Into the Darkness

10.

Leofsig was becoming, if not thrilled about latrine duty, at least resigned to it. It was nasty, smelly work, but no harder than chopping wood or any number of other assignments in the captives’ camp. Both his Algarvian captors and his Forthwegian superiors seemed content to make him the token Forthwegian on the largely Kaunian latrine crew.

He made the best of it, or tried. His own Kaunian had grown rusty since his escape from school. When he’d first tried speaking it again, the lean blonds had smiled among themselves and, more often than not, replied in Forthwegian. But he’d persisted. He’d never be mistaken for a Kaunian when he opened his mouth, but these days he was even getting a good notion of how to use the optative mood, which had always baffled him even when his masters drilled it into him with a switch.

Having his cot next to Gutauskas in the barracks helped in getting the Kaunian captives on the latrine crew to accept him. So did his continued enmity with Merwit. If Merwit called him a Kaunian-lover, he wore what was meant for an insult as a badge of pride.

One day, as he was covering over a stinking slit trench, Gutauskas came up to him with a gleam in his blue-gray eyes. “You know, stale piss is a good bleach,” the Kaunian said in his own language. Leofsig had not learned the Kaunian word for piss in school; latrine duty was educational in all sorts of ways. Gutauskas went on, “Maybe we should dye your hair blond. Do you think you would look like one of us if we did?”

“Oh, indeed—without a doubt,” Leofsig answered. He pointed to the stinking slit into which he was shoveling dirt. “And shit”—another word he hadn’t picked up in school—“will turn your hair brown. Do you think you would look like a Forthwegian if I flung you in there?”

“It could be,” Gutauskas said imperturbably. “We have been known to call Forthwegians dungheels, just as Forthwegians have their own pleasant names for us.” He cocked his head to one side, waiting to see how Leofsig would take that.

With a shrug of his broad shoulders, Leofsig said, “Everyone calls his neighbors names. Why, I would bet even the Unkerlanters aren’t too efficient”—he had to drop into Forthwegian for that, being unable to come up with the Kaunian word—“to call their neighbors names.” He rolled his eyes to show he intended sarcasm.

Gutauskas nodded. “I would bet you are right: you prove it with your own speech, in fact. So tell me, would you sooner dwell in that part of Forthweg occupied by the Algarvian barbarians or the portion occupied by the Unkerlanter barbarians?”

“I would sooner no one occupied Forthweg,” Leofsig answered.

“That was not one of the choices offered,” Gutauskas said in the quietly mocking way that so often set Forthwegians’ teeth on edge.

By then, though, Leofsig had grown used to it. He gave the question serious thought; it was more interesting than what he had been doing. At last, he said, “It is likely easier for your people under the Unkerlanters, for my people under the Algarvians.”

“Aye, I think you are right,” the Kaunian agreed, “for the Algarvians have us to despise, which keeps them from despising you quite so much.” He waited while Leofsig threw a couple of shovels’ worth of dirt into the slit trench, then went on, “Perhaps around midnight tonight, you will need to make a call of nature, as I shall.”

“Will I?” Leofsig scratched his head. “I knew you Kaunians were an orderly, regular folk, but I didn’t realize you were as regular as all that.” Gutauskas said nothing, but kept looking at him with head cocked slightly to one side. Leofsig scratched his own head again. In a romance about the Six Years’ War, he would have figured out right away what the Kaunian was trying to tell him. At least he’d figured out Gutauskas was trying to tell him something. He said, “Well, who knows? Maybe I will.”

Gutauskas still didn’t say anything. He went off and started digging a new slit trench. Leofsig went back to covering over the one at which he’d been working. He didn’t move any faster than he had to. The Algarvians didn’t feed him enough to make him want to move very fast—and latrine duty wasn’t the sort of work that fired a man’s enthusiasm anyhow.

At last, as sunset drew near, he stowed his shovel in the rack and lined up for the meager supper that made a perfect accompaniment to his meager breakfast and meager dinner. He got a small slab of brown bread and a bowl of cabbage-and-turnip soup with a few small floating bits of salt pork so fatty it might as well have been lard. He also got a small cup of what the Algarvians insisted was beer. By the way it tasted, it might have come straight from the latrine trenches.

He drank it anyway. He ate and drank almost anything he even vaguely suspected of containing nourishment. He’d seen men pop their own lice into their mouths. He hadn’t fallen that far himself, but he knew he might. All too often, his belly ached like a rotting tooth. He cherished the hour or so after each meal, when that ache drew back and waited for a while.

After supper, the captives formed up in front of their barracks hall for the day’s final roll call and count. For a wonder, the Algarvian guards managed to get the same number twice running, which satisfied them. Their leader spoke in bad Forthwegian: “You going in now. You no coming out till morning roll call unless you pissing, you shitting. You trying any other come-outings …” He drew a finger across his throat. Leofsig wished that finger were the sharp edge of a knife.

Along with the rest of the men from his barracks, he went inside. Some of them clumped into little groups to talk. Others diced for money or, more often, for food. A few wrote letters or read the handful they’d been allowed to receive. By far the largest number lay down on their cots to rest or sleep away as much time as their captors allowed them.

Merwit glared at Leofsig in the dim lanternlight. Leofsig glared back. They were both too hungry and tired to do anything more than glare—and neither was eager to go up before the Algarvian authorities. That would mean half rations for sure, and whatever other punishments the redheads chose to add. Such delights made good behavior seem sensible even to Merwit.

The bruiser eventually rolled over and started to snore. Leofsig wanted to go to sleep, too; every fiber of his being cried out for it. If he did doze off, he’d miss whatever Gutauskas had in mind for midnight. If he didn’t, he’d be a wreck tomorrow. Which had the greater weight? Not nearly sure he was doing the right thing, he feigned sleep instead of falling headlong into it.

Gutauskas came back to his own cot. He’d been talking in a low voice with the few other Kaunians in the hall, as he usually did before the guards came in and blew out the lanterns. His breathing soon grew slow and regular. Had he fallen asleep?

Leofsig watched him out of half-closed eyes that kept wanting to slide all the way shut. No strip of moonlight shone on the barracks floor to let Leofsig gauge the hour even roughly; the moon, nearing new, would not rise till a little before the sun did. How, Leofsig wondered resentfully, is Gutauskas supposed to know when it’s midnight, anyway?

He got angry enough at the Kaunian captive to keep himself a little less sleepy than he might otherwise have been. And at last, at an hour that might have been midnight or might not, Gutauskas rose from his cot and walked toward the barracks door, which was always open—and which, at the moment, let a chilly breeze into the hall.

Heart pounding, Leofsig got to his feet and walked out into the night after Gutauskas. If anyone challenged him, he intended to curse the Kaunian for waking him and making him get up in the middle of the night. But no one did. Yawning, he stumbled toward the latrines.

The one advantage of the cold was that the slit trenches did not stink quite so badly—or maybe it simply numbed Leofsig’s prominent nose. That dim shape ahead had to be Gutauskas. Leofsig yawned again, wishing he were back on his hard cot under his thin blanket: a strange wish, when most of the time he would have given anything to get away from the barracks.

Someone—a Forthwegian—came back from the latrine, tugging at his tunic. He grunted at Leofsig as they passed each other in the darkness.

Several men straddled slit trenches. All, by their silhouettes, were Kaunians. A couple exchanged soft comments in their own language: “They’re here.” “Aye. The last of them.”

Gutauskas set a hand on Leofsig’s arm. “Come. Come quickly. Come quietly. Ask no questions, not now. Soon enough, you will know.”

Naturally, questions flooded into Leofsig’s head. When he started to ask the first one, Gutauskas’s hand closed tight enough to hurt. Leofsig’s mouth stayed closed, too. Gutauskas jerked his chin toward the small knot of Kaunians ahead. Leofsig followed him over to them without another word.

As he came up, one of the Kaunians spoke in quiet Forthwegian: “An advantage to digging trenches is that there is digging, and then there is digging.”

A light shone in Leofsig’s dark, sleepy mind, bright as if an egg had burst in front of his face. Gutauskas said, “Come. It will be noisome. We could not keep everyone from using this trench. But will you set filth on your feet against the chance for freedom?”

“By the powers above, no!” Leofsig said in the best classical Kaunian he could muster.

“Hmm. As well we do take him, Gutauskas,” said the Kaunian who’d spoken a moment before. “Some of them, in truth, can be decent.” By them, Leofsig realized, he meant Forthwegians. He himself was the only non-Kaunian here.

Gutauskas said, “We can all be caught if we stand around here much longer.”

By way of answer, the other Kaunian scrambled down into the stinking trench. He yanked at the side—and pulled up a tiny square door covered with dirt and muck. “Go, my friends. Crawl as fast as you may. Crawl on one another’s heels. Never stop. There is an opening at the other end. Go to it.”

One by one, the six or eight men slid down into the trench and into the mouth of the tunnel. Gutauskas gave Leofsig a tiny shove. “Go before me,” he murmured. Leofsig got into the slit trench as quietly as he could. The muck at the bottom tried to suck the sandals off his feet. He scrambled through the doorway. It was barely wide enough for his broad Forthwegian shoulders.

Outside, it had been dark. In the tunnel—shored up here and there with boards that caught Leofsig in the head when he raised up too far, but mostly dirt, like a grave—it was black beyond black. The air felt dead. He crawled on, crawled for his life. A tiny thump came from behind him as the last Kaunian let the door fall. With luck, it would be filthy enough to keep the Algarvians from noticing it for a while.

Leofsig crawled. Sometimes he touched the feet of the man in front of him. Sometimes Gutauskas bumped his. How far had he come? How far to go? He had no idea. He kept crawling. He aimed to keep crawling till he came out, even if that were in Gyongyos or Lagoas. Blackness and dirt and shoving one knee past the other.

Fresh air, live air, ahead. He smelled it, as a hound would. The tunnel rose a little under his shins. A Kaunian pulled him out. The night looked like a hazy day to his light-starved eyes. Gutauskas came up behind him, and then the last man. “Now,” Gutauskas said in quiet but businesslike tones, “we all piss.”

“Why?” Leofsig asked—at last, a question he could put.

One of the other Kaunians answered, mirth in his voice: “To put running water between us and the Algarvians’ searching sorceries.”

Hot piss splashed out of them, there near the mouth of the tunnel, hidden from the captives’ camp by a grove of olive trees. Leofsig laughed, silently but with great joy, as he shook himself. He was filthy and stinking and liable to be recaptured or blazed on sight, but not one bit of that mattered, not now. Now—for the moment—he was free.

Bembo strolled along the streets of Tricarico, swinging his club and doing his best to make people notice him. Like most Algarvian towns, Tricarico was, among other things, a center of display. Even the most outrageously swaggering constable got less notice than he craved.

Still, Bembo would rather have been swaggering along the street than marching and countermarching in the park. He didn’t care for the weight of the dummy stick on his shoulder, and he especially didn’t care for the way that monster of a sergeant screamed at him and at everybody else in the makeshift militia. If any screaming went on, he wanted to give it, not to be on the receiving end.

He glanced nervously toward the east. The real army, or such part of it as Algarve could spare on this part of the frontier, was still holding the Jelgavans in the foothills of the Bradano Mountains. Bembo couldn’t quite figure out how the army was holding them there. The news sheets made it sound like strong sorcery, but no sorcery was that strong. He just hoped the regulars could keep doing it. If they couldn’t, he would have to try. He relished that notion not at all.

A couple of people started yelling at each other down a side street. At first, Bembo was inclined to keep on walking. People shouting at one another was nothing out of the ordinary in any Algarvian city. But then he thought that, since he’d had a quiet shift, he ought to find out what was going on there. He could bring the story back to the stationhouse, which would keep Sergeant Pesaro from calling him a lazy son of a whore.

He turned the corner. A crowd had already started to gather around the quarreling pair. “What’s going on here?” Bembo said loudly. Several people in the crowd looked his way, saw what he was, and discovered urgent business elsewhere. He chuckled. He’d expected nothing different.

One of the people who’d been doing the yelling was a redheaded woman heading hard toward middle age. Her clothes and her wary eyes didn’t say whore, not quite, but they did say slattern. Facing her was a rather younger man who wore tunic and kilt and spiky waxed mustaches of unimpeachably Algarvian style. But those mustaches and his hair were pale gold, not red or auburn or chestnut.

Uh-oh, Bembo thought. Aloud, he repeated, “What’s going on here?”

“This stinking Kaunian was trying to rob me,” the slatternly woman shouted. “I bet he’s a Jelgavan spy. He looks like a spy to me.”

A couple of men behind Bembo growled. The constable’s head started to ache, as if he’d poured down too much red wine. The man standing there looking affronted and innocent was undoubtedly of Kaunian blood, as Jelgavans were. That might mean anything, or nothing. His ancestors could have been living in Tricarico for centuries before there were any Algarvians within a couple of hundred miles. But even if they had been, that didn’t prove anything, either. Some folk of Kaunian blood were perfectly loyal to King Mezentio. Some still dreamt of the days of the ancient Kaunian Empire.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Bembo demanded of the blond man. His voice was rough with suspicion, partly because he was a constable, and so was suspicious on general principles, and partly because he’d been reading a lot of the torrid historical romances that had been coming out lately, and so was more suspicious of Kaunians than he had been.

“Why would I try to rob her?” the man asked. “Does she look like she’s got anything worth having?” He spoke Algarvian with the accent of someone who’d grown up in the northeastern part of the kingdom—the same accent as Bembo’s. But a spy would be smooth, the constable thought.

The blond man looked the woman up and down, then rolled his eyes, as any Algarvian who found a woman unattractive and wanted her to know it would have done. She screeched at him. Bembo looked her up and down. She didn’t have anything he particularly wanted, though he probably wouldn’t have said no if she offered it free of charge.

Wearily, Bembo hauled out his notebook. “Give me your names,” he growled. “Don’t get cute with ’em, either. We’ll have a mage checking.

We don’t like people who lie to the constabulary.” The woman called herself Gabrina. The man said his name was Balozio.

“A likely story,” Gabrina sneered. “Probably started out as Balozhu.” She twisted it from an Algarvian-sounding name to one that sprang from Jelgava or Valmiera.

“Your father never knew what your name was,” Balozio told her: an insult as Algarvian as the day was long.

Gabrina screeched again. Balozio shouted at her. “Shut up!” Bembo yelled, hating them both. He pointed to the woman. “What did he try to rob you of? How did he do it?”

“My belt pouch,” she answered, sticking out the hip on which she wore it. She remained unalluring to Bembo.

“Why, you lying slut!” Balozio shouted. She bit her thumb at the blond man. Turning to Bembo, he went on, “All I was trying to do was pat her on the bum.”

For a moment, Bembo accepted that. He’d felt up a good many women strolling along the street. But then he stopped thinking like a man and started thinking like a constable. “Now just you wait,” he said. “A minute ago, you were telling me this broad didn’t have anything you wanted.”

“Don’t you call me a broad, you tun of lard!” Gabrina yelled at him.

Bembo brandished his club. “For that, you can come along to the station, too. We’ll sort it out there.”

Balozio and Gabrina both looked appalled. If one ran one way and one the other, Bembo didn’t know what he’d do. Calling on people to help was about as likely to get them to help the fugitives as to help him: he knew his countrymen and how they felt about constables only too well. If they’d felt differently, Algarve wouldn’t have needed so many constables.

But then the man and woman didn’t run. Bembo smacked the club into the palm of his left hand. “Come on,” he growled. They came. They came sullenly, but they came.

Before one of them could decide to make a break, Bembo spotted another constable and waved him over. “What’s going on?” asked the newcomer, a burly fellow named Oraste.

“Curse me if I know,” Bembo told him. “He says he was just letting his hand get happy, you know what I mean? She says he tried to steal her pouch.”

Oraste eyed Gabrina. He rocked his hips forward and back; he must have liked what he saw. Gabrina noticed, too, and let her tongue slide along the edge of her lower lip. When Oraste inspected Balozio, he might have been looking at a pile of dog turds on the street. “I’ve never seen a blondie yet who wouldn’t steal whenever he got the chance,” he declared.

Balozio turned pale. Since he was already very fair, he ended up looking downright ghostly. “Now see here,” he said. “I’m an honest man. I’ve always been an honest man, and I’ve always been a loyal man.” He was trying to bluster, and not doing a good job of it—he sounded more frightened than arrogant. After a moment, he added, “I can’t help the way I look. It’s how I was born.”

Gabrina contrived to brush against Oraste. “I still say he looks like a Jelgavan spy,” she murmured in tones that shouldn’t have been heard outside a bedchamber.

Balozio was too upset to notice the byplay. He snarled, “I say you look like a case of the clap on the hoof.”

“Shut up, Kaunian,” Oraste said in a deadly voice. He might have modeled himself after an Algarvian warrior chief in one of those popular historical romances; Bembo thought he read them, too.

Oraste looked about to lay into Balozio with his club. “Have a care,” Bembo muttered behind his hand. “He might be a rich Kaunian.” It didn’t seem likely, not from the blond man’s clothes, but stranger things had happened. Oraste scowled, but desisted.

When they went upstairs and into the station, Sergeant Pesaro set down the plum tart he’d been eating; a couple of flaky crumbs clung to the tuft of hair under his lower lip. “What’s all this?” he rumbled.

Everyone started speaking… shouting… screaming at once, with increasingly frantic gesticulations to accompany the increasingly loud talk. Quite suddenly, Balozio ended up on the floor. Bembo didn’t see how it happened; he’d been nose to nose with Gabrina, exchanging uncompliments.

Like most Algarvians, Pesaro was adept at following several different threads at once. “Enough,” he said after watching and listening to the show for a while. “Bembo, you take this lug”—he pointed at Balozio—“down to the recording section. If he’s tried stealing before, we’ll drop him in a cell and charge him. If he hasn’t, I guess he can go. Oraste, you handle the wench. Same deal: you find out she tries getting customers in trouble, we jug her. Otherwise, kick her tail back out on the street.”

Bembo thought Gabrina would start screeching at Pesaro for implying she had customers. But she was shrewder than that: she sent another smile of invitation toward Oraste, who looked as if he’d like handling her just fine. Bembo got the idea her records wouldn’t be searched so closely as, in a little while, her person would.

Resignedly, Bembo turned to Balozio, who had a bruise on his cheek the constable didn’t remember. “Come on, pal, let’s find out about you,” Bembo said.

Balozio seemed to know his way to the recording station, which Bembo found interesting in a man who’d loudly proclaimed his honesty. The constable leered at Saffa. The sketch artist bit the thumb at him, as Gabrina had at Balozio, but then she winked. Was she teasing him to encourage him, or to drive him mad? Probably to drive him mad.

A bored-looking clerk took Balozio’s name and his thumbprint. He mumbled a charm. One of the many file drawers in back of him came open. He nodded to Bembo. “There’s a thumbprint in there similar to his, all right.” Still bored, he went back and got the file with the thumbprint in it. When he opened it, Bembo recognized one of Saffa’s sketches. “Let’s see,” the clerk said, flipping sheets. “Fine for cheating a courtesan of her fee, petty theft, petty theft again, charged with stealing a pouch, but that wasn’t proved.”

“Of course it wasn’t proved,” Balozio exclaimed. “I didn’t do it.” He spread his hands in despairing appeal. “I’m a blond, and they still couldn’t convict me. I must have been innocent, right?”

“It’s close enough,” Bembo said to the clerk. “Thanks. We’ll pack him away for a while. Getting a Kaunian off the streets sounds good to me.”

“I don’t even speak Kaunian!” Balozio said.

The clerk ignored him, except to put his file back in its proper drawer. Bembo took Balozio by the arm. “Come on, pal. Come quiet, and you’ll just get packed away. If you don’t—” Head hanging miserably, Balozio went with him.

Cornelu drank the bitter wine of exile. He ate the hard bread of the man cast from his home. The metaphor, he knew, was only a metaphor.

The bread the Lagoans fed him was no harder than what he’d been used to eating in Sibiu. Now that Lagoas was at war with Algarve, wine had grown hard to come by, but he found nothing wrong with Lagoan ales and lagers, stouts and porters.

However well they fed him, though, an exile he remained. The Algarvian banner, green and white and red, flew above Tirgoviste and the other cities of Sibiu. King Burebistu was a captive, seized in his own palace before he could flee. And Costache, Cornelu’s wife, was a captive, too. By now, he might well have a son or daughter. He did not know. He could not know. He did know Algarvians. They’d be sniffing around Costache like dogs around a bitch in heat.

His hands folded into fists as he sat on his hard cot in one of the barracks halls the Lagoans had given to the forlorn few soldiers and sailors who’d got out of Sibiu: the only free Sibians left. He cursed the Algarvians who occupied his kingdom. He cursed them twice, for being there and for being clever enough to figure out a way to get there that no one in the island kingdom had foreseen.

A Lagoan officer came into the barracks. Cornelu and his fellow exiles looked up from whatever dullnesses occupied them. Cornelu had never been enormously fond of Lagoans. As far as he was concerned, the only reason they’d ever got ahead of Sibiu in trade and war was that they had a larger kingdom.

And now that larger kingdom remained free, while Sibiu lay captive and Algarvian soldiers—or so he feared, at any rate—accosted his wife. That gave him another reason to resent Lagoans: they did not understand what he was going through. Oh, they’d taken him in, they’d fed him, they’d housed him, they’d even promised to use his leviathan and him in the fight against Algarve they now—belatedly—joined. But they did not understand. With gloomy Sibian pride, he was sure of it.

The officer, who wore the grayish green of the Lagoan navy, came toward Cornelu. His stride was easy, loose, confident: the stride of a man whose own king ruled his kingdom and was likely to keep on ruling it. That stride and the thoughtlessly cheerful smile on his face made Cornelu dislike him on sight.

“Good day, Commander, and how are you?” the Lagoan asked in what he no doubt fondly imagined to be Cornelu’s language. To Cornelu, it sounded more like Algarvian, and bad Algarvian at that.

Blithely oblivious, the fellow went on, “I am Lieutenant Ramalho. I hope you are not busy now?”

Slowly, Cornelu got to his feet. He was glad to find himself a couple of inches taller than Ramalho. “I do not know,” he said. “There are, after all, so many important things for me to do right now.”

Ramalho laughed a gay laugh, as if Cornelu had been jocular rather than icily sardonic. Maybe the Lagoan gave him the benefit of the doubt, which was a mistake. Maybe, too, Ramalho couldn’t tell the difference. Still chuckling, the fellow said, “If you are not too busy, will you come with me?”

“Why? Where will we go?” Cornelu kept his words slow and simple, as if speaking to an idiot child. Even Lagoans who thought they spoke his language made heavy going of it. As for him, he despised their tongue, with its nasal vowels and sneezy consonants, with its hordes of words pillaged from Kaunian, Kuusaman, and every other language under the sun. How even people born speaking it figured out what they were going to say was beyond him.

“Well, you’ll know more about that when we get there, won’t you?” Ramalho said, cheerful still. “Come along.” He turned away, certain Cornelu would follow—as indeed he did. He and his fellow Sibian exiles were tools in the Lagoans’ hands—useful tools, to be employed with some care, but tools nonetheless.

He blinked against watery sunshine when he went outside. He also winced at the racket; whatever else the naval half of Setubal harbor was, it was a noisy place. Iron and steel clanged against each other. Sailors and stevedores and teamsters and mages shouted in their incomprehensible language. Every now and then, Cornelu caught a word close enough to its Sibian equivalent for him to recognize it. Those few words made him lonelier than ever; it was as if they were exiles, too.

“Do we go to the leviathan pens?” Cornelu asked. “I should see Eforiel.” He did not want the leviathan to think he’d abandoned her. He counted her a friend—almost the only friend he had here—and did not want to worry her or make her sad.

“Not far from them,” Ramalho answered. He pointed toward a couple of low, white-painted buildings set a little way back from the pens. “We go there.”

“And what do we do there?” Cornelu inquired. All Ramalho did was laugh again, as if at another joke. Cornelu gritted his teeth. He wondered if he should have surrendered to the Algarvians. He’d be with Costache now—if Mezentio’s men didn’t fling him in a captives’ camp. He sighed. He’d done this. He had to live with it.

Gulls, some with white heads, some with dark, rose in angry, skrawking clouds as he and Ramalho drew near. “Miserable beggars,” Ramalho said, his tone halfway between annoyance and affection. “If we fed them, they would love us instead of making such a fuss.”

Cornelu shrugged. The Lagoans fed him. In their offhand way, they tried to be kind to him. He recognized as much. Even so, he could not love them. Ramalho chattered on. If he had any notion what his companion was thinking, he gave no sign of it.

“Well, here we are,” the Lagoan lieutenant said gaily as he led Cornelu up a short wooden staircase and opened the door at the top, standing aside so Cornelu could precede him. Cornelu’s shoulders went back and then forward in a silent sigh. He wondered how, if Lagoas had men like this, Sibiu had ever come out on the short end of their naval wars in centuries past.

When he got a look at the men who stood to greet him, he reluctantly stopped wondering. Here, by all appearances, were Lagoan naval officers who might have stepped from the pages of a Sibian romance: arrogant, aye, but with solid ability underlying the arrogance. “Commander Cornelu,” one of them said, and then went on in his own language: “You speak Lagoan?”

Cornelu understood the question, and could answer “No” in Lagoan—one of the few polite expressions out of the handful of words and phrases he’d picked up.

“Right.” The Lagoan officer spoke good Algarvian, and didn’t try to turn it into Sibian, as Ramalho ineptly kept doing. “We can get along in this tongue, I expect.” He waited for Cornelu to nod, then continued, “I am Commodore Ribeiro; my colleague here is Captain Ebastiao.” After handclasps, the commodore suddenly seemed to remember Ramalho was there. “Run along, Lieutenant,” he said, and Ramalho disappeared.

Ebastiao also handled himself well in Algarvian, saying, “That’s a fine leviathan you rode here. You Sibs have always been good at getting the most out of those beasts.”

“For this I thank you.” Cornelu stiffly inclined his head. “And this is why I have been summoned here, this matter of leviathans?” He realized he was speaking Sibian himself, and started to translate into the language the Lagoan officers had shown they knew.

Commodore Ribeiro made a chopping gesture. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I expect Ebastiao and I can follow your jargon well enough, even if we wouldn’t care to try wrapping our tongues around it.” He poked the other Lagoan officer in the ribs with an elbow. “Eh, Ebastiao?”

“I expect so, sir,” Ebastiao said, nodding. “And if we don’t know what the commander is talking about, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, either, eh?” He had narrow, slanted eyes; they would have been perfect Kuusaman eyes had they been dark rather than gray. The lid to one of them dipped in an unmistakable wink aimed Cornelu’s way.

Cornelu didn’t know how to respond to that. The Sibian navy enforced almost as much distance between ranks as did those of Valmiera and Jelgava. Cornelu tried to imagine Commodore Delfinu winking at him. He shook his head. Inconceivable. He stood still, waiting to see what the Lagoans would do next. You couldn’t tell ahead of time with Lagoans. That was part of what made them dangerous.

Ebastiao said, “What we have in mind for you, Commander, is working with our leviathan riders, teaching them some of your tricks—bringing them up to speed generally, you might say—and then commencing patrols out from our shores and as close to Sibiu as proves practicable.”

“That’s right.” Ribeiro nodded. “We don’t relish the notion of being taken by surprise, as your kingdom was. We shall have leviathans patrolling as far forward as possible, as Ebastiao told you—we shall do our best to equip the riders with crystals, that they may expeditiously report what they see. We shall have the navy moving along the ley lines. We shall also put yachts to see, to peer in between the lines, so to speak.”

“I doubt you will need them,” Cornelu said bitterly. “Some tricks work only once. This one worked on us.”

“Better to have and not need than to need and not have,” Ribeiro replied. “And we shall have long-distance dowsers out along the coasts—as your kingdom should have done, if I may speak frankly without giving offense.”

“Looking back, you are right,” Cornelu said. “But who could have thought ahead of time that even Algarvians would be mad enough to try such a stunt? Had it failed—” He scowled. It had not failed.

“Let’s go back to your place in this,” Ebastiao said. Commodore Ribeiro looked at the broad picture. His subordinate dealt with details. In that, the Lagoan navy operated like its Sibian counterpart—no, as its Sibian counterpart had done. Ebastiao went on, “You will train our men up to your standards. You will, as circumstances permit, draft a manual of training techniques so others may use them. And you will—you most assuredly will—patrol and, again as circumstances permit, take the war to the foe in and around Sibian waters. Will that put enough on your plate to keep you hopping?”

“Aye,” Cornelu said hastily. He was indeed a tool to the Lagoans. But, at last, they were seeing he could be a sharp one.

Ealstan and Sidroc had a day free from school. They and some of their classmates were kicking a ball around in a park not far from Ealstan’s home, along with a few boys—some older, some younger—they’d met there. It wasn’t really a game—how could it be, with no goals, no nets, no properly marked pitch? They were just running and shouting and having as good a time as they could in occupied Gromheort.

It had rained the night before. Mud splashed up from under Ealstan’s shoes as he sprinted toward the beat-up old ball. He and his cousin would come home filthy. His mother would shout at them. He knew that, somewhere in the back of his mind, and was vaguely sorry about it—but not enough to stop running.

Here came Sidroc, too, so intent on the ball that he didn’t notice Ealstan. Joy burst through Ealstan like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. He lowered his shoulder and knocked his cousin sprawling. Sidroc went rolling through the muck. With a wild shout of triumph, Ealstan booted the ball toward a little grove of carob trees. The pack of boys dashed after it.

“Curse you, Ealstan!” Sidroc shouted, spitting mud out of his mouth. He scrambled to his feet.

“Powers below eat you!” Ealstan called back over his shoulder. “I got you fair and square.”

Three strides later, somebody—he never saw who—got him fair and square. He was briefly airborne, like a dragon taking wing. Unlike a dragon taking wing, he didn’t stay airborne. He landed on his belly and skidded along the muddy ground for a good ten feet. His mother would yell, all right—the front of his tunic, he discovered as he got up, was nothing but brown and green. It had started out grayish blue.

He charged after the ball, which had gone its own merry way while he was down. As he ran, he brushed mud from his tunic—and from his arms. He was as grimy as some of the ragged men who stood around watching the boys at their sport.

Before the war, Gromheort had been a quietly prosperous town. Oh, it had some derelicts; Ealstan’s father said there was no place in the world that didn’t have some derelicts, which made sense to Ealstan. Now, though, with so many homes and shops destroyed, with so many former soldiers around whom the occupying authorities hadn’t bothered formally capturing, Gromheort seemed full of men—and some women, too—living as they could, cadging what they could, sleeping where they could.

One of them, a scrawny fellow with an unkempt beard who wore a tunic much too small, started to wave when Ealstan ran past. Ealstan saw him only from the corner of his eye. The ragged men often begged for coins. If he happened to have any, he sometimes gave them out. When he did, he thought of Leofsig, who, in the captives’ camp, couldn’t get even that much help. Today, though, Ealstan had left his belt pouch at home; kicking a ball around was as good a way to lose a pouch as any he could think of offhand.

Then the beggar who’d waved called his name.

Ealstan stopped dead. Sidroc, who’d been about to hit him from the side, skidded past and nearly went down in the mud again. Ealstan didn’t even notice his cousin had almost clipped him. He trotted out of the game, staring at the man he’d taken for a derelict.

“Leof—” he began.

“Don’t say it,” his brother cautioned. He coughed a couple of times before continuing. “I’m not exactly here on official business, you know.”

He hadn’t been released, then, as Ealstan had guessed. He’d escaped. The pride Ealstan felt for his brother swelled enormously. “How did you—?”

Leofsig cut him off again. “Don’t ask stupid questions. And speaking of stupid questions—” He pointed with his chin. Sidroc was coming up.

“Found your own level?” Ealstan’s cousin asked with a hard, sour laugh. “Beggars now? It’ll probably be Kaunians next.”

“I should have wrung your neck years ago,” Leofsig said evenly. “Are you trying to show me it’s not too late?”

Sidroc started to get angry. Then, far more slowly than Ealstan had, he recognized Leofsig. “I thought you were in a camp,” he blurted.

“So did the fornicating redheads,” Leofsig said. “And don’t talk about Kaunians like that. You drip ignorance.”

Sidroc rolled his eyes. “You sound like Ealstan.”

“Do I?” Leofsig glanced at his younger brother. “Are you growing up? Maybe you are. Here’s hoping, anyhow.”

“We’ve got to get you home,” Ealstan said.

“I didn’t want to go straight there—didn’t know how risky it was.” Leofsig’s face took on a look of bleak, cold calculation: the look of the hunted. “The Algarvians haven’t been paying you any special attention?” He waited for both Ealstan and Sidroc to shake their heads before going on. “All right, we’ll try it. Ealstan, you run ahead. Let them know I’m on the way. Sidroc, you come along with me. Keep me company. It’s been a while.”

Ealstan ran like the wind. He’d never run so hard after a ball, not in all his born days. A couple of Algarvian soldiers gave him fishy looks, but he was young enough to look like someone running for the fun of it, not someone running because he’d just done something nasty to one of their pals. One of the Algarvians shrugged, the other made a mildly disparaging gesture, and they walked on.

He kept running. He pounded on the front door to his house. When his sister unbarred it, alarm filled her face. “Ealstan! You’re filthy!” she exclaimed. “And have you gone crazy? Mother and I thought you were a squad of redheads, come to tear the place apart or worse.”

“They’d better not,” Ealstan panted. All at once, how hard he’d run caught up with him. He pushed past Conberge into the short front hall, closed the door behind him, and barred it again. When his sister began to give him more of a hard time about the way he looked, he said, “Shut up.” That made her start to shout; he wasn’t supposed to speak to her so. He knew how to make her stop, though: “Leofsig is on the way home. He’s coming with Sidroc. He’ll be here in about five minutes.”

Conberge went on for another couple of words before she really heard that. Then she hugged him, regardless of how grubby he was. “Did the Algarvians let him go?” she asked. “Why didn’t they tell us if they let him go?”

“Because they’re Algarvians,” Ealstan answered. “And because they didn’t let him go. But he’ll be here any minute, all the same.”

His sister understood at once what he was saying. “He’ll have to hide, won’t he?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “You’d better tell Mother. She’ll know what to do.”

“Of course she will.” Ealstan was just young enough to say that without sounding sardonic. “Is she in the kitchen?” Conberge nodded. She stayed by the door, ready to slam it shut the instant Leofsig crossed the threshold.

When Ealstan burst into the kitchen, his mother looked up from the garlic cloves she was mincing. Her look was much more ominous than the one the Algarvian soldiers had turned on him. “What happened to you?” Elfryth demanded in tones that said he had no possible answer.

He found one anyhow: “Leofsig’s right behind me. He’s coming with Sidroc.”

“Powers above!” his mother said softly. Unlike Conberge, she didn’t think for an instant that the Algarvians had released Leofsig. In tones suddenly brisk and practical, she went on, “You had better go tell your father. He’s casting accounts for Womer—you know, the linen merchant on the Street of the Green Unicorn. Go tell him right now. No—change your tunic first. Then go. You’ll look like a proper human being, so you won’t frighten Womer half to death.”

“Why do I care about frightening Womer?” Ealstan rather liked the idea.

Elfryth looked at him as if he were five years old and none too bright. “We don’t want to draw anyone’s notice to us, not now, not for anything,” she said. “Now go get your father. He’ll know which redheads’ palms we’ll have to grease to stay out of trouble.”

By the time Ealstan had on a clean tunic, Conberge was embracing Leofsig in the front hall. She even hugged Sidroc, and her dealings with her cousin were edgy at best. Ealstan squeezed past them all and out the door. As he started away, he was glad to hear someone bar it behind him.

The Street of the Green Unicorn wasn’t far from Count Brorda’s battered keep. Most of Ealstan’s father’s clients came from the upper crust of Gromheort. Hestan was best at what he did; no wonder he dealt with folk who were best at what they did.

Womer’s secretary was a big, scarred man who looked as if he hated everything and everybody. But when Ealstan said whose son he was and added, “My mother’s been taken ill, sir,” the secretary led him back to the large ledgers his father was poring over with the linen merchant.

Hestan looked up from the books. “Ealstan!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Mother’s sick, sir,” Ealstan said, as he had to Womer’s secretary. “She wants you to come home.”

What his father’s face showed was terror. Ealstan, fortunately, didn’t quite recognize it. Hestan sprang to his feet. “Your pardon, sir, I pray you,” he said to Womer. “I’ll be back as soon as I may.”

“Go on, go on.” Womer made as if to shove him out the door. “I hope everything turns out well for you.”

Once they were on the street, Ealstan said, “Mother’s not really ill, sir.” Hestan seized his arm. He thought he was about to get a very public thrashing. But, again, he knew the charm to get himself out of it: “My brother’s come home.”

His father let him go as quickly and abruptly as he’d grabbed him. Hestan whistled softly, then ruffled Ealstan’s sweaty hair, something he hadn’t done since Ealstan was much smaller. “You did well not to say that in Womer’s hearing,” he admitted. “How is he?”

“Thin. Hungry. Dirty the way you are when you haven’t washed for weeks,” Ealstan said, and then, “But he’s here.”

“Aye.” Hestan’s gaze went far away. “And now I have to figure out how he can stay here without hiding under the bed for the rest of his days.” He plucked at his beard. “It shouldn’t be too hard. Algarvians are fond of cash. The records will have to read that he’s been here with us since before Mezentio’s men took the city. I know which redhead sergeant handles those lists.”

Pride filled Ealstan’s voice: “Mother said you’d be able to handle it.” He was proud of both his parents—of his father for knowing what he knew and of his mother for knowing his father would know it.

Hestan set a hand on his shoulder. “If it has to do with money and papers, I can handle it.” The hand tightened. “The trick is to use money and papers well enough to keep Algarvian soldiers with sticks from coming after us. I can’t do anything about redheads with sticks.” He sighed. “The way it worked out, no one in Forthweg could do anything about redheads with sticks.”

Pekka enjoyed the ley-line caravan journey up to Yliharma, the capital of Kuusamo. She felt a little guilty about saddling Leino with Uto while she was gone, but he’d made craft-related trips before—and Elimaki was next door to lend a hand with the chaos elemental inadequately disguised as a small boy.

A steward came into the car with a tray of pickled herring, smoked salmon, and meat-stuffed rolls. On Kuusaman caravans, unlike those of, say, mercenary Lagoas, meals came with the fare. Pekka took a roll and some herring. Another steward followed the first with a tray of drinks. Pekka chose hot ale, though a stove at each end of the car kept it comfortably warm.

Outside, snow blanketed the Vaattojarvi Hills, the low range that ran across most of Kuusamo from east to west. North of those hills, the climate was less rugged. When Kajaani had blizzards, Yliharma had snowstorms. When Kajaani had snowstorms, Yliharma had flurries, or else freezing rain. When Kajaani had freezing rain, the rain around Yliharma didn’t freeze. When Kajaani had ordinary rain, Yliharma had sunshine… every once in a while.

Some of the trees in the forests north of the Vaattojarvi Hills were oaks and maples, bare-branched in winter. The rest were the pines and firs and spruces that dominated the woods farther south. Once, Pekka thought she saw a red fox trotting over the crusted snow, but the caravan swept past before she could be sure.

She got into Yliharma around lamplighting time—an hour that varied through the year and that, in winter, came later in the capital than down in Kajaani, though it did not come very late in any part of Kuusamo. Steep-roofed buildings stood black against the sky. Steep roofs were Kuusamo and Unkerlant’s contribution to the world’s architecture, as surely as columns were the Kaunian contribution and extravagant detailing the Algarvian.

When the caravan sighed to a stop in the station—which also had a steep roof—Pekka threw on her heavy cloak and a rabbit-fur hat with earflaps. She pulled a pair of carpetbags from the rack above the seats and, thus burdened, walked up the aisle to the door near the forward stove. A square stone block not much different from the ones riders had used to mount horses in the days before stirrups helped her dismount from the car now.

“Mistress Pekka!” Among the folk waiting on the platform to meet and greet arrivals was a man calling her name. She had expected to be met and greeted. But when she saw who was waving to her, her eyes widened. She hadn’t expected this man to do the job himself.

“Master Siuntio!” she called. She couldn’t wave, not burdened as she was. She couldn’t bow, either, which was what she really wanted to do. Siuntio had headed the theoretical-sorcery faculty at the Princely University of Yliharma for more than twenty years. Calling him a first-rank mage was an understatement on the order of calling the heart of the sun warm. Had scholars won prizes like athletes, he would have had a roomful. And he had come to meet her at the station? “Master, you honor me beyond my worth,” she said as she came up to him.

“Pekka, I’m going to tell you a sorcerous secret: a lot of the really good ones haven’t the faintest notion of what they’re worth,” Siuntio answered. He was a stooped, graying man only a couple of inches taller than Pekka, who was herself short even by Kuusaman standards. He looked like an apothecary on the point of retirement. Looks deceived, as they often did. He reached out. “Here, give me one of those bags.”

Pekka did, the lighter one. She would have felt less strange, less constrained, with one of the Seven Princes carrying her carpetbag. They hadn’t earned their rank; they’d just been born into it. Siuntio came honestly by every speck of the acclaim he’d gained through the years.

He seemed an ordinary enough man on the platform, though, using her bag to fend off other people and, once or twice, to help clear a path through them. He cursed when someone trod on his toes, and got cursed when he trod on someone else’s. Pekka would have reckoned getting her toes stepped on by the greatest theoretical sorcerer of his generation a privilege, but not everybody shared her knowledge or her point of view.

“Here we are,” he said when they reached his carriage. “I’ll take you over to the Principality. We’ve got you booked there. I hope that’s all right?” He cocked his head to one side and gave her an anxious look.

“I—think so,” Pekka said faintly. When kings and their ministers visited Yliharma, they stayed at the Principality. Kuusamo did not have another hostel to compare to it; every third romance set a banquet scene there—and a spicy scene in one of the famous bedchambers.

“Well, fine, then.” Siuntio put the bag he was carrying into the carriage, then took the other one from Pekka and set it alongside. He handed her up on to the seat, unhitched the horse, went around to the other side of the carriage, took up the reins, and began to drive. He could readily have afforded a coachman, but didn’t bother. As the carriage started to roll, he said, “You won’t be the only one at the Principality, you know. Several others have come in from the provinces. It should be an interesting gathering in the Ahvenanmaa Room tomorrow midmorning, don’t you think?”

“Should it?” Pekka plucked up her courage and said, “Master Siuntio, I’m not precisely sure why I was asked up to Yliharma.”

“Is that a fact?” Siuntio chuckled, as if she’d said something funny. Had most people done that, she would have got angry. Siuntio she granted the benefit of the doubt. He went on, “It has to do with the business Prince Joroinen asked you not to put in the journals any more. From the bits and pieces you have published, you may be closer to the bottom of things than any of us.”

“That?” Pekka gaped. “I’ve been doing that for my own amusement, nothing more. I don’t know if it will ever have any use.”

“As a matter of fact, neither do I,” Siuntio said. “But it may, Mistress Pekka; it may. You have seen deeper into it than most, as I told you. Others, though, may have had a wider vision.” Before Pekka could say anything to that, Siuntio pulled back on the reins and the horse stopped. “Here we are. You see, it wasn’t far. Go right on in. Shall I carry that bag for you?”

“Please don’t bother. I can manage.” Pekka jumped down and took both carpetbags.

Siuntio beamed. “I’ll see you at midmorning, then. The Ahvenanmaa Room, remember.” He clucked to the horse and nicked the reins. The carriage rattled off, leaving narrow wheel tracks in the slush on the street.

Still dazed, Pekka went into the Principality. By the way the staff fawned on her, she might have been Swemmel of Unkerlant, with the power and the will to take their heads if they displeased her in the slightest. The chambers to which they led her could not have displeased Swemmel or anyone else; they were about the size of her house, and ever so much more luxuriously appointed. She ordered mutton and kale and parsnip fritters from the menu by the enormous bed. The supper came up by dumbwaiter with almost magical speed. It was almost magically good, too.

And the bed, besides being enormous, was almost magically soft. When Pekka lay down on it, she knew a moment’s regret that Leino couldn’t have come along to enjoy it with her and help her enjoy it more. But it was only a moment’s regret. Though she’d dozed a little on the journey up from Kajaani, travel remained wearing. She yawned once, twice, and then slept soundly till morning.

Her suite had an attached steam room and cold plunge. She was still toweling her hair dry when she sent down a breakfast order. The fat smoked herrings and mashed turnips came up almost before she could blink. By the time she’d got outside them and some hot tea, she felt ready to go looking for the Ahvenanmaa Room.

When she got down to the lobby, she almost bumped into Siuntio. He was talking with another theoretical sorcerer, a man of her own generation named Piilis. After the greetings, Piilis said, “Everyone who’s anyone in our business is here today. I just left Master Alkio and Mistress Raahe in the hostel’s cafe.”

“Master Ilmarinen will be here, too,” Siuntio said, “or I’ll know the reason why. And that should be the lot of us.”

Pekka felt like a herring—not like a smoked one, but like a live one swimming in the company of a pod of leviathans. For some unfathomable reason, they seemed to think her a leviathan, too. Piilis pointed and said, “There go Raahe and Alkio. They must know where our room is.”

When Pekka and the other theoretical sorcerers walked into the room, they found Ilmarinen already there. He had close to Siuntio’s years, and stood second only to Siuntio in reputation—first, if you listened to him. Raahe and Alkio were both comfortably middle-aged; Raahe, Pekka thought, would have been a beauty in her younger days.

“Let us begin,” Siuntio said, and then, “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came…” The age-old ritual soothed Pekka, as it always did. When it was over, Siuntio went on, “All of us, in one way or another, have been seeking a unity below the Two Laws.”

Everyone nodded. Gruffly, Ilmarinen said, “Aye, we’ve been seeking it, all right. And if we find it, we’re all liable to end up wishing we hadn’t.”

Siuntio inclined his head in grave agreement. Raahe said, “But if someone else finds it, we shall all wish we had sought harder.” Siuntio also inclined his head to her. So did Ilmarinen, but his agreement seemed sour, not grave.

“All of you, I think, know more of this than I do,” Pekka said. “My approach has been purely theoretical, with no thought to consequences.”

“Which is, I daresay, why you have made such progress,” Siuntio said.

Ilmarinen snorted. “Who could have dreamt such innocence survived in this day and age?” he said. Piilis’s laugh was small and dry.

Alkio turned to Pekka. “Consider, Mistress,” he said. “The more we’ve learned of how the world works, the more effective our sorcery has become. If One is the foundation of the Two, will we not be able to attempt things never imagined before?”

“I suppose that may be so,” Pekka said. “I had not thought much about it, but I suppose it may be so.”

“If we can handle sorcerous energies at a level below the Two,” Ilmarinen said roughly, “don’t you think we’ll be able to make the biggest eggs look like glowworms alongside lightning bolts? I do, curse it, and I wish I didn’t.”

Pekka had not thought along those lines at all. She wished no one else had, either. But Ilmarinen was right. She saw that at once. Understanding the laws of sorcery did give control over them. And the theoretical sorcerer had been right before that, too. Pekka said, “I hope none of the kingdoms fighting the Derlavaian War is working on this.”

“So do we all, my dear,” Siuntio said slowly. “We hope Gyongyos is not working on it, either. We hope—but we do not know. That something is absent from the journals does not prove no one is examining it. And, before the war began, there were hints in the literature from Lagoas, from Algarve, and from Gyongyos. How seriously the sorcerers in those lands are following where those hints lead—again, we do not know.” His smile was sweet and sad. “I wish we did.”

“They must not get ahead of us!” Pekka exclaimed.

“That is why we are met here today,” Alkio said. “That is why we will go on meeting. That is why we will go on working, and sharing with one another what we know—eventually sharing it with more rnages, I suppose, as we progress, if we progress. But, for now, we are racing blindly. Lagoas and the others may be ahead of us, or they may not have started at all. We just have to keep running.”

Heads bobbed up and down around the table in the posh Ahvenanmaa Room. Pekka’s agreement was no less emphatic than anyone else’s.

Talsu and his regiment were back to slogging. He’d enjoyed Colonel Adomu’s brief tenure as regimental commander. The dashing young marquis had gained more ground during that brief tenure than the late Colonel Dzirnavu had managed in a much longer time. But Adomu’s dash had cost him, too; he was as dead as Dzirnavu.

Colonel Balozhu, the count who’d replaced Adomu, was not actively vile, as Dzirnavu had been. But he wasn’t aggressive, either, as Adomu had been. So far as Talsu could tell, Balozhu wasn’t much of anything. He would have made a perfect clerk, keeping track of boots and belts, tunics and trousers. As a regimental commander, he was hardly there at all.

“We are ordered to advance two miles today,” he would say at morning parade. “I am sure all of you will do your duty to King Donalitu and to the kingdom.” He didn’t sound sure. What he sounded was bored. And then he would return to his tent, and it would be up to the captains and sergeants to see to it that the regiment gained the required two miles. And sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn’t. The Algarvians had officers telling them what to do, too.

One evening, with both of them leaning back against tree trunks and gnawing on bread and smoked beef, Talsu said to Smilsu, “You ever get the feeling that the cursed redheads’ officers don’t give them as much trouble as ours give us?”

Smilsu looked around to see who else might be listening. Talsu had already done that, and hadn’t seen anyone. Maybe Smilsu thought he did, or maybe he felt cautious, for he answered, “I haven’t seen Colonel Balozhu giving us any trouble. Powers above, you hardly know he’s around.”

“Powers above is right. That’s trouble all by itself, isn’t it?” Talsu burst out. Maybe the beer he was drinking with his supper had gone to his head. “He’s supposed to be leading us against the enemy, not pretending he’s invisible.”

“Colonel Adomu led us against the enemy,” Smilsu said, still either cautious or contrary. “Are you going to complain about him, too?”

“Not a bit of it,” Talsu answered. “I wish we had more officers like him. I think the Algarvians do have more officers like him.”

Smilsu took a pull at his own beer. “Well, maybe they do. Vartu would say so, anyhow.” He chuckled. “Of course, Vartu was Colonel Dzirnavu’s body servant, so he’s not in the mood to be fair. But no matter what the redheads have, pal, we’re still the ones doing the advancing.”

“So we are, but we ought to be doing more of it,” Talsu said. “You can see the Algarvians don’t have anything more than skeleton forces facing us. We should be in front of Tricarico by now.” He shook his head. “That’s not right—we should be in Tricarico by now, and past it, too.”

“I’m so sorry, General Grand Duke Talsu, sir, my lord,” Smilsu said with a snort. “I didn’t know King Donalitu had set you in command of the fight against Algarve.”

“Oh, shut up.” Talsu’s voice was as sour as the beer he was drinking. “Maybe I will go looking for Vartu. You’re no cursed good, not when it comes to making sense you’re not.” He started to get to his feet.

“Sit tight, sit tight,” Smilsu said. “One thing you’ve got to know is that the redheads have some men who are really good with a stick lurking around here somewhere, waiting to see if they can put a beam through a fellow’s ear. You want to give them a clean blaze at you?”

“No, but I don’t want to hang around with a fool, either. It might be catching.” Despite his harsh words, Talsu didn’t get up.

And Smilsu didn’t get angry. He spat out a piece of gristle, then said, “And what if you’re right? What are we supposed to do then? There’s nothing we can do. If the Algarvians don’t get us, the dungeons back of the line will. We’re stuck in the middle. All we can do is hope we win in spite of ourselves.”

“We can hope the Algarvians kill all our nobles,” Talsu said savagely. “Then we’d be better off.”

“We’ve been round that barn before—and you want to be careful with what you say, and you want to be careful who you say it to.” Smilsu kept his own voice very low indeed. “Otherwise, you won’t be better off, no matter what happens to the rest of us. Do you hear what I’m telling you, my friend?”

“I hear you.” Talsu remained furious at the world in general and at the hidebound Jelgavan nobility in particular.

Because Smilsu kept his mouth shut, the Jelgavan nobility did not take their revenge. The world was another matter. Not ten minutes later, a cold, nasty rain started falling. A couple of weeks earlier in the season or a little higher in the foothills and it would have been snow. Even though Talsu had to make a wet, miserable bed, he didn’t loathe the rain so much as he might have. Like dust and smoke, it cut down the range at which beams were effective. He hoped all those clever Algarvian stick men came down with chest fever from staying out in the bad weather. He wouldn’t grieve a bit.

The Algarvians, unfortunately, found other ways to be troublesome than with sneaky stick men struggling not to sneeze. They started lobbing eggs in the direction of the Jelgavan encampment. They didn’t know exactly where King Donalitu’s men were resting, but they had a fair notion—fair enough to get Talsu and the other Jelgavan soldiers out of their blankets and digging holes in the rocky, muddy soil.

He cursed with every shovelful of dirt he flung aside. “Stinking redheads,” he muttered. “Won’t even let a man get a decent night’s sleep.” An egg burst close by. The flash illuminated the camp for a moment, as a lightning bolt would have done. The suddenly released energy also picked up earth and stones and flung them about. A good-sized rock hissed past, only a foot or two from Talsu’s head. He cursed again and dug harder.

Every so often through the long night, someone would shriek as he was wounded. The redheads weren’t tossing eggs in enormous numbers—this wasn’t anything like the enormous cataclysms of the Six Years’ War, where battlefields became scorched, cratered wastelands. But the eggs the Algarvians tossed did serve their purpose: they hurt a few Jelgavans and kept the rest from getting the sleep they needed. Had Talsu commanded the Algarvian forces, he would have pinned gold stars on the men tossing them.

At last, sullenly, the darkness lifted, though rain kept pouring down. It had put out all the cookfires during the night. Talsu breakfasted on cold, soggy porridge, on cold, greasy—almost slimy—sausage, and on beer that even insistent rain had trouble making any more watery than it already was. He enjoyed it about as much as he’d enjoyed trying to sleep in the wet hole he’d dug for himself.

Colonel Dzirnavu would have thrown a tantrum because the rain interfered with cooking his fancy breakfast. Colonel Adomu would have eaten what his men did and then led them in an attack on the egg-tossers that had harassed them in the night. Talsu didn’t know what Colonel Balozhu ate. Balozhu did appear at an hour earlier than Dzirnavu would have stirred abroad. He carried an umbrella and looked more like a schoolmaster than a noble who commanded a regiment.

“No point trying to move forward in this,” Balozhu said after peering in all directions. “You couldn’t hope to blaze a man till you got close enough to hit him over the head with your stick. We’ll keep scouts out ahead of us, maybe send forward a patrol, but as for the rest, I think we’ll sit tight till this finally decides to blow over.”

Talsu couldn’t argue with any of that, not even to himself—had he proposed to argue with the colonel and count, jumping off a cliff would have put him out of his misery faster and less messily. But, as he squelched off to stand against a tree, he remained vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe I’m tired, he thought, unbuttoning his fly. No doubt he was tired. Was he tired enough for his wits to be wandering? If he was, how could he tell?

He put the question to Smilsu when relieving his friend on sentry-go: “Isn’t the idea behind this war to stamp the cursed redheads into the dirt?”

“You’ve got that look in your eye again—or maybe it’s the rain.” Smilsu thought for a little while, then shrugged. “You really want to advance in this stuff?”

“It might catch the Algarvians by surprise,” Talsu said. He added what he thought the final convincer. “Colonel Adomu would have done it.”

Unconvinced, Smilsu said, “Aye, and look what it got him, too. Dead men don’t have a whole lot of fun.”

“We advanced more under Adomu than under Dzirnavu and Balozhu put together,” Talsu said.

Smilsu sent him a quizzical look. “You’re the one who wants the nobles dead, right? So why are you so cursed eager to fight their fight for ’em?”

Talsu hadn’t looked at it that way. It was his turn to stop and think. At last, he said, “Just because I can’t stand the nobles doesn’t mean I love the Algarvians. No good Kaunian should do that.”

“Tell it to Dzirnavu—but he got his, didn’t he?” Smilsu chuckled, then sobered. “The redheads don’t love us, either, not even a little they don’t.”

“Cursed robbers, cursed thieves, cursed bandits—as if what they love should matter to us.” Talsu grimaced. If Algarvians and what they loved and didn’t love hadn’t mattered to Jelgava, he wouldn’t have been out here in the foothills of the Bratanu Mountains with chilly rain dripping down the back of his neck.

Smilsu put it a slightly different way: “If one of those whoresons points his stick your way and blazes you down, it’ll matter a lot that he doesn’t love you.”

“Aye, aye, aye.” Talsu waved, yielding the point. “I still wish we were giving the redheads a good kick in the balls.” Smilsu started to say something; Talsu shook his head to show he wasn’t finished. “If we don’t, sooner or later they’ll give us one, and you can take that to the bank and turn it into goldpieces.”

“They’re busy,” Smilsu said. “They’ve got the Sibs and Forthwegians to hold down, they’re in a sea fight with Lagoas, and the Valmierans are trying to smash through their lines down south. With all that in their mess kit, they aren’t going to be bothering us any time soon.”

“There—you’ve gone and proved my point,” Talsu said. “If they can’t bother us, what better time to bother them?”

“Ahh, you bother me, so I’m going back to camp.” Off Smilsu went, dripping. Talsu stood in the warm glow surrounding any man who has won an argument. Then he wondered, What good did it do me? The glow faded.