Through the Darkness

Nineteen

These days, Bembo had a hard time swaggering through the streets of Gromheort. Even Oraste, as stolid and unflinching as any Algarvian ever born-he might almost have been an Unkerlanter, as far as temper went-had trouble swaggering through the streets of the occupied Forthwegian town. Too many walls had a single word scrawled on them: SULINGEN.

“It’s still ours,” Bembo said stubbornly. “As long as it’s still ours, these stinking Forthwegians have no business mocking us, and they ought to know it.” He kicked at the slates of the sidewalk. He didn’t even convince himself, let alone Oraste, let alone the Forthwegians.

Oraste said, “We’re going to lose it. We couldn’t push soldiers down there, and the ones who were down there couldn’t get out.” He spat. “It’s not an easy war.”

That was a sizable understatement. Bembo said, “I wonder what they’ll do when they run out of Kaunians here in Forthweg.”

“Good question.” Oraste shrugged. “Probably start hauling ‘em out of Jelgava and Valmiera. Plenty of the blond buggers in those places.” His chuckle was nasty. “And they can’t get away with magicking their looks or dyeing their hair black there, either. Nothing but blonds in the far east.”

“Well, that’s so.” Bembo tried swinging his truncheon, but even that couldn’t give him the panache he wanted. “But who’ll get ‘em on the caravan cars and send ‘em west? Do we have enough men in the east to do the job?”

Oraste spat again. “We can have the constables-the blond constables, I mean-do it for us. Why not? They’d be glad to, I bet-and glad nobody was shipping them off instead of the whoresons they’re catching.”

“You think even a Kaunian would stoop so low?” Bembo asked.

“Kaunians are Kaunians.” Oraste sounded very sure-but then, Oraste always sounded very sure about everything. “Their hair may be blond, but their hearts are black.”

“For that matter, their hair may be black, too, at least in Gromheort,” Bembo said. “I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who thought of that. Wouldn’t he squeal when I was done with him! What we need are mages to nail the ones using those spells.”

“Army needs ‘em more than we do,” Oraste said. “Army gets what it needs. We get what’s left-if there’s anything left. Usually we just get hind tit.”

Somebody behind the two Algarvian constables shouted, “Sulingen!” Bembo and Oraste both whirled. Bembo raised his truncheon as if to break a head. Oraste grabbed for his stick. Both gestures were useless. The Forthwegians they saw were all just walking along the street. No way to tell which one of them had shouted. And they were all smiling, enjoying the occupiers’ discomfiture.

“Ought to blaze a couple of ‘em just for fun,” Oraste growled. “That’d teach ‘em not to get gay.”

“It’d probably touch off a riot, too,” Bembo pointed out. “And if the bigwigs ever found out who did that, they’d throw us in the army and ship us off to Unkerlant. All they want is for things to stay quiet here.”

He sighed with relief when Oraste reluctantly nodded. Of course the occupiers wanted peace and quiet in Forthweg. Anything but peace and quiet would have required more men. Algarve had no men to spare. Anybody who wasn’t doing something vitally important somewhere else was off in the freezing, trackless west, fighting King Swemmel’s men.

“I bet it was a Kaunian who shouted that,” Oraste said.

“Maybe,” Bembo answered. “Of course, the Forthwegians love us, too. They just don’t love us quite as much.”

As Bembo had used “love” to mean something else, so Oraste said something that could have meant, “Love the Forthwegians.” The burly, bad-tempered constable went on, “Those whoresons didn’t have the balls to get rid of their own Kaunians, but do they thank us for doing it for ‘em? Fat chance!”

Bembo said, “When does anybody ever thank a constable?” Part of that was his usual self-pity, part a cynical understanding of the way the world worked.

Then, around a corner, he heard a cacophony of shouts and screams. He and Oraste looked at each other. They both yanked their sticks off their belts and started running.

By the time Bembo turned that corner, he was puffing. He’d always been happier about sitting in a tavern eating and drinking than about any other part of constabulary work. And his girth-especially now that the constables weren’t marching out to the villages around Gromheort to bring back Kaunians-reflected that.

All the yelling was in Forthwegian, which he didn’t understand. But pointing fingers were obvious enough. So were the three men running down the street as fast as they could go, knocking over anybody who got in their way.

“Robbers!” Bembo exclaimed, a brilliant bit of deduction if ever there was one. He raised his voice to a shout: “Halt, in the name of the law!”

He shouted, inevitably, in Algarvian. It might have been Gyongyosian for all the good it did. Oraste wasted no time on yelling. He lowered his stick, sighted along it, and started blazing. “Buggers won’t go anywhere if we kill them,” he said.

“What if we hit a bystander?” Bembo asked. The street was crowded.

“What if we do?” Bembo answered with a scornful shrug. “Who cares? You think this is Tricarico, and somebody’ll call out his pet solicitor if we singe his pinkie? Not fornicating likely.”

He was right, of course. Bembo also sighted along his stick. By the time he did so, two of the robbers had vanished around a corner. But the third one, or a man Bembo presumed to be the third one, sprawled motionless on the slates of the sidewalk.

“Good blazing,” Bembo told Oraste.

“I should have killed all of them,” his partner answered. He started toward the man he had killed. “Let’s see what we’ve got before some light-fingered Forthwegian walks off with the loot, whatever it is.”

A crowd had formed around the corpse. People were pointing at it and exclaiming in their unintelligible language. “Move aside, curse you, move aside,” Bembo said, and made sure people moved aside with a few well-placed elbows. Then he got a good look at the body and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a whore.”

“What else is new?” Oraste pointed down to the dead man and said, “What do you bet the other two were the same?”

“I wouldn’t touch that,” Bembo said. The corpse had black hair-hair that surely had to be dyed, for the man’s build, skin tone, and long face were all typically Kaunian. “I bet he looked like a Forthwegian till your beam caught him,” Bembo added.

“Of course he did,” Oraste said. “Now let’s see what he was trying to lift.”

Bembo picked up the leather sack that lay by the dead man’s outflung right hand. He looked inside and whistled softly. “All sorts of pretties: rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets and I don’t know what.” He hefted the sack. It was heavy, all right. “Good stuff-gold and silver, or I don’t know anything.”

“You don’t know bloody much-you’ve made that plain enough,” Oraste said. “But I’ll believe you know what’s worth something and what isn’t.”

A Forthwegian spoke up in good Algarvian: “That’s my jewelry, gentlemen, I’ll have you know.” He held out a hand for the sack, at the same time asking, “Where are the other two bandits? They said they’d cut my throat if I didn’t give them everything I had on display. I believed them, too.”

“They’re long gone, pal.” Oraste didn’t sound particularly brokenhearted about that, either. “You’re cursed lucky you had constables around. Otherwise, you never would have seen any of your stuff again. This way, you get some of it back, and one of the bad eggs is dead.” He spat on the corpse. “Stinking Kaunian.”

“You get some of your pretties back eventually,” Bembo added. “For now, it’s evidence of a crime-and serious crime, and even more serious because these outlaws were Kaunians with illegal, very illegal, sorcerous disguises.”

Maybe the jeweler had been robbed before. Maybe he just knew how the minds of Algarvian constables worked. His expression sour, he said, “You mean you’ll make the stuff disappear for good if I don’t pay you off.”

“I never said that,” Bembo answered righteously: everyone else gathered around the dead Kaunian was listening. Being corrupt was one thing, getting caught being corrupt something else again. Still more righteously, he went on, “What you’re saying violates our regulations.”

Oraste gave him a horrible look. Having killed a robber, he wanted to make a profit on the deal, too. Fortunately, the jeweler wasn’t so naive as to take Bembo seriously. He said, “Come back to my shop, boys, and we can talk this over like reasonable people.”

Once inside the shop-which had several glass cases opened, and several others smashed-Bembo said, “All right, pal, just how reasonable do you propose to be?”

He and Oraste left without the sack of trinkets, but with a couple of gold-pieces each that hadn’t been in their belt pouches before. “If I’d thought getting rid of robbers was such good business, I’d’ve tried harder before,” Oraste said.

“If you’d listened more to me, you’d have known that,” Bembo answered. “Your trouble is, half the time you care more about smashing heads than making a good deal. This time, you got to do both.”

“What if I did?” Oraste said. “We’d better see if we can find out who that dead Kaunian sack of turds is-was. If we can get a name for him, maybe we can find out who his pals are.”

“That’s true.” Bembo gave his partner a puzzled look. Oraste wasn’t usually so diligent. “Why do you want ‘em so bad?”

“Were you born that stupid, or did you have to practice?” Oraste asked. “Whichever, you’re a champion. Why do you suppose the cursed Kaunians were after a jeweler? Just for the take? Maybe, but not bloody likely, you ask me. Who’s getting the money they’d take in from unloading those jewels? Nobody who likes Algarvians any too well, or I’m a naked black Zuwayzi.”

Bembo saw nasty, greedy men everywhere he looked. Years as a constable had taught him to do that. He didn’t see plots everywhere he looked. Here in Gromheort, maybe that meant he was missing things. “You’d look good as a naked black Zuwayzi,” he remarked.

“You’d look good as a mountain ape,” Oraste replied. “It’s about the only way you would look good.” He turned to the people who were gawking at the robber’s body. “Anybody here know this filthy Kaunian son of a whore?”

“He’s liable to come from one of the villages,” Bembo said.

But Oraste shook his head. “He’ll be a townman. You wait and see. If he wasn’t, how would his pals and him know which place to hit?” Bembo’s only answer was a grunt. He hated it when Oraste outthought him, and Oraste had done it twice in a row now.

Nobody in the crowd spoke up. Bembo said, “I know you people don’t much like Algarvians, but do you love Kaunians? Do you want them robbing you next?”

Someone said, “Isn’t that the fellow named Gippias?” Bembo didn’t see who’d chosen to open his mouth, but Oraste did. He knifed through the crowd and grabbed the Forthwegian. The man looked anything but happy about having to say more, but that was just too bloody bad. Bembo and Oraste looked at each other and nodded. They had a name. They’d find out more. And if there was a plot, they’d find out about that, too.

More and more these days, Ealstan thought of Vanai as Thelberge. Things were safer that way. Even inside their flat, they spoke more Forthwegian and less Kaunian than they had before she’d turned the botched spell in You Too Can Be a Mage into one that really did what it was supposed to do. When the spell that made her swarthy and stocky lapsed and she got her own features back for a while, he would look at her sidelong, a little curious, a little surprised. Maybe that was because he wasn’t used to seeing Kaunian looks under her dark hair- for her hair, of course, being dyed, didn’t go back to blond. But maybe it was because he wasn’t so used to her real looks any more, too.

“Do you know what we can do?” he asked one evening after supper. “If you want to, I mean.”

Vanai set down the dirty dish she’d been washing. “No, what?”

He took a deep breath. Once he’d said what he was going to say, he couldn’t back away from it. “We could go down to the hall of laws and get married. If you want to, I mean.”

For a long moment, Vanai didn’t say anything. She looked away from Ealstan. Fear ran through him. Was she going to turn him down? But then she looked back. Tears streaked her face. “You’d marry me, in spite of-everything?” she asked. Everything, of course, boiled down to one thing: her blood.

“No,” Ealstan said. “I just asked you that to watch you jump.” And then, fearful lest she take him seriously, he went on, “I’m marrying you-or I will marry you, if you want to marry me-because of everything. I can’t imagine finding anybody else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with.”

“I’m glad to marry you,” Vanai said. “After all, if it weren’t for you, I’d probably be dead.” She shook her head, dissatisfied with the way she’d answered. “And I love you.”

“That sounds like a good reason to me.” Ealstan walked over and kissed her. One thing led to another, and the dishes ended up getting finished rather later than they would have if he hadn’t proposed.

When they woke the next morning, Vanai’s sorcery had slipped, so that she looked like herself, or herself with dark hair. She quickly set the spell to rights, waiting for Ealstan’s nod to let her know she’d done it correctly. Once she was sure of that, she meticulously redyed her hair, both above and below.

“You don’t suppose they’ll have mages at the hall of laws, do you?” she asked anxiously.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Ealstan answered. “Unless I’m daft, any redhead with enough magic in him to make a flower open two days early is off fighting the Unkerlanters.” His smile held a fierce delight. “And they’re not doing too bloody well even so. That’s why you find SULINGEN scrawled on every other wall.”

“Let’s see how many times we see it before we get to the hall of laws,” Vanai said, at least as happy at the idea of Algarvian disasters as Ealstan was.

They counted fourteen graffiti on the walk through Eoforwic. Twice, the name of the Unkerlanter city had been painted over recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade. The combination made Ealstan thoughtful. “I wonder if Sidroc’s down in Sulingen,” he said hopefully. “The only thing wrong with that would be getting my revenge through an Unkerlanter instead of all by myself.”

“Would it do?” Vanai asked.

After a little thought, Ealstan nodded. “Aye. It would do.”

The hall of laws lay not far from King Penda’s palace. In the days before the war, judges and barristers and functionaries would have gone back and forth from one building to the other. They still did, the only difference being that most of them, and all the high-ranking ones, were Algarvians now.

Forthwegians did remain in the hall of laws-as clerks and other minor officials not worth the occupiers’ while to replace. One of those clerks, who looked so bored he should have been covered with dust, handed a form to Ealstan and another to Vanai. “Fill these out and return them to me with the fee indicated on the sign on the wall,” he droned, not even bothering to point at the sign he’d mentioned.

Ealstan filled in his own true name and his place of residence. That was where the truth stopped for him. He invented his father’s name and declared that his fictitious forebear had been born and raised in Eoforwic. He didn’t know whether the constables were still looking for Ealstan son of Hestan of Gromheort, but he didn’t know that they weren’t, either, and didn’t care to find out by experiment.

Glancing over at Vanai’s form, he saw that the only truth she’d told on it was her place of residence. She’d invented a fine Forthwegian pedigree for herself. Their eyes met. They both grinned. This was all part of the masquerade.

When they went back to the counter, the clerk barely glanced at the forms. He was more interested in making sure Ealstan had paid the proper fee. On that, he was meticulous; Ealstan supposed the Algarvians would take it out of his pay if he came up short there. Having satisfied himself, the clerk said, “There is one more formality. Do you both swear by the powers above that you are pure Forthwegian blood, without the slightest taint of vile Kaunianity?”

“Aye.” Ealstan and Vanai spoke together. She must have expected something like this, Ealstan thought, for not even a flicker of anger showed in her eyes.

But the occupiers required more than oaths. A couple of burly Forthwegian men came up to Ealstan; a couple of almost equally burly women approached Vanai. One of the men said, “Step into this anteroom with us, if you please.” He sounded polite enough, but not like somebody who would take no for an answer.

As Ealstan headed for the antechamber, the women led Vanai off in the other direction. “What’s all this about?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.

And, sure enough, the bruiser said, “Ward against oathbreakers.” He closed the door to the antechamber, then took a small scissors from his belt pouch. “I’m going to snip a lock of hair from your head.” He did, then nodded when it failed to change color. “That’s all right, but you wouldn’t believe what some of the stinking Kaunians try and get away with. I’m going to have to ask you to hike up your tunic and drop your drawers.”

“This is an outrage!” Ealstan exclaimed. He wondered what Vanai was saying in the other room. With any luck, something more memorable than that.

With a shrug, the Forthwegian tough said, “You’ve got to do it if you want to get married. Otherwise you throw away your fee and you get the redheads poking and prodding at you, not just fellows like me.”

Still fuming, Ealstan did what he had to do. The tough with the scissors snipped again, with surprising delicacy. He looked at the little tuft of hair between his fingers, nodded, and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Ealstan yanked his drawers back up. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

“I am, and now you can be.” The bruiser chuckled at his own wit. So did his pal. Ealstan maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence.

Vanai came out of her anteroom at the same time as he came out of his. She looked furious, like a cat that had just been forced to take a bath. The two blocky women who’d escorted her in there were both smirking. But they weren’t restraining her. Ealstan assumed that meant she’d passed her test.

He asked the clerk, “What do we have to go through now?”

“Nothing,” the man answered. “You’re married. Congratulations.” He sounded as bored saying that as he had through the rest of the proceedings.

Ealstan didn’t much care how he sounded. Turning, he embraced Vanai and gave her a kiss. The two bruisers who’d taken him away snickered. So did the women who’d examined Vanai-but not closely enough.

The newlyweds left the hall of laws as quickly as they could. Not all of Vanai’s fury turned out to be acting. “Those, those-” She came out with a classical Kaunian word Ealstan had never heard before. “I’d almost sooner have had your pair. They couldn’t have been worse about letting their hands wander where they didn’t belong. And they kept looking at me as if they thought I was enjoying it.” She said that Kaunian word, in a low voice but even more hotly than before. Now Ealstan had a pretty fair notion of what it meant.

He said, “The ones who got hold of me weren’t interested like that. They just wanted to make sure I was a real Forthwegian.”

“Well, I’m a real Forthwegian, too-now I am,” Vanai said. “And I took an oath to prove it.” She sighed. “I hate being forsworn, but what choice had I? None.”

“It was a wicked oath,” Ealstan said. “If the oath is wicked, how can you do wrong by swearing falsely?” He wasn’t sorry when Vanai didn’t pursue that. He saw the slippery slope ahead. Who decided when an oath was wicked? Whoever he was, how did he decide? This one seemed obvious to Ealstan, but it must have looked different to the Algarvians.

“Married,” Vanai said in wondering tones. Then she chuckled, not altogether pleasantly. “My grandfather would pitch a fit.”

“I hope he’s alive to pitch a fit,” Ealstan said.

“On the whole, so do I,” Vanai answered, and he shut up in a hurry.

When they got back to the flat, he unlatched the door. He motioned for Vanai to go in ahead of him. While she was in the doorway, he stepped in beside her, took her arm so she couldn’t fully pass into the flat, and gave her a kiss. She squeaked. “That’s what we do at proper Forthwegian weddings,” he said, “not the kind where the fee is the only thing that makes it real.”

“I knew that. I’ve seen Forthwegian weddings in Oyngestun,” Vanai said. “At a proper Kaunian wedding, there would be flowers and there would be olives and almonds and walnuts-oh, and mushrooms, too, of course-for fruitfulness.” She sighed and shrugged. “However we did it, I’m glad I’m married to you.”

Ealstan hadn’t thought anything could make up for the shabby ceremony-no ceremony at all, really-and for the goons who’d tried to make sure he and Vanai weren’t Kaunians in sorcerous disguise. But that double handful of words did the job. He kissed her again, this time for the sake of the kiss, not for anything else. Then he said, “I bet there’s one part of the wedding-or right after the wedding-that’s the same for Forthwegians and Kaunians.”

Vanai cocked her head to one side. “Oh?” she said. “Which part do you mean?

He wanted to grab her. He wanted to take her hand and set it on the part of him he had in mind. He did neither. He’d seen she didn’t care for such things-in fact, she sometimes froze for a moment when he did them. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened to her before they came together, but he thought something bad had. One day, she might decide to tell him. If she did, fine. If she didn’t… he would live with that, too.

And she was still standing there smiling, waiting for his answer. “Come into the bedchamber,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

He did. She showed him, too. They lay side by side, waiting for him to rise for another round. He was eighteen; it wouldn’t take long. Stroking her, he said, “That’s better magic than any the sorcerers work.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Vanai said. “I wonder if it was the very first magic, and everything else grew out of it.”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose anyone else knows, either,” Ealstan said. After a little while, they began again. The oldest magic of all, if that was what it was, had them well and truly-and happily-ensnared.

Talsu got up from the supper table. “I’m off,” he said in Jelgavan, and then, in classical Kaunian, “I go to learn my lesson.”

Gailisa beamed at him. “You sound so smart when you speak the old language.”

“Only goes to show you can’t always tell,” Ausra remarked.

Trying to smile at his wife and glare at his sister at the same time, Talsu feared he ended up looking foolish. “Don’t bother waiting up for me,” he said, and went downstairs, out the front door, and onto the dark, quiet streets of Skrunda.

With the winter solstice not long past, nightfall came early. So it seemed to Talsu, at any rate. From what he’d read about how things worked down in places like Kuusamo and southern Unkerlant, though, he knew they had it worse. And in the land of the Ice People, the sun didn’t come up for days- sometimes for weeks, if you went far enough south-at a time. He tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing.

A constable strode past, twirling his truncheon. He was a Jelgavan, but no Jelgavan before the war would have swaggered that way. Learned something from the Algarvians who give you orders? Talsu thought.

Almost as if the constable had heard the thought, he barked at Talsu: “Curfew’s coming soon. You’d better be off the streets!”

“Aye, sir. I will,” Talsu said. That was true. He’d get to the house of Kugu the silversmith before the curfew hour. And then, because Skrunda would only get darker to foil any dragons that might fly overhead, he would sneak home again. The constables hadn’t caught him yet, and he didn’t expect that they would.

Even in the dark, he knew the way to Kugu’s. He’d been there many times now. When he rapped on the door, Kugu opened it and peered out into the gloom through his thick spectacles. “Ah, Talsu Traku’s son,” he said in the classical tongue. “Come in. You are very welcome.”

“I thank you, sir,” Talsu answered, also in classical Kaunian. “I am glad to be here. I am glad to learn.”

And that was true. He hadn’t worried much about Kaunianity before the war. As far as he’d thought about such things-which wasn’t very far-Jelga-vans were Jelgavans, Valmierans were Valmierans (and not to be trusted because they talked funny), and the blond folk left in the far west were mere unfortunates (and they talked even funnier: they still used the classical tongue among themselves).

But if many of the Algarvians knew classical Kaunian, and if they were so eager to destroy monuments from the days of the Kaunian Empire in Jelgava and Valmiera, didn’t that have to mean there was something to the matter of Kaunianity, of all folk of Kaunian descent being in some sense one? That was how it looked to Talsu, and he wasn’t the only one in Skrunda to whom it looked that way.

As usual, he sat down at the big table bedecked with dice and with stacks of coins. If the Algarvians suddenly burst in, it would look as if the students were in fact nothing but gamblers. Talsu wondered if Mezentio’s men-or the Jelgavan constables who served under Mezentio’s men-would care. He doubted it. If the redheads or their stooges came bursting in, someone would have betrayed Kugu and those who learned from him.

He exchanged nods and greetings, sometimes in Jelgavan, sometimes in the old speech, with the others who visited Kugu every week. Everyone watched everyone else. Talsu wondered which of his fellow students had painted slogans on the walls of Skrunda in classical Kaunian. He wondered if they had any real organization. He rather thought so. Most of all, he wondered how to join it, how to say he wanted to join it, without running the risk of betrayal to the Algarvians.

“Let us begin,” Kugu said, and Talsu knew that verb form was a hortatory subjunctive, a bit of knowledge he couldn’t have imagined having a year earlier. The silversmith went on, still in classical Kaunian, “We shall continue with indirect discourse today. I shall give a sentence in direct speech, and your task will be to turn it into indirect discourse.” His eyes darted from one man to the next. “Talsu, we shall begin with you.”

Talsu sprang to his feet. “Sir!” He knew Kugu wouldn’t take a switch to him if he erred, but memories of his brief schooling lingered even so.

“Your sentence in direct speech is, ‘The teacher will educate the boy,’ “ Kugu said.

“He said. . the teacher … would educate … the boy,” Talsu said carefully, and sat down. He was beaming. He knew he’d done it right. He’d shifted teacher into the accusative case from the nominative, and he’d remembered to make would educate a future infinitive because the conjugated verb in the original sentence was in the future tense.

And Kugu nodded. “That is correct. Let us try another one. Bishu!” This time he pointed at a baker. Bishu botched his sentence. Kugu didn’t take a switch to him, either. He patiently explained the error Bishu had made.

Around the room the sentences went. Talsu did make a small mistake on his second one. Since others had done worse before him, he didn’t feel too embarrassed. He didn’t think he’d make that mistake again, either.

No one wrote anything down. That wasn’t because instruction in the days of the Kaunian Empire had been oral, though it had. But if there were no papers, the Algarvians would have a harder time proving the men at Kugu’s house were learning what the occupiers did not want learned. Talsu’s memory, exercised as it had never been before, had put on more muscles than he’d known it could. He’d also noticed he was speaking better, more educated-sounding, Jelgavan than he had before. Learning classical Kaunian gave him the foundation in the grammar of the modern language he’d never had.

At last, Kugu lapsed into Jelgavan: “That will do for this evening, my friends. My thanks for helping to keep the torch of Kaunianity alive. The more the Algarvians want us to forget, the more we need to remember. Go home safe, and I’ll see you again next week.”

His students, about a dozen all told, drifted out by ones and twos. Talsu contrived to be the last. “Master, may I ask you a question?” he said.

“A point of grammar?” the silversmith asked. “Can it keep till our next session? The hour is not early, and we both have to work in the morning.”

“No, sir, not a point of grammar,” Talsu replied. “Something else. Something where I trust you to know the answer.” He put a little extra stress on the word trust.

Kugu, a sharp fellow, heard that. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes-a pale gray-blue-widened slightly. He nodded. “Say on.” Sometimes, even when speaking Jelgavan, he contrived to sound as if he were using the old language.

Taking a deep breath, Talsu plunged: “I trust you, sir, where I wouldn’t trust any of the other scholars here. You’re no fool; you know what the Algarvians are like.” Kugu nodded again, but said nothing more. Talsu went on, “I wish I knew some kind of way I could hit back at them-I mean, not by myself, but one of a bunch of people working together. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Aye, I know what you’re saying,” the silversmith answered slowly. “What I don’t know is how far to trust you, if at all. These are dangerous times. Even if I knew something, you might be trying to learn it to betray me to the redheaded barbarians, not to strike at them.”

Talsu yanked up his tunic and showed Kugu the long, fresh scar on his flank. “An Algarvian knife did this to me, sir. By the powers above, I have no reason to love Mezentio’s men: no reason to love them, and plenty of reasons to hate them.”

Kugu rubbed his chin. He wore a little goatee, so pale as to be almost invisible in some light. He sighed. “You are not the first to approach me, you know. Whenever someone does, I always wonder if I am sowing the seeds of my own downfall. But, now that you bring it to my mind, I remember hearing of what you suffered, and how unjustly, at that Algarvian’s hands. If anyone may be relied upon, I believe you to be that man.”

“Sir,” Talsu said earnestly, “I would lay down my life to see Jelgava free of the invaders.”

“No.” Kugu shook his head. “The idea is to make the Algarvians lay down theirs.” At that, Talsu grinned ferociously. Eyeing him, the silversmith smiled a thin smile of his own. “Do you know the street where the arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire once stood?”

“I had better. I was there when the Algarvians wrecked the arch,” Talsu answered.

“All right. Good. On that street, half a dozen houses past where the arch used to be-going out from the town square, I mean-is a deserted house with two dormers,” Kugu said. “Come there night after next, about two hours after sunset. Come alone, and tell no one where you are going or why. Knock three times, then once, then twice. Then do what I or the other men waiting inside tell you to do. Have you got all that?”

“Night after next. Two hours past sunset. Don’t blab. Knock three, one, two. Follow orders.” Talsu reached out and pumped the silversmith’s hand. “I can do all that, sir. Thank you so much for giving me the chance!”

“You’ve earned it. You deserve it,” Kugu answered. “Now go back to your own home, and don’t let the constables nab you on the way.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Talsu said. “I can slide around those buggers.”

Slide around them he did. He was very full of himself the next two days, but he was often full of himself when he came back from his lessons in classical Kaunian. He wanted to tell Gailisa where he would be going, what he would be doing, but he remembered Kugu’s warning and held his peace.

On the appointed night, he said, “I have to go out for a bit. I should be back before too long, though.”

“A likely story.” Gailisa winked. “If you come back reeking of wine, you can sleep on the floor.” The kiss she gave him suggested what he’d be missing if he were rash enough to stagger home drunk.

Thoughts of what he didn’t intend to miss made him extra careful to dodge patrolling Jelgavan constables. He had no trouble finding the house Kugu had named; its whitewashed front made it seem to glow in the dark. No light showed in either of the dormers. Talsu knocked. Three. Pause. One. Pause. Two.

The door opened. Starlight gleamed off the lenses of Kugu’s spectacles. He carried no lamp, nor even a candle. “Good,” he said. “You are punctual. Come with me.” He turned and started into the pitch-black interior of the house. Over his shoulder, he added, “Close the door behind you. We don’t want to let anyone know this building is in use.”

Talsu obeyed. As he shut the door, he felt rather than hearing someone moving toward him. He started to whirl, but something smacked into the side of his head. He saw a brief burst of light, though there was no true light to see. Then darkness more profound than any in the dark, dark house washed over him and swept him away.

When he woke, pain and nausea filled him. He needed a while to realize not all the rattling and shaking were inside his battered head; he lay in a wagon clattering along over cobbles. He tried to sit, and discovered his hands and feet were tied.

Someone slipped the hood off a lantern. That little beam pierced him worse than the fiercest sun after the nastiest hangover he’d ever had. “Kugu?” he croaked.

Laughter answered him. The fellow holding the lantern said, “No, the silversmith is trolling for more foolish fire-eaters. You deal with us now.” He spoke Jelgavan with an Algarvian accent. Partly from the anguish of the betrayal that implied, partly from physical misery, Talsu heaved up his guts. His Algarvian captor let him lie in it.

As the reindeer-drawn sleighs carried Pekka and her comrades through a stretch of southeastern Kuusamo where no ley lines ran, she began to grasp how little of her own homeland she’d seen. Sitting beside her in the sleigh, both of them bundled beneath thick fur robes, Fernao might have magicked that thought right out of her head. In classical Kaunian, he said, “This might almost be southern Unkerlant, or even the land of the Ice People.”

“I do not know those places,” she answered, also in Kaunian. “And until now, I did not know the district of Naantali, either.” She stuck a mittened hand out from under the furs for a moment to wave.

“On a map, this is nothing but a blank spot,” Fernao said.

“Of course,” Pekka said. “That is why we are here, after all… wherever exactly here might be.”

One stretch of low, rolling, snow-covered hills looked much like another. Here, not even the forests of pine and spruce and larch and fir that clothed the hills around Kajaani could survive. She shook her head. No, that wasn’t quite true, as she’d seen at a recent stop. But the trees on these hills weren’t trees at all, but bushes, stunted things the eternal cold and wind would not suffer to grow above the height of a man.

“Does anyone actually live here?” Fernao asked. As Pekka’s had, his wave encompassed the whole Naantali district.

“If you mean, are there towns here, or even villages, the answer is no,” Pekka told him. “If you mean, do some of our nomads drive their herds through this country every now and again-well, of course they do.”

Beneath the fox-fur hat that was close to the coppery shade of his own hair, Fernao’s narrow eyes-sure proof of Kuusaman blood-narrowed further. “They had better not, not while we are here,” he said.

“They will not,” Pekka said reassuringly. “We have soldiers on snowshoes and skids patrolling a perimeter wider than any we could possibly need for this experiment.” She suspected some nomads could slip past patrolling soldiers even if the troopers went arm in arm, but didn’t mention that to Fernao.

His thoughts, this time, glided along a different ley line: “A perimeter wider than any we could need for this experiment unless things go badly wrong.”

“If they go that badly wrong,” Pekka answered, “none of us will be in any condition to worry about it.”

“A point,” Fernao admitted. “A distinct point.” He started to say something else, then pointed ahead instead. “Is that where we are going?”

“I think so,” Pekka said. “So far as I know, it is the only real building in this whole district.”

“Was it once a hunting lodge?” Fernao asked.

“No. I do not think there is anything to hunt in these parts-there has not been since we cleaned out the last of the wolves hundreds of years ago,” Pekka answered. “You have Master Siuntio to thank for the building. He went to the Seven Princes and told them we might need a headquarters in some isolated place for our experiments. Here is a headquarters in an isolated place.”

“Isolated is hardly the word,” the Lagoan mage said. “Desolate might come closer.”

He had a point, but Pekka didn’t feel like admitting it. To her, this structure here in the middle of nowhere was a sign of Kuusamo’s might, and also a sign of the importance of the work in which they were engaged. But she was glad wolves had been hunted out of the land of the Seven Princes. Were any still here, she felt sure she would have heard them howling of nights.

Fernao said, “Our experiments had better go well. If they do not, the sleighs will stop coming, we shall quietly starve, and no one will ever find us again, no matter how hard people may look.”

“Stop that!” Pekka told him. “This is a civilized land. No one would do any such thing, and you know it.”

He dipped his head to her. Mischief glinted in his eyes. “I will believe it, but only because you say it.”

Their driver, who up till then might have been operated by sorcery or clockwork, chose that moment to speak up: “Here we are.” He used Kuusaman, of course. Pekka wondered if he understood classical Kaunian. Most sleigh drivers wouldn’t have, but he might have been chosen for something other than how well he could handle reindeer.

The hostel-for lack of a better word, Pekka thought of it as such-did nothing to remind guests of the Principality or of any other fine establishment back in Yliharma. It had been hastily built from yellow pine, the timber so fresh it hadn’t yet aged and weathered even in this harsh climate. The roof climbed steep, to keep snow from clinging. Smoke rose from the red-brick chimney, though the wind swept it away almost at once. Soot here didn’t stain the snow, as it would have in a town; there wasn’t enough of it to matter.

“How cold do you think it is?” Fernao asked as he unswaddled himself and climbed out of the sleigh.

“Not cold enough to freeze quicksilver, I don’t think.” Pekka also descended, taking Fernao’s hand to steady herself on the way down (the injured mage shifted his crutches for courtesy’s sake). With both of them wearing thick mittens, it was hardly a touch at all.

With help from their driver, Siuntio and Ilmarinen were alighting from the other sleigh. Ilmarinen looked at the raw building set down in the middle of the raw land. In perfect idiomatic Kaunian, he exclaimed, “Everybody always told me I’d end up somewhere bad if I stayed on the ley line I was traveling, but I never thought it would be as bad as this.”

“You didn’t come here by ley line,” Siuntio pointed out, “and you still have the chance of escaping.”

Ilmarinen shook his head. “The only way to escape is through failure. If we fail one way, they will send us back in disgrace to lands where people actually live. And if we fail another way, they won’t find enough of us to send anywhere-but they’ll send more poor fools after us, to see if they can get it right.”

“You have left out the possibility of success,” Pekka reminded him.

“Oh, no, by no means,” Ilmarinen replied. “Success and escape have nothing to do with each other, I assure you. If we succeed, if everything goes exactly as planned. . Aside from being a miracle, what will that do? I’ll tell you what: it’ll make the Seven Princes keep us here so we can go right on succeeding. Doesn’t that sound like a delightful prospect?”

“It is what we have come here to do,” Pekka answered.

“Of course it is,” the cantankerous mage said. “But pray pay attention, pretty lady, for that’s not the question I asked you.”

Pekka looked around. She didn’t like the idea of being cooped up here, but she was less worried about it than Ilmarinen. “They will not keep us here for too long a time,” she said, “for they cannot keep us here for too long a time.” Her Kaunian was grammatically accurate, but, try as she would, she couldn’t make the old language come to life in her mouth.

Ilmarinen blew her a kiss. “What an innocent soul you are.”

Siuntio was shivering, standing there in the snow. Had Pekka told him to go indoors, he would have been too proud to listen. Instead, she said, “I am cold,” and went inside herself. That let Siuntio and the other mages follow. Fernao was laughing a little; he must have seen what she was up to.

Fires laid by servitors roared in the hearths. Pekka took off her fur hat, opened her coat, and shed it a moment later. To her relief, Siuntio needed no urging to go stand in front of a fireplace. To her even greater relief, the sleighs carrying their baggage, the experimental animals, and the sorcerous apparatus came up to the hostel just then. So did the other sleighs in which rode the secondary sorcerers-the ones who would keep the animals alive in the cold and transmit spells from where they were cast to where they were needed. The experiments would go forward, then.

With that settled, Pekka claimed a room on the ground floor. It too was about as far removed from the comfort and elegance of the Principality as it could be. It had a cot-with, she saw, plenty of thick wool blankets-a chest of drawers, a stool, and a small bookshelf filled with standard sorcerous reference books. That last was a nice touch, and almost made up for the basin and pitcher that stood on the dresser and the lidded chamber pot under the iron bed. She couldn’t have had a stronger reminder that they were out in the countryside.

Still shaking her head in bemusement, Pekka went out and got her trunk. She manhandled it back into the hostel, doing her best not to get in the way of the secondary sorcerers, who were bringing cage after cage in out of the cold. Fernao managed to get his own case inside and said something in Lagoan. “What was that?” Pekka asked.

“It does not translate into Kaunian, I am afraid,” he replied in the classical tongue. “I said, ‘If I live out of my trunk any longer, I shall turn into an elephant.’ “

Pekka scratched her head. “You are right. It does not translate. I do not understand at all.”

“In Lagoan, the word for a piece of luggage like this and the word for an elephant’s nose sound the same,” Fernao explained. “It is a pun-not a very-good one, I fear.”

“I see.” Pekka sighed. “Any joke where you need an explanation will not be fanny afterwards.”

“A great and profound philosophic truth,” Fernao said. “Do you not feel as if we have fallen back through time to the days of the Kaunian Empire? Here we are, speaking the old language, getting all our light from fire, without even a proper privy to our names.”

“I do think that,” Pekka said, “till I also think of the sorcery we will be trying before long. They would not have imagined the like in the days of the Empire-and how lucky they were not to have to worry about it.”

“I feel no power point close by,” Fernao said. “That will make the magic harder to bring off. We shall have to put all the initial energy into it ourselves.”

“Which may be just as well,” Pekka remarked, “considering how easily it can get out of hand.” Fernao did not argue with her.

After supper-plain food plainly cooked-Pekka was studying in her own room and making a hard job of it by candlelight, when someone knocked on the door. She opened it. There stood Fernao, by Kuusaman standards almost forbiddingly tall. “I would like to review some of the things we will be undertaking,” he said. “Do you mind?”

Pekka considered. The Lagoan mage did not look as if he had anything else in mind. She stepped aside. “No. Come in.”

“I thank you.” He perched on the stool, a gangly, redheaded stork.

Pekka wished Leino were there instead. Loneliness pierced her like iron, like ice. But her husband, these days, had worries of his own. “Where shall we begin?” she asked.

“I have found that the beginning is often the best place,” Fernao replied, his voice perfectly serious.

Leino might have said the very same thing, the only difference being that he would have used Kuusaman, not classical Kaunian. Pekka snorted, as she would have with Leino. Hearing Fernao say something her husband might have made part of her less lonely, part of her more. “Very well,” she said. “From the beginning.”

Fernao supposed it was possible that the wild southern uplands of Lagoas held districts as barren and deserted as Naantali. But those districts, if they existed, would surely have been much smaller. The journey to the hostel in the middle of nowhere had driven home to him how much larger than his own kingdom Kuusamo was.

And now he and the Kuusaman mages with whom he was working and the animal handlers and the team of secondary sorcerers in charge of the apparatus were on the move again. He was quite certain no one in Lagoas traveled by reindeer-drawn sleigh these days. But the sleighs slid smoothly over the snow, and the reindeer seemed more nearly tireless than horses would have been.

Things could be worse, he reminded himself. The Kuusamans could have tamed camels. But the only specimens of those ill-tempered beasts on the island Kuusamo and Lagoas shared dwelt in zoological gardens. Having become more intimately acquainted with camels than he’d ever wanted to down on the austral continent, Fernao missed them not at all.

Beside him, Pekka said, “If we have not got enough empty land for the experiment here, there is no kingdom save Unkerlant that has got enough.”

“I think we will be all right,” Fernao answered. That would have been sarcasm, except none of the three Kuusaman mages seemed to think such jokes were funny. They took this conjuration very seriously indeed. If they got the energy release they’d calculated, they had reason to take it seriously, too. If. Fernao was still not altogether convinced they would.

He shifted in the sleigh, trying to get his healing leg somewhere close to comfortable. The Kuusaman physicians had promised the cast could come off when he got back to Yliharma. He’d stay on crutches for a while after that, though, while the wasted muscles now under plaster got back their strength.

“Is it troubling you?” Pekka asked.

“A little,” he answered. “It is not too bad, though, not really. Not nearly so bad as it was just after it was broken.” The potions he’d swallowed left his memories of those days blurry, but not blurry enough.

“I am glad you are healing,” Pekka told him.

“So am I, now that you mention it,” Fernao said, which made her laugh. He was also glad the two of them traveled in the same sleigh. Ilmarinen still famed with resentment over his presence, like a volcano warning it might erupt at any time. Siuntio would have been a more congenial companion, but his intellect intimidated Fernao more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.

He glanced over toward Pekka. He could see hardly anything but her eyes; she had her fur hat pulled down low on her forehead and the fur robe pulled up over her nose. No matter how little he could see of her, though, he knew she was prettier than Siuntio and Ilmarinen put together.

“I wonder what it would be like,” she said, “to live out your days as a nomad in this kind of country.”

Fernao had had his fill of nomads, as of camels, down in the land of the Ice People. “Unpleasant,” he said at once. “For one thing, consider how seldom you would have the chance to bathe.”

Pekka’s nose must have wrinkled; the fur robe stirred a little. “If it is the same to you, I would rather not,” she said.

Before Fernao could mention any other reasons why he didn’t care for the nomad’s life, the sleighs stopped in the middle of a stretch of snow-covered waste not visibly different from the snow-covered waste over which they’d been traveling for the past couple of hours. “This is the place,” the driver said in Kuusaman. Fernao was beginning to understand the language of Lagoas’ eastern neighbors, though he still made a hash of it when he tried speaking.

“Now we shall see what we shall see.” Excitement crackled in Pekka’s voice. “Do we have something here, or have we spent a goodly sum of the Seven Princes’ money for nothing?”

They did not see quite on the instant. The animal handlers set up wooden racks to hold the cages of the beasts that would be involved in this exploration of what lay at the bottom of the way the world worked. As the handlers set the cages on the racks, some of the secondary sorcerers started the spells that would keep the rats and rabbits from freezing to death before the main magecraft began.

“Over this way,” called the Kuusaman who’d driven Siuntio and Ilmarinen out here. Fernao made his way through the snow, planting his crutches and his broken leg with great care. Pekka paced along beside him. He didn’t know whether she could save him if he started to slip, but she plainly intended to try.

To his relief, she didn’t have to. Moving slowly and cautiously, he stayed upright for the quarter of a mile or so till he came to what he first thought to be an upswelling of earth under the snow. But it proved rather more than that: it was a low hut with thick walls of stone. The doorway, which one of the drivers shoveled clean, faced away from the animals.

“This was also readied in advance?” he asked Pekka.

“Of course,” she answered.

The secondary sorcerers not involved in keeping the animals alive also came over to the stone … blockhouse, Fernao decided was the best name for it. Siuntio said, “They will transmit to the beasts the spell we shape.”

Fernao hadn’t thought about all the consequences of their sorcery. Now he realized he should have. If this spell released as much energy as the Kuusamans thought it would, not being in the immediate neighborhood of that energy release looked like an excellent idea. Only one drawback occurred to him: “I hope they will not introduce any garbling. That could be … unfortunate.”

“It should not prove a difficulty,” Pekka said. “They are skilled at what they do.”

“And if they do make a mess of things, it’s liable to end up saving their necks-and ours, too,” Ilmarinen put in.

“We are going to succeed,” Pekka said. “We are going to succeed, and we are going to be safe while we are succeeding. And if you think differently, Master Ilmarinen, I am sure the sleigh will take you out of all possible danger.”

“Death is the only thing that will take me out of all possible danger,” Ilmarinen retorted, and stuck out his tongue at Pekka. That was something no one would have seen before a sorcerous experiment in Lagoas. Instead of getting angry-or, at least, instead of letting her anger show-Pekka stuck out her tongue, too, and started to laugh.

But she didn’t laugh for long. She walked out into the center of the blockhouse and chanted the ritual words with which Kuusamans began any magical operation. Fernao still didn’t believe those claims of Kuusaman antiquity, but he discovered he understood much more of the chant than he had when he first came to the land of the Seven Princes.

When Pekka finished, she turned to the secondary sorcerers and asked, “Are you ready?” They nodded. She asked the same question of Ilmarinen and Siuntio. Both master mages nodded, too. Pekka turned to Fernao. “And you?”

“As ready as I can be,” he replied. Because of his limited grasp of Kuusaman, his role in the conjuration could only be trying to stave off disaster once it was already loose. He didn’t think he would be able to do that, and hoped-hoped with all his heart-he wouldn’t have to try.

“I begin,” Pekka said, this time not just to steady herself but also to warn the secondary sorcerers. The chant and passes were mostly familiar, but this spell was more potent than any they’d tried before. Fernao had suggested some of the improvements. He hoped they would serve.

Siuntio and Ilmarinen remained alert. They were the first line of defense if Pekka faltered. Fernao studied her. He’d never had much use for theoretical sorcerers when they did step into the laboratory; they too often forgot which hand was their left and which their right. But Pekka had an air of calm that suggested she really did know what she was doing as she incanted-and that she wouldn’t panic if she did make a mistake. The secondary sorcerers also seemed very competent as they relayed Pekka’s magic to where it would be most needed: the rows of animal cages.

Fernao hoped the other group of secondary sorcerers, the ones who’d been keeping the animals warm, had known when to depart. If they hadn’t, they would be in danger now. He assumed they had; the Kuusamans would be neither so heartless nor so slipshod as to leave them. Had he fallen in among Unkerlanters, now …

Pekka incanted with ever greater urgency. Despite the work of the secondary sorcerers, Fernao felt the energies inside the blockhouse build and build.

His hair tried to stand on end. That wasn’t fright; it was sorcerous energy on the loose. The other mages’ hair also started to stand up straight, as if lightning had struck nearby. It hadn’t-not yet. Out in the cages on the snowy plain, though, the rats and rabbits would surely be getting frantic.

Here it comes, Fernao thought. He wanted to say it out loud-he wanted to scream it-but held back for fear of hurting Pekka’s concentration. She cried out one last word of Kuusaman. Fernao had learned what that final command meant: “Let it be accomplished!”

And it was accomplished. The thunderous roar from the direction of the racks of cages was astonishing, overwhelming. The ground shook beneath Fer-nao’s feet. Brilliant white light appeared for a moment between the planks of the roof-planks that had, till then, been thickly covered with snow. Fernao wondered if the blockhouse would come down on the mages’ heads.

It held. The shaking cease. The light faded. Fernao bowed to the Kuusamans. “It appears your calculations were accurate. I thought you optimistic. I see I was wrong.”

“We did what we set out to do.” As always in the aftermath of such conjurations, Pekka looked and sounded ghastly. Food and rest would revive her, but for now she was fordone. Fernao wished he could tell her to lean on him, but he probably would have fallen over had she tried.

“We did it, aye,” Ilmarinen said. “And now half the mages in the world will know we’ve done something large, even if they don’t know what.”

“We don’t know what,” Siuntio pointed out. “Maybe we had better go see.” He was the first one out the door. The Kuusamans who’d built the blockhouse had known what they were doing when they made that door face away from the racks of experimental animals.

Fernao made his own slow way out and then stopped in astonishment. No dragon could have carried an egg anywhere near big enough to gouge such a crater in the ground. The burst of energy had flung snow back far past the blockhouse, leaving bare ground behind.

Ilmarinen ran toward the center itself. “Be careful!” Fernao called after him, but he wasn’t listening. The Kuusaman master mage paused at the edge of the crater, picked something up, and violently waved it about. Fernao had to get closer to see what it was. When at last he did, awe and dread prickled through him. Ilmarinen held a bright green clump of fresh spring grass.

Handlers fastened loads to the dragons of Sabrino’s wing. The dragons bellowed and hissed at the idea of being made into beasts of burden-or perhaps just from general bad temper. Sabrino had little sympathy for them at the best of times, and none whatsoever now.

He waved to the chief dragon handler. “Can you make them carry a little

more:

To his disappointment, the fellow shook his head. “Colonel, I’d love to, but I don’t dare. You’ll be flying a long way, and the beasts are anything but in the pink of condition. The idea is for them to come back and fly more loads, not to try and do too much all at once and break down.”

Reluctantly, Sabrino nodded. “All right. That makes more sense than I wish it did.” He bowed to the handler, sweeping off his fur cap as he did so. “I am glad enough to own that you know your business.”

“Like I say, I wish I could do what you want,” the handler answered. “I know what our comrades need down there, same as any Algarvian does.”

“Well, we’re going to bring diem as much as we can.” Sabrino raised his voice to a great, full-bodied shout: “To me, you whoresons, to me! We run the gauntlet one more time.”

Out of their tents came the men who weren’t already standing by or mounted on their dragons: not very many, since most of the dragonfliers were as eager to fare south as was their commander. When the handlers finished the job of loading the dragons, they waved. Sabrino, by then atop his own mount, waved back. He whacked the beast with his goad. It screamed in outrage, beat its great wings, and all but hurled itself into the air despite the heavy burden it carried. One after another, the remaining dragons in the wing followed.

Their farm lay close to the fighting front. Before long, they flew south out of the land the Algarvians still held and into the terrain Unkerlanters had seized in this second winter counteroffensive. Footsoldiers on the ground blazed at them. Without a doubt, crystallomancers sent word of them farther south-in the direction of Sulingen.

Sabrino let out a glum, weary curse. He had to fly a nearly straight path to the besieged city. Had it been much farther from his dragon farm, the dragons wouldn’t have been able to get there at all, not if they carried anything worthwhile.

Clouds scudded through the air, getting thicker as the dragons flew farther south. Sabrino spoke into his crystal: “Let’s use those to hide in. The less Swemmel’s whoresons see of us, the less chance they’ll have to try to blaze us down.”

Dragons didn’t care about clouds one way or the other. Sabrino was glad these were intermittent; otherwise, he would have had a hard time making sure he was flying south. As things were, he got glimpses of the terrain below every so often. He didn’t need more than glimpses. He’d flown this route a great many times.

And so it was, when he passed over the Presseck River, that he warned the men of his wing: “Don’t fly too straight and smooth and stupid around these parts. The Unkerlanters have a lot of heavy sticks waiting down there. Give ‘em a good target and you’ll pay for it.”

His own dragon didn’t take kindly to dodging now this way, now that, to speeding up and slowing down, or, indeed, to much of anything else. He didn’t care whether the beast took kindly to it or not. So long as the dragon obeyed, that sufficed.

Sure enough, beams came to life below the wing. He watched the flashes with respectful attention. None came particularly close to him. None brought down a dragon. He knew better than to rejoice too soon. The Unkerlanters would have another blaze at the wing on the way back. His dragons would be unladen then, but they would also be very worn.

Somewhere up ahead, Unkerlanter dragons, fresh ones, would be flying back and forth across the route he and his comrades would have to take. Sometimes they found the Algarvians, sometimes they didn’t. Sabrino doubted that was the most efficient way to use dragons, but King Swemmel hadn’t asked for his advice.

This time, he and his countrymen were lucky. If the Unkerlanters had spotted them, it would have meant a running fight in the air all the way down to Sulingen. As things were, the Algarvian dragons flew on undisturbed toward the still-burning pyre of the much-battered city.

Unkerlanter footsoldiers-the men besieging the Algarvians trapped in the wreckage of Sulingen-started blazing at the dragons. That didn’t worry Sabrino much. Footsoldiers brought down dragons only by the strangest of chances. But Swemmel’s army would have heavy sticks, too, and those were truly dangerous.

As he did on every trip into Sulingen, Sabrino marveled that anything there was left to burn. His countrymen had fought their way into the place in late summer, had fought their way through it as summer gave way to autumn, and had been trapped inside it since the middle of autumn, since not long after snow began to fall down here. Now, one block at a time, the Unkerlanters were taking back what they’d previously lost the same way.

A big green, white, and red banner marked a badly pocked city square. Up till a couple of weeks before, that had been the place where dragons landed to unload supplies and to take wounded men off to safety. Algarvian dragons didn’t land in Sulingen anymore. No part of the city that Mezentio’s men still held was out of range of Unkerlanter egg-tossers. Landing, these days, was suicidally risky.

But that banner still made a useful beacon. Sabrino spoke into his crystal: “All right, boys, you can see where the goodies are supposed to go. Put ‘em down as close as you can.”

He used his saw-edged knife to cut the cord that attached the crates of food and charges and medicine to his dragon. Those crates plummeted down. He placed them as carefully as if he were dropping eggs on the Unkerlanters. And he clapped his hands with glee when they came down in the square, where Algarvian soldiers could recover them.

Most of his men were as careful, or nearly as careful, as he. He cursed when a few crates fell well wide of the mark the soldiers on the ground had given his wing. King Swemmel’s men would probably get their hands on those. But he clapped again to see Algarvian soldiers, tiny as ants from the height at which he watched them, run out to grab the supplies they needed so desperately. Some of

them waved or blew kisses to the dragons overhead. Behind Sabrino’s goggles, tears stung his eyes.

He spoke into the crystal again: “We’ve done what we came for. Now let’s get back, give our beasts as much rest as we can spare them-grab a little ourselves, too, come to that-and then come down here and do it all over again.”

“Aye, Colonel.” That was Captain Domiziano, smiling out at Sabrino from the crystal. “Who knows? We may find a way to lick those Unkerlanter buggers down there.”

“So we may,” Sabrino answered. He would not say anything that might hurt the wing’s morale, not in public. In the privacy of his own mind, he wondered how Domiziano managed to hold on to such boyish optimism.

For a little while, though, he could be optimistic himself. Freed of so much weight, his dragon flew like a young, fresh beast, which it assuredly was not. Or maybe, he thought, I haven’t flow a young, fresh dragon for so bloody long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like.

He found the answer to that riddle sooner than he would have liked. His wing hadn’t got very far north of Sulingen when Unkerlanter dragons assailed them. As often happened, his men were slower to spot the Unkerlanters than they might have been-in rock-gray paint, the enemy dragons looked like nothing so much as detached, hostile bits of cloud.

“Powers above, they’re fast!” he muttered as the Unkerlanter squadron closed with the men and dragons he commanded. After a moment, he realized they weren’t so very fast after all. It was just that his own dragons couldn’t come close to matching the foe’s turn of speed.

Had the Unkerlanters been able to equal his dragonfiiers in skill, his wing would have suffered badly, for Swemmel’s men flew fresher beasts. But, no matter how fast they were, none of the Unkerlanters had seen much action. They didn’t dive from on high as they might have, and they did start blazing too soon, when they weren’t close enough to their targets to have much chance of hitting.

No matter how fresh and fast their dragons were, they paid for those mistakes. Sabrino and his men were veterans. They knew what they could do, what they couldn’t, and how to help one another when they got in trouble. Had it been a tavern brawl, the Unkerlanters would have complained that the Algarvians didn’t fight fair. As things were, rock-gray dragons and the men who flew them tumbled toward the snow far below one after another in quick succession.

One of those Unkerlanters, intent on some other Algarvian, flew right in front of Sabrino’s dragon, as if he weren’t there at all. From fifty yards, perhaps less, even a poor blazer could hardly have missed. Sabrino was as good with a stick from dragonback as any man breathing. A quick blaze and the Unkerlanter dragonfiier no longer was breathing. His dragon, suddenly out of control, went wild. By luck, the first beast it attacked belonged to another Unkerlanter. Sabrino nodded in sober satisfaction.

But his men did not have it all their own way. Two of their number also plummeted to the ground before the Unkerlanters had enough and broke off their attack. One of the Algarvian dragons, wounded but not ruined, came down gently in the snow. The flier aboard it might well have survived the landing. How long he would survive once Unkerlanter footsoldiers got their hands on him was, unfortunately, another question.

Heavy weather closed in around the Algarvians as they kept flying north. The clouds shielded them from more Unkerlanter dragons and from the heavy sticks down on the ground. Sabrino would have liked that better if those clouds hadn’t been a harbinger of more dreadful weather blowing in from the trackless west.

A great roaring bonfire on the ground led him back to the dragon farm. When he landed, his dragon’s wings drooped limply. So did the small head on the end of its long neck. The beast didn’t even protest when a handler came up and chained it to a stake.

Sabrino knew exactly how the dragon felt. He felt every one of his years as he unfastened the harness securing him in place and slid down to the frozen ground. Ever so slowly, he walked toward the tents at the edge of the dragon farm. He wanted a tender slice of veal and a fine brandy. What he’d get was a chunk of sausage and a mug of raw spirits cooked up from turnips or beets. That would have to do.

“Colonel!” The call made him pause and turn his head. Up came Captain Orosio, goggles shoved up onto his forehead. Sabrino waited for him. When Orosio had caught up with his wing commander, he asked, “Sir, how much longer do you think we’ll be flying down to Sulingen?”

Orosio wasn’t Domiziano. He had a notion of the way the world really worked. Sabrino was speaking to him alone, not to all the squadron commanders through the crystal. The truth, here, wouldn’t hurt. Sabrino spoke it without joy but without hesitation: “Not much longer.” Orosio grimaced, but didn’t contradict him.