’d made love that once. He hadn’t knocked on hers, either, however much he’d wanted to. “About what?” she asked at last.

“Something important I don’t want to talk about here,” he answered, “but notthat, in case you were wondering.”

“All right. I trust you.” But Pekka’s voice held doubt-she still had to be wondering whether he’d planned to seduce her when he’d invited her to his chamber. She finished the odorous sandwich in a few bites, took a gulp of tea to wash it down, and stood. “Come to my chamber with me, then.”

When they got there, Pekka sat down on the bed. Fernao would have liked to sit beside her, but didn’t think she would like it if he did. He perched on the stool instead. Even as Pekka raised a questioning eyebrow, he asked, “Why are all the mages we’re training Kuusamans? Why aren’t there any Lagoans?”

“Ah.” Pekka visibly relaxed. Thatwas important, and it had nothing to do with their going to bed with each other. She ticked off points on her fingers. “Item-the spells are in Kuusaman. Until they get translated into classical Kaunian or Lagoan, my folk will have an advantage. Item-even if that weren’t so, your Guild of Mages hasn’t sent any sorcerers for training. Item- the Algarvians would have an easier time planting a spy among Lagoans, because you are also an Algarvic people. Shall I go on?”

Those were all good reasons. Fernao wished he could have argued otherwise. He said, “You do understand why I’m worrying? If your mages all learn these spells and my countrymen don’t, who has the advantage if we quarrel after the war?”

“Aye, I see that,” Pekka answered. “The first two points can and should be addressed. I don’t know how you can help looking like Algarvians, though.” She winked at him.

He grinned; she hadn’t done anything like that since they became lovers, and the only reason he could think of that she hadn’t was that she didn’t want to encourage him. But the grin didn’t last. He said, “If we had more Lagoan mages here, the problem of translating the spells would be smaller. Your people have not seemed to want to let my countrymen join me, though.”

With candor that surprised him, she said, “We aren’t very eager, no. You worry about what Kuusamo might do. Here, we worry about what Lagoas might do.”

“Why?” Fernao asked. “You’re bigger than we are. Nothing we can do will change that.”

“Bigger, aye, but with this spell even a small kingdom will be able to wreak havoc on its neighbors. And”-Pekka’s nose wrinkled-”Lagoans are Lagoans, after all. Who can guess what you people will do next?”

“You’re right, of course.” Fernao slid down off the stool, took two steps forward, gave her a quick kiss, and backed away again while she was still letting out a startled squeak. He was glad his leg had healed enough to let him move fairly fast; she might have hit him had he lingered.

As things were, she shook her head and said, “Fernao,” in such a way that his name couldn’t mean anything but, Iwish you hadn’t done that.

He didn’t wish he hadn’t done it. He wished he’d done more: “Pekka,” he said, and got that into her name, too.

She shook her head. She’d heard what he meant, just as he’d heard her. “It’s no good,” she said. “It’s no good at all.”

“That’s not what you thought then,” Fernao answered. He was in no doubt whatever about that.

Pekka didn’t try to deny it. Instead, she said, “That makes it worse, not better. I was stupid. Now everybody’s life is more complicated than it would have been.”

“But-” Fernao struggled for words. He’d never tried dealing with a woman who’d enjoyed going to bed with him but still didn’t want to do it again.

Pekka shook her head again. “No. Itwas good, but that isn’t enough.” She held up a hand before he could snort in disbelief or do anything else in like vein. “Itisn’t. For you, maybe, but, for one thing, you’re a man, and-”

“Thank you so much,” he said.

She talked right through him: “-and, for another, you’re not a married man. Your life isn’tso much more complicated than it was before. Mine is.”

Fernao started to protest. But what complicated his life, at the moment, was Pekka’s unwillingness to sleep with him again. Somehow, he didn’t think that would impress her.

She sighed and said, “If I weren’t happy with Leino, that would be something different. But I am. It’s just that we were apart too long. Sometimes your body can make you stupid. I think it happens more easily with men, but it happens to women, too.”

“I suppose so,” Fernao said dully. He didn’t much care to be reckoned no more than the object of her stupidity.

Pekka pointed a finger at him. “Maybe we ought to get more Lagoans to the hostel here, after all. I know how Lagoans think about my people. If you had those tall, round Lagoan women here, you wouldn’t look twice at me.”

But now Fernao shook his head. “I started wishing I could meet you back when I was reading your journal articles, before you Kuusamans stopped publishing all of a sudden. It isn’t just that I think you’re beautiful…” He hadn’t quite intended to say that, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Pekka looked down at the floor directly between her feet. In a very small voice, she said, “You’re not making this any easier, you know.”

“I’m sorry.” Fernao shook his head. He wasn’t sorry. He was about as far from sorry as he could be, and wanted to make things as hard as he could. Most of all, he wanted to bed her again, and again, and again, and let whatever happened afterwards take care of itself.

That must have been very plain. Pekka said, “I think you’d better go.” She laughed-briefly. “In the romances, I’d throw yourself into your arms now, either because you were here and my husband wasn’t or because you made me so passionate, I couldn’t help myself. But life isn’t always like the romances. Youdid make me passionate-I’d be lying if I said anything else. It’s not enough, though, and I’m not going to let it be enough. I know where I belong.”

He heard the finality in that. He wished he were so sure of such things. He didn’t see that he could do anything but what she asked now. She looked relieved when he got up and started for the door. Relieved he was going? Or relieved he wasn’t making her make hard choices? He wished he could believe the latter. Every fiber of him wanted to. Every nerve ending he had told him he’d be wrong if he did.

If only I hadn’tbeen after anything but seducing her, he thought as his hand fell on the latch. But if there were two more dismal words thanif only in Lagoan-or Kuusaman, or classical Kaunian, or any other language-he was cursed if he knew what they were.

A band stood on the deck of theHabakkuk, thumping away in the emphatic style the Kaunian kingdoms favored. To Leino, the Jelgavan royal hymn sounded like a lot of raucous noise. Not far away from him, Xavega twisted her face into a sneer. She looked pretty even while sneering, no mean feat. Ireally have been away from Pekka too long, Leino thought.

But looking at Xavega was more pleasant than looking atKingDonalitu of Jelgava, whose presence aboard theHabakkuk occasioned the band. Donalitu was pudgy and graying. Neither his face nor his body seemed to match the splendid, dazzlingly bemedaled uniform he wore.

Xavega sneered atKingDonalitu, too. Lagoas might be at war with Algarve, but that didn’t mean Lagoans loved and admired folk of Kaunian blood, any more than they loved and admired Kuusamans. As far as Leino could see, Lagoans loved and admired nobody but other Lagoans, and often not too many of them.

He didn’t love or particularly admireXavega. All I want to do is get it in, he thought. She started to glance toward him. He looked away. He didn’t want to see her sneer aimed at him. He knew it would be, but he didn’t want to see it.

CaptainBrunho, who commanded theHabakkuk, was also a Lagoan, which meant he towered more than half a head over Leino. He ledKingDon-alitu up to the Kuusaman mage and spoke in classical Kaunian: “Your Majesty, I present to you Leino of Kajaani, one of the sorcerers who designed and created this ship here.”

Leino bowed. “I am honored to meet you, your Majesty,” he said. It was at least theoretically true.

The exiled King of Jelgava looked him over. By Donalitu’s expression, what he saw didn’t much impress him-he could have given Xavega lessons in sneering. He said, “So you will help me get my throne back? You will help drive the filthy, barbarous usurper from the high place that is not his?”

“Uh, I will do what I can, your Majesty,” Leino said. Beside Donalitu, CaptainBrunho turned a dull red: the color of hot iron. When Donalitu called Algarvians filthy barbarians, he also indirectly called Lagoans-his protectors, and another Algarvic people-filthy barbarians. He seemed unaware that might prove a problem. Odds were he’d been unaware of it ever since going into exile. Leino had no intention of being the one to enlighten him.

Donalitu said, “What good is this big icy boat? I hope I shall not catch cold here.”

Now Leino suspectedhe was turning a dull red. By all appearances, no one had ever taught Donalitu anything resembling manners. Maybe kings didn’t need them, though Leino had his doubts about that. Keeping a careful grip on his temper, he replied,“Habakkuk can carry many more dragons than any ordinary ship, your Majesty. This ship is also harder to damage than any of the ordinary sort.”

“But it will melt,” Donalitu exclaimed.

Patiently, Leino said, “Not if we have mages refreshing the ice-and we do.” Maybe no one had ever taughtKingDonalitu to think, either.

Donalitu turned toCaptainBrunho and said, “I shall be glad to go back aboard a proper ship, a natural ship, when this inspection is done.”

“Aye, your Majesty.” Brunho’s face and voice were wooden.

Leino held his face straight, too, though it wasn’t easy. Donalitu assumed an iron ship was a natural ship. What kind of sense did that make, when ice floated and iron sank? He almost said as much, but somehow managed to keep his mouth shut.

CaptainBrunholed the King of Jelgava off to inspect the dragonfliers and their mounts. With any luck at all, a dragon will bite off his head, Leino thought. That would do his kingdom some good. As soon asKingDonalitu was out of earshot, or perhaps rather sooner, Xavega said something in Lagoan. The mages who spoke her language snickered. Not wanting to be left out, Leino asked, “What was that?” in classical Kaunian.

“I said, ‘What a horrid, stupid little man,’ “ she replied in the same tongue. In her loathing of Donalitu, she was willing to treat Leino as an equal. It was the first time she’d done that since the Algarvian leviathan-rider planted an egg on theHabakkuk. Plainly, she needed something drastic.

After what seemed like forever, KingDonalitu left the iceberg-turned-dragon-hauler. He went down a rope ladder into a little patrol boat that took him back to the ley-line cruiser-the iron ship, the natural ship, Leino thought with amusement-in which he’d come out to visitHabakkuk. The cruiser sped away.

Leino waved after it. “Good-bye!” he called in classical Kaunian. “With any luck, we shall never see you again. Good-bye!”

“May it be so!” Xavega said. She beamed-she actually beamed-at Leino. His hopes, or something close to his hopes, rose. Common sense quashed that. Xavega’s smile wasn’t likely to show how much she liked him. It would show how much she despised Donalitu of Jelgava.

CaptainBrunhocame up behind them. “That will be enough of that,” he said. “That will be more than enough of that, in fact.”

“He insulted you, he insulted the ship, he insulted all of us, he is a moron,” Xavega snarled. “Are we supposed to put our lips on his posterior?”

“He is a king. He is an ally. He deserves respect,” Brunho said formally.

“Powers below eat him,” Xavega said. “Even Leino here could tell he is more like a leg of mutton than a proper man.”

A leg of mutton? Leino wondered. Maybe it was a Lagoan insult, translated literally. Maybe it just meant Xavega’s command of classical Kaunian wasn’t quite so good as she thought it was. Whatever it was, Leino felt he had to say something, and did: “The land of the Seven Princes would be ashamed to have him as one of the Seven.”

“You are welcome to your opinion,” Brunho said. “You are not welcome to express it on my ship, not where others can hear it, not where it can affect the morale of my crew.”

“You would not have a ship-you would not havethis ship-if it were not for us mages,” Xavega pointed out.

“That is true. But I do have it now.”

Maybe such relentless precision made Brunho a good captain. For his sake, forHabakkuk ’s sake, Leino hoped so. Nevertheless, he observed, “Bringing King Donalitu aboard will do more to hurt morale than I could if I talked for a month.”

Xavega laughed and clapped her hands and nodded. CaptainBrunho stared down at Leino out of cold green eyes. “This was done at the command of my sovereign, KingVitor. I prefer his opinion to yours.” He swung that disapproving stare toward Xavega. “KingVitoris your sovereign, too, in case you have forgotten.”

“I remember perfectly well,” she snapped. “But if he approves of that Donalitu creature, he has less in the way of taste than I would have thought.” She flounced off. Leino watched her do it. He watched carefully.

CaptainBrunhowas made of stern stuff-he kept his attention on Leino. “You mages are an insubordinate lot,” he said.

“Thank you,” Leino answered. Whatever Brunho had been expecting by way of a reply, that wasn’t it. He spun on his heel-carefully, so as not to fall on the icy deck of theHabakkuk -and stalked away.

Before long, Leino went below to serve a shift fightingHabakkuk ’s unfortunate tendency to melt. That tendency was more in evidence than ever lately, as the ship cruised the ley lines in warmer, more northerly waters. Without constant attention from mages, Habakkuk would have ceased to be. We aren‘t too insubordinate to keep you from swimming, CaptainBrunho, Leino thought.

Xavega was also part of this anti-melting shift. The magecraft, by now, was routine, though it hadn’t been when Leino helped develop it down in the land of the Ice People. The sorcerers didn’t need to give it all their attention; they could gossip while they worked.

“A pity we have Donalitu for an ally,” Xavega said. “He would make a much better enemy.”

“He does think the world of himself, does he not?” Ramalho said, shaking his head. The Lagoan mage continued, “He thinks the world spins around him, too.”

“If you told him that back in Jelgava, you would have ended up in one of his dungeons faster than you could blink,” Essi remarked. Her hands never faltered in the passes she needed to support the spell.

“All the more reason for throwing him into one of those dungeons himself.” Xavega stopped reviling Donalitu in classical Kaunian long enough to chant her portion of the spell that keptHabakkuk solid-also in classical Kaunian.

“He is a useful tool against Algarve,” Ramalho said. “His countrymen dote on him.”

“Which only goes to prove Jelgavans are not so smart as they would have other people believe,” Leino said.

The other mages chuckled. Xavega said, “No one who has Donalitu for a king could be very smart. And if our preciousCaptainBrunho cannot see that, may the powers below eat him.” To Leino’s surprise, she nodded his way. “You could see it, whether Brunho could or not. Thank you for trying to get him to be sensible.”

“Er-you are welcome,” Leino answered in some surprise. She’d actually talked to him in friendly fashion. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. For a moment, he couldn’t imagine why she’d done it. But that didn’t take long to figure out. He’d agreed with her about Donalitu, and he’d said as much toCaptainBrunho ’s face. What could be more calculated to endear him to her than agreement? Nothing he could think of offhand.

As if to confirm that calculation, Xavega went on, “I had not realized you were such a sensible man.” The look she gave him was frankly appraising.

“I do my best to hide it,” Leino said, which made her laugh out loud. If I’m so sensible, why do I want to flip up her kilt? But there was more than one kind of sense, and he knew it. Bedding a good-looking woman needed no fancy justifications. It was its own best argument.

He performed his share of the maintenance spell with casual competence.

His eyes kept sliding Xavega’s way. Hers kept meeting his, and she wasn’t looking at him as if she wanted to go wash her hands afterwards any more, either. Was it really that easy? he wondered. Did I just have to make her think I thought she was right, to make her forget I’m a Kuusaman? He wasn’t used to people who responded so simply.

Do I really want anything to do with somebody who responds so simply? If Pekka were here… If Pekka were there, Xavega wouldn’t have done anything but amuse him. He was sure of that. But Pekka was far away, and had been for quite a while. Every time Leino looked at Xavega, and every time he caught her looking at him, he was reminded of just how long he’d been away from his wife.

Xavega was never one to beat around the bush. When the shift ended, she waited for Leino in the corridor. “I was wrong about you,” she announced.

“Oh?” His heart pounded. “How?”

“I never thought Kuusaman men could be so… interesting,” she said.

Sure enough, I agreed with her, Leino marveledThat was all I needed to do. It was probably all he should have done, too. Part of him knew it, anyhow. But that wasn’t the part that said, “Now that we have spent all this time keepingHabakkuk solid, will you come to my cabin and see how much ice we can melt?”

She couldn’t very well misunderstand that. If she didn’t care for it, she’d slap him across the icy hallway. Instead, she said, “Aye,” and set her hand in his. I’ll be sorry for this later, Leino thought. But that would be later. Now… Now he hurried toward the cabin, Xavega at his side.

“Leave?” The Algarvian lieutenant stared at Sidroc. “You want leave?”

“Aye, sir,” Sidroc answered stolidly. Speaking the redheads’ language, he had to be stolid; he wasn’t all that fluent. “I have had none since I came to Unkerlant more than a year and a half ago.”

“Have any of your comrades had leave?” his company commander asked, and Sidroc had to shake his head. The Algarvian went on, “There are two ways to stop fighting here in the west. You can be wounded. Then you stop long enough for them to repair you. Or you can die. But if they could call you back from that, believe me, they would. Now go back go your squad and stop troubling me with foolish notions. Have you got that?”

“Aye, sir,” Sidroc repeated. Back to his squad he went.

Ceorl was stirring the stewpot. He looked up. “Well?”

“Two ways to get leave,” Sidroc reported. “You can get wounded, or you can get killed. Otherwise, forget it.”

“Told you so,”SergeantWerferth said. “They’re going to use us up. That’s what we’re here for. I’d hate it even worse if they didn’t treat their own soldiers the same way.”

“Wonderful.” Speaking Forthwegian, Sidroc had no trouble sounding as sarcastic as he pleased. “I want to go home for a while, curse it. I’d come back.”

“Of course you would,” Werferth said. “It’s not like anybody except our own kin loves us back there-and even some of them don’t.”

“Futter ‘em all,” Ceorl said, giving the pot another stir.

“Futter ‘em all is right,” Sidroc muttered. The trouble was, Werferth was also right. Most Forthwegians had no great use for either the Algarvians or the men from Forthweg who’d taken service in Plegmund’s Brigade. “Ungrateful whoresons. If it weren’t for the redheads, we’d still be stuck with all those stinking Kaunians back in our own kingdom.”

“Well, that’s the truth.” Ceorl always sounded surprised when he agreed with Sidroc. He tasted the stew and nodded. “It’s as good as it’ll get, not that that’s saying much.”

Sidroc dug out his mess kit. Ceorl filled the tin tray with carrots and turnips and onions and bits of meat. “What is this stuff?” Sidroc asked, prodding one of those bits with his spoon. “Unicorn? Horsemeat?”

“No, it’s mutton,” Ceorl said. Sidroc laughed in his face. The ruffian grinned back, unabashed. “Well, close, anyhow. It’s goat.”

After tasting and chewing-after chewing for quite a while-Sidroc nodded. “All right, I’ll believe that. It must have been in the pot a good long time. It’s not too gamy, and it’s all the way down to tough.”

Werferth methodically emptied his mess kit. “Next to some of the stuff we’ve eaten, this is downright good. Remember that behemoth that had gone over?” He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Which one?” Sidroc asked. His own tin was almost empty, too. “It’s not like we’ve only done it once.”

Werferth laughed. So did Ceorl. After a moment, so did Sidroc. Werferth said, “Ah, the happy stories we’ll have to tell our grandchildren.”

That made Ceorl laugh harder than ever-harder than the joke deserved, as far as Sidroc was concerned. He asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Grandchildren,” Ceorl answered. “Who’s dumb enough to think we’ll live long enough to have kids, let alone grandchildren?”

“Oh.” That brought Sidroc back to earth-to the muddy earth of Unkerlant-with a bump. It wasn’t that Ceorl was wrong. Ceorl was too likely to be right. Sidroc turned to Werferth. “See, Sergeant, there’s another reason I need leave. I should have told the lieutenant. How am I going to meet a girl in this miserable country?”

“Drag one down on the floor and have a couple of your pals hold her,” Werferth said. “It’s not like we haven’t done that before, either.”

“Curse it, that’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Sidroc said. “Even if we do father brats on these Unkerlanter women, we’ll never find out about it. I want to meet a nice girl, settle down-if I live, I mean.”

“If you don’t, you won’t have to worry about it, that’s bloody sure.” Ceorl laughed again, nastily, showing off bad teeth.

AndSergeantWerferth let out the grunt he used to show his patience had run short. “Powers above, Sidroc, you come home from the war, what in blazes makes you think a nice girl’d want anything to do with you?”

This time, Ceorl practically wet himself, he thought that was so funny. Sidroc started to scowl at Werferth, then carefully made his face blank instead. You’ll pay for that, Sergeant, powers below eat you -and they will. Aye, you’ll pay. It’ll look just like an accident, or like the Unkerlanters got you. Plenty of chances to make that happen.

He went off to a little stream not far away to clean out his mess kit. By the time he got back, his face wasn’t even blank any more. He looked like his usual self instead. If he seethed inside, nobody needed to know it. In fact, Werferth needed not to know it, or Sidroc wouldn’t get his chance. Werferth hadn’t lived long enough for gray to streak his beard by being careless.

“Behemoths!” The cry made everybody in Plegmund’s Brigade who heard it grab for his stick. Sidroc was no slower than any of his comrades. He might want to make something unfortunate happen toSergeantWerferth, but he didn’t want the Unkerlanters to make anything unfortunate happen to him.

Here came the thump of the great beasts’ feet against the ground, the rattle and clank of their chainmail. Panic seized him-the noise came from the east, from the direction he’d thought safe. If Swemmel’s soldiers had managed to bring behemoths into the rear of Plegmund’s Brigade… If they’ve done that, we ‘re all dead men right now, and I won’t have to worry about killing Werferth because they’ll take care of it for me -and they’ll get me while they’re at it.

Then somebody let out another shout, this one holding nothing but relief: “They’reour behemoths, powers above be praised!”

Sure enough, the behemoths that tramped into the clearing had Algarvians atop them. The redheads looked as nervous about encountering the men of Plegmund’s Brigade as the Forthwegians did at their unexpected appearance. “You boys look too much like Unkerlanters for your own good,” one of them called.

“Your behemoths look too much like Unkerlanter beasts foryour own good,” a trooper retorted.

Sidroc nodded, but then hesitated-that proved true only at first glance. It wasn’t only that Algarvian behemoth armor differed from what the Unkerlanters used. But the behemoths themselves seemed different. After a moment, he figured out how and why. “They’re young beasts,” he blurted.

An Algarvian on one of those behemoths heard him and nodded. “If the world were a perfect place, we’d leave ‘em on the farm for another year- maybe for another two years,” he said. “But the world’s not perfect. Ready or not, they’re got to go into the fight.”

Thinking back on all the behemoths Algarve had left dead on the field on both sides of the Durrwangen bulge, Sidroc nodded. True, the Unkerlanters had also lost a lot of behemoths there. But Unkerlant seemed to have plenty left. The same didn’t hold true for Algarve.

“Er-whereis the fight?” Sidroc’s company commander asked. He should have been left on the farm a while longer, too, but here he was.

“Didn’t they tell you?” asked a fellow on behemothback, and the young lieutenant shook his head. So did the behemoth crewman, who went on, “We’re supposed to make sure Swemmel’s buggers don’t cross over the river line. What do they call that river? The Fliss?”

“No, the Fluss,” the Algarvian lieutenant said. “But the Unkerlanters already have a bridgehead on this side.”

Now the men on the behemoths cursed. “Nobody bothered telling us that,” one of them said. “It’s a demon of a lot harder to dig them out of a bridgehead than it is to keep them from getting one in the first place.”

That was only too true. Sidroc wondered if the Algarvians would call off the attack on realizing they were walking into a saw blade. No such luck; Mezentio’s men didn’t seem to think that way. Sidroc’s company commander said, “We’ll do our duty, of course.”

“Let’s go do it, then, or try.” The behemoth crewman looked up to the heavens as if he were a Gyongyosian. “They don’t let us know the bridgehead’s already in place? Powers above, sometimes you’d think they really want us to get killed.”

“Forward!” said the lieutenant with Plegmund’s Brigade. He didn’t blow his whistle, which proved he had some measure of sense.

Forward Sidroc went. He’d probed Unkerlanter bridgeheads before. Going after one of them was like grabbing a porcupine. But then Ceorl said, “We’ll better drive ‘em back over the river if we can. If we don’t, they’ll flood men through and swarm all over us. They’ve done it before, the whoresons.”

Sidroc wished he could have disagreed. Unfortunately, the ruffian was right. Sidroc eyed a spot on the back ofSergeantWerferth ’s tunic. Right about there, he thought. Aye, right about there, especially if they drive us back. It’ll look like one of their beams.

The Unkerlanters were indeed on the eastern side of the Fluss, and there in greater numbers than even the men of Plegmund’s Brigade had thought. They had behemoths on this side of the Fluss, too, behemoths that promptly got into a brawl with their Algarvian counterparts and made the Algarvian beasts useless for spearheading any further advance.

“We have to do it ourselves,” Sidroc said bitterly. “Isn’t that how it always works? Whenever they find a tough job, who do they hand it to? Us, that’s who.”

“They’d sooner spend us than their own men,” Werferth said, as he had before. Sidroc came close to forgiving him for that-close, but not close enough.

Before long, the Unkerlanters proved to have enough behemoths on this side of the river not only to keep the Algarvian behemoths in play but also to mount attacks of their own. They lumbered forward to toss eggs at Sidroc and his comrades at a range from which the Forthwegians couldn’t reply. Sidroc went to earth, digging himself in behind a fallen tree. The other men of Plegmund’s Brigade were quick to do the same.

On came the Unkerlanter behemoths, footsoldiers trotting along behind. “Those men on foot should be up farther,”SergeantWerferth said from close by Sidroc, as if the Unkerlanters were his troops. “We’re going to make them pay.”

Sidroc intended to make them pay. He waited quietly in his hole till an incautious behemoth drew too close. Then he flung one of the little pottery-encased sorcerous eggs the Algarvians had been issuing lately. As he’d hoped, it landed right under the behemoth, rolling beneath the animal’s armored skirt before bursting. Mad with pain and fear, the behemoth rampaged back the way it had come, trampling a luckless footsoldier who stood in its path.

Other Unkerlanter footsoldiers started blazing at Sidroc when he stayed up too long to admire his handiwork. Werferth knocked him down. “Back in your hole, sonny boy,” the veteran said. “We’ll need you next time around.”

“Right,” Sidroc said. “Thanks, Sergeant.” Only after the words were out of his mouth did he remember how angry at Werferth he was supposed to be. He shrugged. He didn’thave to do anything about it now. If he decided he still wanted to later, he could take care of it. He’d have more chances. He was sure of that.

LieutenantLeudastsprang to one side, away from the wounded behemoth that now ran wild, far out of its crew’s control. Trailing blood, the behemoth thundered west, back toward the Fluss River. It would keep spreading chaos through the Unkerlanter bridgehead till its injuries made it fall over or till someone finally killed it.

“Steady, men!” Leudast called. “Keep up the advance. We can do it.”

In spite of his words, the Unkerlanter counterattack faltered. The Algarvians and their Forthwegian flunkies weren’t going to be able to smash in the bridgehead and drive his countrymen back over the river. That much seemed clear. The enemy lacked both men and behemoths for the job. But no breakthrough was coming here, either, not until more Unkerlanter men and beasts and egg-tossers made it over the Fluss.

Little by little, both sides realized they wouldn’t accomplish much, and the fighting tapered off. What point to risking your neck when getting killed wouldn’t get you victory? What point to risking your neck even when getting killed willget you victory? Leudast wondered. He shook his head. That was a subversive thought for a soldier to have.

SergeantKiunsaid, “I don’t like fighting those fornicating Forthwegians for beans. For one thing, they always fight hard.”

“They’re volunteers,” Leudast answered. “They aren’t conscripts, the way the redheads are.” He didn’t mention how impressers went through Unkerlanter villages herding young men into Swemmel’s army. He didn’t need to mention it. He’d joined the army that way. So, very likely, had Kiun, and so, very likely, had most of the men they led.

“Other thing is,” Kiun went on, “they look more like us and they dress more like us than the Algarvians do. That means you’re liable not to figure out who they are till too late.”

“That’s so,” Leudast said. “It’s not as bad as with the Grelzers, but it’s so.”

“Grelzers.” Kiun rolled his eyes. “May we see the last of the stinking traitors, and soon.”

Leudast nodded. He hadn’t had anything in particular against the folk of the Duchy of Grelz before entering it. All he’d known about them was that they had what was, in his ear, a funny accent. Capturing Raniero, the redhead who’d called himself their king, had won him wealth and rank, no matter what it had done to Raniero himself afterKingSwemmel paraded him through Herborn.

But fighting Grelzers… At the beginning of the war through the Duchy, some of the men who wore the dark green tunics of what called itself the Kingdom of Grelz had been halfhearted about fighting their Unkerlanter brethren. A good many had thrown down their sticks and surrendered the first chance they got.

That didn’t happen anymore. With most of Grelz inKingSwemmel ’s hands these days, the Grelzers who kept on fighting against him were the ones who’d joined the late, not much lamented Raniero because they hated the King of Unkerlant with a deep and abiding passion, not because they’d been looking for advantage from the Algarvians. Few of the ones who wore dark green these days bothered trying to surrender. Few of the ones who did yield went back to captives’ camps.

With a sly grin, Kiun said, “Bet you almost wouldn’t’ve minded getting chased back over the Fluss, Lieutenant.”

“You can’t say things like that,” Leudast answered, which didn’t mean the underofficer was wrong.

“I just thought you’d like to get back to Leiferde and your lady friend there,” Kiun said, his smile disarming now. “I’ve got a lady friend back there myself, matter of fact.”

“Have you?” Leudast said, and Kiun nodded. “I didn’t think you meant anything you shouldn’t have,” Leudast continued, “but you never can tell who may be listening.”

Kiun’s grimace said he understood exactly what Leudast meant. KingSwemmel saw traitors everywhere. That he saw so many had helped create a good many here in the Duchy of Grelz. It had probably helped create a good many elsewhere in Unkerlant, too. But any Swemmel could reach suffered for it: a potent argument against treason.

Captain Recared, the regimental commander, came up to Leudast. “I think things here have settled down for a while,” he said.

“Aye, sir.” Leudast nodded. “Just one more little fight.”One more little fight I’m lucky I lived through. How many didn ‘t this time? How many have I got left?

“We’ve held the bridgehead,” Recared went on, and Leudast nodded again. His superior said, “That’s what really matters. Sooner or later, we’ll break out and give the Algarvians another good kick in the teeth.”

“We’ve given them a lot of kicks, the past year and a half,” Leudast said. “Feels good to be the foot and not the backside.”

Recared laughed. He’d seemed impossibly young when he first took command of the regiment where Leudast commanded a company. His features were still youthful-he couldn’t have been much above twenty years old- but he’d been through a lot since then, just as all Unkerlanter soldiers had. All of us who are still breathing, anyhow, Leudast thought.

“You saw how they threw a few behemoths at us and tried to make them count for a lot,” Recared said. “That’s what they’re reduced to these days. They’re still dangerous-I expect they’ll always be dangerous-but we can beat them.”

They’re still dangerous-but we can beat them. Almost three years before, Leudast had been near the border between Unkerlanter and Algarvian-occupied Forthweg. He and his comrades had been on the point of attacking the Algarvians, but the redheads struck first. After that, Leudast had done nothing but retreat for a long time, till Mezentio’s men finally stalled in the snow of an Unkerlanter winter just outside Cottbus.

He’d done more retreating the following summer, down in the south, and missed some of the fight in Sulingen because he’d been down with a leg wound that still pained him now and again. But he’d come a long way east since then.

They’re still dangerous-but we can beat them. It would have seemed absurd in the days when the Algarvians swept all before them. Now it was simply truth.

“Do you know what I wish, sir?” Leudast asked.

“Probably,” Recared answered. “You wish you were back on the other side of the Fluss, finding some way or other to be alone with that girl you met there. Am I right, or am I wrong?” He chuckled. He knew he was right.

And Leudast could only nod once more. “If I live through the rest of the war, I think I’ll come back here.”

“Who knows whether you’ll think the same way then?” Recared said. “A girl goes to bed with you a few times, you decide you’re in love.” That was cynical enough to have come from an Algarvian’s throat. Before Leudast could say anything or even shake his head, the regimental commander changed the subject: “Do you know, Lieutenant, we’ve been promised a new field kitchen, and it never did show up.”

“Sir?” Leudast said blankly; this was the first he’d heard about a field kitchen. It was news to him that the Unkerlanter army boasted such things. In the field, even the Algarvians mostly cooked catch as catch can.

But Captain Recared nodded. “I’ve sent complaints west by crystallomancer, but you know what that’s worth. They might as well be written on the air. I really need someone to look into it. Why don’t you commandeer a horse or a mule or a unicorn and go raise a stink?”

“Me, sir?” Leudast squeaked. “I’m just a-”

“You’re a lieutenant,” Recared said. “And you’re not justa lieutenant. MarshalRathar personally promoted you, and everybody knows why. You’ll have my written authorization, too. I’ll make sure you take it with you.” He smiled a small, thoughtful smile. “The cursed thing is supposed to be somewhere not too far from a wide spot in the road called Leiferde. I expect you’ll be able to track it down in those parts, eh?”

Leudast stared at him. Recared looked back. No, he wasn’t so young and innocent as he had been. “Thank you, sir,” Leudast said.

“For what?” Recared answered. “You came back with that field kitchen and I’ll thank you. With it or without it, be back here in three days.”

“Aye, sir.” Leudast saluted. Leiferde was about a day away. That would leave him a day-or whatever was left of a day after he chased after a field kitchen{was there one somewhere near Alize’s village?)-to do what he pleased. And he knew exactly what he pleased. “Let me round up a mount…” He wasn’t much of a rider, but he would manage. After all, he had an incentive.

“You do that.” Recared sounded professionally brisk. “While you’re doing it, I’ll prepare your orders.”

Leudast took charge of a horse that had been pulling a wagon now down with a broken axle. Getting riding gear took rather longer than scaring up the animal. He felt very high off the ground when he rode back to Recared.

“Here you are,” Recared said. “Now you’re official. Go find that field kitchen-and whatever else you happen to find around Leiferde.” That was as close as he came to admitting he knew Leudast might have anything else in mind.

Saluting again, Leudast rode off. He wanted to boot the horse up to a gallop, to get to Alize’s village as fast as he could. Only the accurate suspicion that he would fall off on his head long before he got to Leiferde kept him at a more sedate pace.

Unkerlanter artisans had thrown a couple of quick bridges of precut lengths of timber across the Fluss. Military constables stood at the eastern end of the one Leudast approached. They inspected the order Recared had given him, then nodded and stood aside. “Pass on, Lieutenant,” one of them said, and grudged him a salute. “Youare authorized.” He sounded as if he’d turned back plenty who weren’t. He probably had.

More artisans were bringing up the timbers for another bridge. Leudast waved to them as he headed west past their wagons. He neared Leiferde early the next morning, after sleeping rolled in his cloak by the side of the road. Before going into the village, he went to the supply dump in search of the possibly mythical field kitchen.

To his amazement, he found a sergeant who knew what he was talking about. “Aye, Lieutenant, your regimental commander’s been bending everybody’s ear about the cursed thing,” the fellow said. “We’re bloody short of draft animals, is the trouble. You can haul it away with your horse there right now, if you want to.”

“I’ve got some other business on this side of the Fluss I need to take care of first,” Leudast said. “I’ll be back for it tomorrow morning.”

“Suits me,” the supply sergeant said. “It’ll be ready and waiting.”

It suited Leudast, too. He mounted the horse and rode into Leiferde. Most of the peasants ignored him: what was one more soldier, after so many?

He found Alize weeding the vegetable plot by her father’s house. She let out a squeal of delight and sprang to her feet. “What are youdoing here?” she asked.

He grinned. “I was in the neighborhood, so I just thought I’d drop by.”