Through the Darkness

Ten

Marshal Rathar wished he were still at the front. Coming back to Cottbus meant coming back to King Swemmel’s constant complaints. It meant coming back to subordination, too. Away from the capital, Rathar gave orders and none dared say him nay. In Cottbus, Swemmel gave the orders. Rathar understood that very well.

He also understood why he’d been summoned to the capital. Major Merovec fiddled with the decorations pinned onto Rathar’s fanciest dress-uniform tunic. “The ministers-especially the Lagoan-will sneer at you if everything isn’t perfect,” Merovec said fussily. He sniffed. “I don’t care what anybody says: the whoreson looks like a stinking Algarvian to me.”

“He looks like an Algarvian to me, too,” Rathar answered. “There’s one difference, though: he’s on our side. Now am I pretty enough? If I am, kindly let me take my place beside the king.”

Still fussing, Merovec reluctantly stepped aside. Rathar walked from the antechamber out into the throne room. A murmur ran through the courtiers as they spied him. They wished he were at the front, too; his presence meant they had less room for jockeying among themselves.

He’d overstated things when telling Merovec he would stand beside Swemmel. The king, gorgeous in ermine and velvet and cloth of gold, sat on a throne that raised him high above the mere mortals who formed his court. That was how things were in Unkerlant: first the sovereign, then, a long way below, everyone else. But Rathar’s place was closest to the throne.

Horns blared harsh. In a great voice, a herald cried, “Your Majesty, before you come the ministers of Lagoas and Kuusamo!” And down the long way from the entrance to the throne room to the throne itself came the two diplomats. They walked side by side in step with each other, so that neither had to acknowledge his colleague as his superior.

Lord Moisio of Kuusamo bore an annoyingly ambiguous title, as far as Rathar was concerned. He wore an embroidered tunic over baggy trousers, but there his resemblance to anything Kaunian stopped. He was swarthier than any Unkerlanter, little and lithe, with narrow eyes and a nose that hardly seemed there at all. A few gray hairs sprouted from his chin: a most halfhearted beard.

And Major Merovec had been right-but for his ponytail, Count Gusmao, Lagoas’ minister, did look like an Algarvian as he strode along beside Moisio. He even walked like an Algarvian, with the air of a man who owned the world and expected you to know it. He was tall and long-faced and redheaded, and wore tunic and a kilt that showed his knobby knees. Maybe the styles of those garments were subtly different from the ones Mezentio’s men would have worn, but few Unkerlanters cared for subtleties. Rathar wasn’t the only man who wanted to bristle at the sight of Gusmao. The real Algarvians had come too close to swarming over the palace here.

Still in unison, Gusmao and Moisio bowed before King Swemmel. Not being his subjects, they didn’t have to prostrate themselves. Moisio spoke first, which had probably been decided by the toss of a coin: “I bring greetings, your Majesty, from my masters, the Seven Princes of Kuusamo.” His Unkerlanter had an odd drawl.

Swemmel leaned forward and peered down at him. “Most men have trouble enough serving one master. We have never fathomed serving seven.”

“I manage,” Moisio said cheerfully. He nudged Gusmao.

The nobleman who looked too much like an Algarvian said, “And I bring greetings from King Vitor, who congratulates your Majesty on your brave resistance against Mezentio’s hungry pack.” He didn’t sound like an Algarvian; his accent, though probably thicker than Moisio’s, lacked the trilling lilt Mezentio’s men gave to Unkerlanter.

“We greet you, and Vitor through you,” Swemmel said. He glared down at both diplomats. “More gladly, though, would we greet soldiers from Lagoas or Kuusamo fighting our common foe on the mainland of Derlavai, where this war will be won or lost. Our men fight here. Where are yours?”

“All over the seas,” Gusmao answered. “In Siaulia. On the austral continent. In the air above Valmiera and above Algarve itself.”

“Everywhere but where it matters,” Swemmel said with a sneer. “You had some on the Derlavaian mainland, and the redheads-the other redheads, I should say-ran you off it. What heroes you must be!”

“We shall be back,” Gusmao answered. “Meanwhile, we tie up plenty of Algarvians and Yaninans who would be fighting you.”

Swemmel’s glance flicked, fast as a striking snake, at Rathar. Ever so slightly, the marshal nodded. Gusmao was telling the truth there, or a good part of it, no matter how welcome Lagoan soldiers on Derlavai would have been. All that meant at the moment was Swemmel swinging his eyes toward Moisio. “And you, sirrah, what lying excuses will you give us?”

“I don’t know,” Moisio answered easily. “What sort of excuses would you like, your Majesty?” Rathar didn’t think Swemmel would order a friendly land’s minister boiled alive, but he wasn’t altogether sure. Few people had the nerve to talk back to the King of Unkerlant. Even he trembled every time he had to try it. But Moisio went on, “The plain truth is, we are not ready to fight on the mainland yet. We would not have been in this war at all had the Algarvians not started killing Kaunians to power their sorcerers’ spells against you.”

Don‘t push us too far, or we can still back out. That was what Rathar thought the Kuusaman meant. He hoped King Swemmel understood as much. Swemmel’s storms of temper were famous, but now would be a very bad time for him to have one.

The king glared at Moisio. The Kuusaman minister looked steadily back. In his quiet, understated way, he had sand. After a silence that stretched, Swemmel said, “Well, now you have seen for yourselves what their wizards can do. If you are not yet ready to fight hard, you had better be soon.”

“We work toward it,” Moisio answered. “As soon as we can, we aim to hit Algarve a good, solid blow.”

“As soon as you can.” Swemmel was sneering again, though not so fiercely. “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? We have been bearing this burden by ourselves since last summer.”

“We bore it alone for most of a year,” Gusmao said.

King Swemmel looked daggers at him. “But Mezentio’s men could not come to grips with you, not when you hid behind the sea. If they could have, your kingdom would have rolled onto its belly soon enough. We did not. We have not. We fight on.”

Rathar coughed. If the king ever wanted help from Kuusamo and Lagoas, he would be wise not to antagonize their ministers now. Gusmao was scowling back at the King of Unkerlant. Lagoans weren’t quite so proud and touchy as their Algarvian cousins, but they had their limits.

Then Moisio said, “We need to remember the enemy we all fight.”

And that, for the first time in the audience, struck the proper chord with Swemmel. “Aye!” he exclaimed. “By the powers above, aye! But you two, your lands are all but untouched. We have taken many heavy blows. How many more can we take before our hearts break?”

In his own way, Swemmel was clever. He never would have raised the possibility of defeat to his own people. If these foreigners thought Unkerlant might give up, though, what would they not do to keep her in the fight? If Unkerlant went under, Kuusamo and Lagoas would have to face a Derlavai-bestriding Algarve allied with Gyongyos. Rathar wouldn’t have wanted to try that.

By their expressions, neither Lord Moisio nor Count Gusmao relished the prospect. Gusmao said. “We of Lagoas have not given up, and we know our brave Unkerlanter comrades will not give up, either. We’ll help you in every way we can.”

“And we,” Moisio agreed. “It would be easier if we didn’t have to dodge so many Algarvian ships to bring things to you, but we manage every now and then.”

“A pittance,” Swemmel said. Rathar suppressed a deadly dangerous urge to turn and kick his sovereign in the ankle. But then the king seemed to realized he’d gone too far. “But all aid, we grant, is welcome. We are in danger, and stretched very thin. Aye, all aid is welcome.”

When Gusmao and Moisio used we they were plainly speaking of their people. With King Swemmel, Rathar often had trouble figuring out whether he was talking about Unkerlant or himself. He certainly seemed stretched very thin these days-one more reason Rathar wished he were back on the battlefield and away from the subtle poisons of the capital.

Not two minutes after the ministers from Kuusamo and Lagoas bowed their way out of the throne room-before most of the Unkerlanter courtiers had had the chance to leave-a runner came up the aisle toward Rathar. “Lord Marshal!” he called, and waved a folded sheet of paper.

Rathar waved back. “I am here.”

Swemmel leaned down from the throne. “How now?”

“I don’t know, your Majesty.” Rathar could think of nowhere he less wanted to open an urgent dispatch than under the king’s eye. But he had no choice-and the news was urgent indeed, even if it was news he would sooner not have had. He looked up toward Swemmel. “Your Majesty, I must tell you that, since you summoned me up here to attend this audience, the Algarvians have broken through in the direction of Sulingen.”

“And why is that, Marshal?” King Swemmel rasped. “Is it because you botched the defenses while you were there, or because you are the only one of our generals with any wits at all?”

Rathar bowed his head. “That is for your Majesty to judge.” If Swemmel still felt liverish because of the imperfectly satisfying meeting with the ministers of Lagoas and Kuusamo, his head might answer.

But the king said only, “Well, you’d better get back down there and tend to things, then, hadn’t you?”

After a long but, he hoped, silent breath of relief, Rathar answered, “Aye, your Majesty.” He almost added, Thank you, your Majesty. He didn’t. He was beholden to Swemmel, of course, but not, he hoped, overtly so. Staying official was easier and safer.

Traveling south to Sulingen wasn’t so easy, and on one stretch of the journey Algarvian dragons dropped eggs from on high, trying to wreck his ley-line caravan. They missed, but not by much.

When he did make it to the city on the Wolter, he found that General Vatran had set up his headquarters in a cave in the side of a steep gully that led down to the river. The only light in the place when Rathar ducked inside came from a candle stuck into the mouth of an empty jar of spirits. The jar sat on a folding table, at which Vatran was scribbling orders. He looked up from his work and nodded. “Back from the capital, eh, lord Marshal?” he said. “Well, welcome home, then.”

“Home?” Rathar looked around. The walls of the cave were nothing but dirt. When he looked back through the opening, most of what he saw was rubble and wreckage. Smoke and the smell of death filled the air. He grabbed a folding chair and sat down beside Vatran. “Thanks. What do we need to do here?”

Sergeant Istvan sneaked toward the forest village with nothing but suspicion. Most of these places were only Unkerlanter strongpoints these days. King Swemmel’s soldiers looked to have forgotten about this one, though. Maybe they didn’t never know it was here. Maybe.

Corporal Kun was as delighted to find the village as he was. “If only we had a couple of light egg-tossers, we could knock the place flat without needing to go in there and do the job ourselves. That’s expensive.”

“I know. There’s you and me and Szonyi-I don’t think anything the stars shine on will kill Szonyi any time soon,” Istvan said. “But there’s an awful lot of new fish, too, and they die easier than they should.”

Kun said, “We’re not getting the best of the levies, either. I heard Captain Tivadar grousing about that. They’re sending the men they like best out to the islands in the Bothnian Ocean to fight the Kuusamans. We get what’s left.”

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” Istvan said. “Only thing that surprises me is how long it took ‘em back home to figure out this miserable war here isn’t ever going to get anywhere.”

Kun nodded. His spectacles and, somehow, his patchy beard made him look very wise. “Aye, I think you’re right. The trouble is, we still have to fight it.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Istvan peered through a screen of pine saplings and ferns at the village ahead. All at once, he went very still. Voice the tiniest thread of whisper, he said, “Come up here and tell me whether that’s not a real woman drawing water from the well there.”

“Has it been so long you’ve forgotten the differences?” Kun asked, but also in a whisper. Istvan started to plant an elbow in his ribs as he moved up to take a look, but refrained. The noise might give them away. Kun’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “That is a woman-may the stars accurse me if I lie. What’s she doing?”

“Drawing water from the well there,” Istvan repeated patiently. “Where there’s one woman, there’ve got to be more, wouldn’t you say?”

“Are the Unkerlanters trying to make them into warriors?” Kun asked. “If they are, they must be running out of men.”

“She doesn’t look like a warrior,” Istvan said. That proved nothing, and he knew it. If Swemmel’s men-no, Swemmel’s soldiers-were setting a trap, the woman naturally wouldn’t look like a warrior.

He kept peering toward the village. It didn’t look like a trap, either. It looked like a village that had been going about its business for a long time. He wondered if the people there even knew Unkerlant and Gyongyos were at war. After a moment, he wondered if the people there had ever heard of Gyongyos. His hand tightened on his stick. If they hadn’t, they would.

A man strolled by. He was an Unkerlanter, of course, but wore a brown tunic, not one of rock-gray. He carried a chicken carcass by the feet. When he came up to the woman, she said something. He paused and answered. She made as if to slosh the bucket of water she’d just drawn up over him. They both laughed. Thin with distance, their voices floated to Istvan’s ears.

He turned to Kun. “If that’s a trap, it’s an accursed good one.”

“The Unkerlanters make accursed good traps,” Kun pointed out, which was inarguably true.

But Istvan shook his big, shaggy head even so. “It doesn’t feel like a trap,” he said, which was a harder argument to knock over the head. “It feels like a village that hasn’t thought about anything but its own concerns since-since the stars first shone down on it.”

He waited for Kun to mock him. Mockery was one of the things the city man, the mage’s apprentice, the sophisticate, was good for. But when Kun answered, he too sounded wondering: “It does, doesn’t it?”

“It’s. .” Istvan groped for a word, and found one: “It’s peaceful, that’s what it is. Maybe peace is a magic.” That wasn’t the sort of thing that should have come from a man of a warrior race, but it was what lay in his heart.

Kun only nodded. He’d seen enough war to know what it was, enough war to have had a bellyful of it himself. He said, “You don’t suppose that woman would laugh for us if we came out of the woods and tried to chat her up?”

“She’d laugh if we tried doing it in Unkerlanter, that’s certain sure,” Istvan said. Wistfully, he went on, “I haven’t even seen a woman since that Unkerlanter I blazed in the mountains this past winter.”

“No sport in her,” Kun said. “Well, Sergeant, what do we do?”

“Let me think.” Istvan plucked at his beard and tried to do just that. What he wanted to do was what Kun had said: show himself, walk up to the villagers, and say hello. He knew he had a better than even chance of getting blazed if he did; he wanted to do it anyhow.

Safest would be to bring the whole company forward and crush the village under an avalanche of Gyongyosian might. But if the village really was just a village, he would be wrecking something he might enjoy.

He let out a soft sigh. He’d long since come to understand the difference between what he wanted to do and what he needed to do. “Go back to the company encampment,” he said with a sigh. “Let the captain know what we’ve found, and tell him we want reinforcements to make sure we take it out.”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Kun looked as if he hated him, but obeyed. Silent as a cat, he slipped off into the woods.

Is this part of the curse of eating goat’s flesh? Istvan wondered. Must I worry for the rest of my days? Or am I simply being led astray now? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But he feared that, sooner or later, the curse would bite down hard. Ritual cleansing went only so far. The stars had seen what he’d done.

Maybe thinking about the goat’s flesh was what made him step out of the forest and into the clearing that held the village. If somebody there grabbed a stick and blazed him, it would be expiation for what he’d done. If no one did, maybe the stars had forgiven him after all.

Behind him, his men let out startled gasps. “Get back, Sergeant!” Szonyi hissed from a few trees away. Istvan shook his head. They’d already seen him, there in the village. Oh, he could still duck back into cover but, oddly, he didn’t want to. Whatever would happen would happen, that was all. The stars already knew. They’d known for as long as they’d been shining. Now he would find out, too.

Startled cries rang out. The woman at the well stared and pointed toward Istvan. People came tumbling out of houses and a bigger log building that might have been a tavern. They all pointed and exclaimed. Plainly, strangers here were a prodigy, which proved the Unkerlanter army didn’t know this place existed. Nobody aimed a stick at him. Nobody was holding one. They have to have them, Istvan thought. There isn‘t anybody who doesn‘t know about sticks. . is there?

Like a man in a dream, he walked toward the villagers. Some of them came toward him, too. He still had hold of his stick, but didn’t raise it. It was too light to see the stars, but they were always there. Eclipses proved it. If you want me to make amends for what I did, that can happen. I’m ready.

One of the villagers spoke to him in guttural Unkerlanter. It wasn’t Hands high! or Surrender! or Throw down your stick! — about all he knew of the enemy’s language. “I don’t follow,” he said in his own language, and then, because being polite seemed wise in a dream, he added, “I’m sorry.”

To his surprise, the Unkerlanter, a gray-haired man, answered in accented, halting Gyongyosian: “Not try to talk this talk many years. Sometimes-past times-you people come, trade for furs. You want trade for furs? We have furs to spare.”

They didn’t know there was a war. They didn’t recognize his uniform for what it was. “Maybe I will… trade for furs,” he said dazedly. He fumbled in his belt pouch and pulled out a small silver coin. “Can I buy some brandy first?”

All the villagers gaped at the coin. There were out-of-the-way valleys in Gyongyos that hardly ever saw real money, too. The Unkerlanter who spoke Gyongyosian said something in his own language. Everyone exclaimed. Three young men pelted toward the big building. The one who got there first came back with not just a mug but a jar. He took the silver from Istvan as if afraid the soldier would scream about being cheated.

With another coin, I could buy the prettiest girl here, Istvan realized. Money’s worth a lot. They must never see it at all. First things first, though. He yanked out the stopper and took a swig. Sweet fire ran down his throat. It was plum brandy, and tasted like summer. “Ahh!” he said, and swigged again. The gray-haired Unkerlanter clapped him on the back. He put an arm around the shorter man’s shoulder, then looked around, trying to decide which girl he would offer silver.

The villagers exclaimed again, and pointed toward the woods. The soldiers in Istvan’s squad, seeing nothing bad happen to him-seeing, in fact, the reverse-were coming out, too. “Your friends?” asked the man who spoke Gyongyosian.

“Aye-my friends.” Istvan turned and called to his men: “They’re nice as can be. Act the same, and we’ll all stay happy.”

“They all to dress like you,” the Unkerlanter said. He sounded surprised once more. Didn’t he know about uniforms? If he didn’t, how long had this village been cut off from the wider world? A cursed long time, that was sure.

Istvan’s troopers wasted no time in getting spirits for themselves. A couple of them wasted no time in trying to get friendly with the village girls, and their luck looked likely to be good. Sure enough, silver was almost sorcerously potent here.

Smiling at one of the girls, Istvan jingled the coins in his belt pouch. She smiled back. Aye, she’s a slut, he thought. But it might not have been so simple. An encounter with a stranger was hardly the same as lying down with a village boy who’d brag of his conquest for months afterwards.

With dumb show, they reached a bargain. Istvan gave the girl two coins and offered her the jar of brandy. She drank from it, then tilted her face up and kissed him. His arms slid around her. Her lips were sweet on his, her breasts firm and soft against his chest.

“Where?” he asked. She might not know the word, but she’d understand what he meant. And she did, pointing back toward one of the houses.

But they’d taken only a few steps in that direction when more Gyongyosian soldiers burst from the woods, shouting war cries: “Gyongyos! Ekrekek Arpad!” They started blazing before they asked a single question or saw nothing amiss had happened to Istvan and his squad.

The villagers screamed and ran and tried to fight back. Some of them made it back to their homes. They did have sticks, and used them bravely. A beam from a comrade’s weapon caught the girl Istvan had kissed and dropped her dead at his feet. He was lucky his own friends didn’t blaze him down, too.

“No!” he shouted, but nobody on either side-and there were sides now- paid him any attention. When the villagers started blazing, he threw himself down behind the girl’s corpse and blazed back. Finishing them off didn’t take long, not when Captain Tivadar’s whole company rolled down on them.

Three or four women didn’t get killed right away. The Gyongyosians lined up to have a go at them, ignoring their shrieks. Istvan stayed out of the lines; he found he had no taste for that sport. Captain Tivadar came over to him-public rape was beneath an officer’s dignity. “One village that won’t trouble us,” Tivadar said.

“It wasn’t troubling us anyhow,” Istvan mumbled.

Tivadar only shrugged. “War,” he said, as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.

As she usually did, Pekka bristled when someone knocked on her office door. How was she supposed to guide a caravan of thought down its proper ley line if people kept interrupting her? If this was Professor Heikki, Pekka vowed to put an itching spell on the department head’s drawers.

But it wasn’t Heikki, as Pekka discovered when she opened the door. A Kuusaman soldier stood there, one hand on the stick at his belt, the other holding a sealed envelope. He eyed her. “You are Pekka, the theoretical sorcerer?”

“Aye,” Pekka said. The soldier looked as if he didn’t want to believe her. In some exasperation, she told him, “You can knock on any door you like along this hall and get someone to tell you who I am.”

To her amazement, he actually did. Only after one of her colleagues vouched for her did he give her the envelope, for which he required her to write out a receipt. Then, with a grave salute, he went on his way.

Pekka found herself tempted to throw the envelope in the trash unopened. That appealed to her sense of the perverse: what more fitting fate for something the soldier so obviously judged important? But she shook her head. The trouble was, the soldier was all too likely to be right.

And the envelope, she saw by the design of the value imprint, came from Lagoas. One corner of her mouth turned down. She still wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing in backing Siuntio and agreeing to share some of what they knew with Kuusamo’s island neighbors. Aye, the Lagoans were allies, but they were still Lagoans.

She opened the envelope. She wasn’t surprised to find the letter written in excellent classical Kaunian.The last time I dropped you a line, Mistress Pekka, I did not have to send it by special courier, the Lagoan wrote.

Of course, the last time I dropped you a line, you insisted I had no need to do so. I understand why you said that, but now I know it is not true. I have been astonished at the discoveries you and your colleagues have made, and offer my assistance in any way you might find useful. I am presently recovering from wounds I received on the austral continent, but should be well enough to work before too long. Until then, and until I hear from you, I remain your obedient servant: Fernao, mage of the first rank.

“Fernao,” Pekka murmured, and slowly nodded. Sure enough, she remembered his earlier letter. He’d been a snoop then, and evidently remained one. But now he was a snoop with a right to know.

She set aside her calculations (not without a small, irked grimace: she couldn’t see now where she’d hoped to head before the soldier knocked on the door) and reinked the pen she’d been using on them. I have received your letter, she wrote, and hope your recovery from your wounds is swift and sure. My own husband went into the service of the Seven Princes not long ago, and I worry about him.

Pekka looked at that and frowned again. Was it too personal? She decided to leave it in; the powers above knew it was true. She went on,

Indeed, we have done a good deal of interesting work since we stopped publishing in the learned journals, and a man of your abilities will help us go further. I cannot set down the details here, but I think we may be on the edge of something intriguing, as perhaps you may also be hearing from my colleagues. Again, I wish you well, and hope to hear from you again. Pekka, at Kajaani City College.

She put the letter into a prepaid envelope and copied out the address in Setubal Fernao had given her. Then she hesitated. Her letter didn’t say much, but neither had Fernao’s, and he’d sent his by courier. Could she risk hers in the maelstrom of the mailstream? For all she knew, half the postal workers in Kajaani were Algarvian spies.

But she hadn’t the faintest idea how to order up a special courier. Maybe she should have told the one who’d brought the letter to wait. Unfortunately, that would have required more forethought than she’d had in her. The head of whatever garrison Kajaani boasted could have told her, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t already know what she was involved with.

Then she smiled. Ilmarinen would know. Siuntio would, too, no doubt, but she still fought shy of bothering him. She didn’t so much with Ilmarinen; he lived both to bother and to be bothered.

When she attuned her crystal to his, she found his image looking out of the glass at her a moment later. “Well, what now?” he asked. “An assignation, because your husband’s not at home? I can be there in a few hours, if you like.”

“You are a filthy old man,” Pekka said, to which the senior theoretical sorcerer responded with an enormous grin and a big nod of agreement. Telling herself she should have expected as much, she asked, “How do I go about getting a courier to deliver a letter for me?”

Ilmarinen might have made more suggestive banter. Pekka watched him think about it and, to her relief, decide against it. He said, “You’d do best to talk to Prince Jauhainen’s men, I think. He’s not half the man his uncle was, but he can manage that for you-he’d cursed well better be able to, anyhow.”

“Expecting anyone to match up to Prince Joroinen is asking a lot,” Pekka replied. “But that’s still a good notion--his folk will know enough of what I’m doing that I won’t have to do any more explaining. Thank you. I’ll try it.”

“Who’s the letter to?” Ilmarinen asked.

“The Lagoan named Fernao,” Pekka said; she wouldn’t mention Fernao’s trade by crystal, not when emanations might be stolen. She did add, “You know him, don’t you?”

“Oh, aye-a most inquisitive fellow, Fernao is.” Ilmarinen set a finger by the side of his nose. “I see: you’re arranging an assignation with him, not with me. I must be too old and ugly for you.”

“And too crackbrained, to boot,” Pekka snapped. Ilmarinen crowed laughter, delighted at getting a rise out of her. She glared. “I’ll have you know he was wounded down in the land of the Ice People.”

“What a painful place to be hurt,” Ilmarinen exclaimed. Pekka refused to acknowledge that in any way, which wasn’t easy. Ilmarinen shrugged. “Anything else?” he asked. Pekka shook her head. “So long, then,” he told her, and vanished from the crystal. It glowed for a moment, then went back to being nothing but a glassy sphere.

Pekka activated her crystal again. Sure enough, Prince Jauhainen’s aide- who’d served Prince Joroinen before he died in the Algarvians’ sorcerous assault on Yliharma-promised to send a man, and the fellow arrived not much later. Pekka gave him the letter and went back to work.

It went better than she’d thought it would. Maybe that was because she, like Fernao, had written in classical Kaunian: composing in a language not her own, especially one so different from Kuusaman, forced her to think clearly. Or maybe, though she hadn’t thought so, she’d just needed a break from what she was doing.

Pretty soon, I’ll be ready to go back into the laboratory again, she thought. If Siuntio or Ilmarinen comes up with something interesting, it’ll be sooner yet. Those were notions she’d had several times since she’d started probing the relationship at the heart of the laws of similarity and contagion. Now, though, she had a new one: Iwonder what Fernao is making of this as he catches up to us. She hoped the Lagoan was well and truly impressed. If he wasn’t, he should have been.

Without Leino to come knock on her door, she had to pay more attention to leaving for home at the right time. She’d been very late one day when Uto had been even more inventive than usual, and her sister Elimaki, usually the best-natured woman around, had screamed at her when she finally came to get her son. She didn’t want that to happen again.

As she chanted the spells that would secure her calculations in her desk till she came for them in the morning, she wondered if they were as strong as they might be. Oh, she was sure they would foil a burglar looking for whatever he could sell for a little cash, but who was more likely to want to break into her office: that kind of burglar or an Algarvian spy?

Ilmarinen will know if the spells are good enough, she thought. Ilmarinen had a raffish distrust of his fellow man Siuntio couldn’t come close to matching. Siuntio was more brilliant, but Ilmarinen lived in-reveled in-the real world.

The real world hit her in the face when she walked across the Kajaani City College campus to the ley-line caravan stop to wait for a car to take her home. The news-sheet vendor at the stop was shouting word of the Algarvian breakthrough into the outskirts of Sulingen. “Trapani says it’s so, and Cot-tbus doesn’t deny it!” he added, as if that proved everything. Maybe it did; she’d got used to evaluating war claims out of the west by splitting the difference between what the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters said. If the Unkerlanters weren’t saying anything. . Pekka shook her head. That wasn’t a good sign.

And the grim look on Elimaki’s face when Pekka came to pick up Uto wasn’t a good sign, either. Pekka wanted to throw up her hands. “What now?” she asked, and scowled at her son. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing,” Uto replied, as sweetly as he always did when he’d committed some new enormity.

“He learned a little spell,” Elimaki said. “Powers above only know where children pick these things up, but they do. And he’s your son and Leino’s, so he has talent, too-talent for trouble, that’s what.”

“What did you do? Pekka asked Uto, and then, realizing she wouldn’t get an answer from him, she turned to Elimaki. “What did he do?”

“He animated the dog’s dish, that’s what, so it chased poor Thumper all over the house and spilled table scraps everywhere, that’s what he did,” Elimaki said. Uto looked up at the sky, as if he’d had nothing to do with that dish.

“Oh, no,” Pekka said, doing her best to sound severe and not burst into giggles. Uto found such creative ways to land in trouble. Not many children his age could have made that spell-Pekka was pretty sure she knew which one it was-work so well. Even so … Even so, he would have to be punished. “Uto, you can’t do that kind of thing at Aunt Elimaki’s house-or at home, either,” Pekka added hastily; leaving loopholes around Uto wasn’t safe. “Your tiny stuffed leviathan is going to spend the night up on the mantel.”

That brought the usual storm of tears from her son. It also brought a new threat: “I’ll make him come back to me so I can sleep! I can! I will!”

“No, you won’t,” Pekka told him. “You will not use magic without permission. Never. You will not. Do you understand me? It can be very dangerous.”

“All right,” Uto said sulkily.

Pekka could see he wasn’t convinced. She didn’t care. She would do whatever she had to do to convince him. Children playing with sorcery were at least as dangerous as children playing with fire. If taking Uto’s toy leviathan away didn’t work, if she had to switch his backside instead, she would. Were Leino here, he surely would have. Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Ahead of Trasone, Sulingen burned. It was a great burning, the smoke rising in tall, choking, brown-black clouds. Sulingen was a bigger city than the Algarvian veteran had thought it would be. It sprawled for miles along the northern bank of the Wolter, its districts cut here and there by steep gullies. Day after day, dragons painted in red, green, and white pounded it from the air. Egg-tossers hurled more destruction at it. But, because it was a big city, it was hard to wreck. And the Unkerlanters fought back as if they would fall off the edge of the world if they were forced into the Wolter.

Crouched behind a heap of bricks that had once been somebody’s chimney, Trasone called out to Sergeant Panfilo: “I thought, what with all the behemoths and such we’ve got, we were supposed to go around the cursed Unkerlanters, not through “em.” He didn’t lift up his head when he spoke. Plenty of King Swemmel’s soldiers would have been delighted to put a beam between his eyes if he were so foolish.

Panfilo stayed low, too, in a little hole in the ground for which he’d made a breastwork from the dirt dug out of it. “We did all that. How do you think we got here? Now there’s no more room to go around, so we go forward instead.”

An egg burst not far from them. Rocks and clods of earth and chunks of wood pattered down on Trasone. He ignored them with the resignation of a man who’d known worse. “We ought to find some kind of way to get across the Wolter,” he said.

Over in his foxhole, Panfilo laughed. “Only way I know is straight south,” he answered. “This is the only place where we’ve even come close to the bloody, stinking river-and we’ve already got Yaninans guarding our flanks.”

Trasone grunted. He knew that as well as Panfilo did. “They aren’t quite as hopeless as I thought they’d be,” he said-not much praise, but the best he could do.

Panfilo laughed again. “They don’t like the notion of getting killed any better than you do, pal. If they don’t fight some, they know cursed well they’ll die. But wouldn’t you sooner see our lads doing the job instead?”

“Of course I would. You think I’m daft, or something?” Trasone shook his head, which made a couple of pebbles fall from the brim of his hat into the dirt beside him. “And I’d sooner the Yaninans were full strength with behemoths and egg-tossers and dragons. I’d sooner we were, too.” Now he laughed, a laugh full of vitriol. “And while I’m at it, I’ll wish for the moon.”

It wasn’t funny. Replacements kept filtering in to the battalion, but it was still far under strength. All the battalions and regiments at the thin end of the wedge were far under strength. That was how it got to be the thin end of the wedge: by grinding against the Unkerlanters. They had to be getting thin on the ground, too, but they always seemed to have plenty of soldiers when the battalion tried to go forward.

And sometimes they tried coming forward themselves. More eggs fell around Trasone. He wanted to hide, to dig down deep in the dirt so no danger could find him. But he knew what was liable to happen when the Unkerlanters started tossing lots of eggs. They wanted the Algatvians to put their heads down, whereupon a wave of infantry in rock-gray tunics would wash over them.

Sure enough, from off to the left Major Spinello shouted, “Here they come, the bare-faced, bald-arsed buggers!”

He didn’t need to have cried out. The rhythmic roars of “Urra! Urra!” that rose from the Unkerlanters would have told the Algarvians fighting in the outskirts of Sulingen everything they needed to know. Now Trasone had to peer out from behind his heap of bricks.

As he’d seen them do outside Aspang, the Unkerlanters were advancing in thick lines, one a few feet behind another. They blazed as they came. Some of diem had linked arms, which helped steady them as they scrambled over the wreckage that had once been houses and shops.

They hadn’t knocked out all the Algarvian egg-tossers. Eggs caught the footsoldiers out in the open, knocking some of them down, flinging others high into the air, leaving nothing whatever of still others. The eggs tore great holes in the Unkerlanters’ ranks. But Trasone, like his countrymen, had long since learned King Swemmel’s men had very little give in them. The ones who weren’t felled came on. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!”

Along with his comrades, Trasone started blazing. Their beams made more Unkerlanters stumble and fall, but other men in rock-gray always rushed up to take the places of those who couldn’t go forward any more.

Trasone’s mouth went dry. The Unkerlanters were going to break in among the Algarvian troopers. It would be every man for himself then, with numbers counting as much as or more than skill: a melee of blazing and sticks swinging like clubs and knives and fists and teeth. Sometimes the Unkerlanters took prisoners. More often, they slaughtered them. The Algarvians fought the war the same way.

Trasone had just blazed down another Unkerlanter when several shadows swiftly swept over him. With coughing roars, half a dozen Algarvian dragons flamed Swemmel’s onrushing soldiers. The Unkerlanters could endure eggs. They could endure beams. Watching their friends crisp and blacken, smelling the stink of burnt flesh, was more than they could bear. They broke and fled, or went to earth well outside the Algarvian lines.

“Forward!” Spinello ordered, and blew a long blast on his officer’s whistle to emphasize the order.

Wishing the battalion commander would have been content to beat back the Unkerlanter attack, Trasone scrambled out from behind the shelter that had served him so well. Somebody saw him: a beam charred in hole in a sun-bleached board by his head. It could have gone through him instead, and he knew it.

He threw himself flat behind an overturned wagon. It offered concealment, but not much protection. He looked ahead for a better place. Spying one, he dashed toward it. An Unkerlanter broke cover and started running for the same hole. They saw each other at the same instant. The Unkerlanter started to bring his stick up to his shoulder. Trasone blazed from the hip. The Unkerlanter went down, stick falling from nerveless fingers. Trasone dove into the hole.

But the dead enemy’s countrymen attacked again; they truly were saying, Thus far and no farther. Again, Algarvian dragons swooped down on the Unkerlanters. Swemmel’s men could not stand in the face of flame. Those who could fell back.

Those who couldn’t. . Trasone ran past a shrunken, twisted black doll that had, up till a few minutes before, been a man who wanted to kill him. Now the horrid thing, still smoking, sent up a stink that reminded him of a pork roast forgotten on a hot, hot stove. He spat-and spat black, from all the soot he was breathing in. With a broad-shouldered shrug, he jumped down into a new hole.

A moment later, Sergeant Panfilo jumped down with him. “You see the dead one back there?” Panfilo asked. Trasone nodded. Panfilo shuddered. “That could have been us, as easy as it was him.”

“Not quite as easy,” Trasone said. “The Unkerlanters haven’t got a whole lot of dragons down here.”

“What difference does that make?” Panfilo demanded. “You think our own beasts wouldn’t flame us? They’re too stupid to care who they’re killing, as long as they’re killing somebody.”

“That’s why they’ve got dragonfliers on their backs,” Trasone pointed out.

“Aye, so they do-and half the time they’re as stupid as the beasts they ride,” Panfilo said. Trasone chuckled and nodded; he was always ready to listen to slander about anyone who wasn’t a footsoldier.

Before Panfilo could add to the slander, Spinello’s whistle blew an urgent blast. “Be ready, boys!” he called.

“Ready for what?” Trasone asked.

“More counterattacks,” the major answered. “Crystal says they’re sending lots of men up over the Wolter from the south bank. They don’t want us in Sulingen. They don’t want us anywhere near Sulingen. If we can get them out of this place and cross the Wolter ourselves, there’s nothing between us and the Mamming Hills and most of the cinnabar that isn’t in the land of the Ice People.”

“Nothing but a few million Unkerlanters who hate everything about us and want to have fun with us before they finally let us die,” Trasone said.

“We can lick the Unkerlanters,” Spinello said. Trasone envied him his blithe confidence, but couldn’t imagine where he got it. Spinello went on, “If we couldn’t lick the buggers, what would we be doing here? We’ve done nothing but lick ‘em for the last seven hundred miles or so, and we can keep right on doing it a few miles more.”

The Algarvians hadn’t done nothing but lick the Unkerlanters; they’d taken some lickings of their own, as Trasone knew and Spinello should have remembered. But the battalion commander had a point: without a lot of victories, the Algarvian banner wouldn’t be flying here so far from home.

“And one thing more,” Spinello added: “Be ready to counterattack, boys. You’ll know when.”

Before Trasone could ask any questions about that, the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs at his position again. “Urra! Urra! Urra!” The fierce shouts they used to nerve themselves for battle rang out. Sometimes they nerved themselves with raw spirits, too. “Here they come!” someone yelled in Algarvian.

Again, Algarvian egg-tossers caught the Unkerlanters in the open. Again, they worked a gruesome slaughter on Swemmel’s men. Again, the Unkerlanters, or those of them who lived, rolled forward in spite of that and in spite of the sharp, accurate blazing of the Algarvians awaiting them.

Then the ground shuddered under Trasone. It shuddered more under the Unkerlanters. Fissures opened in what had been solid ground; what had been holes closed up, often trapping men inside them. Flames spurted up from the surface of the ground, violet flames like nothing Trasone had seen till the autumn before. Burned Unkerlanters shrieked. As the dragons had been, the magic was more than King Swemmel’s men could bear. They turned and fled.

Spinello’s whistle shrilled once more. “Come on, boys!” he yelled. “They’re on the run now. You don’t want to make our mages spend all those Kaunians for nothing, do you? Come on!” Scrappy as a terrier, he was, as usual, the first to leap from cover and rush after the retreating foe.

Trasone followed. He didn’t care whether Kaunians were being massacred to some good purpose or for no reason at all. He had no use for diem, and wouldn’t have been sorry to see them all dead. But seeing the Unkerlanters in front of him dead struck him as a lot more important at the moment.

He and his comrades were nearing the Unkerlanters’ trenches when the ground shook beneath them again. This time, Spinello cried out in fury- Algarvian mages weren’t the ones working magic here. Trasone cried out, too-in fear. He didn’t run, not because he didn’t want to but because he didn’t think it would do any good. He lay down behind a riven wall and hoped no crevasse would gape wide beneath him.

When the shaking finally ended, the battalion didn’t return to the attack with the same jauntiness. Trasone wondered how many of their own-they didn’t use Kaunians-the Unkerlanters had spent to gain a respite. However many it was, it had worked.

Sidroc had seen war before, when the Algarvian army pummeled Gromheort from the air and then took it. He’d lost his mother when the redheads dropped an egg on his house. He knew he was lucky to be breathing himself.

But then, after the Algarvians occupied eastern Forthweg, a routine of sorts had returned to life. And the Algarvians, as he’d seen, were strong, where his own people were weak and the cursed Kaunians even weaker. Fighting in Plegmund’s Brigade, Sidroc gathered strength for himself.

When the Algarvians, including their alarming physical trainer, decided his regiment was ready to fight, the Forthwegians left the encampment in the southwest of their kingdom and went south and south again, sometimes by ley-line caravan, sometimes by shank’s mare, till they reached the Duchy of Grelz.

Until he joined Plegmund’s Brigade, Sidroc had never been far from Gromheort. What he saw of southern Unkerlant didn’t impress him. Even the houses that hadn’t been wrecked in the fighting struck him as shabby. So did the Unkerlanters, especially the men. Their custom was to stay clean-shaven, but most of them wore a few days’ worth of stubble, giving them the look of derelicts. When they spoke, he could sometimes understand a word or two of their tongue, which was related to his own, but never a full sentence. That made them seem suspicious to him, too.

His squad leader was a scarred veteran sergeant named Werferth, who’d fought in the Algarvian army during the Six Years’ War and for Forthweg in the early days of the Derlavaian War. Werferth seemed happy as long as he was fighting for someone, or perhaps against someone. For or against whom? As best Sidroc could tell, the sergeant didn’t care. He said, “You’d fornicating well better be suspicious of these cursed Unkerlanters. Turn your back and they’ll cut your balls off.”

“They’ll be sorry if they try.” At eighteen, after weeks of hard training, Sidroc felt ready to take on the world.

Werferth laughed in his face. Sidroc bristled-inside, where it didn’t show. He didn’t think he was afraid of any Unkerlanters, but he knew he feared the sergeant. Werferth said, “You’re liable to be sorry if they try, on account of they’re sneaky whoresons and you’re still wet behind the ears. Like I said, the trick of it is not to give the buggers the chance.”

Sidroc nodded and did his best to look wise. Werferth laughed at him again, which made him grind his teeth. But that was all he did. After one more chuckle, Werferth went off to terrorize some other common soldier.

For the first time, all of Plegmund’s Brigade assembled together just outside Herborn, the capital of Grelz. The regiments already down there were as full of cutthroats and men down on their luck as the one of which Sidroc was a part. But that didn’t matter when the Brigade drew itself up for King Raniero’s review.

Algarvian officers and Forthwegian underofficers scurried among the men, making sure not a speck of dust lay on a tunic sleeve or a boot top, not a hair was out of place. To his dismay, Sidroc had discovered sergeants insisted on even more in the way of cleanliness and tidiness than mothers or aunts. He could give them what they wanted, but he resented the need.

Drawn up to one side of Plegmund’s Brigade stood a regiment of Grelzer infantry in dark green tunics that looked to have been recently dyed. Like Sidroc and his comrades, they had Algarvian officers. They looked very serious and solemn about what they were doing. The couple of companies of Algar-vians on the other side of Plegmund’s Brigade looked anything but. They stood at attention and their faces were quiet, but mischief still gleamed in their eyes and blazed forth from every line of their bodies.

A band marched out from Herborn blaring a tune that might have been the Grelzer national hymn-Sidroc presumed it was. Guarded by a squad of horsemen in dark green tunics, King Raniero rode a fine white unicorn. Three or four high-ranking Algarvian officers accompanied him. He was an Algarvian himself, of course, but wore a long tunic of the same color as his soldiers’, but of finer fabric and cut.

He swung down from the unicorn with surprising grace and began the inspection. The Grelzer soldiers gave him a curious little half bow by way of a salute. He was half a head taller than most of them. Sidroc wondered what they thought of having a foreign sovereign. If they had any doubts, they would be wise to keep quiet about them.

When Raniero came to Plegmund’s Brigade, he startled Sidroc by speaking good Forthwegian: “I thank you all for joining my Algarvian allies in helping to assure my kingdom’s safety.”

“Huzzah!” the Brigade’s Algarvian officers shouted. “Huzzah!” the Forthwegian troopers echoed a moment later. The redheads swept off their hats and gave Raniero extravagant bows. Sidroc was cursed if he’d do any such thing. Like the rest of the ordinary soldiers, he stayed at stiff attention.

“I know how brave you men are,” Raniero went on. “During the Six Years’ War, I commanded a regiment of Forthwegians, and they fought like lions.” Sidroc hadn’t done well in school, but he knew Algarve and Unkerlant had divided Forthweg between them like a couple of hungry men cutting up a slab of roast beef. Any Forthwegians Raniero commanded would have been fighting for Algarve-as Werferth had done-not for their own kingdom.

And now that was so again. Sidroc shrugged. Nothing he could do about it. And he didn’t like Unkerlanters, not even a little. If fighting for Algarve was how he got to fight against King Swemmel, then it was, that was all.

Raniero said, “Bandits and brigands still trouble my land. I know you will help put them down. For that, you will have not only my thanks but also the thanks of all the great and ancient Kingdom of Grelz.”

Beside Sidroc, Sergeant Werferth snickered, just loud enough to let him hear. He understood what that snicker meant, more from dining-room talk between his father and Uncle Hestan than from anything he’d learned in school. Grelz hadn’t been a kingdom for three hundred years. The Algarvians had revived it not for the sake of the Grelzers but to complicate life for Swemmel of Unkerlant.

How many Grelzers really thought of Raniero as their king? If the Algarvians had named one of their own King of Forthweg after King Penda fled, Sidroc wouldn’t have thought of him as his king. He’d always said pretty much what he thought, but saying that struck him as a bad idea.

Raniero strolled through the ranks of Plegmund’s Brigade. He smelled of sandalwood, which almost made Sidroc crack a smile. But he’d learned that wasn’t a good idea, either. Then Raniero went over to the Algarvian companies. He had no compunction about joking with the redheads, nor they with him. Guffaws floated up to the sky. Sidroc tried to remember his Algarvian so he could find out what was funny, but couldn’t make out enough to tell.

And then the ceremony was done. Raniero got back onto his unicorn and rode away. So did his Algarvian commanders and his Grelzer bodyguards. The regiment of Grelzers marched back toward Herborn, as did the Algarvian companies. That left Plegmund’s Brigade alone on the vast plain of southern Unkerlant.

They set up camp as if in the middle of hostile company-which in fact they were, or why else would Raniero have wanted them? Sentry posts surrounded the encampment on all sides. Seeing them, Sidroc said, “Well, at least we’ll be able to rest easy tonight.”

Sergeant Werferth snickered again, this time at him. “Oh, aye, if you want to wake up with your throat cut. You got to figure the Unkerlanters for sneaky whoresons. What happens if they slide past the sentries? They’re liable to, you know. How well can you see in the dark?”

“I don’t know,” Sidroc answered. “I guess I’ll just have to be ready to get up and fight in a hurry if I have to.”

That made Werferth nod and thump him on the back. “Aye, so you will. There-you see? You’re not as dumb as you look.”

Worries about sleep turned out to be largely academic. As soon as the sun went down, mosquitoes came out by armies, swarms, hordes. The tents the Brigade had brought from Forthweg lacked the netting they needed to hold the mosquitoes at bay; Forthweg was a drier, hotter land, with fewer bugs.

When Sidroc got up the next morning, he was yawning and irascible and covered with bites. So was Werferth, who looked no happier than he did. “And we aren’t the worst of it,” the sergeant added. “Cursed mosquitoes flew off with two men from another company. They raise ‘em the size of dragons around here.” Sleepy and grouchy, Sidroc believed him for a moment. Then he snorted and went off to stand in line for breakfast.

The Brigade broke up into regiments and then into companies, and began prowling across the countryside looking for Unkerlanter irregulars. What they found were farmers doing their best to get a crop out of their land. Few of the farmers seemed very friendly, but few seemed actively hostile, either.

Werferth hated all of them, for no better reason Sidroc could see than that they were there. “Some of ‘em are irregulars, sure as I stand here farting,” the veteran sergeant said. “And a lot of the ones who haven’t got the ballocks for that will tell the irregulars where we’ve been and where we’re going. Bugger the bunch of’em, is what I’ve got to say.”

After a couple of days of marching, Sidroc’s company went into a forest that astonished him. Forthweg didn’t have woods like these, dark and brooding and wild, with the air chill and damp even in summertime under pines and beeches and firs and birches and larches and spruce. Sidroc kept looking around not for Unkerlanter irregulars but for bears or possibly trolls. He knew there were no such things as trolls, but that didn’t keep him from worrying about them, not in a place like this.

Without warning, the trooper tramping along three men in front of him went down as if all his bones had turned to jelly. Sidroc hurried up to him. He had a neat hole in his left temple; the beam that killed him had blown off much of the right side of his skull. Blood soaked into the pine needles on the path.

“By squads!” an Algarvian officer shouted. “Into the woods on either side. We won’t let the buggers get away with this.”

Into the woods Sidroc went. He hoped somebody in his squad could find the way back to the path, because he soon lost track of it. He could hear himself and his comrades blundering along. He couldn’t hear anyone else-but at least one Unkerlanter irregular had been there somewhere, and probably more. They knew the woods, the whoresons. If he heard them at all, it would be because they were laughing their heads off.

“Back!” The command came in Algarvian. It also told Sidroc where the path lay. Back he went. He didn’t care that he’d caught no irregulars. He just wanted to escape the woods alive.

He did. A little village lay beyond the forest. Farmers and their wives looked up curiously at the bearded men in strange uniforms. Without a word, the men of Plegmund’s Brigade started blazing. They killed as many as they could catch, and left the village a smoking ruin behind them. Sidroc laughed. “Welcome to Grelz!” he said. “As long as we’re here, we may as well make ourselves at home.”

“Another pack of murdering goons to worry about,” Munderic said, leaning against the trunk of a spruce. “That’s all Algarve’s brought to Grelz-foreign murdering goons.”

“Aye,” Garivald said: one voice in a general rumble of agreement from the irregulars.

Another fighter said, “These Forthwegian buggers are even nastier than the redheads, powers below eat ‘em.”

“That’s bad, but it’s not so bad,” Garivald said. People turned to look at him, puzzlement on a good many faces. He tried to put it into words: “The more people who hate these buggers, the more who’ll come over to our side.”

“Here’s hoping, anyway,” Munderic said. “But we’ve got to show folks we can stand up to the whoresons, hurt ‘em bad when we find the chance. Otherwise they’ll just be afraid, and do whatever the foreigners say.”

“We blazed that one fellow just to give ‘em a hello, like,” somebody said, “and then they wrecked a village to pay it back. What’ll they do if we nail a proper lot of ‘em?”

“See? They’ve already put you in fear,” Munderic said. “We’ll find a time to give ‘em a good boot in the arse, see what they do then. If we can prod ‘em into something everybody’s bound to hate, all the better.”

“They must look like a pack of wild beasts, with all that hair on their faces people talk about,” Garivald said. He had a good deal of hair on his face, too; chances to scrape it off were few and far between. But he still thought of himself as clean-shaven, which the Forthwegians weren’t.

“They act like a pack of wild beasts, that’s certain,” Munderic said. “Off what they’ve shown so far, they are worse than the Algarvians.”

“A mean man will keep a meaner dog,” Garivald said, and then, musingly, tasting the words, “Sometimes you have to whack it with a log.” He made a face. That didn’t work. Around him, irregulars nudged one another and grinned. They knew the signs of a man with a song coming on.

Munderic didn’t give Garivald any time to work on it now. He said, “We’re going to hit them. We’re going to teach them this is our countryside, and they can’t come along and tear things up whenever they get the urge.”

Obilot stuck up a hand. When Munderic pointed to her, she added, “Besides, with these cursed Forthwegians beating on us here in Grelz, the redheads can send more of their own soldiers against our regular armies.”

“That’s so.” Munderic grinned at her. “You make quite a little general there.” Most of the irregulars-most of the male irregulars, anyhow- grinned and chuckled, too. Obilot’s jaw set, though she didn’t say anything. Most of the men viewed the handful of women who’d joined them as something more than conveniences, but something a good deal less than full-fledged fighters.

In a way, Garivald understood that. The only reason he’d gone easier on his wife back in Zossen than most Unkerlanter peasants did was that he had a wife of unusually forceful character. But all the women here fit that bill-and most of them had been through worse than any of the men. He sent Obilot a sympathetic glance. She didn’t seem to notice. He shrugged. She probably thought he was leering at her, the way the men often did.

Someone said, “Those Forthwegians are no cursed good in the woods.”

“They don’t seem to be,” Munderic agreed. “They’re even worse than the Algarvians, I think. The redheads act like they think woods ought to be parks or something, but the Forthwegians, I think half of’em never saw a tree before in all their born days.” He smacked one fist into the palm of his other hand. “And we’ll make ‘em pay for it, too, as soon as we get the chance.”

Three days later, an Unkerlanter slipped into the irregulars’ camp with word that the Forthwegians would make another sweep through the eastern part of the forest, the part closest to Herborn, before long. Garivald never saw the fellow, but such things happened all the time: people who had to work with the Algarvians-and, now, with their Forthwegian flunkies-were only too glad to let the irregulars know what was going on.

“I’ve got just the spot for an ambush,” Munderic said with a broad smile that showed broken teeth. He walked over to Garivald and slapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not far from where we nailed those redheads and picked you up, as a matter of fact.”

“Sounds good by me,” Garivald said. “Let’s do it.”

“We will,” Munderic declared. “And maybe Sadoc can cast a glamour over the roadway, so we make extra sure nobody spots us.”

“Aye, maybe,” Garivald said, and said no more. Before the fighting started, King Swemmel had sent a drunken wreck of a mage to Zossen to conduct the sacrifices that powered the village’s crystal. Next to Sadoc, who’d joined the irregulars a couple of weeks earlier, that fellow looked like Addanz, the arch-mage of Unkerlant. Garivald didn’t know where, or even if, Sadoc had learned magecraft. He did know the fellow hadn’t learned much, and hadn’t learned it very well.

But Munderic liked Sadoc: the leader of the irregulars finally had someone who could work magic, no matter how feebly, and Sadoc was recklessly brave when he wasn’t working-or more likely botching-magic. Garivald liked him, too-as an irregular. As a mage, he made a good peasant.

Munderic at their head, the irregulars moved out to await the soldiers of Plegmund’s Brigade. Garivald had heard of Plegmund; some old songs called him the biggest thief in the world. By all the signs, Forthwegians hadn’t changed much from his day till now.

Garivald couldn’t have said whether Munderic’s chosen spot was close to the place where he’d been rescued. He wasn’t all that good in the woods himself, though he was getting better. And, back then, he’d been too busy fearing the death he was sure lay ahead of him to take much notice of his surroundings.

He couldn’t help agreeing the spot was a good one, though. The woods track widened out into a little clearing, around whose edges the irregulars grouped themselves. They could punish the Forthwegians who tramped into the trap. Garivald looked forward to it.

He kept sneaking glances at Obilot, who crouched behind a thick, rough-barked pine a few feet away. She went right on paying no attention to him. He sighed. He missed Annore. He missed women, generally speaking-and he looked likely to keep on missing with Obilot.

Sadoc, a big, unkempt fellow, chanted a spell that would, with luck, make the concealed Unkerlanters harder for the men of Plegmund’s Brigade to spot. Garivald couldn’t tell whether it did anything. He had his doubts. From everything he’d seen, Sadoc would have had trouble enchanting a mouse away from a blind cat.

Munderic, though, Munderic surely did think the world of his more-or-less mage. “Use your powers to let us know when the Forthwegians draw near,” he said.

“Aye, I’ll do it.” Sadoc was eager. No one could have denied that. If only he were bright, too, Garivald thought.

Time crawled slowly past. Garivald kept glancing toward Obilot. Once, she was looking back at him. That flustered him enough to make him keep his eyes to himself for quite a while.

Sadoc stood some way off, behind a birch with bark white as milk. Suddenly, he stepped out into the clearing for a moment. “They’re coming!” he exclaimed, and pointed up the track the men of Plegmund’s Brigade were likely to use. Then, for good measure, he pointed off into the woods, in a direction from which no one was likely to come.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Obilot hissed to Garivald as Sadoc returned to cover.

“Probably means he doesn’t know which way they’re coming from,” Garivald answered, and the woman irregular nodded.

But the bearded Forthwegians did come into the clearing from the direction-the likely direction-Sadoc had predicted. They marched along in loose order, chatting among themselves, not looking as if they expected trouble. Garivald had expected them to look like animals, or more likely demons. They didn’t. They just looked like men doing a job. He didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. Probably worse, he decided.

But their job was fighting and killing and dying. They started dying as soon as enough of them were in the clearing to make it worthwhile for the irregulars to begin to blaze. One of Garivald’s beams knocked a man over. Exulting, he swung his captured Algarvian stick toward another Algarvian puppet.

Like the redheads he’d helped ambush between Lohr and Pirmasens, the men of Plegmund’s Brigade fought back hard-better than he thought the irregulars could have done. The Forthwegians blazed into the woods. Those who could drew back toward the mouth of the clearing. Their comrades who hadn’t yet come into the clearing went off the path and into the forest, moving forward to fight the Unkerlanters.

Sadoc shouted, “The north! The north!” That was the second direction to which he’d pointed. Garivald had plenty of other things to worry about; he paid the hapless mage little attention.

He slipped around past Obilot, looking for another good place from which to blaze at the retreating men of Plegmund’s Brigade. Then she scuttled past him, no doubt after the same thing. He smiled, and so did she; it might almost have been a figure dance in a village square.

A beam slamming into a tree trunk not far from his head reminded him this was no amusement, but a game either side might lose. And if he lost, he’d never have the chance to play the game again.

Crashing noises and yells from out of the north made Garivald’s head whip around. He couldn’t understand most of the yells-they weren’t in Unkerlanter. But one word came through with perfect clarity: “Plegmund!”

“Powers above!” Garivald blurted. “They’ve got us in a trap, not the other way round.” He looked through the trees for an avenue of escape.

Obilot clapped a hand to her forehead. “That great clodpoll of a Sadoc was right,” she said, sounding disgusted with the world, with Sadoc, and with herself. “He’s wrong so often, we didn’t believe him this time, but he was right.”

“Break clear!” Munderic shouted, his voice cutting through the Forthwegians’ unintelligible cries. “Break clear! You know where to gather. The whoresons outfoxed us this time, but our turn’ll come round again, see if it doesn’t.”

Garivald hadn’t traveled through the woods enough to be sure of finding his way back to the irregulars’ encampment. Perhaps sensing as much, Obilot said, “Stick close to me. I’ll get you back. Now let’s step lively, before these buggers get a clear blaze at us. I don’t know about the redheads, but they’re sure nastier customers than Grelzer soldiers. That’s clear.”

“Aye.” Garivald nodded. “Seems they really mean it when they come after us, all right. Well, now we know.” Obilot started off toward the west. He followed, moving as fast and as quietly as he could.

He had to blaze only once, and he dropped his Forthwegian before the bearded man could shout. Then the sounds of fighting and the foreign shouts from Plegmund’s Brigade faded behind him. “I think we got away,” he said. “Thanks.”

“We really have to do better.” Obilot didn’t sound happy. “Now we have to see how many of us got away, and how much we’ll be able to do for a while. Curse the Algarvians, anyhow.” Garivald nodded again. How many Unkerlanters were thinking the same thing right now?