Rulers of the Darkness

Five

When Ealstan came into the flat he shared with Vanai, she handed him an envelope. "Here," she said. "This came in the morning's post. The rest was just advertising circulars. I threw them away."

He kissed his wife, then said, "All right- what have we got here?" He thought he knew; the hand that had addressed the envelope looked familiar. When he opened it and extracted the note inside, he nodded. "Ethelhelm is back in Eoforwic," he told Vanai.

"And he'll want you to reckon up the accounts for the band's tour in the provinces?" she asked.

"That's right." Ealstan sighed. "I wonder if he'll have any money left, what with the squeeze the redheads take from him." Ethelhelm was half Kaunian. If he hadn't been the most popular singer and band leader in Forthweg, he might well have been shipped west. As things were, the Algarvians preferred to let him go on playing, but to make him pay heavily for the privilege of staying free. It was a highly unofficial form of taxation, but that didn't mean it wasn't lucrative.

Ethelhelm played Forthwegian-style music. Ealstan knew Vanai didn't much care for it; her tastes along those lines were purely Kaunian, which meant she liked a thumping beat to every song. And her thoughts here weren't strictly on the music anyhow. She said, "As long as the Algarvians leave him enough money to keep paying you."

"If they don't, he'll bloody well have to find himself another bookkeeper, that's all." Ealstan sighed again. "He used to be my friend, you know, not just my client. He used to write bold songs, strong songs, songs that'd make even a lackwit sit up and think about what Mezentio's men were doing to us. Then they got their hooks into him."

"If he hadn't gone to sing for the men of Plegmund's Brigade when they were training outside of town here…" Vanai's voice trailed away.

"Aye, he might have stayed free," Ealstan said. "Of course, the redheads might have flung him into a ley-line caravan car and cut his throat, too. You can't know." Ethelhelm hadn't had the nerve to find out. Ealstan wondered what he would have done in the band leader's place. He was glad he didn't know.

"You can worry about Ethelhelm later," Vanai said. "For now, you can sit down to supper. I found some nice sausage at the butcher's."

"Probably half horsemeat and half dog," Ealstan said. Vanai made a horrible face at him. Shrugging, he went on, "I don't care. I'll eat it anyway, as long as it doesn't bark when I stick a fork in it."

Enough garlic and pepper and oregano and mint spiced the sausage to make it impossible to tell what the meat had been before it was ground up and stuffed into a casing. Whatever it was, it went well with salted olives and crumbly white cheese and bread and honey, and filled the hole in Ealstan's belly.

Walking over to Ethelhelm's block of flats the next morning reminded Ealstan of the distance between the wealthy entertainer and the fellow who kept books for him. Actually, Ealstan could have afforded a better flat for himself, but clung to the neighborhood into which he'd moved when he first came to Eoforwic because it let him- and, more important, Vanai- stay nearly invisible to the Algarvian occupiers.

Ethelhelm's building boasted a doorman. Ealstan was glad his building boasted a sturdy front door. The doorman opened the door from inside the lobby. Nodding to Ealstan, he said, "Master Ethelhelm told me I was to expect you, sir. Go right on up."

"Thanks," Ealstan said, and did. Ethelhelm's building also boasted carpeting on the stairs. Nobody'd pissed in the stairwell, either.

And yet, when Ealstan rapped on Ethelhelm's door, he knew he would rather have worn his own shoes than the band leader's. Ethelhelm looked worn to a nub. Ealstan had seen that before on his face when he came back from a tour. But Ethelhelm had never seemed quite so frazzled till now. "Hard trip?" Ealstan asked, hoping that accounted for the musician's state.

"You might say so," Ethelhelm answered. "Aye, you just might say so." A glass of brandy rested on the arm of a chair. Pointing to it, Ethelhelm asked, "Will you join me?" He didn't bother to wait for an answer, but went into the kitchen to pour another glass, brought it back, and thrust it into Ealstan's hand. He pointed to another chair. "Sit, if you care to."

Ealstan sat. The chair, at a guess, was worth more than all the furniture in his flat. He raised the glass Ethelhelm had given him and asked, "To what shall we drink?"

"I've been drinking for a while," the band leader said. "I've been drinking to being able to drink. Will that do for you, or do I have to come up with something fancier?" He knocked back his glass of brandy at a gulp.

More cautiously, Ealstan drank, too. "As bad as that?" he asked.

"Worse," Ethelhelm said. "Eventually, you can go through all the receipts and see how much money I lost. It could have been worse. I could have stayed here and lost even more. Aye, as bad as that."

"Why did they let you go, then, if all they were going to do was steal from you?" Ealstan didn't usually drink brandy in the morning, but made an exception today. He thought he would need lubricating to hear the band leader's story.

"Why?" Ethelhelm's laugh had nothing to do with honest mirth; it seemed more a howl of pain. "I'll tell you why: so they would have more to steal, that's why." He disappeared into the kitchen again, and returned with his glass newly full. "But I never thought when I set out that they'd steal so bloody much."

"They're Algarvians," Ealstan said, as if that explained everything.

But Ethelhelm only laughed that raw, wounded laugh again. "Even Algarvians have limits- most of the time. They don't have any limits with me. None at all. Look."

He rose again. Ealstan had hardly any choice but to look at him. The band leader was swarthy like a proper Forthwegian, but he overtopped Ealstan (who was of good size by Forthwegian standards) by half a head. His face was longer than a Forthwegian's should have been, too. Kaunian blood, sure as sure.

"If I don't do what they tell me, if I don't pay whatever they ask of me…" His voice faded out. "They'd just as soon kill me as waste their time dickering. You can't pick your ancestors. That's what everybody says, and it's not a lie, but oh, by the powers above, how I wish it were."

"Maybe you ought to quit singing and find quiet work where they won't pay any attention to you," Ealstan said slowly.

Ethelhelm glared. "Why don't you ask me to cut my leg off, too, while I'm at it?"

"If it's in a trap, sometimes you have to," Ealstan answered. He knew all about that. He'd had to flee Gromheort after stunning his cousin Sidroc when Sidroc found out he'd been seeing Vanai. At the time, he hadn't known whether Sidroc would live or die. He'd lived, lived and gone on to kill Ealstan's brother Leofsig, so Ealstan wished he'd killed him.

Ethelhelm was shaking his head back and forth. He looked trapped. "I can't, curse it," he said. "Ask me to live without my music and you might as well ask me not to live at all."

Patiently, Ealstan said, "I'm not asking you to live without your music. Make all you want, for yourself and for whatever friends you make after you disappear from Eoforwic. Just don't make a big enough splash with it to draw the redheads' notice."

"It's not just making the music." The band leader shook his head. "I think I'm trying to explain color to a blind man. You don't know what it's like to get up there on a stage and have thousands of people clapping and yelling out your name." He waved at the elegant flat. "You don't know what it's like to have all this stuff, either."

Ethelhelm didn't know that Ealstan's father was well-to-do. Ealstan didn't know how much like his father he sounded when he said, "If these things are more important to you than staying alive, you haven't got them. They've got you. Same goes for getting up on stage."

Now Ethelhelm stared at him. "You're not my mother, you know. You can't tell me what to do."

"I'm not telling you what to do," Ealstan said. "I'm just a bookkeeper, so I can't. But I can't help seeing how things add up, either, and that's what I'm telling you. You don't have to listen to me."

Ethelhelm kept shaking his head. "You don't have any idea how hard I've worked to get where I am."

"And where is that, exactly?" Ealstan returned. "Under the Algarvians' eye, that's where. Under their thumb, too."

"Curse you," the band leader snarled. "Who told you you could come here and mock me?"

Ealstan got to his feet and gave Ethelhelm a courteous bow: almost an Algarvian-style bow. "Good day," he said politely. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding someone else to keep your books in order for you- or you can always do it yourself." He had a good deal of his father's quiet but touchy pride, too.

"Wait!" Ethelhelm said, as if he were a superior entitled to give orders. Ealstan kept walking toward the door. "Wait!" Ethelhelm said again, this time with a different kind of urgency. "Do you know any people who could help me disappear out from under the redheads' noses?"

"No," Ealstan said, and set his hand on the latch. It was true. He wished he did know people of that sort. He would gladly have joined their ranks. Even if he had known them, though, he wouldn't have admitted it to Ethelhelm. The musician might have used their services. But he might also have betrayed them to Mezentio's men to buy favor for himself. Ealstan opened the door, then turned back and bowed again. "Good luck. Powers above keep you safe."

Walking home, he wondered how he'd make up the hole in his income he'd just created for himself. He thought he would be able to manage it. He'd been in Eoforwic a year and a half now. People who needed their accounts reckoned up were getting to know he was in business, and that he was good.

Men were pasting up new broadsheets in his neighborhood. They showed a dragon with King Swemmel's face flaming eastern Derlavai, the slogan beneath reading, SLAY THE BEAST! The Algarvians used good artists. Ealstan still wondered if anyone took the broadsheets seriously.

The postman was putting mail in boxes when he went into his building. "One for you here," the fellow said, and thrust an envelope into his hand.

"Thanks," Ealstan replied, and then said, "Thanks!" again in a different tone of voice when he recognized his father's handwriting. He didn't hear from Gromheort nearly often enough, though he understood why: he might still be sought, and writing carried risk. He was smiling when he opened the envelope and stepped into the stairwell- he'd read the letter on the way up.

By the time he got to the top, he wasn't smiling anymore. When Vanai opened the door to let him in, he thrust the letter into her hand. She quickly read it, then let out a long sigh. "I wish I were sorrier to hear they'd caught my grandfather," she said at last. "He was a fine scholar."

"Is that all you have to say?" Ealstan asked.

"It's bad luck to speak ill of the dead," she answered, "so I said what good I could." Brivibas had raised Vanai from the time she was small; Ealstan knew as much. He didn't know what had estranged them, and wondered if he ever would. Later that evening, he found his father's letter, a balled-up wad of paper, in the wastebasket. Whatever her reasons, Vanai meant them.

Lieutenant Recared's whistle squealed. "Forward!" the young officer shouted.

"Forward!" Sergeant Leudast echoed, though without the accompaniment of the whistle.

"Urra!" the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted, and forward they went. They'd been going forward ever since they cut off the redheads down in Sulingen, and Leudast saw no reason they shouldn't keep right on going forward till they ran King Mezentio out of his palace in Trapani.

He had no sure notion of where Trapani was. Until Swemmel's impressers hauled him into the army, he'd known only his own village not too far west of the border with Forthweg and the nearby market town. He'd seen a lot more of the world since, but few pleasant places in it.

The village ahead didn't look very pleasant. It did have one thing in common with Trapani, wherever Trapani was: it was full of Algarvians. Mezentio's soldiers had never quit fighting through their long, hard retreat from southern Unkerlant; they simply hadn't had the manpower to hold back the Unkerlanters over a broad front. In any one skirmish, though, there was no guarantee Leudast and his countrymen would come out on top.

That thought crossed Leudast's mind even before eggs started bursting among the advancing Unkerlanters. He threw himself down in the snow, cursing as he dove: nobody had told him the Algarvians had a couple of egg-tossers in the village. Some of his men dove for cover, too. Some- the new recruits, mostly- kept running forward in spite of the eggs. A lot of them went down, too, as if a scythe had sliced through them at harvest time. Their shrieks and wails rose above the roar of the bursting eggs.

Algarvian pickets in carefully chosen hidey-holes in front of the village blazed at Leudast and his comrades. "Sir," he shouted to Lieutenant Recared, who sprawled behind a rock not far away, "I don't know if we can pry them out of there by ourselves."

At the start of the winter campaign, Recared would have called him a coward and might have had him blazed. They'd been ordered to take the village, and orders, to Recared, might have been handed down by the powers above. But action had taught the company commander a couple of things. He pointed off to the left, to the west. "We don't have to do it by ourselves. We've got behemoths for company."

Leudast yelled himself hoarse as the big beasts lumbered forward. He'd hated it when the Algarvians threw behemoths at him, and loved Unkerlanter revenge in equal measure. Eggs from the tossers mounted on the behemoths' back started bursting in the village. The redheads there stopped pounding the Unkerlanter footsoldiers and swung their egg-tossers toward the behemoths.

"Forward!" Recared yelled again, to take advantage of the enemy's distraction.

But, even though the tossers weren't aimed at the footsoldiers, eggs kept bursting under them anyhow as they got closer to the village. "They've buried them under the snow!" Leudast shouted. "We burst them as we run over them." He'd seen the Algarvians do that before, but not since the fighting in the ruins of Sulingen, where they'd had plenty of time to dig in.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than an Unkerlanter behemoth trod on a buried egg. The burst of sorcerous energy killed the beast at once. Its body shielded the crew who rode it from the worst of the energies, but as it toppled over onto its side, it crushed a couple of men beneath it.

Recared's whistle squealed again- the shrill squeak reminded Leudast of the noise a pig made in the moment it was castrated. "Forward!" the young lieutenant yelled once more. "Look behind you- we're not in this alone. We've got reinforcements coming up to give us a hand, too."

Leudast risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, a fresh wave of soldiers in white smocks worn over long gray tunics stormed toward the village on the heels of Recared's regiment. That was plenty to make him shout, "Urra!" and scramble toward the huts himself. This winter, for the first time, his kingdom seemed able to put men where they were needed when they were needed there. Up till very recently, far too many attacks had gone in either late or in the wrong place.

An Algarvian picket popped up out of his hole to blaze at the onrushing Unkerlanters. Leudast raised his own stick to his shoulder and blazed the redhead. The enemy soldier went down with a screech. An Unkerlanter closer to that hole than Leudast was jumped down into it. A moment later, he scrambled out again and ran on toward the village. The Algarvian didn't come up again.

As King Swemmel's men pushed forward, a couple of enemy pickets tried to run back into the village themselves. One fell before he could take half a dozen steps. The other might have blazed Leudast if he hadn't been more interested in trying to get away.

"Surrender!" Leudast shouted in Algarvian. "Hands high!" That was about all of the language he knew: all a soldier needed to know.

The soldier took a couple more steps. Leudast raised his stick, ready and more than ready to blaze. Then the redhead seemed to realize he couldn't get away. He threw his stick down in the snow and raised his hands over his head. The smile he aimed at Leudast was was half cheerful, half fearful. He loosed a torrent of speech in his own language.

"Shut up," barked Leudast, who understood not a word. He strode forward and relieved the Algarvian of money and rations, then gestured with his stick: go to the rear. Hands still high, the redhead obeyed. Maybe he'd end up in a captives' camp; maybe the other Unkerlanters would kill him before he got off the battlefield. Leudast didn't look back to find out.

Sticks or bursting eggs had started fires in a couple of the peasant huts at the southern end of the village. Leudast welcomed the smoke. It made the Algarvians have a tougher time seeing him, and it might attenuate their beams, too. More eggs churned up the ground in front of him as the behemoth crews did all they could to help the footsoldiers.

Getting through the houses in the southern half of the village proved easier than Leudast had expected. Once the Unkerlanters reached those houses, the enemy fought only a rear-guard action against them. That surprised Leudast till he got to the edge of the market square.

As in most Unkerlanter peasant villages, the square was good and wide. In happier times, people would buy and sell things there, or else just stand around and gossip. Now… Now the Algarvians had dug themselves in on the far side of the square. If the Unkerlanters wanted to come at them, they would have to charge across that open space. It might be possible. It wouldn't be easy, or cheap.

An Algarvian beam seared the timbers of the hut behind which Leudast crouched. He pulled back in a hurry; smoke scraped his throat as he breathed in. He hoped the hut wouldn't catch.

A couple of men, both new recruits, tried to rush across the square. Almost contemptuously, the Algarvians let them run for four or five strides before knocking them over. One crumpled and lay still. The other, moaning and dragging a useless leg, crawled back toward cover. Beams boiled snow into puffs of steam all around him. He'd nearly made it to safety when one struck home. His moans turned to shrieks. A moment later, another beam bit. He fell silent.

"Can we do it, Sergeant?" a soldier asked Leudast.

He shook his head. He wouldn't order a charge across the square. If Recared did, he'd try to talk the regimental commander out of it. If he couldn't, he'd sprint across the square along with his comrades- and see how far he got.

Somewhere a few houses over, Lieutenant Recared was speaking to some other soldiers: "We'll have to be quick, aye, and we'll have to be bold, too. The Algarvians can't have that many men on the other side of the square." Leudast's heart sank. He saw no reason why the redheads couldn't have that many men and more in the northern part of the village.

But it turned out not to matter. He didn't know where the dragons came from. Maybe they were returning from another raid when some of their dragonfliers looked down and saw the fighting, or maybe the other regiment had a crystallomancer with better connections than Recared's. The Algarvians in the village were surely ready for an attack on the ground. They were just as surely not ready for the death that swooped on them from the sky.

When Leudast heard the thunder of great wings overhead, he threw himself flat in the muddy snow- not that that was likely to save him. But the attacking dragons were painted rock-gray, and they flamed the half of the village Mezentio's men still held. Even from across the market square, he could feel the heat as houses and barricades- and soldiers- caught fire. Soldiers burned not quite to death screamed. A couple of minutes later, the Unkerlanter dragons flamed the Algarvians again. Then they flew off toward the south.

Even before Lieutenant Recared blew his precious officer's whistle, Unkerlanters started rushing across the square. A few of them fell; the dragons hadn't killed all the redheads. But they had flamed the heart out of the enemy's position. Some of the Algarvians fought on anyhow, and made Swemmel's men pay a price for killing them. The rest- more than usual in this kind of fight- surrendered. They seemed dazed, astonished to be alive.

"Another village down," Recared said proudly. "Little by little, we take back our kingdom."

"A village down is right, sir," Leudast answered, coughing a little and then more than a little. "It'll be a while before the peasants move back here."

Recared opened his mouth in surprise, as if the people who'd once lived in the village hadn't crossed his mind. They probably hadn't; he was, Leudast knew, a city man. After a moment, he did find a reply: "They weren't serving the kingdom with the Algarvians holding this place." Since that was true, Leudast nodded. He couldn't prove Recared had missed the point.

With what light remained to the day, the Unkerlanters pushed north again. Leudast approved of that without reservation. He approved of it even more because it didn't involve fighting. Somewhere up ahead, Algarvians would be holed up in the next village. When he came to them, he'd do whatever he had to do. Till then, he enjoyed the respite.

He didn't enjoy having Recared shake him awake in the middle of the night. "What's gone wrong, sir?" he asked, assuming something had.

Only faint glowing embers illuminated the young lieutenant's face. In that dim, bloody light, Recared looked, for once, far older than his years. "Our crystallomancer just got the order," he said. "We have to countermarch, head back south."

"What?" Leudast exclaimed. "Powers above, why?"

"I don't know, curse it. The order didn't explain." Recared sounded as harassed as an ordinary soldier. "But you're bound to be right, Sergeant: something's gone wrong somewhere."

Hajjaj hoped no one knew he'd left Bishah. He did manage to sneak out of the capital every now and again. So far, he'd managed to keep the secret from those who would have been most interested in learning it: chief among them Marquis Balastro, the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza. Balastro knew Zuwayza was imperfectly happy in her role as Algarve's ally; Hajjaj worked hard to keep him from knowing just how unhappy his kingdom was, not least since Zuwayza would have been even unhappier without Algarve.

As the ley-line caravan glided east out of the Zuwayzi capital, Hajjaj smiled at his secretary and said, "Isn't it astonishing how quickly I've recovered from the indisposition everyone thinks I have?"

Qutuz smiled, too. "Astonishing indeed, your Excellency. And I am very glad to see you looking so well."

"I thank you, my dear fellow, though I think I ought to ask whether you need new spectacles," Hajjaj said. "I don't look particularly well. What I look is old." He paused a moment in thought. "Of course, a man my age who does not look well is liable to look dead."

"May you live to a hundred and twenty," Qutuz replied, a polite commonplace among the Zuwayzin.

"I've been over halfway there for a while now, but I don't think my private ley line will stretch quite so far," Hajjaj said. "Tewfik, now, Tewfik seems bound and determined to take the proverb literally. I hope he makes it."

"Someone does every now and then, or so they say," his secretary answered.

"They say all sorts of things," Hajjaj observed. "Every now and then, what they say is even true- but don't count on it." As foreign minister of a kingdom with a large, unfriendly neighbor and an arrogant cobelligerent, Hajjaj didn't see the advisability of counting on much of anything.

Qutuz leaned back in his seat- King Shazli had laid on a first-class caravan car for Hajjaj and his secretary- and remarked, "The scenery is prettier than usual, anyhow."

"Well, so it is," Hajjaj agreed. "It was high summer the last time I traveled to Najran, and the sun had baked the life out of everything. Gray rock, yellow rock, brown thornbushes- you know what it's like most of the year."

"Don't we all?" Qutuz spoke with a certain somber pride. In high summer, the sun of northern Zuwayza stood right at the zenith or even a little south of it, something seen nowhere else on the mainland of Derlavai. Except at oases and along the banks of the few streams that flowed down from the mountains the year around, life seemed to cease. Qutuz's wave urged Hajjaj to look out the window. "Certainly not like that now, your Excellency."

"No, it isn't." As his secretary had said, Hajjaj could for once enjoy peering through the glass. Late winter was the time for that in Zuwayza, if ever there was such a time: some years, there wasn't. But, by Zuwayzi standards, this had been a wet winter. The thornbushes were green now. Flowers of all sorts carpeted the usually barren hills and splashed them with crimson and gold and azure.

Had the ley-line caravan halted, Hajjaj would have been able to spy butterflies, moving bits of color. Toads would be croaking and creeping in the wadis, the dry riverbeds, that weren't quite dry now. Had Hajjaj been lucky, he might have spotted a small herd of antelope grazing on greenery whose like they wouldn't see again for months.

He sighed. "It won't last. It never does." With another sigh, he added, "And if that's not a lesson for anyone daft enough to want to be a diplomat, curse me if I know what would be."

The ley-line caravan got into Najran late in the afternoon, gliding up over a last little rise before revealing the almost painfully blue sea ahead. The ley line that ran from Bishah to Najran continued on out into the Bay of Ajlun. If it hadn't, Najran would have had no reason for being. As things were, its harbor was too small and too open to the elements to let it become a great port, or even a moderately important one. It was nondescript, isolated- a perfect home for the Kaunian refugees who'd fled west across the sea from Forthweg.

Their tents, these days, considerably outnumbered the ramshackle houses of the fishermen and boatbuilders and netmakers and the handful of merchants who called Najran home. Without the ley line, the Zuwayzin could never have kept them fed. Pale-skinned men and women in tunics and trousers were more common on the streets than naked, dark brown locals. But the Kaunians had universally adapted the wide-brimmed straw hats the Zuwayzin wore. If they hadn't, their brains would have baked in their skulls.

Hajjaj had thought about putting on tunic and trousers himself when he came to visit the refugees. In the end, he'd decided not to. They were guests in his kingdom, after all, so he didn't feel the need to go against his own usages, as he did when meeting diplomats from other, chillier lands.

A carriage waited for him at the caravan depot: much the largest building in Najran. As he and Qutuz climbed in, he told the driver, "The tent city."

"Aye, your Excellency," the man said, touching the brim of his own big hat. He flicked the reins and clucked to the horses. They were sad, skinny beasts, and didn't seem in a hurry to get anywhere- they would pause to graze whenever they passed anything green and growing.

"Fellow ought to take a whip to them," Qutuz grumbled.

"Never mind," Hajjaj said. "We're not going far, and I'm not in that big a hurry." The truth was, he didn't have the heart to watch the horses beaten.

Blond men and women, a lot of them sunburned despite their hats, greeted the carriage as it approached. Hajjaj heard his own name spoken; some of the people in the growing crowd recognized him from his earlier visit. They started taking off their hats and bowing- not theatrically, as Algarvians would have, but with great sincerity. "Powers above bless you, sir!" someone called to Hajjaj, and a moment later everyone took up the cry.

Irony smote: he'd learned classical Kaunian in Algarve before the Six Years' War. He stood up in the carriage and bowed to the refugees in return. Letting them stay in Zuwayza sometimes felt like the single most worthwhile thing he'd done in the war. Had he given them to the Algarvians, they would surely be dead now.

A couple of blond men pushed their way through the cheering crowd. They, too, bowed to Hajjaj, who returned the courtesy. "Thank you for coming, your Excellency," one of them said. "We're grateful to you once more."

"Which of you is Nemunas, and which Vitols?" Hajjaj asked.

"I'm Vitols," said the man who'd spoken before.

"And I'm Nemunas," the other one added. He was a couple of years older than Vitols, and had a nasty scar on the back of one hand. They'd both been sergeants in King Penda's army before the Algarvians crushed Forthweg. Now they led the Kaunian refugees in Zuwayza.

Vitols pointed to a tent not far away. "We can talk there, if that suits you."

"As good a place as any," Hajjaj said. "This gentlemen with me is my secretary, Qutuz. He knows what we'll be discussing." The Kaunians bowed to Qutuz, too. He bowed back.

In the tent waited tea and wine and cakes. Hajjaj was touched again that the blonds favored him with a Zuwayzi ritual. He and Qutuz sipped and ate and made small talk; as hosts, Vitols and Nemunas were the ones to say when to get down to serious business. Nemunas didn't wait long. "Will you let us sail back to Forthweg, like we asked in our letter?" he said. "Now that there's a magic to let us look like Forthwegians, we can go back there and take proper revenge on the redheads."

He and Vitols leaned toward Hajjaj, waiting on his reply. He didn't leave them waiting long. "No," he said. "I will not permit it. I will not encourage it. If Zuwayzi ships see Kaunians sailing east, they will sink them if they can."

"But- why, your Excellency?" Nemunas sounded astonished. "You know what the Algarvians are doing to our people there. You'd never have let us stay here if you didn't."

"Every word of that is true." Hajjaj clamped his jaws shut tight after he finished speaking. He'd known this would be hard, brutally hard, and it was.

"Well, then," Vitols said, as if he expected the Zuwayzi foreign minister to change his mind on the instant and give his blessing to the Kaunians who wanted to go back to Forthweg and cause trouble for Algarve there.

But Hajjaj did not intend to change his mind. "No," he repeated.

"Why?" Vitols and Nemunas spoke together. Neither sounded as if he believed his ears.

"I will tell you why," Hajjaj replied. "Because, if you go back to your homeland and harass my cobelligerents, you make them more likely to lose the war."

Both Kaunian refugee leaders spoke several pungent phrases of a sort Hajjaj's language master had never taught him. He understood the sentiment if not the precise meaning of those phrases. At last, the Kaunians grew more coherent. "Of course we want to make them lose the war," Vitols said.

"Why wouldn't we?" Nemunas added. "They're murdering us."

"Why won't you let us strike back at them?" Vitols demanded. "Why don't you want them to lose the war? Why don't you curse them the way we curse them?"

"Because if Algarve loses the war, Zuwayza loses the war, too," Hajjaj said. "And if Zuwayza loses the war, King Swemmel is all too likely to serve my people as King Mezentio is serving yours."

"He wouldn't," Vitols said. "You might lose, you might even have to go back under Unkerlanter rule again, but you wouldn't get slaughtered."

"It is possible that you are right," Hajjaj admitted. "On the other hand, it is also possible that you are wrong. Knowing Swemmel, knowing the affront Zuwayza has given him, I must tell you that I do not care to take the chance. The things my cobelligerents have done horrify me. The things my foes could do if they get the chance horrify me more. I am sorry, gentlemen, but you cannot ask me to risk my people for the sake of yours."

Nemunas and Vitols put their heads together for a couple of minutes, muttering in low voices. When they were done, they both bowed to Hajjaj. Vitols spoke for them: "Very well, your Excellency. We understand your reasons. We don't agree, mind, but we understand. We'll obey. We wouldn't endanger your folk after you saved ours."

"I thank you." Hajjaj bowed in return. "I also require that obedience."

"You'll have it," Vitols said, and Nemunas nodded. The meeting ended a few minutes later.

On the way back to the ley-line caravan depot, Qutuz remarked, "They're lying."

"I know," Hajjaj said calmly.

"But…" his secretary said.

"I've done what I had to do," Hajjaj said. "I've warned them. Our ships will sink some of them. That will make the Algarvians happy. And if some do get back to Forthweg and raise trouble… that won't make me altogether unhappy." He smiled at Qutuz. The carriage rolled on toward Najran.

Krasta had been to a good many entertainments since joining herself with Colonel Lurcanio. Having a companion from among the victorious Algarvians with whom to go to entertainments had been one of the reasons, and not, perhaps, the least of them, why she'd let Lurcanio into her bed. But this one, at a wealthy cheese merchant's house in Priekule, struck her as the strangest of any of them.

After looking around at the other guests, she stuck her nose in the air, ostentatiously enough for Lurcanio to notice. "Is something troubling you, my sweet?" he asked, concern mostly masking the faint scorn in his voice.

"Something? Aye, something." Krasta struggled to put what she felt into words. Except when inspired by spite, she wasn't usually very articulate. What she came up with now was a horrified four-word outburst: "Who are these people?"

"Friends of Algarve, of course," Lurcanio said.

"Powers above help you, in that case." As soon as she spoke, Krasta realized she might have gone too far. She cared- Lurcanio, when annoyed, made life unpleasant for her- but only to a point. The trouble was, she'd spoken altogether too much truth.

Most gatherings since the redheads overran Valmiera featured mixed crowds. Krasta had grown to accept that. Some nobles, like her, made the best of things; others chose not to appear with the occupiers. Not all the female companions the Algarvians found for themselves were noblewomen, or even ladies. And a lot of the Valmieran men who worked hand in glove with Algarve conspicuously lacked noble blood.

But tonight's crowd… Except for Lurcanio- possibly except for Lurcanio, Krasta thought with a sweet dash of spite- the Algarvian officers were boors, busy getting drunk as fast as they could. The women with them were sluts; half of them were making plays for men of higher rank than the ones who'd brought them.

One of them, in too much powder and paint and not enough clothes, sidled up to Lurcanio, who didn't bother pretending he didn't notice her. "Go away," Krasta hissed at her. "You'll give him a disease."

"He already has one," the tart retorted. "You're here."

"What's your name?" Krasta asked sweetly. "Do you dare tell it? If they look in the constabulary records, how many solicitation charges will they find?"

She hadn't meant to be anything but bitchy, but the other woman, instead of going on with the row, turned pale under her thick makeup and found something else to do in a hurry.

"I have better taste than that, I assure you," Lurcanio said.

"Maybe you do." Krasta's eyes left her Algarvian lover's face and slid down to the front of his kilt. "I'm not so sure about him." Lurcanio threw back his head and laughed, for all the world as if she were joking.

She didn't enjoy her little triumph long. It oozed away as she went back to contemplating the company she was keeping. The Algarvian officers were bad. The Valmieran women were worse. But the Valmieran men were worst of all.

Even the handful of nobles depressed her. Backwoods counts and viscounts, they'd never shown their faces in Priekule before the Algarvians came- and there were good reasons why they hadn't. Krasta knew a couple of them by reputation. The Valmieran nobility was and always had been reactionary. Krasta despised commoners and was proud of it. But, even by her standards, that count over there- the one who belted his trousers with a short, nasty whip- went too far.

She had little use for the commoners in the crowd, either. Some people came from families that had been prominent for generations, even if they weren't noble. You could rely on folk like that. The ones here at the cheese merchant's… Krasta hadn't heard of any of them before the Algarvians took Priekule, and wished she hadn't heard of most of them since.

"We shall prevail," one of them told another not far away.

"Oh, aye, of course we shall," the other man answered. "We'll grind Swemmel into the dust. Plenty of time after that to settle with treacherous Lagoas."

Both men wore kilts and tunics not merely Algarvian in style but modeled after those of Algarvian soldiers. They'd grown side whiskers and little strips of chin beard, too; one of them waxed his mustaches so that they stuck out like horns. But for being blond and speaking Valmieran, they might have been born in Mezentio's kingdom.

Krasta nudged Lurcanio and pointed to the two men. "Buy them some hair dye and you could have a couple of new Algarvians to throw into the fighting against Unkerlant."

He surprised her by taking her seriously. "We've thought about that. But in Forthweg and in Algarve, hair dye has caused us more problems than it's solved, so we probably won't."

"What kind of trouble?" Krasta asked.

"People masquerading as things they aren't," the Algarvian colonel said. "We've pretty much put a stop to that by now- and about time, too, if you ask me."

"People masquerading," Krasta echoed. "The folk here are masquerading as things they aren't- as important people, I mean."

"Oh, but they are important," Lurcanio said. "They are very important indeed. Without them, how could we run Valmiera?"

"With your own men, of course," Krasta answered. "If you don't run Valmiera with your own men, why have you taken half my mansion?"

"Do you know what the Algarvians in your mansion do?" Lurcanio asked. "Have you any idea?"

Krasta didn't like his sardonic tone. She returned it, with venomous interest: "You mean, besides seducing the serving women? They run Priekule for your king." Spoken baldly like that, it seemed less shameful that Algarve should run a city that had never been hers.

Lurcanio clicked his heels and bowed. "You are correct. We run Priekule. And do you know how we run Priekule? Nine times out of ten, we go to some Valmieran and say, 'Do thus and so.' And he will bow and say, 'Aye, your Excellency.' And lo and behold, thus and so will be done. We have not the men to do all the thus and sos ourselves. We never did. With the war in the west drawing so many thither, having so many Algarvians here grows more impossible by the day. And so, as I say, we rule this kingdom and your countrymen run it for us."

Valmieran constables. Valmieran caravan conductors. Valmieran tax collectors. Even, Krasta supposed, Valmieran mages. And every one of them in the service, not of poor drunken King Gainibu, but of redheaded King Mezentio and the Algarvian occupiers.

She shuddered. Before she thought- nothing new for her- she said, "It reminds me of sheep leading other sheep to the slaughter."

Lurcanio started to reply, then checked himself. "There are times when I do believe that, given education and application, you could be formidable." He bowed to Krasta, who wasn't sure whether that constituted praise or dismissal. When she didn't say anything, he went on, "As for your metaphor, well, what do you think a bell wether is sometimes called upon to do? And what do you think happens to a ram when he is made into a wether?"

"I don't know," Krasta said, irritable again. "All I know is, you're confusing me."

"Am I?" Lurcanio's smile turned smug again. "Well, this isn't the first time, and I doubt it will be the last."

Krasta found one question more- one question too many, probably: "What will happen to all these people if Algarve loses the war?"

The smug smile slipped. "You may rest assured, my poppet, that will not happen. Life is not so easy as we wished it would be, but it is not so hard as our enemies wish it were, either. We struck Kuusamo a heavy blow not long ago- struck it from here in Valmiera, in fact." Lurcanio seemed on the point of saying more, but turned the subject instead: "But I will answer you, in a hypothetical sense. What would happen to them? Not what will, mind you, but what would? It should be obvious even to you: whatever the victors wanted."

If Algarve somehow lost the war, what would the victors do with those who had taken her side? Krasta couldn't stay on that high philosophical plane for long. As usual, her thoughts descended to the personal: if Algarve somehow lost, what would the victors do to her?

She shuddered again. That might have some distinctly nasty answers. She'd made her bed, made it and lain down in it and invited Lurcanio into it to keep her warm. Clasping his arm in sudden fright, she said, "Take me home."

"You listened to a ghost story and frightened yourself," Lurcanio said.

That was likely to be true. Krasta hoped it was. She would have held that hope even more strongly were Lurcanio not pursuing her brother, and had Skarnu not penned that sheet claiming all sorts of horrors in the west. But she'd chosen her side, and she had no idea how to unchoose it. "Take me home," she repeated.

Lurcanio sighed. "Oh, very well," he said. "Let me apologize to our gracious host" -he couldn't say that with a straight face, try as he would- "for leaving the festivities so early."

A chilly rain had begun to fall. They both put up the hoods to their cloaks as they hurried out to Lurcanio's carriage. He spoke to his driver in Algarvian. The driver, already hooded against the rain, nodded and got the horses moving. The carriage rolled away from the cheese merchant's house.

"I hope he can find his way back," Krasta said. "It's very dark. I can hardly see across the street."

"I expect he will manage," Lurcanio answered. "He used to have trouble, I know, but by now he has been here long enough to learn his way around." That was another way of saying Valmiera had been in Algarvian hands for quite a while. Krasta sighed and snuggled against Lurcanio, partly for warmth, partly to keep from thinking about the choices she'd made and the choices she might have made.

They hadn't gone far before a dull roar sounded off to the north, and then another and another. "The Lagoans," Krasta said. "They're dropping eggs on us again." Yet another burst of sorcerous energy echoed through Priekule, this one quite a bit closer.

"Well, so they are," Lurcanio answered. "Dropping them at random, too, in this weather. Charming people, there on the other side of the Strait." If he knew he was in danger, he gave no sign of it. He'd never lacked for courage.

"Should we find a shelter?" Krasta asked.

She felt rather than seeing Lurcanio shrug. "If you like," he said. "I think the odds favor us, though. He spoke in Algarvian to the driver, who laughed and replied in the same language. Lurcanio also laughed, and translated: "He says he is fated to be blazed by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three, and so he is not worried about Lagoan eggs."

That made Krasta laugh, too. Then an egg burst close enough for her to see its flash, close enough that a piece of its thin metal casing whined through the air past the carriage. It had certainly come down on somebody's head. Krasta knew she could have been that somebody. And she, unlike Lurcanio and his driver, had no Algarvian bravado to sustain her. She cursed the Lagoans all the way back to her mansion. Did they care about the Valmierans one bit more than Mezentio's men did? If so, she wished they would have found a different way to show it.

Things could have been worse. A few weeks before, watching Algarvian soldiers stream out of Durrwangen without orders, against orders, Colonel Sabrino would have had a hard time saying that. Now… Now it looked as if something might be salvaged in the southwest after all.

The colonel of dragonfliers wasn't the only one with that thought. At supper one evening at the wing's dragon farm, Captain Domiziano raised a glass of ferocious Unkerlanter spirits in salute and said, "Here's to General Solino. Looks like he really did know what he was doing."

He knocked back the spirits, coughing a little as he did so. Along with the rest of the officers, Sabrino also drank to the toast. Captain Orosio said, "Aye. Turns out we're better off with that army loose and able to hit back than we would have been if we'd pissed it away like the one down in Sulingen."

"Pity Solino's head had to roll," Domiziano said. "Doesn't seem fair."

Orosio shrugged. "The price you pay for being right."

"Aye, that's how things work," Sabrino agreed. "If you advance against orders to hold and something good comes of it, you're a hero. If you retreat against orders to hold, they'll reckon you a coward no matter what happens. Even if you were right, they'll figure you're liable to run away the next time, too." He pointed to the big plate of pork ribs in the middle of the table. "Pass me a couple more of those, somebody, if you please."

Once he had the ribs, he smeared them with horseradish sauce and gnawed all the meat off the bones. Like his own glass of spirits, the sauce gave the illusion of warmth. In an Unkerlanter winter, even the illusion was not to be despised.

Domiziano also spread the sauce over another rib. In between bites, he sighed and said, "This cursed war is jading my palate so I'll never properly appreciate a delicate sauce again."

Sabrino chuckled at that. "There are worse problems to have. I was in the trenches in the Six Years' War, and I know." Domiziano had been making messes in his drawers during the Six Years' War, if he'd been born at all. He looked at Sabrino as if he'd started speaking Gyongyosian. Orosio was only a little older, but he understood such things. His nod and, even more, his knowing expression said as much.

A dragon handler stuck his head into Sabrino's tent and said, "Sir, that new wing is starting to land at the farm."

"The one that had been flying against Lagoas?" Sabrino asked, and the handler nodded. Mischief glinting in his eyes, Sabrino turned back to his squadron commanders. "Well, gentlemen, shall we help them settle in? I'm sure they'll be delighted at the accommodations they find waiting for them here."

Even Domiziano recognized the irony there well enough to chuckle. Orosio laughed out loud. Sabrino got to his feet. His subordinates followed him out.

Cold bit at his nose and cheeks. He ignored it; he'd known worse. Sure enough, dragons spiraled down out of the cloudy sky along with the occasional snowflake. Many, many dragons… "Powers above," Sabrino said softly. "If that's not a full-strength wing, then I'm a naked black Zuwayzi." Wings with their full complement of sixty-four dragons and dragonfliers simply didn't exist in the war against Unkerlant. Whenever he got his up over half strength, he counted himself lucky.

Accompanied by a dragon handler, an officer he'd never seen before came up. "You are Colonel Sabrino?" the newcomer asked, and Sabrino admitted he was. After bows and an embrace and kisses on both cheeks, the other officer continued, "I am Colonel Ambaldo, and I was told you would arrange for the well-being of my dragons and my men."

"My handlers will do what they can, and we'll see what we can scrounge up in the way of extra tents and extra rations," Sabrino answered. "Anything you brought and anything you can steal will help a lot, though."

Ambaldo stared at him. "Is that a joke, my dear sir?"

"Not even close to one," Sabrino answered. "Let me guess. You've spent the whole war up till now in Valmiera? At some pretty little peasant village? With pretty blond women to darn your socks and warm your beds? It's not like that here."

"My dear sir, I have been fighting, too," Ambaldo said stiffly, "fighting against the vile air pirates of Lagoas and Kuusamo. You will please remember this fact."

Sabrino bowed again. "I didn't say you haven't been fighting. But I meant what I did say. It's not like that here. It's nothing like that here. The Unkerlanters really and truly hate us, or most of them do, anyway. We haven't got enough of anything to go around: not enough men, not enough dragons, not enough supplies, nothing. The current strength of my wing is thirty-one- I've just been reinforced."

"Thirty-one?" Ambaldo's eyes looked as if they'd pop out of his head. "Where are the rest, by the powers above?"

"Where do you think?" Sabrino said. "Dead or wounded. And a lot of the replacements that could have got sent to me went to some other wing instead."

"Do your superiors hate you so?" Ambaldo asked.

"No, no, no." Sabrino wondered if he could ever get through to this poor, naive soul. "They went to other wings because those were even further under strength than mine."

Orosio spoke up: "Colonel Ambaldo, sir, if you want to look good in your uniform, you can do that anywhere. If you want to fight a war and hurt the kingdom's enemies, this is the place."

"Who is this insolent man?" Ambaldo demanded of Sabrino. "I ask, you understand, so that my friends may speak to him."

"We don't duel on this front," Sabrino said. "Oh, there's no law or king's command against it, but we don't. The Unkerlanters kill too many of us; we don't make things easier for them by killing each other."

Ambaldo's eyebrows shot upwards. "Truly I have come to a barbarous country." Some of his officers walked up behind him. They were staring around in amazement at the landscape in which they found themselves.

Sabrino had a hard time blaming them. Had he been jerked out of a pleasant billet in Valmiera and plopped down in the wilds of Unkerlant, he would have been amazed, too, and not with delight. "Come on, gentlemen," he said. "We'll do what we can for you. We have to work together, after all."

The newcomers had brought some tents. Sabrino shoehorned the rest of their dragonfliers in with his men; he shoehorned Colonel Ambaldo in with himself. Getting enough meat for the new dragons would have been impossible if his dragon handlers hadn't come across the bodies of a couple of behemoths. Brimstone was not a problem. Brimstone had never been a problem. Quicksilver… He didn't have and couldn't get enough quicksilver to give his own dragons all they needed. He shared what he had with the new arrived wing.

Horseradish and raw Unkerlanter spirits did nothing to improve Ambaldo's mood. He kept muttering things like, "What did we do to deserve this?" Since Sabrino didn't know whom Ambaldo might have offended, he couldn't very well answer that. At last, to his relief, the other wing commander pulled himself together and asked, "What is to be done?"

"Here." Sabrino pointed to a map. "The Unkerlanters have failed to concentrate their forces as they should have. Instead of one large attack advancing from Durrwangen to some other point that could anchor their whole line, they've sent columns out in several directions, none of them with its far end secured by a river or mountains or anything we can't maneuver around. And so, we're going to cut those columns off and then cut them up." He showed what he meant with several quick gestures.

Ambaldo studied the map. "Do we have the force here to bring this off?"

Good. Sabrino thought with more relief. He's not a fool. "On paper, the Unkerlanters always have more than we do," he answered. "But, for one thing, we're better than they are, no matter how much Swemmel babbles about efficiency. And, for another" -he grimaced- "our mages work stronger magic killing Kaunians than theirs do, slaughtering their own peasants."

Ambaldo didn't just grimace. He reached for the jar of spirits, poured his mug full, and gulped it down. "They really do those things here, then?" he said. "Nobody in Valmiera much wanted to talk about them- we were living among blonds, after all."

"They do them," Sabrino answered grimly. "So do we. By the end of this fight, only one side will be left standing. It's as simple as that." He hated that truth with all his soul, but hating it made it no less a truth. Colonel Ambaldo drank more spirits.

But Ambaldo was ready to fly again the next day, and so were his dragons. In spite of their long journey from Valmiera, Sabrino envied them their condition. They'd eaten better and fought less than any wing here in the west.

And they proved professionally competent; they plastered an Unkerlanter strongpoint northeast of Durrwangen with eggs and swooped low to attack a ley-line caravan surely loaded with enemy soldiers. They left the caravan a flaming wreck. Sabrino, whose smaller, more depleted wing accompanied and guided them on their attacks, found nothing about which he could complain.

Ambaldo's image appeared in his crystal. "Why didn't we win the war here long ago, if this is the best the Unkerlanters can do?" demanded the wing commander from out of the west.

Before Sabrino could reply, the Unkerlanters gave Ambaldo an answer of their own. Dragons painted rock-gray hurled themselves at the Algarvians in the air. As usual, Swemmel's men flew with less skill than the Algarvians they attacked- and Ambaldo's dragonfliers showed they had as much skill aboard their mounts as any other Algarvians. But there were, also as usual, a demon of a lot of Unkerlanters. Ambaldo's wing had holes torn in it, even though it gave better than it got.

So did Sabrino's. He was, by now, long since used to scraping by and making do with whatever replacements he happened to get- if he happened to get any. He wondered how Ambaldo's men would fare in a place where, without scrounging and improvising, they couldn't hope to keep going. They hadn't had to do such things in Valmiera- that was plain from the abundance they'd brought west.

Down on the ground, Algarvian troopers and behemoths were moving toward the places the dragons had pounded. Sabrino wondered if they included regiments and brigades plucked from occupation duty in Valmiera or Jelgava and carried across a good stretch of Derlavai by ley-line caravan so they could get into this fight. He rather hoped so. He'd gone on peacetime holiday to the beaches of northern Jelgava. Occupation duty there had to be a true hardship- he rolled his eyes, thinking of how dreadful patrolling beaches full of nearly naked bathers had to be. A little frostbite would go a long way toward fixing the sunburn from which those troopers might be suffering.

And then the ground shook down below: literally, for he could see the ripples as it writhed like an animal in pain. Here and there, purple flames shot up through the snow and stabbed toward the heavens. What had been Unkerlanter strongpoints were wrecked, ruined, ravaged.

Sabrino's sardonic smile slipped. How many Kaunians had died to power that magecraft? However many it was, even troops plucked from pleasant occupation duty should have been able to exploit the holes it tore in the Unkerlanter line.

Garivald was on sentry-go when the Grelzer company strode into the forest Munderic's band of irregulars reckoned all their own. He didn't see the Grelzers till they were quite close; snow was falling fairly heavily, cloaking things in the middle and far distance from his eyes.

When he did spy them, he pulled the hood of his white snow smock down low on his forehead, making sure it covered his dark hair. Then he slipped back through the bare-branched woods toward the clearing where the irregulars had their headquarters. He moved far faster than the soldiers who'd chosen Raniero the Algarvian puppet rather than Swemmel of Unkerlant. He knew where he was going, while the Grelzers couldn't be sure- he hoped they couldn't be sure- just where in the woods the irregulars lurked.

He'd got about halfway to the clearing when a soft, clear voice called a challenge: "Who goes?"

"It's me, Obilot- Garivald," he answered.

She slid out from behind a birch, her snow smock hardly lighter than its pale bark. Her stick didn't quite point at him, but wouldn't have to move far to do so. After she recognized that it was indeed he, she demanded, "Why aren't you at your post?"

"Because there's a great mob of Grelzers not very far behind me," he answered. "We'd better get ready to beat them back if we can, or to make sure they don't find us if we can't."

Her mouth twisted. "Fair enough," she said, and then, "Can we make sure they don't find us? It's not like they're Algarvians or those mercenaries from up in Forthweg."

"I know," Garivald said unhappily. Except in their choice of a king, the Grelzers who favored Raniero weren't much different from the ones who still carried on the fight against him and against Algarve. Some of them would have hunted in this forest in peacetime, hunted or come here to gather mushrooms or honey. They might not know where the irregulars denned, but they would have some idea.

"Go on, then," Obilot said. "You haven't got time to waste." Garivald nodded and plunged on through the woods.

He got challenged once more before reaching the clearing: Munderic was not about to be taken by surprise. The other irregular also passed him through after only a few words. Raniero's troopers hadn't come into the forest in force for quite a while.

When he trotted, panting, into the clearing, he wanted to shout out his warning. He didn't, not knowing how far behind him the Grelzer troopers were, he didn't want to risk their hearing a wild cry of alarm. Instead, he called out the news urgently but without panic or excitement in his voice.

That did what wanted doing. The irregulars came boiling out of their makeshift shelters, almost all of them clutching sticks. "What do we do?" Garivald asked Munderic. "Do we fight them, or do we try to get away?"

Munderic gnawed on his lower lip. "I don't know," he answered. "I just don't know. What kind of soldiers are they? That's the rub. If they just go forward till they bump into something and then run away, that's one thing. But if they're like that bunch we ran into on the way to the ley line…" He scowled and shook his head. "Those whoresons meant it, powers below eat them."

"Let's fight 'em!" Sadoc boomed. If the makeshift mage favored fighting, that in itself was to Garivald a strong argument against it.

Munderic had more confidence in Sadoc's sorcerous abilities than Garivald thought wise. Any confidence in Sadoc's sorcerous abilities was more than Garivald thought wise. But the leader of the irregulars never had believed Sadoc made much of a general. Munderic said, "No, I think we'd do better to pick the fight ourselves and not let those bastards do it for us. Let's slide into the woods off to the west and see if we can't give 'em the slip."

Another irregular hurried into the clearing with word of the advancing Grelzers. That seemed to decide the men and the handful of women there against arguing with Munderic. They left the clearing by ones and twos, slipping deeper into the woods. Munderic gestured to Garivald, who nodded. They hurried out together.

"We've played these games before," Munderic said. "Remember the fun we had when the Algarvians tried to chase us out of here?"

"Oh, aye," Garivald answered. "I'm not likely to forget- I was part of it, after all."

But befooling the Algarvians in summer, when trees in full leaf gave extra cover and when dirt didn't hold tracks so well, was a business different from confusing Grelzer soldiers here in winter, where the trees were bare and when snow on the ground told trackers too much. Maybe Munderic didn't want to think about that. Maybe he just didn't believe the irregulars could make a standup fight. And maybe he was right not to believe that, too.

If he was, though, what did that say about how much good the irregulars were doing in their fight against Algarve and her puppets? Maybe Garivald didn't want to think about that.

Munderic pointed to a snow-covered boulder. "Shall we flop down behind that and pot ourselves a couple of those Grelzer traitors if they try and come after us?"

"Aye. Why not?" Garivald said. "I wondered if you intended to do any fighting."

"Oh, I'll fight… now and again," Munderic answered, not much put out. "I'll fight when I can hurt the enemy and he can't do much to hurt me. Or I'll fight when I haven't got any other choice. Otherwise, I'll run like a rabbit. I'm not doing this for the glory of it."

There he sounded very much like an Unkerlanter peasant- or perhaps like a soldier who'd been in enough fights to realize he didn't want to be in a whole lot more. Garivald stretched out behind the boulder. Munderic had certainly been in enough fights to know good cover when he saw it. Garivald barely had to lift his head to have a perfect view of the route by which the pursuers would likely come- and they would have a demon of a time spotting him.

By the happy grunt Munderic let out from the other side of the boulder, his position was just as good. "We'll sting them here, so we will," he said.

"You could have Sadoc make a great magic and sweep the Grelzers to destruction," Garivald said, unable to resist the gibe.

"Oh, shut up," the leader of the irregulars muttered. He turned his head to glare at Garivald. "All right, curse you, I'll admit it: he's a menace when he tries to do magecraft. There. Are you happy?"

"Happier, anyhow." But Garivald didn't have long to celebrate his tiny triumph- he spied motion through the dancing snow and flattened himself behind the rock. "They're coming."

"Aye." Munderic must have seen it, too: his voice dropped to a thin thread of whisper. "We'll make them pay."

The Grelzers advanced as confidently as if they'd taken lessons in arrogance from their Algarvian overlords. Garivald thought Munderic would tell him to wait, not to hurry, to let the enemy come close before he started blazing. But Munderic kept his mouth shut. It wasn't because the Grelzers were already so close, he'd give himself away; they weren't. It was, Garivald realized after a long moment's silence, because he himself had turned into a veteran, and could be trusted to do the right thing without being told.

He waited. Then he waited some more. We'll know what kind of soldiers they are as soon as the blazing starts, he thought. That made him want to wait even longer. Not knowing, he could imagine that the men who followed the Algarvian-imposed King of Grelz were a pack of cowards who'd run right away. The last thing he cared to do was discover he was wrong.

At last, he couldn't wait anymore. A couple of soldiers with white smocks over the dark green of Grelz were within ten or twelve paces of the boulder. They were looking off into the trees farther west; if they hadn't been, they surely would have spotted Munderic or him.

Garivald slipped his finger out through the hole in his mitten and into the blazing hole on his stick. The beam leaped forth. It caught a Grelzer square in the chest. He stopped as abruptly as if he'd walked into a stone wall, then crumpled. Munderic blazed his companion, not so neatly- the second Grelzer started howling like a dog a wagon had run over and tried to drag himself away. Munderic blazed him again. He shuddered and lay still.

"Urra!" the irregulars in the rear guard shouted as they started blazing down the men who'd invaded their forest. "King Swemmel! Urra!" If they made as much noise as they could, the Grelzers might think they had more men than they really did.

They were blazing from ambush, every one of them, and took their foes by surprise. A good many Grelzers went down. But the others dashed for cover with a speed that warned they had a good notion of what they were doing. They raised shouts of their own: "Raniero of Grelz!" "Death to Swemmel the tyrant!" "Grelz and freedom!"

"Grelz and the Algarvians' cock up your arse!" Garivald yelled back- not a splendid song lyric, but a fine insult. A Grelzer, shouting with fury, hopped up from behind the bush where he crouched. Garivald blazed him. He'd never been trained in the proper response to literary criticism, but had considerable natural talent.

A beam sizzled snow not far from Garivald's head: one of the critic's comrades, protesting his sudden abridgement. Garivald blazed back, making the Grelzer keep his head down. Then he glanced over at Munderic. "Most of the band will have slid off to some other hidey-holes. Don't you think it's about time we did the same?"

"Aye, we'd better," Munderic agreed. "Otherwise they'll flank us out and rip us to pieces. The redheads would, and these whoresons have been taking lessons."

Garivald scrambled back toward a pine. More beams sent up gouts of steam as the Grelzers tried to make sure he'd sing no more songs. But he made it to the tree, scuttled behind it, and started blazing at Raniero's men again.

Munderic had waited till Garivald could cover him before retreating himself. The leader of the irregulars dashed off toward a bush thickly covered with snow. He never made it. A beam caught him in the flank as he ran. He let out a horrible scream and fell in the snow. He crawled on for another few feet, leaving a long trail of scarlet behind him. Then, as if very tired, he let his hands slip out from under him and sprawled at full length. He might have been lying down to sleep, but from this sleep he would not awaken.

Cursing, Garivald blundered west through the forest, blazing now and then but also doing his best to shake off the Grelzers. He finally did; they weren't cowards, but the irregulars knew the routes they'd made through these woods better than they did. Munderic's men had made false trails, too, and punished the Grelzers from ambush when they came charging down them.

Every time he came on some of his fellows, Garivald had to tell them Munderic was dead. It tore at him; he hadn't had such a hard time speaking of a death since his own father's. At least, near sundown, the irregulars- those who survived- gathered in a clearing well to the west of the one they'd called their own. Garivald started to say something. Then he saw all of them looking straight at him. "Not me!" he exclaimed, but his comrades nodded as one man. He never would have joined a band of irregulars on his own, but now he led one.