Rulers of the Darkness

Two

A guard clattered his bludgeon against the iron bars of Talsu's cell. "Come on, you cursed traitor, get up!" the guard shouted at him. "You think this is a hostel, eh? Do you?"

"No, sir. I don't think that, sir," Talsu replied as he sprang off his cot and stood at attention beside it. He had to give a soft answer, or else the guard and maybe three or four of his comrades would swarm into the cell and use their bludgeons on him instead of on the bars. He'd got one beating for talking back. He didn't want another one.

"You'd cursed well better not," the guard snarled before stamping down the hall to waken the prisoner in the next cell after not enough sleep.

Talsu was glad when he couldn't see the ugly lout any more. The prison guard was as much a Jelgavan as he was: a blond man who wore trousers. But he served Mainardo, the younger brother King Mezentio of Algarve had installed on the Jelgavan throne, as readily as he'd ever served King Donalitu. Donalitu had fled when Jelgava fell. His dogs had stayed behind, and wagged their tails for their new masters.

Another Jelgavan came by a few minutes later. He shoved a bowl into Talsu's cell. The barley mush in the bowl smelled sour, almost nasty. Talsu spooned it up just the same. If he didn't eat what the gaolers fed him, he would have do make do on the cockroaches that swarmed across the floor of his cell or, if he was extraordinarily lucky, on the rats that got whatever the roaches missed- and got their share of roaches, too.

The cell didn't even boast a chamber pot. He pissed in a corner, hoping he was drowning some roaches as he did it. Then he went back and sat down on his cot. He had to be plainly visible when the guard collected his bowl and spoon. If he wasn't, the guard would assume he'd used the tin spoon to dig a hole through the stone floor and escape. Then he would suffer, and so would everyone else in this wing of the prison.

As always, the guard came by with a list and a pen. He scooped up the bowl and the spoon, checked them off on the list, and glared through the bars at Talsu. "Don't look so bloody innocent," he growled. "You're not. If you were, you wouldn't be here. You hear me?"

"Aye, sir. I hear you, sir," Talsu answered. If he didn't sit there looking innocent, the guards would decide he was insolent. That rated a beating, too. As best he could tell, he couldn't win.

Of course you can't win, fool, he thought. If you could, you wouldn't be stuck here. He felt like kicking himself. But how could he have guessed that the silversmith who taught classical Kaunian to would-be patriots in Skrunda was in fact an Algarvian cat's-paw? As soon as Talsu wanted to do more than learn the old language, as soon as he wanted to strike a blow against the redheads who occupied his kingdom, he'd gone to Kugu. Who was more likely to know how to put one foe of the Algarvians in touch with others? The logic was perfect- or it would have been, if Mezentio's men hadn't stayed a jump ahead.

Algarvians had caught him. They'd said he was in their hands. But they must have decided he wasn't that important, because they'd given him to their Jelgavan henchmen for disposal. Thanks to the fears of Jelgava's kings, her dungeons had been notorious even before the redheads overran the kingdom; Talsu doubted they'd improved since.

After breakfast, the Jelgavan guards retreated to the ends of the corridors. Cautiously, captives began calling back and forth from one cell to another. They were cautious for a couple of good reasons. Talk was against the rules; the gaolers could punish them for it no matter how innocuous their words were. And if their words weren't so innocuous but did get overheard… Talsu didn't like to think about what would happen then. For the most part, he kept quiet.

His corridor's exercise period came at midmorning. One by one, the guards unlocked the cells. "Come along," their sergeant said. "Don't dawdle. Don't give us any trouble." No one seemed inclined to give them trouble: they carried sticks now, not truncheons.

Along with his fellow unfortunates, Talsu shuffled down the corridor and out into the exercise yard. There, under the watchful eyes of the guards, he walked back and forth, back and forth, for an hour. The stone walls were so high, he got not a glimpse of the outside world. He had no idea in what part of Jelgava the prison was. But he could look up and see the sky. After spending the rest of the day locked away from light and air, he found that precious beyond belief.

"All right, scum- back you go," the guard sergeant said when the exercise period was over. Now Talsu stared down at the stone paving blocks so the guards couldn't see his glare. The Algarvians hadn't built this prison, or the others much like it scattered over the face of Jelgava- Jelgavan kings had done that, to keep their own subjects in line. But the redheads were perfectly willing to use the prisons- and the guards, as long as they kept their jobs, didn't care whom they were guarding, or for whom, or why.

Talsu sat back down on his cot and waited for the bowl of mush that would be dinner. It might even have a couple of bits of salt pork floating in it. Something to look forward to, he thought. The worst part of that was noticing how seriously he meant it.

But a guard strode up to the cell before dinnertime. "Talsu son of Traku?" he demanded.

"Aye, sir," Talsu said.

The guard made a check on his list. He unlocked the door and pointed a stick at Talsu's chest. "You will come with me," he said. "Interrogation."

"What about my dinner?" Talsu yelped. He really had been looking forward to it. They wouldn't save it for him. He knew that all too well. Instead of answering, the guard jerked his stick, as if to say Talsu wouldn't need to worry about dinner ever again if he didn't get moving right now. Having no choice, he got moving.

Even his interrogator was a Jelgavan, a man who wore the uniform of a constabulary captain. He did not invite Talsu to sit down. Indeed, but for his stool and those on which two armed guards perched, the room had nowhere to sit. One of the guards rose and positioned a lamp so it shone straight into Talsu's face. It was bright enough to make him blink and try to look away.

"So," the constabulary officer said. "You are another one who betrayed his lawful sovereign. What have you got to say for yourself?"

"Nothing, sir," Talsu answered. "Nothing I could say would get me out of the trouble I'm in, anyhow."

"No. There you are wrong," the interrogator said. "Give us the names of those who plotted with you and things will start looking better for you in short order. You may rest assured of that: I know whereof I speak."

"I don't know any names," Talsu said, as he had the first time they'd bothered questioning him. "How could I know any names? Nobody did any plotting with me. I was all by myself- and your man got me." He didn't try to hide the self-reproach in his voice.

"You assert, then, that your father knew nothing of your treason."

It wasn't treason, not in Talsu's eyes. How could turning on the Algarvians be treason for a Jelgavan? It couldn't. He didn't think the constable felt that way, though, so all he said was, "No, sir. You ask around in Skrunda. He's made more clothes for the Algarvians in town than anybody else there."

The interrogator didn't pursue it, from which Talsu concluded he'd already asked around, and had got the same answers Talsu had given. Now he tried a new tack: "You also assert your wife knew nothing of this."

"Of course I do," Talsu exclaimed in alarm he didn't try to hide. "I never said anything about it to Gailisa. By the powers above, it's the truth."

"And yet, she has plenty of reasons for disliking Algarvians- is that not so?" the interrogator went on. "Is it not so that she saw an Algarvian soldier stab you before you were married?"

"Aye, that is so." Talsu admitted what he could hardly deny. "But I never told her about anything. If I had told her about anything, she probably would have wanted to come with me. I didn't want that to happen."

"I see," the Jelgavan in Algarvian service said in tones suggesting Talsu hadn't helped himself or Gailisa with that answer. "You are not making this easy. You could, as I have said, if only you would name names."

"I haven't got any names to give you," Talsu said. "The only name I know is Kugu the silversmith's, and he's been on your side all along. I can't very well get him into trouble, can I?" I would if I could, he thought.

"Perhaps we can refresh your memory," his interrogator said. He rang a bell. A couple of more guards strode into the chamber. Without a word, they started working Talsu over. He tried to fight back, but had no luck. One against two was bad odds to begin with, and the fellows with the sticks would have intervened had he got anywhere. He didn't. The bruisers had learned their trade in a nastier school than he'd known even in the army, and learned it well. They had no trouble battering him into submission.

When the battering was done, he could hardly see out of one eye. He tasted blood, though no teeth seemed broken. One of his feet throbbed: a guard had stamped down hard on it. His ribs ached. So did his belly.

Calmly, the interrogator said, "Now, then- who else knew that you were plotting treason against King Mainardo?"

"No one," Talsu gasped. "Do you want me to make up names? What good would that do you?"

"If you want to name some of your friends and neighbors, go ahead," the interrogator said. "We will haul them in and question them most thoroughly. Here is paper. Here is a pen. Go ahead and write."

"But they wouldn't have done anything," Talsu said. "I'd just be making it up. You'd know I was just making it up."

"Suppose you let us worry about that," the interrogator said. "Once you make the accusations, things will go much easier for you. We might even think about letting you go."

"I don't understand," Talsu said, and that was true: he had trouble understanding anything but his own pain. The Jelgavan constabulary captain didn't answer. He just steepled his fingertips and waited. So did the guards with sticks. So did the bully boys who'd beaten Talsu.

It would be so easy, Talsu thought. I could give them what they want, and then they wouldn't hurt me anymore. He started to ask the interrogator to hand him the pen and paper. What happened to the people he might name didn't seem very important. It would, after all, be happening to someone else.

But what would happen to him? Nothing? That didn't seem likely. All at once, he saw the answer with horrid clarity. If he gave the Algarvians- or rather, their watchdog here- a few names, they would want more. After he gave them a first batch, how could he refuse to give them a second, and then a third? How could he refuse them anything after that? He couldn't. Had Kugu the silversmith started by making up a few names, too? Talsu gathered himself. "There wasn't anybody else," he said.

They beat him again before frog-marching him back to his cell. He'd expected they would. He'd hoped his armor of virtue would make the beating hurt less. It didn't. And he didn't get the bowl of mush he'd missed when they took him away. Even so, he slept well that night.

The blizzard screamed around the hostel in the barren wilderness of southeastern Kuusamo. It left Pekka feeling trapped, almost as if she were in prison. She and her fellow mages had come here so they could experiment without anyone else but a few reindeer noticing. That made good sense; some of the things they were doing would have wrecked good-sized chunks of Yliharma or Kajaani even if they went perfectly. And if some of those experiments escaped control… Pekka's shiver had nothing to do with the ghastly weather.

But, while the blizzards raged, Pekka and her colleagues couldn't experiment at all. If the rats and rabbits they were using froze to death the instant they went out of doors in spite of the best efforts of the secondary sorcerers, they were useless. That limited the amount of work the mages could do.

When Pekka said as much over supper one evening, Ilmarinen nodded soberly. "We should use Kaunians instead," he declared. "No one cares whether they live or die, after all: the Algarvians have proved as much."

Pekka winced. So did Siuntio and Fernao. That Ilmarinen spoke in classical Kaunian to include Fernao in the conversation only made his irony more savage. After a moment, Siuntio murmured, "If we succeed here, we'll keep the Algarvians from slaughtering more Kaunians."

"Will we? I doubt it." But Ilmarinen checked himself. "Well, maybe a few, and will we also keep Swemmel of Unkerlant from slaughtering his own folk to hold back the Algarvians? Maybe a few, again. What we will do, if we're lucky, is win the war this way. It's not the same thing, and we'd be fools to pretend it is."

"Right now, winning the war will do," Fernao said. "If we do not do that, nothing else matters."

Siuntio nodded in mournful agreement. He said, "Even if we do win the war, though, the world will never again be what it was. Too many dreadful things have happened."

"It will be worse if we lose," Pekka said. "Remember Yliharma." A sorcerous Algarvian attack had destroyed much of the capital of Kuusamo, had slain two of the Seven Princes, and had come too close to killing her and Siuntio and Ilmarinen.

"Everyone remembers wars." Siuntio still sounded sad. "Remembering what happened in the last one gives an excuse for fighting the next one."

Not even Ilmarinen felt like trying to top that gloomy bit of wisdom. The mages got up from the table and went off to their own chambers as if trying to escape it. But Pekka soon discovered, as she had before, that being alone in her room was anything but an escape.

Sometimes the mages would stay in the dining hall after supper, arguing about what they had done or what they wanted to do or simply chatting. Not tonight. They drifted apart and went upstairs to their chambers as if sick of one another's company. There were times when Pekka was sick of her comrades' company, most often of Ilmarinen's, then of Fernao's, and occasionally even of Siuntio's. Tonight wasn't one of those angry times. She just didn't want to talk to anyone.

Instead, she worked on two letters side by side. One was for her husband, the other for her son. Leino would be able to read his own, of course. Her sister Elimaki, who was taking care of Uto, would surely read aloud most of the one written to him, even though he was learning his letters.

The letter to Uto went well. Pekka had no trouble writing the things any mother should say to her son. Those were easy, and flowed from her pen as easily as they flowed from her heart. She loved him, she missed him, she hoped he was being a good little boy (with Uto, often a forlorn hope). The words, the thoughts, were simple and straightforward and true.

Writing to Leino was harder. She loved him and missed him, too, missed him with an ache that sometimes made her empty bed seem the loneliest place in the world. Those things were easy enough to say, even though she knew other eyes than his would also see them: functionaries serving the Seven Princes studied all outgoing correspondence to make sure no secrets were revealed.

But she wanted to tell her husband more. She couldn't even name the mages with whom she was working, for fear that knowledge would fall into the Algarvians' hands and give them clues they shouldn't have. She had to talk about personalities in indirect terms, a surprisingly difficult exercise. She had to talk about the work in which they were engaged in even more indirect terms. She hadn't been able to tell Leino all that much about it even when they'd been together. He hadn't asked, either. He'd known when silence was important, and respected the need for it.

We've had simply appalling weather lately, she wrote. If it were better, we could do more. That seemed safe enough. Most of Kuusamo had appalling weather through most of the winter. Hearing about it wouldn't tell an Algarvian spy where she was. And bad weather could interfere with any number of things, not all of them things in which a spy would be interested.

I hope to be able to see you before long. She'd been told she might be able to leave for a little while in the not too indefinite future. But even if she did manage to get away, could Leino escape his training as a proper military mage at the same time? She thought he should have stayed in a sorcerous laboratory, improving the weapons Kuusaman soldiers would take into battle. But the Seven Princes thought otherwise, and their will counted for more than hers.

Sighing, she stared down at the page. She wanted to tear it up and throw the pieces in the wastebasket. She had to be able to do better than the words she'd put down, the words that seemed so flat, so useless, even so stupid. What would Leino think when he saw them? That he'd married a halfwit?

He'll understand, she thought. I'm sure he's learning plenty of things he can't tell me, too. Most of her believed that. Just enough had doubts, though, to leave all of her upset and worried.

She jumped when someone knocked on the door. Springing away from her letters was something of a relief. Even arguing abstruse theoretical calculations with Ilmarinen seemed more appealing than trying to say things she couldn't say without having them cut out of her letter before Leino ever saw it.

But when she opened the door, she found Fernao standing there, not Ilmarinen. The Lagoan mage leaned on his stick and had his crutch stuck under his other arm. "I hope I am not disturbing you," he said in careful classical Kaunian.

"Not even a little bit," Pekka said in Kuusaman. She started to repeat that in the scholarly tongue, but Fernao's nod showed he'd followed her. "Come in," she went on, in Kaunian now. "Sit down. What can I do for you?"

"I thank you," he said, and made his slow way into her chamber. She took a couple of steps back, not only to get out of his way but to keep him from looming over her quite so much: Lagoans were almost uncouthly tall.

Maybe Fernao sensed what she felt, for he sank onto one of the stools in the room. Or maybe he's just glad to get off his feet, Pekka thought. Had she been injured as Fernao was, she knew she would have been. She turned the chair on which she'd been sitting to write away from the desk. "Shall I make you some tea?" she asked. She couldn't be much of a hostess here, but she could do that.

Fernao shook his head. "No, thank you," he said. "If you do not mind, I can talk with you without thinking I am once more a student bearding a professor in his den."

Pekka laughed. "I often have that feeling myself around Siuntio and Ilmarinen. I think even the Grandmaster of your kingdom's Guild of Mages would have it around them."

"Grandmaster Pinhiero is not the most potent mage ever to come out of our universities," Fernao said, "but he would speak his mind to anyone, even to King Swemmel of Unkerlant."

Lagoans had always had a reputation for speaking their minds, regardless of whether doing so was a good idea. Pekka asked, "Would that make Grandmaster Pinhiero a hero or a fool?"

"Without a doubt," Fernao answered. Pekka chewed on that for a little while before deciding it was another joke and laughing again. Fernao continued, "Every time I see how far you Kuusamans have come, it amazes me."

"Why is that?" Pekka knew her tone was tart, but couldn't help it. "Because you Lagoans do not think Kuusamo worth noticing at all most of the time?"

"That probably has something to do with it," he said, which caught her by surprise. "We did notice you when it came to declare war against Algarve- I will say that. We would have done it sooner had we not feared you might take Mezentio's side and assail us from behind."

"Ah." Pekka found herself nodding. "Aye, I knew people who wanted to do exactly that." She remembered a party at Elimaki's house. Some of the friends of Elimaki's husband, Olavin the banker, had been eager to take on Lagoas. Olavin was serving the Seven Princes these days. Pekka suspected most of those friends were doing the same thing.

"Did you?" Fernao said, and Pekka nodded again. He shrugged. "Well, I can hardly say I am surprised. It would have been… unfortunate had that happened, though." Even as Pekka wondered how he meant the word, he explained: "Unfortunate for Lagoas, unfortunate for the whole world."

"Aye, you are likely to be right." Pekka glanced over her shoulder at the letters to Leino and Uto, then back to Fernao. "May I ask you something?"

As if he were a great noble, he inclined his head to her. "Of course."

"How do you stand it here, cut off not just from your family but from your kingdom as well?"

Fernao said, "For one thing, I have not got much in the way of family: no wife, no children, and I am not what you would call close to either of my sisters. They never have understood what being a mage means. And, for another, the work we are doing here matters. It matters so much, or may matter so much, I would sooner be here than anywhere else."

That was a more thoughtful answer than Pekka had expected. She wondered how long Fernao had been waiting for someone to ask a question like hers. Quite a while, she guessed, which might also be a measure of his loneliness. "Why have you not got a wife?" she asked, and then, realizing she might have gone too far, she quickly added, "You need not answer that."

But the Lagoan didn't take offense. Instead, he started to laugh. "Not because I would rather have a pretty boy, if that is what you mean," he said. "I like women fine, thank you very much. But I have never found one I liked enough and respected enough to want to marry her." After a moment, he held up his hand. "I take it back. I have found a couple like that, but they were already other men's wives."

"Oh," Pekka said, and then, half a beat slower than she might have, "Aye, I can see how that would be hard." Was he looking at her? She didn't look over at him, not for a little while. She didn't want to know.

"You have things you were doing, I see." Awkwardly, Fernao levered himself to his feet. "I shall not keep you. May you have a pleasant evening." He made his slow way to the door.

"And you," Pekka said. She had no trouble looking at his back. But, when he had gone, she found she couldn't continue the letter to Leino. She put it aside, hoping she'd have more luck with it in the morning.

Ealstan enjoyed walking through the streets of Eoforwic much more these days than he had a few weeks before. True, the Algarvians still occupied what had been the capital of Forthweg. True, King Penda still remained in exile in Lagoas. True, a Kaunian whose sorcerous disguise as a Forthwegian was penetrated still had dreadful things happen to him. And yet…

SULINGEN was scrawled in chalk or charcoal or whitewash or paint on one or two walls or fences in almost every block. Up till now, a lot of Forthwegians had been sullenly resigned to Algarvian occupation. King Mezentio's men looked like winning the war; most people- most people who weren't Kaunians, anyhow- had got on with their lives as best they could in spite of that ugly weight hanging over them. Now, even though the Algarvians still held every inch of their kingdom, some of them didn't.

A couple of Algarvian constables strode past Ealstan. Their height and red hair separated them from the Forthwegians their kingdom had overcome. So did the pleated kilts they wore. And so did their swagger. No matter what had happened to their countrymen down in Sulingen, they showed no dismay.

But a Forthwegian behind Ealstan shouted, "Get out of here, you whoresons! Go home!"

Both Algarvians jerked as if stuck with pins. The shout had been in Forthwegian, but they'd understood. They whirled, one grabbing for his club, the other for his stick. For a dreadful moment, Ealstan thought they thought he'd yelled. Then, to his vast relief, he saw they were looking past him, not at him. One of them pointed toward a Forthwegian whose black beard was streaked with gray. They both strode purposefully by Ealstan and toward the older man. He stared this way and that, as if wondering whether flight or holding still was more dangerous.

Before he had to find an answer, someone from farther up the street- someone behind the constables now, someone they couldn't see- cried out, "Aye, bugger off!"

Again, the Algarvians spun. Again, they hurried past Ealstan. Again, they seized no one, for more insults rained down on them whenever they turned their backs. Algarvians often had tempers that burst like eggs. These redheads proved no exception. One of them shook his fist and shouted in pretty fluent Forthwegian: "You fornicating bigmouths, you yell much more, we treat you all like stinking Kaunians!" To leave no doubt about what he meant, his partner stuck his chin in the air and drew a forefinger across his throat.

"Shame!" Ealstan yelled. That might have got him into trouble, but other Forthwegians were also yelling, and yelling worse things. As Ealstan knew too well, most of them cared little about what happened to the Kaunian minority in Forthweg, but they all cared about what happened to them.

The constable who'd shouted the threat was the one who'd taken the stick off his belt. Cursing now in his own language, he blazed between a couple of Forthwegians standing not far from him. His beam missed them both, but bit into the wooden wall of the wineshop behind them. The wall began to smolder. The Forthwegians fled.

So did everyone else on the street. Ealstan wasted no time ducking around the first corner he came to. He kept on running after that, too, the hem of his long wool tunic flapping just below his knees. "Those bastards have gone daft!" another man making himself scarce said.

"What's daft about it?" Ealstan returned bitterly. "They probably get a bonus for anybody they blaze."

When the other fellow didn't argue with him, he decided he'd made his point. Having made it, he went right on trotting. He didn't know whether a new round of rioting was about to flare up in Eoforwic, and didn't care to stay around to find out. That was the trouble with people feeling feisty: no matter how much trouble they stirred up, they still couldn't get rid of the Algarvians.

"One of these days, though," Ealstan murmured. "Aye, one of these days…" He heard the longing in his own voice. Mezentio's men had been sitting on Forthweg for three and a half years now. He smiled when he passed another scribbled SULINGEN. Surely they couldn't hold down his kingdom forever.

His own block of flats lay in a poor part of town, one already scarred again and again by rioting. He wouldn't have minded seeing another round of that if it meant throwing Mezentio's men out of Eoforwic. Since he didn't think it would, he was glad things seemed quiet.

The stairwell smelled of stale cabbage and staler piss. He sighed as he trudged up toward his flat. He'd been used to better in Gromheort before he had to flee the eastern town and come to the capital. As a matter of fact, he could afford better here. But staying in a district where no one cared about you or what you were and no one expected you to be anybody much had advantages, too.

He walked down the hall and knocked on the door to his flat- once, twice, once. A scraping noise came from inside as Vanai lifted the bar that held the door closed. His wife worked the latch and let him in. He gave her a hug and kissed her. The magecraft that hid her Kaunianity and made her look Forthwegian made her look astonishingly like a particular Forthwegian: his older sister, Conberge. He'd needed a while before that stopped bothering him.

"We could stop using the coded knock, you know," he said. "Now that you don't look Kaunian anymore, there's not much point to it."

"I still like to know it's you at the door," she answered.

That made Ealstan smile. "All right," he said, and sniffed. "What smells good?"

"Nothing very exciting," Vanai told him. "Just barley porridge with a little cheese and some of those dried mushrooms I got from the grocer the other day."

"Must be the mushrooms," Ealstan said, which made Vanai smile and nod in turn: both Forthwegians and the Kaunian minority in Forthweg were mad for mushrooms. Ealstan reached out and stroked her hair. "You must be glad to be able to go to the grocer's yourself."

"You have no idea," Vanai said. Ealstan couldn't argue with her. Until she no longer looked like what she was, she'd had to stay holed up inside the flat. Had an Algarvian spotted her on the street, or had a Forthwegian betrayed her to the redheads, she would have been taken off to the Kaunian district- and then, all too likely, shipped west so her life energy could help power the sorceries the Algarvians used in their war against Unkerlant.

Ealstan went into the kitchen, pulled the stopper from a jar of wine, and filled two cups. He carried one of them back to Vanai and raised the other in salute. "To freedom!" he said.

"Or something close to it, anyhow," Vanai answered, but she did drink to the toast.

"Aye, something close to it," Ealstan agreed. "Maybe something getting closer, too." He told her how the Forthwegians had given the Algarvian constables a hard time.

"Good!" she said. "I wish I'd been there." After a moment, the fierce smile slipped from her face. "Of course, if I'd been there looking the way I really do, they'd have been just as happy to throw rocks at me and yell, 'Dirty Kaunian!' "

Her eyes held Ealstan's, as if challenging him to deny it. He looked away. He had to look away. The most he could do was mumble, "We're not all like that."

Vanai's gaze softened. "Of course not. If you were like that, I'd be dead now. But too many Forthwegians are." She shrugged. "Nothing to be done about it, or nothing I can see. Come on. Supper should be ready."

After supper, Ealstan read a book while Vanai cleaned the dishes and silverware. He'd brought a lot of books home while she was trapped in the flat- reading was almost the only thing she'd been able to do while he went out and cast accounts and got them enough money to keep going. He read them, too. Some- the classics he'd had to study in his academy in Gromheort- proved much more interesting when he read them because he wanted to than when they were forced down his throat.

When Vanai came out of the kitchen, she sat down on the sofa beside him. She had a book waiting on the rickety table in front of the sofa. They read side by side for a while in companionable silence. Presently, Ealstan slipped his arm over Vanai's shoulder. If she'd gone on reading, he would have left it there for a while and then withdrawn it; one thing he'd learned was that she didn't care to have affection forced on her.

But she smiled, set down her book- a Forthwegian history of the glory days of the Kaunian Empire- and snuggled against him. Before long, they went back to the bedchamber together. Making love was the other thing they'd been able to do freely when Vanai was trapped in the flat- and, because Ealstan was only eighteen even now, they'd been able to do it pretty often.

Afterwards, they lay side by side, lazy and happy and soon to be ready to sleep. Ealstan reached out and ran his fingers through Vanai's hair. Some people, he'd heard, eventually grew bored with making love. Maybe that was true. He pitied those people if so.

When he woke the next morning, rain was drumming against the bedchamber windows. Winter was the rainy season in Forthweg, as in most northerly lands. Yawning, Ealstan opened one eye. Rain, sure enough. He opened the other eye and glanced over at Vanai.

He frowned. Her features had… changed. Her hair remained dark. It would: she regularly dyed it. But it looked straight now, not wavy. Her face was longer, her nose straight, not proudly hooked. Her skin had matched the swarthy tone of his. Now it was fairer, so the blood underneath showed through pink.

Before long, the rain woke her, too. As soon as her eyes opened, Ealstan said, "Your spell's worn off." Those eyes should have seemed dark brown, but they were their true grayish blue again.

Vanai nodded. "I'll fix it after breakfast. I don't think anyone will come bursting in to catch me looking like a Kaunian till then."

"All right," Ealstan said. "Don't forget."

She laughed at him. "I'm not likely to, you know."

And she didn't. After they'd washed down barley bread and olive oil with more red wine, Vanai took a length of yellow yarn and a length of dark brown, twisted them together, and began to chant in classical Kaunian. The spell was of her own devising, an adaptation of a Forthwegian charm in a little book called You Too Can Be a Mage that hadn't worked as it should have. Thanks to the training she'd had from her scholarly grandfather, the one she'd made did.

As soon as she spoke the last word of the charm, her face- indeed, her whole body- returned to its Forthwegian appearance. Kaunians in Eoforwic and throughout Forthweg used that same spell now. A lot of them had escaped from the districts in which the redheads had sealed them so they'd be handy when Algarve needed the life energy they could give. Mezentio's men weren't happy about that.

Ealstan was. He kissed Vanai and said, "If these were imperial times, you'd come down in history as a great heroine."

She answered in Kaunian, something she seldom did since taking on a Forthwegian seeming: "If these were imperial times, I wouldn't need such sorcery." Her voice was bleak.

Ealstan wished he could disagree with her. Since he couldn't, he did the next best thing: he kissed her again. "Whether you are remembered or not, you are still a heroine," he said, and had a demon of a time understanding why she suddenly started to weep.

Bembo cursed under his breath as he prowled through the streets of Gromheort. Oraste, his partner, didn't bother keeping his voice down. Gromheort lay in eastern Forthweg, not far from the border with Algarve, and a good many locals understood Algarvian. The constable kept cursing anyway.

"Miserable Kaunians," he growled. "Powers below eat them, every stinking one. They ought to have their throats cut, the filthy buggers, what with all the extra work they've piled on our backs."

"Aye, curse them," Bembo agreed. He was tubbier than he should have been, no braver than he had to be, and heartily disapproved of anything resembling work, especially work he'd have to do.

Oraste, for his part, disapproved of almost everything. "They're liable to cost us the war, the lousy, stinking whoresons. How are we supposed to scoop 'em up and send 'em west when they start looking like everybody else in this fornicating kingdom? The way things are going over in Unkerlant, we need all the help we can get."

"Aye," Bembo repeated, but on a less certain note. The idea of rounding up Kaunians and sending them toward the battlefront to be killed made his stomach turn unhappy flipflops. He did it- what choice did he have but to obey the sergeants and officers set over him? -but he had trouble believing it was the right thing to do.

Oraste had no doubts. Oraste, as far as Bembo could see, never had any doubts about anything. He waved now, not the usual extravagant Algarvian gesture but a functional one, one that took in the street ahead and the people on it. "Any of these bastards- any of 'em, by the powers above! -could be a Kaunian wrapped in magic cloaking. And what can we do about it? What can we do about it, I ask you?"

"Nothing much," Bembo answered mournfully. "If we start using Forthwegians the way we use the Kaunians here, this whole kingdom'll go up in smoke. We haven't got the men to hold it down, not if we want to go on fighting the Unkerlanters, too."

"It's war," Oraste said. "You do what you have to do. If we need Forthwegians, we'll take 'em. We can sell it to the ones we don't take: if the Kaunians weren't wolves in sheep's clothing, we can say, we wouldn't have to do this. The Forthwegians'll buy it, or enough of 'em will. They hate the blonds as much as we do."

"I suppose so." Bembo didn't particularly hate anybody- save, perhaps, people who made him work more than he cared to. Those people included Sergeant Pesaro, his boss, as well as the miscreants he all too often failed to run to earth.

"Look at 'em!" Oraste waved again, this time with a sort of animal frustration. "Any one of them could be a Kaunian. Any one, I tell you. You think I like the notion of those lousy blonds laughing at me? Not on your life, pal." He folded his beefy hands into fists. When he didn't like something, his notion of what to do next was pound it to pieces.

And, whenever he got into that kind of mood, he'd sometimes lash out at his partner, too; he wasn't always fussy about whom or what he hurt, so long as he was hurting someone or something. To try to placate him, Bembo pointed to a man whose beard was going gray. "There. That fellow's a genuine Forthwegian, no doubt about it."

"How d'you know?" Brooding suspicion filled Oraste's voice.

"Don't you remember? He's the one who had a son disappear off to powers above know where, and his nephew murdered his other son. He couldn't get anybody to do anything about it, because the nephew was in Plegmund's Brigade."

"Oh. Him. Aye." The fire in Oraste's hazel eyes faded a little. "Well, I can't say you're wrong- this time."

Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed as deeply as his belly would permit. "Your servant," he said.

"My arse," Oraste said. He pointed to the man with whom the assuredly genuine Forthwegian was speaking. "How about him? You going to tell me you know for sure he's no Kaunian, too?"

"How can I do that?" Bembo asked reasonably as he and Oraste came up to the two men. The other fellow certainly looked like a Forthwegian: a white-haired, white-bearded, rather dissolute-seeming old Forthwegian. "But what else is he likely to be? He's a blowhard, I'll tell you that."

Sure enough, the old man was doing most of the talking, his companion mostly listening and then trying to get a word or two in edgewise. As Bembo and Oraste came up to them, the geezer waved his forefinger in the other man's face and spoke in impassioned Forthwegian. Bembo couldn't understand more than one word in four, but he knew an irate, hectoring tone when he heard one. The fellow the old man was talking to looked as if he wished he were elsewhere.

Oraste rolled his eyes. "Blowhard, nothing. He's a stinking windbag, is what he is."

"Aye, that's the truth." Instead of walking past the windbag, Bembo slowed and cocked his head to one side, frowning and listening hard.

"Are you daft?" Oraste said. "Come on."

"Shut up." Bembo was usually a little afraid of his partner, and wouldn't have dared speak to him like that most of the time. But a moment later he gave a decisive nod. "It is. By the powers above, it is!"

"Is what?" Oraste asked.

Bembo started to point, then thought better of it. "That old Forthwegian- he's not a Forthwegian, or I'll eat my club. Remember that noisy, smartmouthed old Kaunian whoreson we first ran into in Oyngestun? We've bumped into him a few times here in Gromheort, too."

After another couple of paces, Oraste nodded. "Aye, I do. He's the one with the good-looking granddaughter- or he said she was his granddaughter, anyway."

"That's the one. And that's him," Bembo said. "I recognize his voice. Whatever magecraft he's using, it doesn't change that."

Oraste took one more step, then spun on his heel. "Let's snag the son of a whore."

Had Bembo seen two constables bearing down on him, he would have made himself scarce. Maybe the sorcerously disguised Kaunian didn't see him and Oraste; the fellow was still doing his best to talk the other man's ear off. He looked absurdly astonished when the Algarvians laid hold of him. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded- in good Algarvian.

That made Bembo beam. That smartmouthed Kaunian spoke Algarvian- he was supposed to be some sort of scholar. Bembo said, "You're under arrest on suspicion of being a Kaunian."

"Do I look like a Kaunian?" the old man said.

"Not now," Bembo answered. "We'll take you back, throw you in a cell, and wait and see if the magic wears off. If you still look ugly this same way tomorrow, we'll turn you loose. How much you want to bet we don't have to?"

To his surprise, the other Forthwegian, the genuine Forthwegian, tapped his belt pouch. Coins rang in there. "Gentlemen," he said, also in fluent Algarvian, "I'll make it worth your while if you forget you ever saw this fellow."

"No." Oraste spoke before Bembo could. Bembo, like a lot of Algarvians, didn't mind making some money on the side; his constable's salary didn't go very far. But he nodded now. He didn't want money. No, that wasn't quite true- he wanted money, but he wanted this old Kaunian's head more.

And so he, too, said, "No. We're going to take this fellow in and deal with him."

"You are making a serious mistake," the old man said. "I tell you, I am as much a Forthwegian as Hestan here."

Hestan there didn't say another word. He didn't call the old man who looked like a Forthwegian a liar, but he didn't claim he was telling the truth, either. Oraste started hauling the fellow off toward Gromheort's gaol, which was more crowded now than it had been when Forthweg ruled the city.

"What have we got here?" an Algarvian gaoler asked when the constables frog-marched their prisoner into the building. "You catch him filching somebody's false teeth?" He laughed at his own wit.

Bembo said, "Suspicion of Kaunianity. Lock him up and see if he still looks the same tomorrow. The magic isn't even good for a day at a time, from everything I've heard."

"Aha- one of those." The gaoler brightened. "How'd you catch him? Can't tell much by his hair, I'd say- white's still white."

"I recognized his voice," Bembo said proudly. "I'd run into him before, when he looked like what he really is. He made himself enough of a nuisance that he stuck in my mind."

"I am a Forthwegian," the old man said. "I am not a Kaunian."

"Shut up," the gaoler told him. "We'll find out what you are." He turned to a couple of his assistants, who looked to have been shooting dice before Bembo and Oraste came in with their captive. "Strip him- don't leave him anything he can use to make more magic and make more work for us. Then throw him in a cell. Like the constable says, we'll find out what he is."

"Aye," one of his assistants said. They did as they were told. The old man squawked protests and tried to fight back, but he might have been a three-year-old for all the good it did him. The assistant gaolers led him away. Even though he was naked, he kept on squawking.

"Now…" The gaoler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some forms. "The paperwork. If he really is a Kaunian, you'll get the credit. If he's not, you'll get the blame."

"Blame? For what?" Bembo clapped a hand to his forehead in melodramatic disbelief. "For bothering a miserable Forthwegian? Where's the blame in that?"

"There's no blame for bothering a Forthwegian," the gaoler agreed. "But if that old bugger turns out not to be a Kaunian, you get the blame for bothering me." He favored the constables with a singularly unpleasant smile, the sort of smile that made them scurry out of the gaol in a hurry.

Once they'd got outside, Oraste gave Bembo the same kind of smile. "You'd better not be wrong," he said. Bembo wanted to scurry away from his partner, too, but he couldn't. He had to smile himself, and nod, and go on with his shift.

As soon as they came on duty the next day, they hurried to the gaol. The gaoler didn't start cursing the moment he set eyes on them, which Bembo took for a good sign. "Well, you boys got it straight," the gaoler said. "He was a Kaunian."

Oraste thumped Bembo on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Bembo heard something Oraste missed. "Was?" he asked.

"Aye." The gaoler looked sour. "Sometime during the night, somebody gave him drawers and a tunic so he wouldn't freeze. He twisted 'em up and hanged himself with 'em. That killed the spell along with him. Like I say, he was a Kaunian, all right."

"Filthy bastard," Oraste said. "We could have got some use out of his life energy."

"That's right," Bembo said. "Killing yourself like that ought to be punishable by death." He laughed. After a moment, Oraste and the gaoler did, too.

"I've sent the forms off to the constabulary barracks," the gaoler said. "You deserve the credit, like I told you yesterday. That turned out to be a nice bit of work." Bembo beamed and preened and strutted. He hadn't much minded hearing that the longwinded old Kaunian was dead. Now that he knew he'd get the credit for capturing him, he didn't mind at all.

Back in the days when he was a peasant like any other peasant in the Unkerlanter Duchy of Grelz, Garivald had looked forward to winter. With snowdrifts covering the fields, he'd spent most of his time indoors and a lot of that time drunk. Aside from taking care of the livestock that always shared the hut with his family and him, what else was there to do but drink?

But he had no home now, only a miserable little shelter, not even worth dignifying with the name of hut, in the middle of the forest west of Herborn, the capital of Grelz. Munderic's band of irregulars still held the woods, still held away the Algarvians who'd overrun Grelz and the Grelzer puppets who served them, but irregulars had a harder time of it in winter than they did in summer.

Garivald came out of his shelter to look up through the pines and the bare-branched birches to the sullen gray sky overhead. It had snowed the day before. He thought it was done for a while, but you never could tell. He took a couple of steps. At each one, his felt boots left a clear track in the snow.

"Footprints," he growled, vapor puffing from his mouth at the word. "I wish there were a magic to make footprints go away."

"Don't say things like that," Obilot exclaimed. She was one of a handful of women in Munderic's band. The women who ran off to fight the redheads and their local cat's-paws commonly had reasons much more urgent than those of their male counterparts. Obilot went on, "Sadoc's liable to get wind of it and try to cast a spell to be rid of them."

"That might not be so bad," Garivald said. "Odds are, whatever magecraft he tried wouldn't do anything."

"Aye, but it might go wrong so badly, it'd bring the Algarvians down on our heads," Obilot said.

Neither of them spoke of the benefits that would follow if Sadoc's spell succeeded. Neither of them thought Sadoc's spell, if he made one, would succeed. He was the closest thing to a mage Munderic's band boasted. As far as Garivald was concerned, he wasn't close enough. He had no training whatever. He was just a peasant who'd fiddled around with a few charms.

"If only he knew when to try and when not to," Garivald said mournfully. "He might be good enough for little things, but he won't stay with those. He won't even take a blaze at them. If it isn't huge, he doesn't want to bother with it."

"Who doesn't want to bother with what?" Munderic asked. The leader of the irregulars was a big, hard-faced, burly man. He looked the part he played. His temper suited him to it, too. Scowling, he went on, "Who doesn't, curse it? We all have to do whatever we can."

Obilot and Garivald looked at each other. Garivald owed Munderic his life. If the irregulars hadn't plucked him from Algarvian hands, Mezentio's men would have boiled him alive for making songs that mocked them. Even so, he didn't want to give Munderic this particular idea, and neither, evidently, did Obilot.

Munderic saw as much, too. His bushy eyebrows formed a dark bar over his eyes as he scowled. "Who doesn't want to bother with what?" he repeated, an angry rumble in his voice. "You'd better tell me what you were talking about, or you'll be sorry."

"It wasn't anything, really." Garivald didn't want to antagonize Munderic, either. They'd already had a couple of run-ins. To his relief, Obilot nodded agreement.

But they didn't satisfy their leader. "Come on, out with it!" he barked. "If we're going to make the invaders and the traitors howl, we've got to do everything we can." His glare was so fierce, Garivald reluctantly told him what he and Obilot had been talking about. To his dismay, Munderic beamed. "Aye, that'd be just what we need. Footprints in the snow make it hard for us to raid without giving ourselves away. I'll talk to Sadoc."

"There's no guarantee he'll be able to do anything like that, you know," Obilot said. This time, Garivald was the one who nodded.

"I'll talk to him," Munderic said again. "We'll see what he can do. If we've got a mage here, we bloody well ought to get some use out of him, don't you think?" He stamped away without waiting for an answer.

"If we had a mage, we could get some use out of him," Garivald said after the irregulars' leader was out of earshot. "But we've got Sadoc instead."

"I know," Obilot said. They exchanged wry smiles. Garivald knew a certain amount of relief. He'd quarreled with Obilot not so long before, too.

I never wanted to quarrel with anybody, he thought. I just wanted to live out my life back in Zossen with my wife and my son and my daughter. But Zossen lay a long, long way to the west- fifty miles, maybe even sixty. He didn't know if he'd ever see his family again. Obilot was no great beauty, but she wasn't homely, either. He didn't want her angry at him.

He'd been away from Annore for most of a year now. Had Obilot decided to slip under the blankets with him, he wouldn't have thrown her out. But she hadn't. She didn't slip under the blankets with anyone, and she'd knifed a man who tried too persistently to slip under the blankets with her. The other women in the band of irregulars acted much the same way. Garivald looked toward her, but glanced away before their eyes met. What'll you do next? he thought sourly. Start coming up with love songs?

Obilot said, "Maybe nothing'll come of it." She didn't sound as if she believed that.

"Aye. Maybe." Garivald didn't sound as if he believed it, either.

A couple of days later, Munderic gathered the irregulars together in the clearing at the heart of their forest fastness. "We've got to go out and sabotage a ley line," he said. "There's heavy fighting around Durrwangen, south and west of here. If the regular army can take it back, they strike the Algarvians a heavy blow. And the redheads know it, curse 'em. They want to keep Durrwangen, same as they wanted to keep Sulingen. But they've got real supply lines into this place. The more we can do to keep men and behemoths and eggs from getting there, the better we serve Unkerlant. Have you got that?"

"Aye," the irregulars chorused, Garivald among them.

"We've found a stretch of ley line the Grelzer traitors don't guard well," Munderic went on. "We'll plant our eggs there. And we've got a new way of making sure the bastards who call Mezentio's precious cousin Raniero King of Grelz can't follow us. Sadoc will hide our tracks in the snow." He waved to the man who would be a mage.

"That's right," Sadoc said. He was a bruiser himself, maybe as much a bruiser as Munderic. "I'm sure it'll work." He stared from one of his comrades to another, challenging them to disagree with him.

Nobody said anything. Garivald wanted to, but Sadoc already knew what he thought of his magecraft. Maybe he won't make a hash of it this time, Garivald thought, his mind almost echoing Obilot's words. Unfortunately, it also echoed his own mournful coda. Aye. Maybe.

When night came, the irregulars left the forest and crossed the farm country around it. Garivald hoped Munderic was right when he said he knew about a length of ley line that wasn't well guarded. Some of the men supposed to be serving King Raniero really stayed loyal to King Swemmel of Unkerlant, and aided them when and as they could. But others hated Swemmel worse than the Algarvians; those Grelzers, as he'd found to his dismay, made fierce, determined foes.

Clouds scudded across the sky. Every so often, he got a glimpse of the moon, riding high in the northeast. Stars appeared, twinkled for a moment, and then vanished again. Obilot came up alongside Garivald. "Sadoc had better be able to hide our trail," she said in a low voice. "If he can't, the traitors will follow us home."

Garivald nodded. The earflaps on his fur cap bobbed up and down. "I've been thinking the same thing. I wish I hadn't."

Sometimes, the snow was deep, drifted. The irregulars had to bull through the drifts or else find a way around them. Garivald kept muttering under his breath. Even if Sadoc could sorcerously erase footprints, could he get rid of these signs of passage, too? Had Munderic thought about that? Had Munderic thought about anything but hitting the Algarvians a good lick? Garivald doubted it.

If a Grelzer company on patrol caught them out here in the open, they'd get slaughtered. He hung on to his stick- which had once belonged to a redhead who now had no further use for it- and hoped that wouldn't happen.

After what seemed like forever but the moon insisted was well before midnight, the irregulars came to the lines of shrubbery that marked the path of the invisible ley line. The shrubs kept men and animals from blundering into the path of an oncoming caravan. Garivald's heart thudded as the irregulars pushed through them. This time, no Grelzer guards shouted a challenge. Munderic had known whereof he spoke there, anyhow.

Some of the irregulars carried picks and spades as well as their sticks. They started digging a hole in which to conceal the egg they'd brought to destroy the caravan. The ground was frozen hard; they had a demon of a time excavating. Garivald could have told them they would. They probably knew it for themselves, too, but had to do the best they could. They planted the egg and heaped snow over it. With luck, the Algarvians in the lead caravan car wouldn't see it till too late.

"Let's go," Munderic said when the job was done well enough- and when he didn't feel like waiting anymore.

"Back the way we came, as near as we can," Sadoc added. "I'll get rid of all the footprints at once."

"He'd better," Garivald murmured to Obilot as they started off toward the forest. "We're in trouble if he doesn't, unless a blizzard blows up and sweeps our tracks away."

"I don't think one's coming," she said. "This isn't a hard winter, the way last year's was. Just- cold." Garivald nodded. It felt the same way to him. That didn't mean he couldn't freeze to death out here, only that freezing would take longer.

He was weary by the time the irregulars got back to the edge of the woods. Twilight hadn't touched the edge of the sky, but couldn't be far away. He hadn't heard the egg burst. Neither had Munderic, who was unhappy about it. "Something's gone wrong," the leader of the band kept saying. "Powers below eat me if something hasn't gone wrong."

"Maybe the caravan got stuck in a snowdrift," someone suggested.

"No, I'm sure something's buggered up somewhere," Munderic said fretfully. Garivald feared he was right. Munderic rounded on Sadoc. "Even if it didn't work, we don't want the foe to know we've been out. Get rid of those tracks, like you said."

"Aye." Sadoc nodded. He stooped in the snow and began to chant. The tune was one children used in a hide-and-seek game. Did that mean Sadoc was a fool, or that he truly could hide the footprints? Garivald waited and hoped. Sadoc chanted and made passes. With a last dramatic one, he cried out in a loud, commanding voice.

He'd gathered power to him. Garivald could feel it in the air, as if lightning were building. All at once, it was released- and every footprint, all the way back to the ley line (or at least as far as the eye could reach) began to glow with a soft, shimmering iridescence.

Munderic stared, then howled like a wolf. "You idiot!" he roared. "You dunderhead, you turd-witted son of a poxed sow, you-" He leaped at Sadoc. The only thing that kept him from murdering the inept mage was realizing- after he'd been pulled off- that glowing tracks in the snow weren't too much more visible than ordinary ones. The irregulars fled for their shelters in the clearing. Their new tracks didn't glow, for which Garivald thanked the powers above. He didn't think Sadoc would be working more magic any time soon. He thanked the powers above for that, too.

Krasta's foot came down on an icy patch on the sidewalk of the Avenue of Equestrians. She sat down on the pavement suddenly and very hard. An elderly Valmieran man started toward her to help her up, but she was cursing so foully, he beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat.

Her curses didn't bother a couple of Algarvian soldiers on leave in Priekule. The kilted redheads hurried over to her and hauled her to her feet. "You being all right, lady?" one of them asked in Valmieran with a trilling Algarvian accent.

"I am very well. And I thank you." Krasta was very conscious- even smugly conscious- of her own good looks. She was also very conscious that the redheads, given an inch, would cheerfully take a mile. If she were old and homely, they might well have walked right past her. Giving them her most haughty stare, she went on, "I am the Marchioness Krasta, and the companion to Colonel Lurcanio."

Her own rank probably meant very little to the soldiers in kilts. The Algarvian colonel's rank meant they couldn't take any liberties. They weren't too drunk to realize it, either. "You being careful, milady," one of them said. They both bowed, sweeping off their broad-brimmed hats in unison. And then they went away, perhaps in search of a woman who had no way, polite or otherwise, to tell them no. They probably wouldn't have to search too far.

Rubbing her tailbone, Krasta walked on in the opposite direction. The Avenue of Equestrians had always been Priekule's main shopping thoroughfare, with shops of all sorts catering to the most fastidious- and expensive- tastes. It still was, but now only a shadow of its former self. The Algarvian occupiers had methodically plundered Valmiera for more than two and half years. It showed.

They'd been methodically doing other things for more than two and a half years, too. Another Algarvian soldier came by, his arm around the waist of a blond Valmieran girl. He, of course, wore a kilt. But so did she, one that didn't come close to reaching her knees. A lot of Valmieran women- and a fair number of Valmieran men- had adopted their conquerors' fashions.

Krasta sniffed. She kept right on wearing trousers. She'd occasionally worn kilts before the war- as much to shock as for any other reason- but never since. Despite the Algarvians who used the west wing of her mansion as their own, despite an Algarvian lover, in some ways she felt her Kaunian blood more acutely these days than ever before. That was odd, especially since she'd long been convinced Algarve would win the Derlavaian War.

From behind her, someone called, "Congratulations on still having any money to spend, milady!"

She turned. Up the street toward her came Viscount Valnu. He was strikingly handsome, and would have been even more so had he not looked quite so much like a genial skull. He was one of the first men Krasta knew who'd started wearing kilts. She looked him up and down, then shook her head. "You've got knobby knees," she said in the tones of one passing sentence.

Nothing fazed Valnu. His grin grew more impudent yet. "I've got a baby's arm holding an apple, too, sweetheart."

"In your dreams," Krasta said with a snort; she knew the truth there. She waited for Valnu to come up to her. "And what are you doing here, if you haven't got any money?" Nobody came to the Avenue of Equestrians without money; the street offered poor folk nothing.

Valnu patted her on the backside. She couldn't decide whether to slap him or start laughing. In the end, she didn't do anything. The viscount made outrageousness part of his stock in trade. Blue eyes flashing, he answered, "Oh, I manage to scrape a couple of coppers together every now and then. I have my ways, so I do."

He might have meant he was a gigolo. He might have meant he was something with a harsher name; everyone who knew him knew his versatility. But he might just have meant he'd had a good run at dice, or that some rents from properties out in the provinces had come in. You never could tell with Valnu.

Needling him a little, Krasta asked, "And what's new with the Algarvians?"

"How should I know, darling?" he said. "You see more of them than I do. That house of yours is swarming with beefy redheads in kilts. Do you like their legs better than mine? Or will Lurcanio fling you in a dungeon if you even look at anyone but him?" He bared his teeth in happy, even friendly, malice.

Since she couldn't tell what Colonel Lurcanio might do, she was usually circumspect when she looked at anyone but him. "I don't invite them to grand, gruesome orgies at my mansion," she said.

"You don't need to. They're screwing all the maidservants anyhow," Valnu answered. Krasta's chief serving woman had had a baby by Lurcanio's former adjutant, so she couldn't very well deny that. At least Valnu hadn't come right out and said that Lurcanio was screwing her. From him, that was unusual delicacy.

Krasta had trouble holding her thoughts on any one thing. Her wave encompassed the Avenue of Equestrians and the whole city. "I'm so sick of dreariness!" she burst out.

"Things could be better," Valnu agreed. He waited till a couple of more plump, staring Algarvian soldiers enjoying leave in the captured capital of Valmiera went by and got safely out of earshot before adding, "Things could be worse, too. Those fellows are probably in from Unkerlant, for instance. It's a lot worse there."

Unkerlant, to Krasta, might as well have been a mile beyond the moon. "I'm talking about places where civilized people go," she said with a sneer.

"Kaunians go to Unkerlant, the same as Algarvians do," Valnu said in a low voice, almost a whisper. "The difference is, some Algarvians come out again."

The ice that ran through Krasta had nothing to do with the patch that had made her slip. "I saw that news sheet- broadsheet- whatever you want to call it." She shuddered. "I believe it. I believe everything it says."

One of the reasons she believed the horrors the sheet described was that it was written in her brother's hand. She hadn't told Valnu about that, nor Lurcanio, either. A lifetime of cattiness had taught her the importance of keeping some things secret. Lurcanio was after Skarnu as things were.

And you still let him sleep with you? she wondered, as she did every so often. But Algarve was stronger than Valmiera, and Lurcanio had proved himself stronger than she was- a shock that still lingered. What choice had she had? None she'd seen then, none she saw now.

As if to rub salt in the wound, Valnu said, "The redheads keep on falling back in southern Unkerlant. I don't think Durrwangen will hold."

"Where did you hear that?" Krasta asked. "It's not in any of the news sheets."

"Of course it's not." Valnu bared his teeth, mocking her naпvetй. "The Algarvians aren't fools. They don't want anybody here finding out things aren't going quite so well. But they know- and they talk among themselves. And sometimes they talk where other people can listen. Me, for instance." He struck a pose so absurd, Krasta couldn't help laughing.

But that laugh congealed on her face as a couple of constables came up the Avenue of Equestrians toward Valnu and her. They weren't Algarvians; they were the same Valmierans who'd patrolled the city before the kingdom fell. They wore almost the same dark green uniforms they had then. Their cap badges, though, were crossed axes, and crossed axes were also stamped on the brass buttons that held their tunics closed. Something seemed stamped on their features, too: a hard contempt for their own kind. They glared at her as they tramped past.

She glared, too, but only at their backs. Turning to Valnu, she complained, "They have no respect for rank." However angry her words, she didn't speak very loud: she didn't want those grim-looking men to hear.

"You're wrong, my sweet," Valnu said, and Krasta gave him a sour look as well. He blithely ignored it, as he blithely ignored so many things. Wagging a finger in her face, he went on, "They do indeed respect rank. As far as they're concerned, the Algarvians have it, and everyone else is scum. The Algarvians agree with them, of course."

"Of course," Krasta said dully. That wasn't too far removed from her own thoughts of a moment before. The Algarvians had strength, and if strength didn't give rank, what did? Blood, she thought, but the redheads had the strength to ignore that if they chose. "They will win the war, in spite of everything," she murmured. Now her glance toward Valnu was almost beseeching; she wanted him to tell her she was wrong.

He didn't. He said, "They may. They may very well. They've already taken more knocks than they ever expected, but they're still strong, too. And their mages don't care what they do- we know about that. If they win, there's liable not to be a Kaunian left alive in Forthweg by the time they're through."

Before the war, Krasta hadn't thought much about the Kaunians in Forthweg. When she did think of them, it was as backwoods bumpkins in a distant, backward kingdom. They were blood of her blood, aye, but distant cousins she would just as soon have forgotten. Poor relations. But the Algarvians seemed bound and determined to teach the lesson that even poor relations were relations after all.

Something crossed Krasta's mind. She didn't like thinking about these things- truth to tell, she didn't like thinking at all- but she couldn't help it. And she blurted forth the horrid notion as if to exorcise it: "What if they run out?"

Valnu patted her on the head. "My occasionally dear, you must not say these things, lest you risk losing your proud reputation as a featherbrain." She let out an indignant squawk. He ignored her and leaned forward so that his mouth was right by her ear. He teased her earlobe with his tongue for a moment, then whispered three words: "Night and fog."

"What?" The teasing tongue distracted her. She was easily distracted. "What's that got to do with anything?" She'd seen NIGHT AND FOG painted on the windows or doors of shops that suddenly closed for no reason anyone could find, but found no connection between the phrase and her own frightened question.

Viscount Valnu patted her again and gave her a sweet smile, as if she were a child. "I take it back," he said, fond indulgence in his voice. "You really are a featherbrain."

"I ought to slap your face," she snapped. She didn't know why she didn't. Had anyone else spoken to her so (except Colonel Lurcanio, who hit back), she would have. But Valnu made a habit of saying and doing preposterous things, to her and to everyone he knew. His panache had kept him out of trouble so far, and kept him out of trouble now.

He said, "Here, let's do something that's more fun instead," took her in his arms, and gave her a thoroughly competent kiss. Then, bowing as extravagantly as an Algarvian, he turned and sauntered up the Avenue of Equestrians as if he had not a care in the world. Knees aside, he looked better in a kilt than most redheads.

Krasta hadn't bought anything- a shockingly unusual trip to the Avenue of Equestrians. Even so, she went back to her carriage, which waited in a side street. Her driver, surprised at her coming back so soon, hastily hid a flask. "Take me home," she told him. But would she find any shelter there, either?