Through the Darkness

Seven

Colonel Lurcanio chucked Krasta under the chin. She hated that; it made her feel as if she were a child. But, from Lurcanio, she endured it. As the carriage rolled toward Valmiera’s royal palace, Lurcanio said, “This should be a gay gathering tonight.”

“For you, maybe,” Krasta replied; Lurcanio gave her a longer leash for what she said than for what she did. “I don’t see the sport in watching King Gainibu crawl into a brandy bottle nose-first.”

“Do you not, my sweet?” Lurcanio sounded genuinely surprised. “His father presided over Algarve’s humiliation after the Six Years’ War. Since the father is no longer among the living, we have to avenge ourselves on the son.” He chuckled. “With the way Gainibu drinks, I must say he helps.”

The driver had no trouble tonight picking his way through Priekule’s dark avenues. As they pulled up in front of the palace, the redheaded soldier spoke to Lurcanio in their own language. Lurcanio laughed and said something back.

He turned to Krasta. “He says he’s going to do some drinking, too, while he waits for us to come out. I told him he had my leave; it’s not as if he were a king, to do it on his own.”

Krasta made cruel jokes like that herself. They were almost the only jokes she did make. She enjoyed them less when, however justly, they were aimed at the man she still thought of as her sovereign. Lurcanio seldom let such considerations worry him. He handed her down from the carriage and, his night sight seemingly as good as an owl’s, led her to the palace.

Once past the doors and curtains that kept light from leaking out, Krasta blinked against the glare. Servitors gave her and her companion precisely calibrated bows. She was a marchioness and Lurcanio only a count, but he was an Algarvian and she only a local, so they bent fractionally lower for him than for her. That had irked her the first time it happened, and still irked her now. By the way Lurcanio smiled, he knew it irked her, too.

A herald bawled out their names as they strode into the grand salon where Gainibu was receiving his guests. As usual, Krasta scanned the room to see what sort of crowd it was and where she fit into it. At first, she thought it was very much the usual sort: Valmieran noblemen, Algarvian soldiers, and the tarts- some noble, some not-who clung to their arms and smiled at their jokes.

Then, off in one corner of the salon, she noticed an Algarvian in tunic and kilt of civilian cut surrounded by six or eight Valmieran men, some of them quite disreputable-looking. They all ignored the receiving line that led up to King Gainibu (and to the always full glass in his free hand). Most of them were holding glasses, too, and their talk-their arguments, really-bid fair to drown out everything else.

“Who are those people?” Krasta asked irritably.

“You have not made the acquaintance of the Algarvian comptroller of publications?” Lurcanio returned.

“If I had, would I be asking about him?” Krasta tossed her head. “Well, that explains why the others, the Valmierans, are acting the way they are. What can you expect from a pack of writers? I wonder how many of them will take spoons home in their pockets.”

“Some very good work has been done since we took charge of publications,” Lurcanio said. Krasta shrugged. She hadn’t read very much before the Algarvians overran Valmiera, and she still didn’t. Lurcanio went on, “Before the war, Iroldo there used to teach Algarvian at a college in some Valmieran provincial town. He knows your writers well, and wants to get the best from them.”

“Well, of course,” Krasta said. “That makes Algarve look good, too.”

Lurcanio started to say something, stopped, and then said something else altogether: “Every so often, you come out with something surprisingly astute. If you did it more often, it would cause me more concern.”

“What do you mean?” Krasta hardly heard what he’d said; she’d spotted Viscount Valnu, and was waving across the salon at him.

“Never mind.” Chuckling a little, Lurcanio gave her backside an indulgent pat. “Go and see your friend. If the two of you hadn’t been out talking together, who knows what might have happened when that egg burst at the reception the Duke of Klaipeda’s nephew was putting on?”

Krasta didn’t like to think about that. She was much happier thinking about cuckolding Lurcanio with Valnu. Her Algarvian lover-and keeper- thought Valnu liked boys. Valnu, as a matter of fact, probably did like boys, but he liked women, too. Of that Krasta had no doubt whatever.

He gave her a dazzling smile as she came up to him; it made him look like a suave, affable skull. “Hello, darling!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Hello yourself,” Krasta said coolly. She let Valnu introduce her to his friends, most of them young Algarvian officers at least as pretty as he was. They were polite, but none of them seemed interested in Krasta for her own sake. A couple of them gave Valnu sidelong glances, as if wondering how he could possibly find a woman appealing.

As if to explain himself, he said, “We were having a drink together, the marchioness and I, outside that mansion when the saboteur’s egg burst inside it. If we’d stayed there, we might both have been killed.”

“Ah,” the Algarvian officers said, almost in one breath. They could accept a twist of fate as an explanation, where mere animal attraction would have offended them. Krasta had to work not to laugh in their faces. As she’d known more about Valnu than Lurcanio did, so she also knew more about him than did these fellows.

He took her by the arm. “Let’s get something to drink, and you can tell me how you’ve been since.” The pretty Algarvian officers rolled their eyes; again, Krasta had to hold in a laugh.

As Valnu steered her toward the bar, she stroked his cheek and archly murmured, “Are you going to sneak me out of here a minute before this place goes up in flames, too?”

He stopped, which rather surprised her. “I hadn’t planned on it, no,” he replied in unwontedly serious tones. Then he grinned and added, “If that happens tonight, it’ll catch both of us by surprise-and a lot of other people, too.” He waved to one of the tapmen. “Ale for me.”

“Aye, sir-ale,” the fellow said. “And for you, milady?”

“Brandy with wormwood,” Krasta told him. After a couple of shots of that, she would have an excuse for any sort of outrageous behavior. She’d been pretty outrageous the last time she drank it with Valnu, back in the days when Valmiera was still a kingdom in its own right and not an Algarvian appanage.

Having at last been eased from the receiving line, King Gainibu had made a beeline for the bar. He waved to the man behind it. “The same for me as the lady here is having,” he said. Only the slow precision of his diction marked how much he’d already poured down. As the bartender handed him the glass of blue-green spirits., he remarked, “Soon I will find a chair and go to sleep. Then the Algarvians will be happy, and so will I.”

Valnu steered Krasta away from the sodden king, as he’d steered her away from the Algarvian officers. “That’s not the way a sovereign should talk,” he said. “That’s not the way a sovereign should have to talk.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” Krasta said. “He’s a laughingstock for the redheads. The worst part is, he knows it.” Sensitive to slights herself-or at least to being on the receiving end of them-she had some notion of how poor drunken Gainibu had to feel.

“Every now and then, my dear, you do succeed in surprising me,” Valnu said. “This makes twice in one night.”

“Really?” Krasta laughed; sure enough, the spiked brandy was mounting straight to her head. “Lurcanio said the same thing, though I think I only surprised him once.”

“Well, he is bound to be harder to surprise than I am,” Valnu said. “Practically everything surprises me, including my being here at this doleful gathering. It’s like the bloodied ghost of what one of these affairs should be.”

Krasta thought about that. She wasn’t used to figures of speech-those that hadn’t ossified into cliches, at any rate-but she had no trouble figuring out what this one meant. “Hard times,” she agreed, nodding. “But what can we do? The Algarvians are stronger than we are. The Algarvians, as far as I can see, are stronger than everybody else is.”

“So they want you to think,” Valnu said. “So they want everybody to think. It’s part of their magic: thinking them stronger than everybody else helps make them stronger than everybody else. But there are some faces I’ve seen before in these crows that aren’t here tonight.”

“So?” Krasta said vaguely. Sure enough, the brandy was making her thoughts spin. Before long, she might be looking for a chair just like her sovereign.

Valnu bowed himself almost double. “I’m so relieved to discover you don’t know everything there is to know after all. Where, I ask you, are the Algarvian officers who were here but are no more? Why, gone to Unkerlant, of course. King Swemmel, you see, isn’t yet convinced the Algarvians are stronger than everybody else.”

“Captain Mosco!” Krasta exclaimed. He wasn’t here because he’d had to go there. That seemed sensible enough. She wished Valnu wouldn’t try to make something important and meaningful out of it. She wasn’t up to dealing with complications right now.

“Who is Captain Mosco?” Valnu asked. Krasta stared owlishly at him; how could he not know?

“Captain Mosco was my aide, a very good fellow,” Colonel Lurcanio said in his precise, almost unaccented Valmieran. “He has gone to fight in the west; powers above grant that he stay safe.”

“I didn’t notice you come up,” Krasta told Lurcanio. She hadn’t noticed a good many things since drinking the laced brandy. One of the things she hadn’t noticed was how many things she hadn’t noticed.

Lurcanio said, “Seeing a friend is all very well, milady, but I did want to remind you that you came here with me and will also be going home with me.”

Valnu shrieked laughter and patted Lurcanio on the arm. “Why, my dear Colonel, I do believe you’re jealous.”

Lurcanio’s answering laugh was smug, the laugh of a man certain he had nothing to fear. Krasta’s laugh was wild and dangerous-and so drunken that Lurcanio didn’t let it worry him in the least. If Valnu’s laugh was relieved, neither Krasta nor Lurcanio noticed.

“Did you have a good time?” Lurcanio asked as they went home through the dark, quiet streets of Priekule later that evening.

“The poor king,” Krasta answered. She would have a dreadful headache in the morning. King Gainibu, though, would surely have a worse one. Krasta slumped over against Lurcanio and fell asleep.

How long would the good weather last? On the austral continent, people started asking that not long after the summer solstice. Before long, the birds would start flying north. Fernao wished he could fly north, too, but the war against Yanina and Algarve pinned him to the land of the Ice People.

“Just think,” he said to Affonso. “If everything had gone as we’d hoped it would-the way everybody back in Setubal said it would-we could be enjoying the fleshpots of Heshbon right now.”

The second-rank mage raised a gingery eyebrow. “I thought you told me Heshbon was a miserable hole in the ground.”

“Oh, it is,” Fernao assured him. “It is. But what, I pray you, do you think you’re sitting in now?”

Affbnso laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Lagoan attacks and Algarvian counterattacks had chewed up a good deal of the coastal country in the land of the Ice People. Fernao and Affonso had both taken refuge in the crater a bursting egg from some earlier fight had left in the ground. At the bottom of it were a little grass, a little water, and much more muddy ice.

“Next to a literal hole in the ground,” Fernao said in meditative tones, “a metaphorical hole in the ground doesn’t look so bad any more. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

Affonso shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it. How could I? You outrank me. But I will say that, if we’d taken Heshbon, it probably would have got wrecked in the fighting.”

“That depends,” Fernao said. “If we’d taken it from the Yaninans, they would have handed it over and been glad to do it. With the Algarvians, though, you’re right. Those whoresons would have fought us block by block-not that Heshbon has a whole lot of blocks-and there wouldn’t have been one brick left on top of another by the time the battle was through.”

Now Affonso nodded, though gloomily. “Who would have thought a pack of swaggering fops could make such good soldiers?”

“They did in the Six Years’ War, too,” Fernao said. “They are brave; no one’s ever said otherwise. But they don’t know when to stop. They never know when to stop. That’s why we have to beat them: to make sure they don’t go on doing just as they please all over the world, I mean.”

“I understood you,” his colleague said. “Whenever they slaughter another batch of Kaunians, the whole world seems to tremble, for those who can feel it. And they’ve got the Unkerlanters imitating them, too. I think I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

“War was a filthy business before,” Fernao said. “It’s filthier now, and we’ve got Mezentio’s men to blame for it.” Many of his worst nightmares centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked. He kept dreaming he would be asked to judge which was worst, and to sample them all till he made a choice. He had some camel baked in clay in his pack, and thought it the most dreadful thing in the world … save only hunger.

Whatever Affonso might have said about war or about camel meat or about anything else, he didn’t, for a lookout shouted one of the words the Lagoans in the austral continent least wanted to hear: “Dragons!”

Fernao looked to the west. The number of dragons winging toward the Lagoan encampment made him curse. “The whoresons have flown more of the beasts across the Narrow Sea,” he said in dismay. He looked at the hole in which he squatted, wishing it were deeper, wishing it had a good strong roof, wishing most of all that the Algarvians would turn around and fly back toward Heshbon.

As usual, he got none of his wishes. Several Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons flew above the Lagoan army. With a whistling thunder of wings-and with their usual hoarse, angry shrieks-more rose from the dragon farm near the camp to challenge the beasts painted in red, green, and white.

Watching, Affonso said, “Makes you feel helpless, doesn’t it?”

“What, because I can’t do anything about the dragons?” Fernao asked, and Affonso nodded. Fernao considered, then shrugged. “Less than I thought it would, as a matter of fact. There are too many things in this campaign I can’t do anything about to get upset over any one in particular. I’ll just watch the sport and hope I don’t get killed.” He leaned back and did just that.

“Algarvians are trying something new, looks like,” Affonso said.

“Aye,” Fernao answered absently. The lead dragons flying out of the west engaged the Lagoan and Kuusaman defenders with the usual ferocity Mezentio’s men brought to the attack. Dragons wheeled and whirled and twisted and snapped and flamed all over the sky above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Lagoans’ heavy sticks on the ground found targets, they blazed at the Algarvian dragons. When one of those beasts tumbled toward the earth, Fernao couldn’t tell whether a stick or a dragon on his side had laid it low.

But Mezentio’s men had more dragons than they’d been able to bring to the fight before. Some of them kept the Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons busy. The rest started dropping eggs on the Lagoan army. Only a few dragons from his side broke free to attack the ones carrying eggs.

Once the eggs started falling, Fernao stopped watching the action overhead. He did what everyone else on the ground was doing: he buried his face in the dirt and tried to mold himself to the side of the hole in which he lay. Affonso jumped into one nearby. Such precautions had kept them alive and no worse than scratched till now. That they should do so one more time didn’t strike Fernao as unreasonable.

Then a line of eggs, probably all dropped by the same dragon, walked straight toward the crater in which he huddled. Each burst was louder than the one before; each made the ground shake worse. When one hit quite close to that crater, Fernao screamed. He couldn’t help himself. He was still screaming when the next egg burst. The world around him went blinding white, then black.

And when he woke, he screamed again. Every inch of him cried out in agony. The worst of it was concentrated in a couple of places: his right leg, his left arm.

“Take it easy, friend,” somebody told him-far and away the most useless advice he’d ever heard. He would have said so, but he needed all his breath for screaming. His mouth tasted of mud and, increasingly, of blood.

He hadn’t thought he could shriek louder than he was shrieking, but discovered he was wrong when they went about setting his leg and bandaging some of his other wounds. “No!” he howled, but they wouldn’t listen. He choked out two coherent sentences: “Let me die! Kill me!”

They wouldn’t listen to that, either. They talked above him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it,” one of them said, “not with the kind of healing we can give him in the field.”

“He’s a first-rank mage,” another one answered. “The kingdom can’t afford to lose him.” They didn’t ask Fernao’s opinion. He’d given it, and they’d ignored it.

“How are we supposed to get him back to Lagoas, though?” the first voice said. “A dragon can’t fly that far, not without somewhere to rest on the way.”

“We’ve got ships down south of Sibiu,” the second voice replied. “They were going to fly more dragons here. I wish they’d done it sooner, but we can send him that way, and then east from there.”

“I wouldn’t bet on him to last long enough to get slung under a dragon,” the first voice said. Fernao devoutly hoped he wouldn’t last that long.

But the second voice said, “Get a mage and slow him down. It’s the only chance he’s got.” They both went away after that.

The next voice Fernao heard was Affonso’s. “I’ll do what I can,” he was saying to somebody off to the side. “Just fool luck he isn’t doing the same for me. The burst picked him up and flung him into a rock…. Fernao! Can you hear me?”

“Aye,” Fernao answered. The next scream quivered in his throat, as eager to be loose as a racing unicorn.

“I’m going to slow you down,” Affonso said. “I have to hope the spell will last long enough to get you to a ship where the dragon can rest. They’ll have a mage there to renew it, so just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away….” Fernao wished it would sweep him into oblivion. After what seemed far too long, it did.

But when he woke, he was in just as much torment as he had been before Affonso began the spell. For a moment, he forgot the magic altogether, lost as he was in his own pain. Then he realized that, added to all his other torments, he was swaying suspended in space. Instead of Affonso, he saw a dragon’s scaly belly above him. When he turned his head-actually, when it flopped to one side-he got a view of iron-gray ocean far below.

He never knew how long the dragon kept flying. Long enough for him to wish several times he were dead-he knew that. Thanks to, or rather on account of, Affonso’s spell, no time seemed to have passed for him between the magic and his awakening. He hadn’t healed a bit in the interim.

At last, after what seemed like a little longer than forever, the dragon glided down to a ship sliding along a ley line. As dragons had a way of doing, it landed clumsily. The pallet on which he’d been lashed thudded down onto the deck. The jolt made him shriek and faint. Unfortunately-or so he thought of it-he woke up again.

When he did, a man he’d never seen before was staring down at him. “I’ll soon have you out again,” the stranger promised. “I hope my spell will hold long enough to get you back to Lagoas. They’ll put you together again. Powers above willing, you’ll be good as new again in a while.”

Fernao couldn’t imagine being as good as new again. He had trouble even imagining being conscious and out of pain. “Hurts,” he groaned.

“Oh, I bet it does,” the ship’s mage said. “Now, just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away. . ”

Again, oblivion descended on Fernao. Again, it swept over him so abruptly, he had no idea it was there. Again, he woke to agony-but agony of a different sort, for now he found himself on a soft bed with a cast on his leg, another on his arm, and a bandage round his battered ribs. When he whimpered, a nurse said, “Here. Drink this.”

Drink it he did, hoping it was poison. It wasn’t; it tasted overwhelmingly of poppy seeds. It was so concentrated, he wondered if he could keep it down. Somehow, he did. After a while, the pain receded. No, he thought dreamily. It’s still there, but I’ve floated away from it. With the drug in him, it didn’t seem to matter so much. Nothing seemed to matter very much.

“Where am I?” he asked. He didn’t particularly care about the answer, either, but asking about anything but the pain that had crushed him seemed a delightful novelty.

“Setubal,” the nurse told him.

“Ah,” Fernao said. “With any luck at all, I’ll never leave again.” Then the poppy juice made him sleep, a natural sleep different from the time-frozen comas the emergency sorcery had brought on. Little by little, his body began to repair itself.

King Swemmel’s long, pale face stared out of the crystal, straight at Marshal Rathar. Everywhere in the broad kingdom of Unkerlant-everywhere the Algarvians hadn’t overrun, at any rate-peasants and soldiers and townsfolk who could get to a crystal were listening to the king.

“Durrwangen has fallen,” Swemmel said without preamble. “Unkerlant is in danger. We tell you that some of the soldiers who were posted there ran away instead of doing all they could against the invaders who want to enslave us. They have been punished as they deserve for their cowardice, and shall never have the chance to betray the kingdom again.”

General Vatran, who shared an abandoned peasant hut with Rathar, grimaced. “He executed more men than he needed to,” Vatran said. “A lot more men than he needed to.”

Rathar agreed with him, but waved him to silence all the same. He counted himself lucky not to be among the executed, and counted Vatran even luckier. And he wanted to hear what Swemmel had to say.

“Not one step back!” the king shouted, his tiny image clenching a tiny fist. “Not one step back, we say again. We shall never yield another inch of our sacred soil to the Algarvian savages. If they advance, they shall advance only over the bodies of our warriors, warriors who will never again turn their backs to the barbarous foe. Attack, we say! Attack and triumph!”

King Swemmel’s image vanished from the crystal, which flashed and went dark. With another grimace, Vatran said, “I wish it were as easy as he makes it sound.”

“So does the whole kingdom,” Rathar answered. “But he’s right about one thing: if we don’t fight the Algarvians, we won’t drive them away. We haven’t got much room for retreat, not anymore.”

“I don’t care what Swemmel says,” Vatran declared, a reckless statement from any Unkerlanter. “I don’t see how we’re going to stop the redheads this side of Sulingen. Do you, lord Marshal?” He made Rathar’s title half a challenge, half a reproach.

They were alone in the hut. Otherwise, without a doubt, Vatran would have kept his mouth shut. And otherwise, without a doubt, Rathar would not have answered, “No.” Even saying it where only Vatran could hear was a risk; the general might become a marshal if he could persuade Swemmel that the word had passed Rathar’s lips. Of course, Rathar would call him a liar, but still….

But Vatran said, “Well, you’re honest, at any rate.” He tore a chunk off the very stale loaf of black bread they’d found in the hut and passed it to Rathar. Rathar chewed and swallowed and thanked the powers above for a good set of teeth. His canteen was full of spirits. He swigged, then offered Vatran a drink. Maybe the general thought it was water. He took a big swallow. His eyes went wide. He coughed a couple of times, but held the spirits down.

“Fooled you,” Rathar said with a chuckle. But his amusement soon faded. “Now if we could only fool the redheads.”

“If we don’t-” Vatran shook his head. Not even to Rathar’s ear alone, not even with a good slug of spirits in him, would he saw what was in his mind.

Rathar didn’t have much trouble figuring out what that was. He said it, even if Vatran wouldn’t: “If we don’t, we’re ruined.”

“That’s about the size of it, lord Marshal,” Vatran agreed unhappily. “They just keep smashing through us. If we don’t fall back, they cut off chunks of the army with their behemoths and chew ‘em up at their leisure. And if we do fall back, we yield up the land they were after.”

“They’re stretched thin,” Rathar said, as much to keep up his own hopes as to hearten Rathar. “They’ve got Yaninans holding quiet stretches of the line, more of them every day. They’re putting Forthwegians and Sibians into uniform to do their fighting for them. If they keep stretching, they’re bound to break sooner or later.”

“Aye, but will it be before they break us?” Vatran said. Rathar took another swig of spirits; he had no answer for that.

Someone rapped on the door. Rathar opened it. A filthy, skeletally lean runner stood there panting. The fellow saluted, then said, “Lord Marshal, the Algarvians are pounding our lines to the northeast. If they don’t get some help, they’re going to have to fall back again.”

By his tone, he’d plainly either heard or heard about King Swemmel’s speech. “Not one step back!” the king had thundered. To start retreating so soon after such an order did not bear thinking about.

Turning to Vatran, Rathar asked, “Have we got dragons we can use to give them a hard time?” Before the general could answer, the marshal stabbed out a forefinger. “Of course we do-that farm not far from here. Order ‘em into the air-we’ll see how Mezentio’s men like getting hammered instead of doing the hammering.” His chuckle was harsh: they wouldn’t like it any better than soldiers ever did. Well, too bad for them.

“What else can we throw in there?” Vatran asked. He wasn’t shy about fighting. None of the Unkerlanter generals left alive was. The war had already weeded out a lot of men who did nothing but look handsome in a uniform tunic. It would, no doubt, weed more. Without bothering to check the map, Rathar started naming regiments and brigades the Unkerlanters could quickly move to defend the threatened area. Vatran did look at the map, and stared. “How in blazes do you keep all that in your head, lord Marshal?”

“I don’t know,” Rathar answered, a little sheepishly. “I’ve always had the knack. It comes in handy every now and again.” Still standing in the door of the hut, he shouted for an orderly.

One came running up. “What do you need, sir?”

“A horse for me, and another one for General Vatran-or a unicorn apiece, if that’s easier,” Rathar told him. “There’s trouble north and east of here. If we’re not on the spot, how can we command the defense?”

Rathar knew he was less than the best rider in the world. He rapidly discovered Vatran was among the worst. The orderly brought them both unicorns, each with its gleaming white hide painted in mud- and dirt- and grass-colored splotches to make it harder to see. Even the unicorns’ iron-shod horns were carefully rusted to stop any betraying glints of light from them. Rathar thought the beasts perfect. Vatran’s opinion was rather different.

“Not so fast, I pray you,” he protested as Rathar sped to a still-modest trot. By the way Vatran clutched the reins and clung to the saddle, he might have been going at a breakneck gallop. If he ever did have to go at a gallop, Rathar thought he would likely break his neck.

Dragons ranged over the battered land behind the battle line, some low, some high-Algarvian dragons. From the air, the two high-ranking officers looked like a pair of nondescript cavalrymen, which suited Rathar fine.

“What will we do if we spy real Algarvian horse, lord Marshal-or if the redheads spot us?” Vatran asked in piteous tones.

“Why, charge them of course,” Rathar answered, deadpan. Vatran groaned, then cursed as he realized the marshal hadn’t meant it seriously. Rathar laughed a little. Finding anything to laugh about wasn’t easy.

In the tradition of battles from long-ago days, he rode toward the sound of the loudest fighting. Vatran managed to stay with him. They trotted past a team of Unkerlanters stripping the armor and egg-tosser off a slain Algarvian behemoth. “That’s good,” Vatran said. “That’s very good. We can use the gear, and that’s a fact. The Algarvians have too fornicating much of everything.”

“Except soldiers, we hope,” Rathar said, and Vatran nodded. The marshal looked over his shoulder at the Unkerlanter workmen. Thoughtfully, he went on, “Have to make sure they slap a coat of rock-gray paint on that mail before they put it on one of our behemoths. Even then, our men are liable to take it for a ruse-the redheads’ patterns are different from ours.”

“Here’s hoping the Algarvians don’t think of a ruse like that,” Vatran said with feeling. “They think of too cursed many things, and that’s the truth.”

“Aye, isn’t it just?” Rathar said. He filed the idea away, as one against which he would have to warn the Unkerlanter soldiery.

Up ahead, dragons swooped again and again. The sharp roars of bursting eggs came ever closer together. And Unkerlanter footsoldiers began streaming away from the center of the fighting before Rathar could get there and take charge of the defense. They had the look he’d seen too often in the fight against the Algarvians: the look of men not just beaten but stunned by what had rolled over them. They gaped at the sight of anyone going toward the battle from which they were retreating. “It’s another cursed breakthrough,” one of them said.

“Didn’t you hear the king’s order?” General Vatran thundered. “Not another step back!”

The soldier came to a ragged sort of attention, realizing the two men on unicornback were officers. He didn’t realize what sort of officers they were; he was too battered and worn to pay attention to the rank badges on their collar tabs. “If old Swemmel went through what I’ve been through, he’d step back himself, and pretty fornicating lively, too.”

Vatran looked about ready to burst like an egg. His fury did him no good. Before he could start thundering again, the weary soldier and his comrades trudged past him and Rathar, heading west and south. They might-they probably would-fight again later, when the odds looked better. For now, they’d taken all they could.

“Come on,” Rathar told Vatran. “We’ve got more important things to worry about than a squad’s worth of stragglers.” If we can’t stop the Algarvians from breaking through whenever they press hard, the whole kingdom will go over a cliff.”

“Ought to line ‘em up against a wall and blaze ‘em,” Vatran said, forgetting his earlier claim that the king had been too merciful. “That’s what we’d have done in the Twinkings War, and you cursed well know it.”

“We’ve done it in this fight, too,” Rathar said. “And we’ll do more of it, if we have to. But not this lot, that’s all.”

Vatran grunted. His unicorn chose that moment to sidestep. It almost threw him, where even an average rider would have shifted his weight a little and gone about his business. By the time the general had his mount under control (Rathar would have taken oath the beast looked scornful, but it might have been the way the paint streaked its muzzle), he’d calmed down a little. “Have to hit the redheads’ column in flank as it punches through. That’ll give ‘em some trouble, if we can bring it off.”

“Good notion,” Rathar told him, and it was. They’d blunted some Algar-vian attacks that way. He wondered if the Unkerlanter forces moving against the breakthrough could cut it off. Even more, though, he wondered where he was going to make the next fight this side of Sulingen.

Under Garivald’s tunic, a drop of sweat ran down his back as he trudged toward the village of Pirmasens. Heat wasn’t what made him sweat, though the weather was as warm and sticky as it ever got down in the Duchy of Grelz. No, he was afraid, and knew how afraid he was.

“Liaz,” he said, over and over again. “Liaz. Liaz.” He couldn’t very well go into any Grelzer village under his own name, not with the whacking great price the Algarvians had put on his head. Most villagers hated King Mezentio and his puppet King of Grelz, his cousin Raniero, more than they hated King Swem-mel. But enough felt the other way about things to make him glad he had an alias. Now if only he could be sure of remembering it!

Pirmasens wasn’t one of the villages from which Munderic’s irregulars usually gathered food and supplies. The Algarvians held it tight, not least because it stood close to a ley line. Munderic needed to know what they were up to. Irregulars from other parts of Unkerlant would have betrayed themselves as soon as they opened their mouths. Garivald would be a stranger in Pirmasens, but a stranger with the right accent.

As he neared the village, he saw it was intact, which meant Unkerlanter soldiers hadn’t made a stand here the summer before. That wasn’t so good; it gave the locals less reason to hate the redheads. It also gave them more reason to betray a fugitive bard named Garivald, if any of them should recognize him in the person of Liaz. Another drop of sweat slid down his spine.

“It won’t be so bad,” he muttered, and did his best to make himself believe it. Before the war, a stranger wandering into a peasant village would have been a surprise, especially if he was just another peasant and not a merchant with something to sell. The fighting, though, had torn things up by the roots. So Munderic had told Garivald, anyhow. Garivald hoped the irregulars’ leader was right.

Hoofbeats made him look back over his shoulder. An Algarvian trooper on a lathered horse cantered past him and into Pirmasens. The redhead eyed him on riding by, just as he watched Mezentio’s soldier. Any man who trusted another, even for a moment, risked his life these days.

Well behind the horseman, Garivald came into Pirmasens. It was a bigger place than Zossen, which remained his touchstone, probably because it lay close to the ley line and so drew more trade. It looked achingly normal: men out in the fields around the village, women in the vegetable plots by their houses, children and dogs and chickens underfoot. A lump came into Garivald’s throat. This was the way life was supposed to be, the way he’d always known it.

Then a couple of kilted Algarvians strode out of one of the few buildings in the village that wasn’t somebody’s house: the tavern, unless he missed his guess. He’d planned on going in there himself-how better to find out what was going on in Pirmasens than over a few mugs of ale? Now he wondered if that was such a good idea.

A dog came yapping up to him. He stamped his foot and growled back, and the dog ran away. “That’s how you do it, all right,” a villager called. Garivald had to work hard not to stare at the fellow. He’d never seen an Unkerlanter with a fancy waxed mustache before. He hoped he’d never see another one, either; such fripperies might do well enough for an Algarvian, but they struck him as absurd on one of his countrymen.

“Aye, sure is,” Garivald replied.

Hearing Grelzer dialect identical to his own coming out of Garivald’s mouth, the man with the mustache grinned. It was a fine, friendly grin, one that should have made Garivald like him at sight. But for the hair on his lip, it might have. Even seeing the mustache-surely the mark of someone currying favor with the redheads-Garivald warmed somewhat. The local said, “Haven’t seen you in these parts before, have I?”

Now Garivald smiled back. He might be an amateur spy, but he recognized a counterpart on the other side when he heard one. “Wouldn’t think so. I’m from east of here-a little place called Minsen.” That was a village not far from Zossen. “Swemmel’s soldiers, curse ‘em, fought hard to hold it, so it’s not there anymore. Neither is my wife. Neither are my son and daughter.” He made himself sound grim.

“Ah, I’ve heard tales like that so many times,” the fellow with the mustache said. He came up and draped an arm around Garivald’s shoulder, as if he were a sympathetic cousin. “I’m not sorry we’re out from under Swemmel’s yoke, and that’s a fact. Look at the price you paid for getting stuck in the middle of a lost war.”

“Aye,” Garivald said. “You’ve got a good way of looking at things, ah …”

“My name’s Rual,” the man from Pirmasens said.

Garivald clasped his hand, which also let him shake off that arm. “And I’m Liaz,” he said. He’d got it right the first time, anyhow.

“Let me buy you a mug of ale, Liaz,” Rual said. “We can sit around and swap stories about what a son of a whore Swemmel is.”

“Suits me fine,” Garivald said. “I’ve got plenty of ‘em.” And he did, too. Loving Swemmel wasn’t easy. After what he’d seen, after what he’d been through, hating the redheads more was. “I’ll buy you one afterwards, too. I’ve got enough coppers for that, anyhow.”

“Well, come on, then. Let’s get out of the hot sun.” Sure enough, Rual led him to the building from which the Algarvians had come.

More Algarvians sat inside. One of them nodded to Rual in a familiar way. As if the mustache hadn’t been enough, that told Garivald all he needed to know about the other peasant’s allegiance. It also told him he had to be extra careful if he wanted to get out of Pirmasens in one piece.

Rual waved to the fellow behind the bar, who wore not only a mustache but also a ridiculous little strip of chin beard, as if he hadn’t been paying attention while he shaved. “Two mugs of ale here,” Rual called, and set a shiny, newly minted silver coin on the table.

Garivald picked it up and looked at it. “So that’s what King Raniero looks like, is it?” he remarked. “Hadn’t seen him before.” In his opinion, Raniero had a pointy nose. He didn’t think Rual would care about his opinions in such matters.

“Aye.” Rual waited till the tapman brought him his ale, then raised his mug. “And here’s to Raniero.” Having expected such a toast, Garivald had no trouble drinking to it. Rual added, “Good to have a king in Grelz again.”

“That’s the truth,” Garivald said, though Swemmel was the only king in Grelz he acknowledged. After a pull at his ale-which was pretty good-he added, “I wish we hadn’t had to have a war to get one, though.” He also wished the king Grelz had got weren’t an Algarvian, one more opinion he kept to himself.

“No, we should have had one of our own all along,” Rual said. “But I’d sooner be tied to the redheads than to Cottbus.”

The Algarvians in here were surely listening to him, as he was listening to Garivald. Garivald wondered what they’d think of his wanting a Grelzer king rather than Mezentio’s cousin. “I never worried about things like this before the fighting started,” he said at last. “I just wanted life to go on the way it always had.” He wasn’t even lying.

Rual gave him another sympathetic look, though the last thing Garivald wanted was his sympathy. “I understand what you’re saying-powers above know I do,” Rual assured him. “But weren’t you sick of inspectors stealing your crops and impressers liable to drag you off into the army if you looked at ‘em sideways or even if you didn’t?”

“Well, who wasn’t?” Garivald said, making it sound like an admission Rual had dragged out of him. Again, he wasn’t lying. Again, it didn’t matter, which Rual didn’t seem to understand. The Algarvians had done worse in Zossen- and, no doubt, elsewhere in Unkerlant-than Swemmel’s inspectors and impressers. Garivald decided to make his own comment before Rual could ask another question: “This looks like a pretty happy place now, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, it is,” Rual assured him. “Raniero makes a fine king. So long as we don’t trouble anything, he leaves us alone. You could never say that about Swemmel, now could you?”

“No, indeed.” Garivald laughed a particular kind of laugh, one that suggested a lot of things you could say about King Swemmel. He would have enjoyed saying them, too-to his wife, or to his friend Dagulf back in Zossen. Saying them to Rual would have been blackest treason.

“Well, there you are,” Rual said, as if certain Garivald agreed with him in every particular.

“Aye, here I am-at the bottom of my mug of ale.” Garivald set coins- old coins, coins of Unkerlant, not Grelz-on the table and waved to the Unkerlanter with the preposterous mustache and strip of beard behind the counter. When he caught the fellow’s eye, he pointed to his mug and Rual’s. The tapman brought them refills.

“My thanks,” Rual said. “You’re a man of your word. Too many drifters coming through Pirmasens these days want to grab what they can and then slide out again. This is a nice, quiet place. We want to keep it that way.”

“Don’t blame you,” Garivald said. “Almost tempts a fellow into wanting to settle down here for good.” He drank some more ale, to get rid of the taste of the lies he was telling.

“You could do worse, Liaz,” Rual said, and the curse of the war Unkerlant and Algarve were fighting was that he was probably right. “Aye, it’s right peaceful here.” He didn’t mention-maybe he even didn’t consciously notice-the Algarvian soldiers drinking at a table not ten feet away from him. If they’d been back in Algarve where they belonged, he would have come closer to telling the truth.

Garivald finished his ale. Now came the tricky part: sliding out of Pirmasens under the noses of those Algarvian soldiers, and under Rual’s, too. He got to his feet. “Good to find a friendly face,” he said. “Aren’t many of ‘em left these days.”

“Where are you heading?” Rual asked.

“Somewhere that got hurt worse than you seem to,” Garivald answered. “Maybe somewhere I can find a farm nobody’s working and get things going again. That’d keep me too busy to worry about anything else for a while, I expect.”

“And I expect you’re right,” Rual said. “Good luck to you.”

“Thanks.” Garivald took a couple of steps toward the doorway. One of the redheads sitting in the tavern spoke to him in Algarvian. He froze in alarm entirely unfeigned. Turning to Rual, he asked, “What did that mean? I don’t know any of their language.”

“He told you to count yourself lucky you’re still breathing,” Rual said.

“Oh, I do,” Garivald answered, feeling the sweat start out under his arms once more. “Every day, I do.” He stood there for a moment, wondering whether the Algarvians were going to try to wring him dry. But the fellow who’d spoken just nodded and waved him away. Trying not to let out a sigh of relief, he went out into the hot sunshine.

He didn’t just turn around and go back the way he’d come. That would have roused suspicions. Instead, he kept walking east, toward Herborn. Eventually, when he judged it safe, he’d make a wide circle around Pirmasens and double back toward the forests where Munderic, not false King Raniero, was lord and master. For now, he felt like a traveling mountebank who’d stuck his head into a dragon’s mouth and pulled it back unscathed.

Dragons were stupid beasts, though. Every once in a while, no matter how you trained them, they would bite down.

Dragons flew south overhead: hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, some high, some low. All were painted in one variant or another of Algarve’s green, red, and white. To Sergeant Leudast’s horrified gaze, they seemed to cover the whole sky.

“And not a single one of ours to try to flame them down,” he said bitterly.

“They’ll have a fight on their hands sooner or later,” Captain Hawart said. “They’d better, anyhow, or the game is as good as over.”

Leudast wondered if the game was as good as over. He’d wondered that before, back last summer when the Algarvians smashed and encircled Unkerlanter armies again and again, then toward the end of fall when Mezentio’s mages first unleashed their slaughter-filled sorceries. When winter came, Unkerlant fought back hard. But now it was summer again, and. . “Cursed redheads have got more lives than a cat,” he grumbled.

“They’re nasty buggers, no two ways about it,” Hawart agreed. Like every man in his regiment, he looked worn and battered.

Still another wave of Algarvian dragons passed overhead. “At least they’re not dropping their eggs on us,” Leudast said. “Where do you suppose the whoresons are headed?” Coming out of a peasant village in northern Unkerlant, he knew little about the geography of the south-and, till the fighting started, had cared less.

“Sulingen.” Captain Hawart spoke with great authority. “Has to be Sulingen on the Wolter. That’s the last city in front of the Mamming Hills, the last city in front of the cinnabar mines, the last place where we can keep them from breaking through.”

“Sulingen.” Leudast nodded. “Aye, I’ve heard the name. But after a pounding like that, there won’t be one stone in the town left standing on another.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the regimental commander said, sticking a long stalk of grass in the corner of his mouth so he looked like a peasant from a village in the back of beyond rather than the educated man he was. “Sulingen’s a good-size place, and towns take a deal of knocking down before there’s nothing left of them. Powers above know we’ve seen that.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, sir,” Leudast admitted. “Rubble’s as good to fight from as buildings are, too, maybe even better. But still…” He didn’t go on. He and Hawart had been through a lot together, but not so much that he cared to tag himself with the label of defeatist.

Hawart understood where his ley line of thought was going. “But still,” he echoed. “You don’t want them to drive you back to your last ditch, because you don’t have anywhere to go if they push you out of it.” The stalk of grass bobbed up and down as he spoke. He tried to sound reassuring: “They haven’t even driven us back into it yet.”

“No, sir.” Leudast wasn’t about to argue, but he still wanted to say what was in his mind: “You can see it from here, though.”

Off to the east, Leudast could also see columns of smoke marking the latest Algarvian thrust into Unkerlant. He turned his head and looked west. No new smoke there. Leudast let out a small sigh of relief. The regiment wasn’t about to be cut off and surrounded any time soon, anyhow.

A starling hopped through the grass, chirping metallically. It pecked at a worm or a grub, then flew away when Leudast shook his fist at it. “Those things are cursed nuisances,” he said. “They’ll eat the fruit right off a tree and the grain right out of the fields.”

“They might as well be Algarvians,” Hawart said. Leudast laughed, though it was at best a bitter joke.

A runner trotted up, shouting for an officer. When Hawart admitted he was one, the other Unkerlanter said, “Sir, you’re ordered east with as many men as you command, to try and hold back the Algarvians.”

Captain Hawart sighed. Leudast knew how he felt. Simply lying in the grass for a little while, without eggs bursting close by or beams sizzling past overhead, was sweet. It couldn’t last; Leudast knew that all too well. But he wished it would have lasted a little longer.

“Aye, we’ll come, of course,” Hawart said, and started shouting for his men to get to their feet and get moving. The runner saluted and hurried off, likely to haul some more weary footsoldiers into the fight. Hawart sighed again. “We’ll see if we go out again once we’re done, too.”

“Won’t have so many dragons dropping eggs on us, anyhow,” Leudast said as he heaved himself upright. “They’re all off pounding that Sulingen place.”

“Well, so they are,” Hawart said. “Maybe we’ll be able to catch Mezentio’s men in flank, too. From where the smoke’s rising, their spearpoint’s gone past us. With a little luck, we’ll chop it off.”

“Here’s hoping.” Leudast wasn’t sure he believed the Unkerlanters could do that; they’d had as little luck down here in the south this fighting season as they’d had all along the front the summer before. But it was worth trying.

He wondered how many miles he’d marched since the war against Algarve started. Hundreds, he knew-most of them heading west. He was moving east now, toward Algarve. Back during the winter, that had mattered a great deal. Now. . He supposed it still did, but what mattered even more was that he could be blazed just as dead heading this way as the other.

“Open order!” he called to the men he led. “Stay spread out. You don’t want them to be able to get too many of you all at once.”

The veterans in his company already knew that, and were doing it. But he didn’t have a lot of veterans left, and every fight claimed more. Most of his men were not long off farms or city streets. They were brave enough, but a lot of them would get killed or maimed before they figured out what they should be doing. Only luck had kept Leudast from going that way, and he knew it.

A good-size counterattack against the western flank of the Algarvian drive looked to be building. Behemoths trotted forward along with Unkerlanter footsoldiers. More behemoths hauled egg-tossers too heavy to fit on their backs. Teams of horses and mules urged on by sweating, cursing teamsters and hostlers hauled even more.

Leudast looked up into the sky, hoping to spot dragons painted in rock-gray. When he didn’t, he grunted and kept marching. He knew he couldn’t have everything. The support the footsoldiers were getting on the ground was already more than he’d expected.

Eggs started bursting in front of the regiment sooner than he’d hoped, though not really sooner than he’d thought they would. As usual, the Algarvians were alert. They could be beaten, but seldom surprised. Some soldier on the flank with a crystal had seen something he didn’t like, talked to the redheads’ egg-tossers, and then, no doubt, ducked back down into the tall grass.

“Come on,” Leudast said. “They’re trying to scare us off. Are we going to let them?” He was scared every time he went into a fight. He hoped his men didn’t know it. He knew too well he did.

As he’d hoped, Mezentio’s soldiers didn’t have that many egg-tossers here on their flank. Most of them would be down at the head of the attack, at what Captain Hawart called the spearpoint. Leudast would have put them there, too, if he’d wanted to break through deeper into Unkerlant. But now he and his comrades were trying to break through, and he thought they might do it.

Then, just after he’d tramped through the fields around a ruined, abandoned peasant village, somebody blazed at him. The beam missed, but charred a line through the rye that struggled against encroaching weeds. Leudast threw himself down on his belly. The smell of damp dirt in his nostrils brought back his own days in a peasant village.

“Advance by squads!” he shouted to his men. Again, the veterans already knew what to do. He heard them shouting instructions to the new men. Would the raw recruits understand? They’d better, Leudast thought, if they want to have the chance to get any more lessons. Soldiers said you’d last a while if you lived through your first fight. If you didn’t, you surely wouldn’t.

Up he came, running heavily toward a boulder a hundred feet ahead. He dove behind it as if one step ahead of the inspectors, lay panting for a moment, then peered¹ around the chunk of granite. The enemy was blazing from an apple orchard that, like the fields around the abandoned village, had seen better years. Leudast spotted a man in there who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He brought his stick to his shoulder and thrust his forefinger into the beaming hole. The foeman toppled. Leudast let out a growl of triumph.

Two more rushes brought him into the grove. As he crouched behind a tree trunk, he made sure the knife on his belt was loose in its sheath. He knew from bitter experience that Algarvians didn’t go backwards without leaving a lot of dead, theirs and those of their enemies, as monuments to where they’d been.

“Urra!” he yelled as he ran forward again. “Swemmel! Urra!” His countrymen echoed him. He waited for the answering cries of “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” to give him some idea of how many redheads he faced.

Those cries didn’t come. Instead, the enemy soldiers yelled a name he hardly knew-”Tsavellas!”-and other things in a language he’d never heard before. In brief glimpses, he saw that their uniforms were a darker tan than those of the Algarvians, and they wore tight leggings, not kilts.

Realization smote. “They’re Yaninans!” he called to his men. From everything he’d heard, the Algarvians’ allies didn’t have the stomach for the fight that Mezentio’s men brought to it. Maybe that was so, maybe it wasn’t. It might be worth finding out. “Yaninans!” he yelled as loud as he could, and then a couple of phrases of Algarvian he’d learned: “Surrender! Hands high!”

For a moment, the enemy’s shouts and blazing went on as they had before. Then silence fell. And then, from behind trees and bushes and rocks, skinny little men with big black mustaches began emerging. When the first ones weren’t blazed down out of hand, more and more came forth. Leudast told off troopers of his own to take charge of them and get them to the rear.

One of those troopers looked at him in something approaching awe. “Powers above, Sergeant, we’ve just bagged twice as many men as we’ve got.”

“I know.” Leudast was astonished, too. “It’s not so easy against the Algarvians, is it? Go on, get ‘em out of here.” He raised his voice and addressed the rest of his men: “They’ve given us a chance. We’re going into that hole fast and hard, like it belongs to some easy wench. Now come on!”

“Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters, the new men loudest among them: they thought it would be this easy all the time. Leudast didn’t try to tell them anything different. Pretty soon, they’d run into Algarvians and find out for themselves. Meanwhile, they-and he-would go forward as fast and as far as they could. Maybe, if they got lucky enough, they’d cut off the spearhead after all.

Among the books Ealstan had brought home to help keep Vanai amused in the flat she dared not leave was an old atlas. It was, in fact, a very old atlas, dating back to the days before the Six Years’ War. As far as that atlas was concerned, Forthweg didn’t exist; the east belonged to a swollen Algarve, while the west was an Unkerlanter grand duchy centered on Eoforwic here.

Vanai’s chuckle had a bitter edge. Algarve was a great deal more swollen these days than it had been when the atlas was printed. And the news sheets kept announcing new Algarvian victories every day. Down in the south of Unkerlant, their spearheads reached toward the Narrow Sea.

She looked back from the atlas to the news sheet. In fierce fighting, she read, the town of Andlau fell to Algarve and her allies. An enemy counterblow against the flank of the attacking column was turned back with heavy loss.

Andlau, she saw, was well beyond Durrwangen, three quarters of the way from where the fighting had begun in spring to Sulingen. Sure enough, Mezentio’s men seemed to be moving as fast as they had the summer before.

“But they can’t,” Vanai said out loud, defiantly using her Kaunian birth-speech. “They can’t. What will be left of the world if they do?”

What would be left of the world for her if the Algarvians won their war was nothing. But they kept right on rolling forward all the same. The news sheet went on, in the boasting Algarvian style even though it was written in Forthwegian, Algarvian dragons hammered Sulingen on the Wolter, dropping eggs by the thousand and leaving the city, an ungainly sprawl stretched along the northern bank of the river, burning in many places. Casualties are certain to be very heavy, but King Swemmel continues his useless, senseless resistance.

“Good for him,” Vanai muttered. Forthwegians despised their Unkerlanter cousins, not least for being stronger and more numerous than they were. Living in Forthweg, Vanai had picked up a good deal of that attitude. And her grandfather despised the Unkerlanters for being even more barbarous-which is to say, less under Kaunian influence-than the Forthwegians. She’d picked up a good deal of that attitude, too.

But now, if the Unkerlanters were giving King Mezentio’s men a run for their money, Vanai would cheer them on. She wished she could do more. If she left the flat, though, she was all too likely to end up sacrificed to fuel the Algarvian mages’ assault on Unkerlant. And so she stayed hidden, and thought kinder thoughts about King Swemmel than she’d ever imagined she would.

From the atlas and the news sheet, her eyes went to the little book called You Too Can Be a Mage. She wondered why she hadn’t pitched it into the garbage. She’d worked magic with it, all right: magic that had almost got her in more trouble than she’d known before. If you were already a mage, the spells in You Too Can Be a Mage might be useful.. but if you were already a mage, you wouldn’t need them, because you’d already know better.

She complained about that to Ealstan when he came home that evening. He laughed, which made her angry. Then he held up a placating hand. “I’m sorry,” he told her, though he didn’t sound very sorry. “It reminds me of something my father would say sometimes: ‘Any child can do it-as long as he has twenty years of practice.’ “

Vanai worked through that, then smiled in spite of herself. “It does sound like your father, or what you’ve said about him,” she answered. Then her smile faded. “I wish we’d hear from him again.”

“So do I,” Ealstan said, his own face tight with worry. “With Leofsig gone, he must be going mad. My whole family must be, come to that.”

She reached across the small supper table to set her hand on his. “I wish you’d been able to do something about your cousin.”

“So do I,” he growled. “But his regiment or whatever they call it had left the camp outside Eoforwic just before I got the news. And even if it hadn’t…” He grimaced. “What could I have done? Sidroc’s worth more to the Algarvians than I’ll ever be, so they’d surely back him, curse them. Powers below eat them and leave them in darkness forever.”

“Aye,” Vanai whispered fervently. But the Algarvians had to be immune to curses. So many had been aimed their way since the Derlavaian War started, but none seemed to bite.

“I think this may be what growing up means,” Ealstan said, “finding out there are things you can’t do anything about, and neither can anybody else.”

In one way, Vanai was a year older than he. In another, she was far older than that. The second way didn’t always show itself, but this was one of those times. “Kaunians in Forthweg suck that up with their mothers’ milk,” she said. “They have ever since the Kaunian Empire fell.”

“Maybe so,” Ealstan said. “But it’s not bred in you, any more than it’s bred in us. You learn it one at a time, too.”

Vanai remembered Major Spinello. “Aye, that’s so,” she said softly, hoping the redhead who’d taken his pleasure with her to keep her grandfather from working himself to death had met a horrible end in Unkerlant. Then she burst out with what she couldn’t hold in any more: “What will we do if Algarve wins the war?”

Ealstan got up, went over to the pantry, and came back with a jug of wine. After pouring, he answered, “I heard-Ethelhelm says-Zuwayza is letting Kaunians land on her shores.”

“Zuwayza?” Vanai’s voice was a dismayed squeak. “They’re-” She caught herself. She’d been about to say the Zuwayzin were nothing but bare black barbarians. Her grandfather would surely have said just that. She tried something else: “They’re allied with Mezentio, so how long can that last?”

“I don’t know,” Ealstan said. “Ethelhelm says the Algarvians are hopping mad about it, though.”

“How does he know?” Vanai demanded. “Do the redheads whisper in his ear? Why do you believe him when he tells you things like that?”

“Because he’s not wrong very often,” Ealstan said. “What he doesn’t hear, the people in his band do.”

“Maybe,” Vanai said, dubious still. “But where do they hear them? The Algarvians don’t like Etlielhelm’s music.”

“No, but Plegmund’s Brigade does, remember?” Ealstan answered. “He’s played for them, remember, no matter how much I hated that. I still do hate it, but it’s true.”

“Maybe,” Vanai said, this time in rather a different tone of voice. She reached for the jug of wine and poured her own mug full. “I don’t know why I don’t just stay drunk all the time. Then I wouldn’t care.”

“Hard work staying drunk all the time,” Ealstan said. “And it hurts when you start sobering up, too.”

“I know.” What Vanai also knew, and didn’t say, was how much staying sober hurt. Ealstan wouldn’t understand-or he wouldn’t have before Leofsig got killed. Now, he might.

Vanai washed the supper dishes, then returned to her books. She was reading a tale of adventure and exploration in the jungles of equatorial Siaulia. Back when she was living in Oyngestun, she would have turned up her nose at such fare. But when her world was limited to a cramped flat and what she could see out a window-provided she didn’t get too close to the glass-a story of exploration set on the tropical continent made her feel she was traveling even when she really couldn’t. Leopards and gorgeous, glittering butterflies and hanging vines covered with ants seemed real enough for her to reach out and touch them. And when she read about the enormous fungus the natives would boil in the stomach of a buffalo. .

When she read about that fungus, she started to cry. She thought she was being quiet about it, but Ealstan looked up from the news sheet he was reading and asked, “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

She turned a stricken face to him. “When fall comes, I won’t be able to go out hunting mushrooms!”

He came over and put his arm around her. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to, except maybe in a park or something. This is a big city, without a whole lot of open country around it. But I’ll bring back the best ones I can buy, I promise you that.”

“It won’t be the same.” Vanai spoke with doleful certainty. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. Tears were still sliding down her cheeks. “I’ve gone out hunting mushrooms every fall since… since my mother and father were still alive.” She couldn’t think of any stronger way to say for a very long time.

“I’m sorry,” Ealstan said. “If you were shut up inside the Kaunian quarter here or back in Gromheort, do you think you could go mushroom hunting then?”

In one way, it was a perfectly reasonable question. In another, it was infuriating. Vanai stuck her nose in her book and left it there. “When Ealstan said something else to her a few minutes later, she ignored him. She made a point of ignoring him, and kept right on doing it till they went to bed that night.

When he leaned over to kiss her good night, she let him, but she didn’t kiss him back. He said, “I can’t help it, you know. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

Vanai started to ignore that, too. She found she couldn’t. Finding she couldn’t, she wished she could, for tears stung her eyes. “I can’t help it, either,” she said, choking a little on the words. “I can’t help what the Algarvians have done to us, and I wish so much I could. That just makes all-this-that much harder to take.”

“I know,” he said. “I wish I could do something about the redheads, too, but I just can’t, curse it.” He slammed a fist down onto the mattress, hard enough to make Vanai bounce up a little.

He was a Forthwegian, not a Kaunian. The Algarvians’ yoke lay less heavily on his folk than on Vanai’s. But he’d fled his family, fled Gromheort, on account of her. And his brother was dead because his cousin had joined the puppet brigade the conquerors had created. She could hardly say he and his hadn’t suffered on account of the occupation.

Instead of saying anything, she reached for him. He was reaching for her, too. Before long, they were making love. As her pleasure built, she could forget the miserable little flat in which she was caged. She knew the escape wouldn’t last long, but cherished it while it did.

Afterwards, drifting toward sleep, Ealstan said, “One day, by the powers above, I’ll bring you back to Gromheort. You see if I don’t.”

That did make her burst into tears. She so much wanted to believe it, and so much doubted she could. And even if she did … “People there don’t like mixed couples. They didn’t like them before the war. They’ll like them even less now.”

“People are fools,” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they like and don’t like?”

“If more Forthwegians liked Kaunians, the redheads couldn’t do what they’re doing here,” Vanai said. She felt Ealstan’s nod rather than seeing it. People of her own blood-her grandfather, for instance-despised Forthwegians, too, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about anything. She ground her face into her pillow. After a while, she slept.