Out of the Darkness

Ten

Sakarnu hadn’t been back to Pavilosta since not long before escaping from Merkela’s farm one jump ahead of the Algarvians. Whenever he’d gone into the village before, he’d played the role of a peasant. No, he’d done more than play the role: he’d lived it. He still had the calluses to prove it.

Now, though, he and Merkela and little Gedominu wouldn’t be living at the farm. They would be moving into the castle where the traitor Count Enkuru and his son and successor, the traitor Count Simanu, had dwelt. First, though, there was the matter of formally installing Skarnu as the rightful overlord for the marquisate (newly elevated, by royal decree, from a county).

He asked Merkela, “Are you sure you don’t mind having Raunu take over your farm?”

She shook her head. “I’m just surprised he wanted it. You city people don’t usually have the first notion of what to do out in the country.”

She hadn’t had the first notion of what to do in the city, but Skarnu didn’t press her about that. Instead, he said, “Well, you gave Raunu-and me-a good many lessons, and I think this woman he’s sweet on will teach him a good deal more.”

His old sergeant had found a farm widow, just as he had himself. Raunu’s lady friend was a few years older and a good deal more placid than Merkela. She seemed to suit him well. A lot of widows to choose from, Skarnu thought. Too many to choose from. Too many men dead.

At the edge of Pavilosta’s market square, an enterprising taverner had set up a table with mugs of ale and a selection of news sheets from bigger towns: the village couldn’t support one itself. He waved to Skarnu, calling, “I always knew you were more than what you seemed.”

And Skarnu dutifully waved back. That wasn’t easy. He’d been drinking ale at that table and idly going through a news sheet when he saw that his sister was keeping company with an Algarvian. And now I’ve got a bastard for a nephew, he thought with a sigh. And now it will be a long, long time before anybody will be able to look at Krasta without remembering that. How long does disgrace last?

It had lasted long enough for most of her servants to have deserted her and come out to the countryside with Skarnu and Merkela. That suited Skarnu well. He didn’t know the servitors who’d worked for his predecessors. Maybe they were all right. Maybe they’d collaborated as enthusiastically as Enkuru and Simanu had.

Of course, the servants from the mansion had had redheads there, too. And Bauska had a little girl with hair the same color as that of Krasta’s baby boy. Not many people in Valmiera had completely clean hands these days.

I do, he thought. Merkela does. The only trouble is, she doesn‘t want to yield even an inch to anyone who doesn’t. He sighed. He could see years of trouble ahead for the kingdom from quarrels like that.

But today wasn’t a day to dwell on troubles. “Coming back to Pavilosta feels good,” he said.

“I should hope so,” Merkela answered. “I don’t see how you stood living in Priekule for so long.”

“All what you’re used to,” Skarnu said. But he’d had a couple of years to get used to living in this part of southern Valmiera. The thought of spending a good many years here didn’t horrify him, as it would have before the war.

People from Pavilosta, the nearby village of Adutiskis, and the farms on the countryside in the area packed the market square. A good many of them waved to Skarnu as he and Merkela made their way through the crowd toward the traditional seat of installation. Every so often, he would spot someone he knew and wave back. Had he stayed in these parts as a peasant, the locals would have reckoned him that fellow who’s not from around here till the day he died. They would probably say the same thing about him as a marquis-but they might not say it so loud.

A band struck up a thumping tune. Merkela drew herself straight with pride. “That’s the count’s air,” she said, and then corrected herself: “No, I mean the marquis’ air, don’t I?” She squeezed Skarnu’s hand.

He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss. “See what you get for taking in strange men who come stumbling out of the woods?”

“I never thought it would come to this,” she said. Whether that meant marrying him or coming back to Pavilosta in such style, he didn’t know and didn’t ask. The two of them had finally made their way up to the seat, which was in fact two seats, one facing one way, one the other.

Skarnu sat down in the seat facing west, towards Algarve. That symbolized the feudal lord’s duty to defend the peasantry against invasion. No doubt, in years gone by, it had been only one more formality in this ceremony. But, with the redheads only a few months gone from Valmiera, opposing them took on a new urgency. And people hereabouts knew Skarnu had been part of the underground. He really had done what he could to fight Mezentio’s men. Murmurs of approval and even a few cheers rang out as he took his seat.

A peasant from just outside of Adutiskis sat in the other half of the ceremonial seat. Counts-and now a marquis-were traditionally installed in Pavilosta, so the other village provided the second actor in the drama. “Congratulations, your Excellency,” the fellow said in a low voice.

“Thanks,” Skarnu said. “Shall we get on with it?”

“Right you are,” the peasant replied. “You do know how it’s supposed to go?”

“Aye,” Skarnu said, a little impatiently. “For one thing, we’ve rehearsed it a couple of times. And, for another, I was here in the square when Simanu, powers below eat him, made a hash of things.” The collaborator had sat in the west-facing seat, but he’d had plenty of Algarvian officers and soldiers in the square to protect him from the folk whose overlord he was supposed to become.

“That whoreson,” the peasant said. “He deserved every bit of what he got, and more besides. And now, your Excellency, if you’ll excuse me. .” He got to his feet and pushed through the crowd to the edge of the square.

Two cows waited there for him, one plump and sleek, the other distinctly on the scrawny side. He led them back to Skarnu, as another peasant-or perhaps this same fellow? — had led them back to Simanu.

The new overlord was supposed to choose the scrawny cow, showing that he reserved the best for the people living in his domain. Skarnu did. Simanu hadn’t-he’d picked the fat one. Skarnu bent his head and let the peasant give him a light box on the ear, which meant he would attend to the concerns of those who lived under his lordship. Simanu, secure in the knowledge that the Algarvians backed him, hadn’t worried about anything else, and had dealt the peasant a buffet that knocked him sprawling. The riot started immediately thereafter.

He made the redheads hate him, too, Skarnu thought. They wanted peace and quiet in the Valmieran countryside, not trouble. But he was their tool, and they were stuck with him.. till his untimely demise. He’d blazed Simanu himself, which was not the way one noble usually acquired another’s domain.

Loud cheers rang out when Skarnu accepted the lean cow and the buffet. This was the way the ceremony was supposed to go. Skarnu had lived as a farmer long enough to begin to understand how much people who worked the land for a living appreciated it when things went as they were supposed to go.

Now he had to make a speech. He didn’t want to do that; he would sooner have had another box on the ear. But it was part of the ceremony, too, and so he couldn’t escape it. He stood up on that west-facing seat. An expectant hush fell.

“People of Pavilosta, people of Adutiskis, people of the countryside, I am proud to become your marquis,” he said. “I’ve lived among you. I know what sort of folk you are. I know how you never believed the redheads would rule here forever, and how you made their lives hard while they were here.”

He got a nice round of applause. And I know what a liar I am, he thought. Aye, plenty of the locals had opposed Mezentio’s men. But plenty hadn’t. Several women in the crowd still had their hair shorter than most because they’d been shorn after the Algarvians withdrew. A good many men had done a good deal of business with the occupiers. But he didn’t want to dwell on that part of the past.

“I fought the Algarvians, as you did,” he said. “Whatever I can do to protect you from your enemies, I will do. Now you may know that King Gainibu appointed me to this place. But I will also tell you that I will do whatever I can to protect you from the king, should he ever act unjustly. That’s a noble’s duty to his people, and I’ll do everything I can to meet it.”

More cheering, this louder and more enthusiastic. In the old days, nobles really were a shield against royal power-not least because dukes and counts and such didn’t care to give up any power of their own. Things weren’t so easy for the nobility nowadays; kings were stronger than they had been. But the pledge was worth making.

He made another pledge: “I won’t be a scourge on your womenfolk, however much I admire them. And I admire them so much, I married one of them.”

He waved to Merkela, and kept waving till she finally waved back. That got him a different sort of applause, warmer and more sympathetic. What went through his mind was, I’ll take whatever I can get. He hopped down from the high seat and gave the peasant who’d boxed his ear one goldpiece and three of silver. The amount was as traditional as everything else in the ceremony. He wondered how it had first been set, and how long ago. No one seemed to know.

People came up to clasp his hand, to congratulate him-and to start asking him for judgments on their problems and quarrels. Time after time, he said, “Let me find out more before I answer you.” That seemed to satisfy most of the would-be petitioners, but not all.

Merkela said, “You did very well.”

“Thanks,” Skarnu answered. “Now in another twenty years I’ll stand up there and make myself another speech. Till then, no thanks.”

“But isn’t that part of what being a marquis is about?” Merkela asked. “Even a son of a whore like Enkuru would do it every so often. ‘My people,’ he would call us, as if he owned us. But we liked to come into Priekule to listen to him. It gave us a break from what we did every day.”

Skarnu thought about that. Back in Priekule, nobles were common as dirt. Remembering some of the people in the capital, Skarnu knew the resemblance didn’t end there. And, with King Gainibu at the apex of the social hierarchy, one count or marquis more or less didn’t matter much.

Here in the countryside, things were different. People here won’t ever meet the king or even see him. So who’s at the top of the column, then? I am, by the powers above. I’m the one everybody’s going to be looking at.

Slowly, he nodded. “You’re right,” he told Merkela. “I’m going to have to get out there and show myself, even if I don’t much want to do it.”

“It needs doing,” she said seriously.

“All right,” Skarnu said. “But that means you’re going to have to get out and show yourself a lot, too. After all, you’re the main connection I’ve got to this part of the kingdom. You’re the one who’s lived here all her life. You’ll have to help me.”

Merkela had been smiling when she told Skarnu he’d need to face the people. The smile slipped when he suggested she needed to do it, too. The shoe pinched differently on her foot. Even if she needed a moment to gather herself, though, she nodded, too. Skarnu had expected that she would. He put his arm around her. Of one thing he was abundantly certain: she didn’t run away from anything.

Sabrino’s mother had died while he was fighting in the Six Years’ War. He’d got compassionate leave to go home and see her laid on her pyre, but he hadn’t been there during her last illness. His father had lived another fifteen years before passing away from a slow, painful wasting disease. He remembered going into the sickroom one day and realizing what he saw on the old man’s face was death.

He looked at Algarve now. What he saw on his kingdom’s face was death.

Not far west of his wing’s dragon farm, the last Algarvian army holding the Unkerlanter hordes back from Trapani was breaking up. That it was breaking up didn’t surprise him. If anything, the surprise lay in how long it had held together and how badly it had hurt Swemmel’s soldiers. His wing, with a paper strength of sixty-four dragons, had eight ready to fly right now. They’d flown and flown and flown. They’d done everything they could, despite exhaustion, despite being without cinnabar. Every Algarvian in uniform had done everything he could.

The kingdom was dying anyhow. Not enough Algarvians remained in uniform to matter.

“Maybe we ought to stand aside, surrender, let the Unkerlanters and the cursed islanders finish overrunning us,” Sabrino told Captain Orosio as they ate black bread and drank spirits in a miserable little tent that some pen-pushing idiot back in Trapani had surely recorded on a map as the headquarters of a full-strength wing. “Everything would be done then, and the kingdom wouldn’t get trampled like a naked man trying to stand up to a herd of behemoths.”

Orosio looked up from his mug. “Colonel, you’d better be careful what you say, and who you say it to,” he answered. “Even now-maybe especially now- you can’t talk about giving up. They’ll grab you for treason and blaze you.”

Sabrino’s laugh held all the bitterness in the world. “And much difference that would make, to me or to Algarve. I don’t think it’ll happen, anyhow. Mezentio was going to raise us to the powers above. Instead, he’s dropped us down to the powers below, and he won’t quit till they’ve eaten every fornicating one of us.” He took a swig. The spirits held out, if nothing else did. “Won’t be long now.”

“You can’t talk that way, sir.” Orosio sounded worried. “It really is treason.”

“Go ahead and report me, then. You’ll make yourself a hero, a hero of Algarve!” Sabrino said. “The king’ll pin the medal on you himself, and give you your very own wing. You too can command eight dragons, you poor, sorry sod. That’s half as many as a squadron is supposed to have, but who’s counting?”

“Sir, I think you’d better go to bed,” Orosio said stiffly. He would never report Sabrino, but the wing commander realized he’d pushed further than even his longtime comrade could go. With a sigh, Orosio asked, “What’s left for us now?”

“What?” Sabrino waved his hand. “Nothing.”

“No, sir.” The younger man sounded very sure. “We have to go on till we can’t go on any more. No point to quitting now, is there? We’ve come too far for that.”

“You’re right,” Sabrino said with a sigh. Orosio looked relieved. But the two of them didn’t mean the same thing, even if they said the same words. Orosio would go on fighting because fighting was all he had left. Sabrino would go on because he had nothing whatsoever left.

Maybe we aren‘t so different after all, he thought, and drained his mug.

Off to the west, the sound of bursting eggs was a continuous low rumble, and it had been getting closer. It might have been an approaching thunderstorm. It’s a storm, all right. It will blow away the whole kingdom. But, when Sabrino cocked his head the other way, he heard bursting eggs off to the east, too: Unkerlanter dragons, tormenting Trapani. Before long, he’d be in the air again, doing his best to knock some of them out of the sky. And I will. And it won’t change a

“Sir…” Orosio hesitated, then went on, “That mage who wanted to fly with you? Maybe you should have let him.”

“That filthy bastard? No.” Even without the spirits he’d poured down, Sabrino’s voice would have held no doubts. “He wouldn’t have thrown back Swemmel’s army, and you know it as well as I do. He’d have just given all our enemies one more reason to hate us and punish us. Don’t you think they’ve got enough already?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Orosio yawned enormously. “I don’t know anything, except I’m bloody tired.”

“Let’s both go to sleep, then,” Sabrino said, “and see how long till somebody kicks us out of bed.”

It wasn’t nearly long enough. Sometime in the middle of the night, a crystallomancer shook Sabrino awake and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but they’re screaming for dragonfliers up at the front.”

“When aren’t they?” Sabrino answered around a yawn. He climbed out of his cot and yawned again. His head hurt, but not too bad. “All right. We’ll do what we can.”

Popular Assault men and a few real dragon-handlers were loading eggs under the bellies of the wing’s surviving beasts as Sabrino and the handful of dragonfliers he still led strode out toward their mounts. “Northwest,” the crystallomancer told him. “That’s where the most trouble is.”

Sabrino shook his head. “The most trouble is everywhere. But if they want us to fly northwest tonight, northwest we shall fly.”

He didn’t like flying by night, either. Telling where he was going and what he was supposed to be doing was much harder then. No one had asked his opinion. If some officer thought things were desperate enough to need dragons in the darkness. . Well, with the war in its present state, the poor whoreson was all too likely to be right.

As the dragonfliers scrambled aboard their mounts, Sabrino said, “Try not to get killed, gentlemen. Algarve will need you again later.” If they wanted to think he meant, Algarve will need you to fly more missions, that was all right with him. If they wanted to think he meant, Algarve will still need you after the war is over and lost, that was all right, too, and closer to the truth.

He whacked his dragon with the goad. The beast screamed with fury as it flung itself into the air; it liked flying at night no better than he. But it obeyed. As dragons went, it was a tractable mount-not that dragons went very far in that direction.

A bright moon, nearly full, spilled pale, buttery light over the landscape. Fires and bursting eggs and the flashes from blazing sticks of all weights added more. For night flying, this was pretty easy work.

Sabrino had no trouble finding the fighting front. For that matter, he could have found it with his eyes closed, just from the din of bursting eggs. Every time he took his forlorn little wing into the air, the front lay farther east. Unkerlanter armies were lapping around the defenders despite all the Algarvians could do to hold them back. Before long, Trapani would be caught in a ring of iron, a ring of fire.

I hope my wife had the sense to flee, the wing commander thought. The city is going to fall, and it won’t be pretty. The collapse of the Kaunian Empire more than a thousand years before came to mind. Then, though, Algarvic folk had been doing the sacking. Soon, they would be on the receiving end.

I don’t see anything we can do to stop that. Maybe we can still push the day back a bit. The image of a harried-looking Algarvian crystallomancer down on the ground appeared in the crystal Sabrino carried. “Powers above be praised!” the fellow said. “They’ve bridged the stream in front of us, and they’re pouring men and behemoths across. Can your wing take it out?”

“We can try,” Sabrino answered, thinking again of symbols on maps. “You should know, though, that my wing consists of eight dragons, no more.”

“Eight dragons? Eight?” The crystallomancer made a horrible face. “That isn’t what I was given to understand.”

“I don’t care what you were given to understand,” Sabrino said harshly. “Everything we’ve been given to understand about this whole fornicating war is a pack of lies. Now where’s this Unkerlanter bridge?”

The crystallomancer told him. He soon discovered he could have found it without help. The Unkerlanters had torches at both ends and along the bridge itself to guide their men and beasts to and across it. Arrogant bastards, Sabrino thought. They don’t even believe we’re still in the game. Time to show them they’ve made a mistake.

He ordered his dragon down in an attack run as perfect as any he’d ever made. He released the eggs it carried at exactly the right moment. They both burst in the center of the bridge, sending Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths splashing into the stream. One after another, the men in his wing followed him down. By the time they were done, not much remained of the bridge.

“Nice job, boys,” Sabrino said into his crystal. “Now let’s go home and go back to bed.”

He’d just turned toward the dragon farm from which he’d come when the Unkerlanter dragons struck his wing. There were only a couple of squadrons of them-but that meant they outnumbered his comrades and him three or four to one. And their dragons were fresh, not worn out, and were full of cinnabar. They flamed twice as far as the Algarvian beasts could.

For all that, Sabrino’s men were wise in the ways of dragonflying, and quickly took out a couple of the enemy beasts-one with flame from behind, the other by a canny blaze that killed the Unkerlanter dragonflier and let the dragon fly wild. Sabrino thought they might yet break free and win their way back to the dragon farm once more.

He saw the dragon that got him and his own mount as nothing but a blur in the moonlight, and then a tongue of flame licking toward him. An instant later, he screamed, but his shriek was lost, drowned, in the great bellow of agony from his dragon. Wind beat in his face as the dragon lurched toward the ground, but he hardly noticed. His left leg felt on fire.

When he looked down, he saw his left leg was on fire. So was the dragon. He beat at the flames with his fist. The dragon could still fly, though, after a fashion-the Unkerlanter beast had flamed at long range, not wanting to close. Had its dragonflier come closer, he would be dead now, and so would his mount. Things were bad enough as they were. Sabrino wanted to pass out, but the torment in his leg wouldn’t let him. He pounded the dragon with the goad, steering it back toward the southeast.

It didn’t make it all the way to the dragon farm. It came down in the middle of a field of beets. The shock of the landing made Sabrino scream again.

The stench of the dragon’s burnt flesh, and of his own, filled his nostrils.

He loosened the harness and fell to the ground. If the dragon crushed him or flamed him in its own agonies, everything would be over, and he wouldn’t have minded at all. But it rampaged away, leaving him lying there and hoping for death.

Before it found him, Algarvian soldiers did. They’d come to deal with the wounded dragon, but they took Sabrino back to a healer’s tent. The healer took one look at what was left of his leg and said, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but that will have to come off.”

“Oh, please!” Sabrino groaned. The healer blinked in surprise, then nodded. A couple of stalwart helpers lifted Sabrino and set him down in what looked like an oversized rest crate. His awareness of the world was interrupted.

When it returned, so did pain. The healer gave Sabrino a bottle of thick, sweet, nasty stuff. He drained it dry. After what seemed forever but couldn’t have been above a quarter of an hour, the pain retreated. The healer said, “You’ll live, I think. With a cane and a peg, you may even walk again. But for you, Colonel, the war is over.”

Under the drug, that hardly seemed to matter. Under the drug, nothing much seemed to matter. Maybe I should have started taking this stuff, whatever it is, a long time ago, he thought vaguely. He smiled at the healer. “So what?” he said.

Up till the Derlavaian War broke out, Ilmarinen hadn’t known many Unkerlanters. The vast kingdom had its share of talented mages, but they published less often than their colleagues farther east-either that or they published in their own language rather than in classical Kaunian. And Unkerlanter, in Ilmarinen’s biased opinion, was a language fit only for Unkerlanters. Mages from Unkerlant didn’t come to colloquia as often as their counterparts in the kingdoms of eastern Derlavai. Maybe they were afraid of revealing secrets. Maybe King Swemmel feared they would, and didn’t let them out.

Now Ilmarinen had all the chances he wanted to see Unkerlanters up close. A regular ferry service ran across the Albi River, which separated Kuusaman occupiers of Algarve on the east bank from Swemmel’s soldiers on the west. Ilmarinen found the idea of a ferry interesting, too. In Kuusamo, where the rivers froze up in wintertime, they were used less often than here in the mild north of Derlavai.

Ilmarinen, of course, found almost everything interesting. Whenever he got the chance, he stuck his mage’s badge in the pocket of his tunic and crossed over to the west side of the Albi to learn what he could about the Unkerlanters. The ferry, a stout rowboat, had a crew half Kuusaman, half Unkerlanter. When a man from one land needed to talk to one from the other, he was more likely to use Algarvian than any other tongue. For the master mage, that was one more irony to savor.

On the west bank of the Albi, the Unkerlanters looked less than delighted about having visitors from the east. But the Kuusamans were their allies, so they couldn’t very well point sticks at them and keep them out. Ilmarinen wondered what Swemmel’s men made of him. Without his mage’s badge, what was he? A colonel with too many years on him and too much curiosity for his own good.

As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as too much curiosity for his own good. He walked here and there, peered at this and that, and asked questions whenever he found someone who would admit to speaking a civilized language-which didn’t happen very often; a lot of Unkerlanters seemed to go out of their way to deny knowing anything.

For a while, that not only perplexed Ilmarinen but also annoyed him. But he had a mind quick to see patterns. If Swemmel was apt to make someone disappear for saying or doing the wrong thing, what could be safer than saying and doing nothing? But Swemmel’s people couldn’t very well have beaten the Algarvians by doing nothing. It was a puzzlement. Ilmarinen loved being puzzled.

He did find a young lieutenant named Andelot who spoke some Algarvian and didn’t seem afraid to speak it to him. The fellow said, “Aye, is true. We have not so much initiative. Is a word, initiative?”

“It’s a word, sure enough,” Ilmarinen answered. “How in blazes did you win without it?” He had a good many shortcomings of his own. Lack of initiative had never been one of them. Too much initiative? That was a different story.

“By doing what our commanders order us to do,” Andelot replied. “This is most efficient way we find.” When he spoke Algarvian, he seemed stuck in the present indicative.

“But what happens when your commanders make a mistake?” Ilmarinen asked. Obeying without question struck him as inhuman. He had a certain amount of trouble-perhaps more than a certain amount-obeying at all. “What happens when a lieutenant like you or a sergeant, say, needs to fix a mistake? How do you do that when you have no initiative?”

“We have some. We have less than Algarvians, maybe, but we have some. I admit, if we have more, we do better.” Lieutenant Andelot turned and called in Algarvian to another, older, man, who came over and saluted. Returning to a language Ilmarinen could follow, Andelot said, “Here is Sergeant Fariulf. I am sorry, but he speaks Algarvian not. He has initiative. He shows over and over.”

“Well, good for him,” Ilmarinen said. At first glance, Fariulf was just another peasant in uniform, one badly in need of a shave and a bath. First glances, though, showed only so much. “Ask him how he decides to use it, then.”

Andelot spoke again in Unkerlanter. Fariulf replied in the same tongue. His eyes were guarded as they flicked first to his superior officer, then to Ilmarinen. Andelot said, “He says, if I do it not, who does? When I need to do, I do.”

Ilmarinen hardly heard the answer. He was staring at Fariulf. Sometimes- not always-a mage could feel power. Ilmarinen felt it here. It wasn’t sorcerous power, or not exactly sorcerous power, but it radiated out from the man like heat from a fire. Finding such in an Unkerlanter peasant was the last thing Ilmarinen had expected. He was so startled, he almost remarked on it.

A second look at Fariulf convinced him that wouldn’t be a good idea. The sergeant would have hidden that power if he could; Ilmarinen sensed as much. Whatever was inside Fariulf-if that was even the man’s true name, which Ilmarinen suddenly doubted-he didn’t want anyone else to know it was there. Andelot didn’t know; Ilmarinen was sure of that.

The lieutenant had said something. Lost in his own thoughts, Ilmarinen had no idea what it was. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“I say, how you give better answer about initiative?” Andelot repeated.

“I doubt you could.” But Ilmarinen was still eyeing the sergeant. And Fariulf, or whatever his real name was, was eyeing him, too. Something like shock showed itself in the Unkerlanter’s eyes. He knew Ilmarinen knew what he was- or some of what he was, anyhow. That alarmed him.

Little by little, Ilmarinen realized the fellow might be dangerous if he stayed frightened. This was, after all, the Unkerlanter side of the river. If I have an accident, how hard would anyone try to find out whether it was really accidental? Not very, unless I miss my guess.

Picking his words with care, the Kuusaman mage said, “I believe the more initiative a man shows, the more he does for himself, the better off he’s likely to be, and the better off the world is likely to be.”

Andelot translated for Fariulf. Ilmarinen smiled and nodded. He hadn’t even been lying. Now, would the Unkerlanter see as much? Andelot said, “Maybe that so in your kingdom. Believe me, sir, not always so in Unkerlant.”

Ilmarinen did believe him. In Unkerlant, from everything he’d heard, everything he’d seen, a man who stuck his neck out was asking the axe to come down. The mage wanted to talk more with Sergeant Fariulf, to see if he could learn just what sort of power burned behind the stocky man’s eyes. He would have to be careful. He saw as much. Andelot plainly had no idea what a wonder he had for an underofficer.

But Fariulf-an Unkerlanter, sure enough-was wary about giving up whatever secrets he possessed. He spoke in his own language. Andelot translated: “Colonel, he asks if you done with him, if he can go back to duties.”

What Ilmarinen felt like doing was kidnapping Fariulf and dragging him over to the eastern bank of the Albi so he could wring knowledge from him like a man wringing water from a towel. He reluctantly recognized he couldn’t do that. And Fariulf, alerted now, would yield him very little. Ilmarinen gave up, something he didn’t like to do. “I’m done with him, aye. Tell him thanks, and tell him good luck.”

The sergeant got to his feet and took off. His power, his secrets, went with him. Ilmarinen could feel them leaving. He sighed. Andelot asked, “Is anything else with me, Colonel? I too have duties.”

Get out of my hair, old man. That was what he meant, even if he was too polite to say so. “No, nothing else, Lieutenant,” Ilmarinen answered. Except for your sergeant, you haven’t got anything very interesting. “I thank you for your time, and for your translating.”

As Ilmarinen returned and started back toward the ferry, another officer came by. This one, Ilmarinen saw, wore a chest badge along with the rank badges on his collar tabs. Ilmarinen figured out what the badge meant as soon as the fellow looked at him. He felt himself recognized for what he was, just as he’d recognized Fariulf for something out of the ordinary. The newcomer spoke rapidly in Unkerlanter. Andelot exclaimed in surprise, then returned to Algarvian: “This mage say-says-you too are mage. Is so?”

He couldn’t even lie. The other wizard would know he was doing it. “Aye, I’m a mage,” he replied. “So what?”

More back-and-forth in Unkerlanter. After a bit, Andelot said, “This other mage says you are no ordinary mage. He says you are strong mage, mighty mage. Is so?”

Powers below eat you, Ilmarinen thought at the Unkerlanter wizard. It wasn’t so much because the fellow was right, but because, by being right, he’d made sure Ilmarinen couldn’t casually visit this side of the river any more. Getting escorted to things he was supposed to see didn’t strike him as much fun.

“Is so?” Andelot persisted.

“Aye, it’s so,” Ilmarinen said with a sigh.

“You are spy?” the young lieutenant asked-a very Unkerlanter question.

“I’m an ally,” Ilmarinen answered. “Spies are enemies. How can I possibly be a spy?”

“How can you be spy?” Andelot echoed. “Easy.” The other mage, who didn’t speak Algarvian, had a good deal to say in Unkerlanter. Andelot didn’t sound very happy about hearing any of it. When Swemmel’s sorcerer finished, the lieutenant said, “You go back to your side of river now. You stay on your side of river now. You not welcome on this side of river now.”

“And is that how one ally treats another?” Ilmarinen demanded, doing his best to show more indignation than he felt.

“Do you show us all your secrets?” Andelot returned. Because Unkerlanters had to keep so many secrets so inspectors and impressers wouldn’t drag them away and do something dreadful to them, they were convinced everyone had secrets and guarded them and tried to spy out other people’s.

“Plenty of your officers on our bank of the Albi, too,” Ilmarinen said. And, odds are, they’re spies, or some of them are, he thought.

“That is that bank of river. This is this bank of river,” Andelot said, as if that made all the difference in the world. Maybe, to him, it did. He pointed east, toward the riverbank. “You have to go now.”

Ilmarinen went, protesting all the while. To go quietly would have been out of character for him. Andelot and the mage walked with him. He wondered what the Unkerlanters didn’t want him to see. He wondered if there really was something he shouldn’t see. Curse Swemmel’s whoresons, he thought. When you start dealing with them, you have to start thinking like them.

Lieutenant and wizard stood watching till he boarded the ferry, till it began to move, till it reached the other side of the river. What don’t they want me to see? Is anything at all there? Can I find out? He was planning ways and means when he realized he’d given himself a new challenge.

Spring in Skrunda was an enjoyable time most years: warm without being too hot, with just enough rain to keep things green and growing. Talsu enjoyed this spring even more than the past few. Not only were the Algarvian occupiers gone from Jelgava, but the news sheets shouted of the triumphs of allied armies deep inside Algarve itself. A few Jelgavan regiments were in the fight, too. By the way the news sheets trumpeted what they did, they might have been whipping King Mezentio’s men all by themselves.

Some people-people who hadn’t seen action themselves-doubtless believed the news sheets. Talsu knew better. He knew what sorts of armies the Kuusamans and Lagoans had. He had a pretty fair notion of what sort of army the Unkerlanters had. In amongst all those fighters, a few regiments of Jelgavans would have been like a fingernail: nice to have, but hardly essential to the body as a whole.

When he remarked on that to his father, Traku said, “Well, we’ve got to start somewhere, I expect.”

“I suppose so,” Talsu admitted, “but do we have to cackle so much about it?”

He made a noise that might have come from a chicken after it laid an egg.

Traku laughed and then tossed him a pair of linen trousers. “Here-these are ready to go to Mindaugu for summer wear. He’s got himself too much silver to sweat in wool.”

“I’ll take them,” Talsu said. “I’ll be glad to, in fact-his house is near the grocery where Gailisa’s working.”

“Don’t dawdle away the whole day there,” his father said. “I would like to get a little more work out of you.”

“Foosh,” Talsu said. His father laughed. Talsu grabbed the trousers and headed across town with them. When he got to Mindaugu’s, the wealthy wine merchant took them, ducked away to try them on, and came out beaming. He gave Talsu his silver. Talsu looked the coins over, as he’d got into the habit of doing. “Wait a bit. This one’s got Mainardo’s ugly mug on it.”

Mindaugu made a sour face. “I thought I’d made a clean sweep of those.” He suddenly looked hopeful. “The silver’s still good, you know.” Talsu just clicked his tongue between his teeth. He had right on his side, and he knew it. Muttering, Mindaugu replaced Mainardo’s coin with one that had King Donalitu’s image. Talsu stuck it and the others in his pocket and headed off to the grocery store.

I won’t spend too much time there, he thought, but a fellow is entitled to see his wife every once in a while, isn’t he? He’d been married for more than a year, but still felt like a man on his honeymoon.

As he left the wine merchant’s, a couple of utterly ordinary middle-aged men in clothes even more ordinary (a tailor’s son, he noticed such things) who’d been leaning against a wall stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk-and into his path. “You Talsu son of Traku?” one of them asked, his voice mildly friendly.

“That’s right,” Talsu answered; only afterwards did he wonder what would have happened had he lied. As things were, he just said, “Do I know you?”

“You know us well enough,” replied the man who hadn’t asked his name. He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out a short stick such as a constable might use. “You know us well enough to come along quietly, don’t you?”

Ice ran through Talsu. When he first saw the stick, he thought the men were a couple of robbers. He would have given up the silver he’d just got-it wasn’t worth his life. But they knew his name. And they wanted him, not his money. That could only make them King Donalitu’s men. As he bleated, “But I haven’t done anything!” he thought he would rather have dealt with robbers.

“Quietly, I said.” That was the fellow with the stick.

“Charge is treason against the Kingdom of Jelgava,” added the other one, the one who’d asked his name.

“Come along,” they said again, this time together. The one who didn’t have his stick out took Talsu’s arm. The other one fell in behind them so he could blaze Talsu at the first sign of anything untoward.

Numbly, Talsu went where they took him. If he’d done anything else, something dreadful would have happened to him. He was sure of that. Donalitu’s men had no reputation for restraint. They didn’t lead him in the direction of the constabulary station, which surprised him enough to make him ask, “Where are we going?” He added, “I really haven’t done anything,” not that he thought it would do him any good.

And it didn’t. “Shut up,” one of them said.

“You’ll find out where,” the other told him.

He did, too, when they marched him into the ley-line caravan depot. He wondered how they would keep things quiet and discreet in an ordinary caravan car. But, being servitors of the king, they didn’t have to worry about ordinary cars. They had a special laid on just for them-and him. He would gladly have done without the honor.

“What about my family?” he howled as the car-which had bars across the windows and sorcerous locks on the door-rolled out of Skrunda, heading southeast.

“Can’t pin anything on ‘em yet,” one of the men who’d seized him said. That wasn’t what Talsu meant, nor anything close to it, but he didn’t try to make himself any clearer. He’d caught the unmistakable regret in the fellow’s voice.

The other man said, “You want to confess now and make it easy on everybody?”

Everybody but me, Talsu thought. Of course, they didn’t care about him. He said, “How can I confess when I haven’t done anything?”

“Happens all the time,” the fellow answered.

Talsu believed that. He’d spent time in a dungeon before. “How can you arrest me for treason when the cursed redheads arrested me for treason?” he demanded.

“Happens all the time,” Donalitu’s bully boy said again. “Some people have treason in their blood.” While Talsu was still spluttering over that, he went on, “Turn out your pockets. Everything that’s in ‘em. You leave anything at all behind, you’ll be sorry-you can bet your arse on that.” He shoved a tray at Talsu.

Having no choice, Talsu obeyed. King Donalitu’s men examined everything with great care, especially the coins he set on the tray. Talsu let out a silent sigh of relief that he’d got Mindaugu to take back the silverpiece with Mainardo’s Algarvian visage on it. These whoresons could have made a treason case from it without any other evidence. What difference does it make, though? he thought bitterly. They can make a treason case from no evidence at all.

Late in the afternoon, the ley-line caravan car glided to a halt. “Come on,” one of Talsu’s captors said. The other one murmured the charm that opened the door. The dungeon lay right by the ley line, out in the middle of nowhere. Talsu hadn’t expected anything else. These whoresons wouldn’t want to walk very far once they got out of the car.

Guards searched Talsu as soon as he got into the dungeon. They found nothing; the fellows who’d seized him had got it all. But they had their jobs, too, and did them. Then they threw him in a cramped little cell that held nothing but a bucket and a straw pallet. He sighed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been through this before.

I have to be ready for the first interrogation, he thought. They ‘II let me get hungry first-he was hungry already-and they’ll probably wake me up so I’ll be all muzzy. But I have to be ready. They’ll want to break me right then and there. If I break, I’m theirs. I can’t give in.

He made himself as comfortable as he could, and waited. A cart rattled down the corridors. Suppers, Talsu thought; he knew the sound of that cart. It didn’t stop at his cell. He sighed, disappointed but not surprised.

After darkness fell, he stretched out on the musty pallet. His growling belly kept him awake for a while, but not for too long. His dreams were nasty and confused.

The door flew open with a crash. A bright light blazed into his eyes. Two guards grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. “Come on, you!” one of them shouted. Talsu went. Had he not gone, the guards would have beaten him and then dragged him where they wanted him to go. They might-they probably would- beat him later. He was willing to put off the evil moment as long as he could.

But when they took him into the interrogation chamber, he let out a cry of horror and dismay even before they slammed him down onto a hard, backless stool. The Jelgavan major on the other side of the desk greeted him with a smile. “Hello, Talsu son of Traku,” he said. “You remember me, I see.”

Talsu shuddered. “I’m not likely to forget you,” he said. The Jelgavan major had interrogated him during his last stretch in the dungeons. Then, he’d been asking questions for King Mainardo and the Algarvians. Now he served Donalitu, as he had before the redheads invaded. Then he’d been a mere captain. Bitterly, Talsu remarked, “I see you got promoted.”

“I’m good at what I do,” the interrogator said placidly. He wagged a finger at Talsu. “Didn’t I tell you I would still be here, still doing my job, under whoever happened to be ruling the kingdom?”

“You served the Algarvians with all your heart,” Talsu said. “If that’s not treason, what in blazes do you call it?”

“Following orders,” the major replied. “I am a useful man, and known to be loyal to the king. Neither of those applies to you.” His tone sharpened. “You are charged with associating with Kugu the silversmith, a known Algarvian agent and collaborator, during the late occupation. What have you got to say for yourself?”

“You idiot!” Talsu howled, too outraged to remember where he was. “I went to Kugu trying to join the underground against the fornicating Algarvians. You know that’s true. You have to-he’s the son of a whore who betrayed me to the redheads.”

“I’m not referring to that association,” the interrogator told him. “I’m referring to the association you continued to have with him after you were released from your last period of confinement. That’s plainly treason against King Donalitu.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Talsu said. “I had to associate with Kugu then. If I didn’t, you people would have thrown me back into a cell.” He’d also arranged for the silversmith’s untimely demise, but he didn’t even bother bringing that up. He couldn’t prove it, as he’d done it by stealth and sorcery.

“That is no excuse,” the interrogator said. “You also provided the occupying authorities with the names of certain people you believed to be loyal to King Donalitu. Arrests were made as a result of your actions. Punishments were inflicted. I will have you know, this is a very serious charge.”

“Occupying authorities?” Talsu started to get up to throttle the fellow. The guards slammed him down onto the stool again. They didn’t try to keep him from talking: “What occupying authorities? You were the bastard who tormented me-and tormented my wife, too-till I gave you names. I did get into the underground, and I fought the Algarvians while you were probably still torturing people for them.”

“Subject does not deny the charges,” the major murmured, jotting a note on the pad in front of him. Talsu howled again, a wordless cry of fury. The interrogator gestured to the bully boys. They went to work on Talsu. Before long, he had plenty more reasons to howl.

Over the years, Bembo had grown used to giving orders. It wasn’t just that he’d been a constable in occupied Forthweg. He’d been a constable long before that, here in Tricarico. People jumped when he told them to jump. They did him favors to stay on his good side. He’d had no trouble getting all sorts of bribes and other sweeteners.

That was over now, and his broken leg had nothing to do with it. The leg was healing as well as it could, though it looked thin as a twig under the splints that protected it. But Algarvians didn’t give orders in Tricarico anymore. The city belonged to the Kuusamans now, and they made who was in charge very plain.

Bembo and Saffa sat at a table in a sidewalk cafe, drinking wine he would have turned up his nose at before the war and eating olives and salted almonds. Saffa’s nose-much cuter than Bembo’s-wrinkled. “What’s that stink?” she asked.

Taking everything into account, Tricarico had been lucky during the war. Devastation had mostly left it alone, and, when the town fell, it fell fast. Having been in Eoforwic, Bembo knew things didn’t have to be that way. The grinding fight there had also left him intimately acquainted with the stench in question. “That’s dead bodies,” he answered, and surprised even himself with how casually the words came out.

“Oh.” Saffa grimaced. “That’s right. Those three in the town square. I’d forgotten.”

“Naughty.” Bembo waggled a forefinger at her. “The Kuusamans don’t want you to forget. They don’t want any of us to forget. That’s why they hanged those three stupid bastards right in the middle of the square four days ago, and it’s why they haven’t taken ‘em down, too.”

“Stupid bastards?” The constabulary sketch artist let out an indignant squawk. “They were patriots, heroes, martyrs.”

“They were cursed fools,” Bembo said. “If you aren’t in the army and you blaze at the people who’ve taken your town and they catch you, this is one of the things that’re liable to happen.” He remembered some of the things that had happened in Eoforwic. Compared to those, hanging was a mercy. Saffa didn’t know about things like that, and didn’t know how lucky she was not to.

“But the Kuusamans are the enemy,” she protested.

“That’s why we have an army-or had an army,” Bembo answered. “Civilians who try to fight against soldiers are what you call free-blazers. If the soldiers catch ‘em, they’re what you call fair game.”

“They were brave,” Saffa said.

“They were bloody dumb,” Bembo told her. “They didn’t do themselves any good, and they didn’t do Algarve any good, either. We don’t have any soldiers in the field anywhere within a hundred miles of here, not any more we don’t.” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of extravagant despair. “Powers below eat everything, we’ve lost.”

Saffa stared at him. The truth there was obvious. The little slant-eyed soldiers in the streets made it so. Maybe she somehow hadn’t realized everything it meant, though, till he all but shouted in her face. She bit her lip, blinked a couple of times, and quietly began to cry.

“Don’t do that!” Bembo exclaimed. He fumbled for a handkerchief, didn’t find one, and gave her a cafe napkin instead. “Come on, sweetheart. Please don’t do that.” He had a soft spot for weeping women. Most Algarvian men did.

“I can’t help it,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “I don’t think Salamone is ever coming home, not from fighting the horrible Unkerlanters.” Her tears came faster, harder.

Bembo muttered something more or less polite. Salamone was the fellow who’d fathered her son. She still hadn’t let Bembo into her bed, or come into his. He wondered why he bothered with her; he wasn’t usually so patient with women. Maybe it was because he’d known her before things got bad, and she was a line back to those better days. He took a pull at his wine to disguise a snort. That was an alarming thing to think about somebody all over prickles like Saffa.

She gave him a look holding a good deal of her old vinegar. “I know what you’re thinking. You hope those savages have him for supper, and without any salt, too.”

“No such thing!” Bembo said with an indignation all the louder for being less than sincere. But then he followed it with the truth: “I wouldn’t wish getting caught by the Unkerlanters on anybody at all.”

Saffa eyed him, then slowly nodded. “You may even mean that.”

“I do!” Bembo exclaimed. “Remember, darling, I was in Eoforwic when all the Unkerlanters in the world came rolling east across Forthweg straight at me.” Being who he was, of course he saw the battles of the summer before, so disastrous for Algarve, in that light. He ate an almond, then went on, “And the cursed Forthwegians rose up and stabbed us in the back, too. Fat lot of good it did them-now they’ve got Swemmel sitting on ‘em instead of us, and may they have joy of that.”

“It’s all a mess,” Saffa said, which summed things up as well as any four words Bembo might have found.

“That it is,” he said dolefully, and then, when a plump woman with a pitted complexion almost stumbled over his splinted leg-which had to stick out from the table a bit-his gloom turned to spleen: “Watch it, lady!”

She glared at him. “If you were any kind of a man, you’d have let yourself get killed before all this happened.” Her wave encompassed the whole of Tricarico and, by extension, the whole of Algarve. She might have held Bembo personally responsible for the lost war.

He wouldn’t have taken that from Saffa, and he certainly wasn’t about to take it from a stranger he didn’t find attractive. “If I had anything to do with you, I certainly would have let myself get killed before I came home,” he said, and bit his thumb at her, a fine Algarvian insult.

The plump woman screeched like a wounded trumpet. She drew back a foot to kick Bembo’s bad leg. He grabbed a crutch by the wrong end and got ready to swing it like a club. Algarvians were normally the most chivalrous of men, but he wasn’t about to let anybody do that leg any more harm.

Saffa snatched up the bowl of olives and made as if to throw it at the woman. The olives glistened with oil; they would have ruined the plump woman’s kilt and frock. Bembo wondered if she didn’t find that a more dangerous threat than his makeshift bludgeon. Mumbling curses under her breath, she stalked off with her nose in the air.

“Thanks,” Bembo told Saffa.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “That stupid sow had no business coming down on you so. You did everything for the kingdom you could. What did she do? Sit around and eat cakes the whole war long, by the look of her.”

Everything I could do for the kingdom? Bembo wondered. He really had fought, and he really had kept order in foreign towns. And you sent powers above only know how many Kaunians off on their last rides. Had that helped Algarve or hurt it? Hurt it, probably, for such things made all her neighbors more certain they couldn’t afford to lose. But his superiors had ordered it, and so he’d done it.

He wished he hadn’t had that thought. He saw in his mind’s eye that horrible old Kuusaman mage who’d looked through him as if the ocean of his soul were no more than ankle-deep. What that fellow thought of him. . No, better not to imagine what that fellow thought of him. And the Kuusaman had given him the benefit of the doubt, too. Bembo shivered even though the day was warm, almost hot. He gulped down the rest of his wine and waved for more.

Before it got there, Saffa’s eyes narrowed with anger. “Oh, that’s too much,” she said. “That really is too much.”

Bembo wondered what he’d done now, but her rage wasn’t aimed at him. She pointed. He twisted in his chair. Up the street came a couple of Jelgavan officers in tunics and trousers, looking around at Tricarico as if they’d conquered it themselves.

“Those stinking Kaunians have their nerve,” Saffa said savagely. “They shouldn’t show their faces here. It’s not like they beat us.”

“No, it isn’t,” Bembo agreed. “Even so. .” His voice trailed off. As far as he could see, Algarvians were going to have a hard time saying anything bad about Kaunian folk, even if it was true (maybe especially if it was true), for generations to come. He saw no way to say that to Saffa, precisely because she didn’t know all the things he did. She’s the lucky one, he thought again.

She stared at the trousered blonds, looking daggers into their backs, till they went round a corner. Then she turned back to Bembo and said, “Your flat is only a couple of blocks from here, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he answered.

“Let’s go back there,” she said. “We’ll see what happens.” She cocked her head to one side, laughing at his flabbergasted expression. “Don’t get your hopes up too far. You don’t move very fast. I have plenty of time to change my mind.”

He knew that was true, but couldn’t hurry on his crutches no matter how much he wanted to. He spent most of the time on the way trying to remember how messy the flat was. If Saffa laughed at him for being a slob, she might not want to do anything but laugh.

She raised an eyebrow at the state of the front room when he opened the door, but said only, “I expected worse.” And she did go into the bedchamber with him, and, he being hampered by the splint, she rode him as if he were a racing unicorn. But that was a race they both could win-and, by the way she threw back her head and cried out at the end, they both did.

Then she sprawled down onto him, her breasts soft and firm against his chest. “Ask you something?” he said, running his hand along the sweet curves of her back down toward her bottom.

One of Saffa’s eyebrows quirked upward. The smile she smiled down at him was lopsided, too. “It can’t be that one, and I didn’t know you knew any other questions.”

His hand paused on her backside and pinched, not too hard. She squeaked. Bembo said, “I didn’t even need to ask that one. You asked me instead, remember?”

“Well, maybe I did,” she said, and bent down to kiss the end of his nose. He’d wondered if she would bite instead, but she didn’t. “All right, Bembo- what’s your other question?”

“I was just wondering why,” he answered. “Not that I’m not not happy you did”-he kissed her this time-”but how come? You’d been telling me no for so long, I’d kind of got used to it.”

“Maybe that’s why you hadn’t been pestering me so much lately,” Saffa said. But it was a serious question, and after a small pause she gave it a serious answer: “We’ve really lost. There’s nothing we can do about it. Seeing those cursed Jelgavans walking along like they owned the town gave me a kick in the teeth. Salamone isn’t coming home. I’ve got to start over somewhere.”

“And I’m it?” Bembo said. It might have been a serious answer, but it was a long way from flattering.

But Saffa nodded. “And you’re it.” This time, her smile held fewer barbs. “Better than I thought you’d be, too.”

“Thanks-I suppose,” he said. She laughed. He hadn’t slipped out of her, and felt himself growing hard once more. He began to move, slowly and carefully. “Shall we try again, then?”

“So soon?” Saffa sounded surprised.

“Why not?” Bembo answered grandly. The only reason why, of course, was that he’d been so very long without. He didn’t have to tell her that, though. And she didn’t seem displeased. After a while, she seemed very pleased indeed. Bembo knew he was.

Colonel Lurcanio sat beneath an oak tree just coming into full leaf and contemplated the death and ruination of his kingdom and its army. He didn’t think the Unkerlanters were in Trapani yet, but he didn’t know how much longer his countrymen could hold them away from the capital. The last few reports coming by crystal from Algarve’s greatest city had held a note of frantic desperation under their defiance. The past couple of days, no reports at all had come from Trapani: enemy mages were blocking the emanations. That didn’t strike him as a good omen.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he muttered. Even if King Mezentio had personally appealed to him to come to the capital’s rescue, he couldn’t have obeyed his sovereign. A good-sized Algarvian army remained in the field here in the southeastern part of the kingdom, but it was cut off from the rest of Algarve by the Lagoans and Kuusamans. Having bypassed it, the islanders seemed content to leave it alone so long as it didn’t make a nuisance of itself.

Captain Santerno came up to Lurcanio. The combat veteran didn’t bother saluting. Lurcanio didn’t bother reproving him. Without preamble, the captain said, “Sir, how in blazes are we going to get out of this mess?”

“That’s a good question, Captain,” Lurcanio replied. “As best I can see, there’s no way. If you want to tell me I’m wrong, I’d be delighted to hear the whys and wherefores, believe me.”

Santerno cursed with soldierly fluency. When he ran out of curses-which took a while-he said, “I don’t see any way, either. I was hoping you did.”

“Me?” Lurcanio said. “What do I know? After all, I spent the war shuffling papers in Priekule and laying Valmieran women.” Santerno hadn’t thrown his previous duty in his face, but his scorn for Lurcanio because of it had never been far from the surface.

Now the captain had the grace to cough and shuffle his feet and show a certain amount of embarrassment. “Turned out you knew what you were doing in the field after all, sir,” he said. “I stopped doubting it after the way you led the brigade down toward the sea this past winter during our last big attack in Valmiera.”

“We might have gone farther if those Kuusamans holed up in that one town hadn’t cramped the whole attack.” Lurcanio sighed. “But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run.”

“Maybe not.” Santerno drew himself up with a certain melancholy pride. “We scared the buggers out of a year’s growth, though.”

“I suppose we did,” Lurcanio replied. “And how many men and behemoths and dragons did we throw away doing it? We could have used them against the Unkerlanters instead, don’t you think, and got more with them.”

His adjutant shrugged. “I don’t give orders like that, sir. I just follow the ones I get.”

“We all just followed the ones we got, Captain.” Lurcanio waved, as if to show this last bypassed army trapped in its pocket. “And look what we got for following them.”

Before Santerno could answer that, a soldier came up to Lurcanio and said, “Sir, there’s an enemy soldier coming up under flag of truce.”

“Is there?” Lurcanio heaved himself to his feet, however much his weary bones protested. “I’ll see him.” The soldier nodded and trotted off to bring back the foe.

“He’s going to ask for our surrender,” Santerno said.

“Probably,” Lurcanio agreed. “I can’t give it to him, of course.” I would if I could, he thought, but kept that to himself. Aloud, he went on, “All I can do is pass him along to General Prusione, and I expect I will.”

But his resolve wavered when he saw the fellow who came in under the white flag. Not that the major in the greenish brown tunic and trousers was ugly, but he was, unquestionably, a Valmieran. “Do you speak classical Kaunian, Colonel?” he asked in that tongue. “I regret to tell you, I have no Algarvian.”

“I know Valmieran, Major,” Lurcanio replied in that language. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

“My name is Vizgantu, Colonel,” the Valmieran said, plainly relieved to be able to use his own speech. “Please take me to your commander. I have been sent to request the surrender of the Algarvian army in this pocket, further resistance on your part plainly being hopeless. Why spill more blood to no purpose?”

Lurcanio took a deep breath. “Major Vizgantu, I am going to send you back to your own superiors instead. I mean no personal offense to you, sir, but having a Valmieran demand our surrender is an insult, nothing less. We may have lost this war, but we did not lose it to your kingdom. I spent more than four very pleasant years in Priekule. I should have a child there now, as a matter of fact.”

Captain Santerno laughed out loud. Major Vizgantu turned red. Doing his best to choke back rage, he said, “You are in a poor position to tell the armies opposing you what to do, Colonel. By the powers above, I hope you pay for your insolence.”

My whole kingdom is paying, Lurcanio thought. What Algarve had made her neighbors pay never entered his mind-that was their worry, not his. He turned to the soldier who’d brought the Valmieran to him. “You may take this gentleman to the front once more. His flag of truce will be honored as he returns to his own side, of course.”

“You bastard!” Vizgantu snarled.

“My bastard, as I told you, is back in Priekule,” Lurcanio answered calmly. Unless it’s Valnu’s bastard. He shrugged. He would gladly claim paternity here, just to watch the Valmieran steam. He wondered how many times Krasta had been unfaithful to him, and with whom. Another shrug. As many as she thought she could get away with, or I miss my guess. It wasn’t as if he’d spent all his nights in her bed.

Off went the Valmieran, still furious and not trying very hard to hide it any more. Santerno came over and slapped Lurcanio on the shoulder. “Well done, your Excellency, well done! Your occupation duty turned out to be good for something after all. You put that fellow in his place as neatly as you please.”

“And now we find out how much we’ll pay for my pleasure,” Lurcanio replied. “If the islanders are annoyed enough, they’ll plague us with their egg-tossers for the rest of the day.”

And the Lagoans and Kuusamans did exactly that. The egg-tossers the Algarvians had left did their best to reply. Huddling in a hole in the ground, Lurcanio was glumly certain their best would not be good enough.

The next morning, Major Vizgantu returned, white flag and all. A different soldier brought him to Lurcanio, saying, “Sir, this cursed Kaunian says he is ordered to report to you, if you’re still alive.”

“I think I may qualify,” Lurcanio answered, which made the soldier chuckle. Lurcanio bowed to the Valmieran. “And a good day to you, Major. We meet again.”

“So we do,” Vizgantu said coldly. He took from his pocket a folded leaf of paper, which he held out to Lurcanio. “This is for you.”

“Thank you so much.” Lurcanio unfolded the paper. It was written in classical Kaunian. To Colonel Lurcanio of the Algarvian army, greetings, he read. Major Vizgantu is my chosen representative in requesting a surrender of the Algarvian forces currently surrounded in this area. If you do not permit him to proceed to your commander, no other representative will be proffered, and no other request for surrender will be made. The fate of your army will be left, in that case, to the chances of the battlefield. The choice, sir, is yours. Your humble servant, Marshal Araujo, commanding allied armies in southern Algarve.

“Have you read this?” Lurcanio asked the Valmieran. A slight smirk was all the answer he needed. He let out a long sigh. The enemy commander had had his revenge, and had taken more than he’d expected. Was Araujo bluffing? Lurcanio studied the note again. He didn’t think so, and he knew the army of which he was a part had no hope of stopping any serious push the Lagoans and Kuusamans-aye, and the Valmierans-chose to make.

“What is your answer, Colonel?” Vizgantu demanded.

Lurcanio contemplated his choice: give up his pride or give up any hope for the soldiers in the pocket with him. He knew more than a few of his countrymen who would have sacrificed the army for the sake of pride. Had he been younger, he might have done the same himself. As things were. .

He thought of salvaging what he could by insulting the Valmieran again, by saying that if Marshal Araujo, a distinguished soldier, chose to use a man who was anything but as his emissary, that had to be respected, but he himself deplored it. He thought of it, then shook his head. It would have come out as childish petulance, no more. All he said was, “I shall send you forward, Major.”

“Thank you,” Vizgantu said. “You might have done this yesterday and saved everyone a good deal of difficulty.”

“So I might have, but I did not,” Lurcanio replied. “And I doubt everything was perfectly smooth in Valmiera almost five years ago, when you folk found yourselves on the other end of victory.”

Vizgantu gave back a proverb in classical Kaunian: “The last victory counts for more than all the others before it.”

Since Lurcanio knew that to be true, he didn’t try to argue it. He just sent the Valmieran major deeper into the pocket the Algarvians still held. If the Algarvian commander chose to surrender, that was, or at least might have been, his privilege. And if he chose to fight on …

If he chooses to fight on, he’s a madman, Lurcanio thought. That, of course, had little to do with anything. If the Algarvian commander chose to fight on, his men would keep fighting for as long as they could. Lurcanio didn’t know what good it would do, but he hadn’t known what good further fighting would do for quite a while. He didn’t want to die at this stage of the war-his goal was to be blazed by an outraged husband at the age of 103-but he knew he would go forward if ordered, or hold in place as long as he could.

The order didn’t come. Instead, that afternoon a runner announced, “General Prusione will yield up this army at sunrise tomorrow.”

“It’s over, then,” Lurcanio said dully, and the runner nodded. He looked not far from tears.

It wasn’t quite over, of course. Around Trapani and here and there in the north, the Algarvians still fought on. Surrendering to Unkerlant was different from yielding to Lagoas and Kuusamo-different and much more frightening. The Algarvians had plenty of reason to worry about how their enemy in the west would treat them once they gave up, and even about whether King Swemmel would let them give up.

But that wasn’t Lurcanio’s concern. He took a certain pride in knowing he’d made a tolerably good combat soldier. It hadn’t mattered, though. However well he’d fought, Algarve still lay prostrate.

When the sun rose, he led his men out of their holes. Lagoan soldiers relieved them of their weapons and whatever small valuables they had. Lurcanio strode into captivity with his head up.