Into the Darkness

13.

Talsu dug like a man possessed. Beside him, his friend Smilsu also made the dirt fly. A few men over, Vartu, the late Colonel Dzirnavu’s former servant, used his shovel with might and main. By the way they dug, all the men in the regiment might have suddenly imagined themselves turned into moles. All along the western foothills of the Bratanu Mountains, the Jelgavan army was digging in.

“So much for meeting Forthweg halfway across Algarve,” Talsu said, flinging a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder. “So much for taking Tricarico.” Another spadeful went. “So much for doing anything but waiting for the Algarvians to come and hit us.” Another spadeful.

Smilsu looked around to make sure no officers were within earshot. Then he said, “Powers above know I think our nobles are a pack of fools. This time, though, they may be right. What if the stinking redheads come and hit us the way they hit Valmiera? We’d better be ready for them, don’t you think?” Like Talsu, he kept digging as he spoke.

“How can they hit us the way they hit Valmiera?” Talsu demanded. He pointed back toward the east. “We’ve got the mountains to shield us, in case you didn’t notice. I’d like to see the Algarvians try and go through them in a hurry.”

Vartu put down his spade for a moment and rubbed his palms on his trousers. “That’s what the Valmierans said about their rough country, too,” he observed. “They were wrong. What makes you think you’re right?”

“More to the Bratanus than ‘rough country’,” Talsu answered. “How are they going to move fast through those passes?”

“I don’t know,” Vartu said. “I’d bet a good deal that our generals don’t know, either. What I wouldn’t care to bet is that the Algarvians don’t know.”

“They aren’t mages,” Talsu said, and then amended that: “They aren’t all mages, anyhow, any more than we are.” Now he looked around. “Even with the stupid nobles we’ve got commanding us, we’ve pushed them back till now. Why should things change?”

Smilsu gnawed at the rough skin by one fingernail. “They can aim their whole cursed army at us now, near enough. They beat Forthweg. They beat Sibiu. They just got done beating Valmiera and chasing all the Lagoans off the mainland of Derlavai. That leaves them—and us.”

“Hmm.” Talsu hadn’t looked at things from quite that angle. All at once, he started digging harder than ever. Smilsu laughed, took a swig of sour beer from the flask he wore on his hip, and also went back to digging.

If the Algarvians were about to fall on the Jelgavan army that had moved, however tentatively, into their territory, they gave no sign of it. Every now and then, a dragon would fly by from out of the west. No doubt the redhead aboard was looking down to see what the Jelgavans were up to. But no eggs fell on the trenches Talsu and his friends were digging. No kilted Algarvian troopers trilling out barbarous battle cries swarmed into the trenches, blazing or flinging little hand-tossed eggs or laying about them with knives. It was about as peaceful a war as Talsu could imagine.

Like any sensible soldier, he enjoyed that while it lasted. He still wondered how long it would last. That wasn’t up to him. And, very plainly, his superiors had decided it wasn’t up to them, either. That left it up to the Algarvians, a notion Talsu enjoyed rather less.

But the lull did have its advantages. Mail came up to the front line for the first time in weeks. Talsu got a package from his mother: socks and drawers she and his sister had knitted for him. He also got a letter from his father, urging him, in harsh, badly spelled sentences, to go forth and conquer Algarve singlehanded.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked his friends. “My old man didn’t fight in the last war. He doesn’t know what things are like.”

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if I were you,” Smilsu said. “They tell all sorts of lies to the people back home. You can’t blame the poor fools for believing some of them. During the last war, my mother told me, they were saying the Algarvians would slaughter everybody with blond hair if they won.”

“That’s pretty stupid, all right,” Talsu agreed. “I wonder what the Algarvians have to say about us.”

“Nothing good, that’s for cursed sure,” Smilsu said softly. “You ask me, though, it doesn’t much matter to the likes of us which side wins the war, as long as we don’t get blazed while it’s going on.”

Talsu looked around again, to make sure he was the only one who’d heard that. “And you say I’m careless about the way I talk,” he murmured. “Do you want to find out how dungeons work from the inside?”

“Not so you’d notice,” his friend answered. “But I don’t think anybody would turn me in for the sake of licking some noble’s backside.” His mouth twisted into what looked like a smile. “Of course, I could be wrong. In that case, I’d probably have to try and kill the bastard before the nobles’ watchdogs dragged me away.”

“How would you know who it was?” Talsu asked.

“I’d have a pretty good notion,” Smilsu said darkly. “Anyhow, I can think of a couple of people here who nobody would miss.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Talsu said, which made Smilsu laugh. Then Talsu looked back over his shoulder. He started whispering again, and urgently: “Here. Stuff one of the socks from my mother in it. An officer’s coming.”

Smilsu’s mouth had been open to say more. He shut it with a snap and, alarm on his face, also turned to get a look at the newcomer. After a moment, he relaxed, at least to a degree. “It’s not exactly an officer,” he said. “It’s only a mage.”

“Ah, you’re right,” Talsu said. Mages serving in the Jelgavan army wore officer’s uniform to show they had the authority to command ordinary soldiers, but did not wear officer’s badges, which would have shown they enjoyed that authority by right of birth. Instead, they used smaller, plainer badges that put them midway between true—noble—officers and the common herd of soldiers. Their authority was not a birthright, but rather a privilege granted by King Donalitu.

Some sorcerers Talsu had seen enjoyed aping the arrogance of the nobility. Others realized they were just jumped-up commoners, and didn’t take themselves so seriously. This mage seemed a chipper enough fellow. As he drew near, he said, “You get on with your work, fellows, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll all stay happy.”

Even Smilsu couldn’t find anything to complain about there. “Not so bad,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, and went back to digging.

Grinning, the mage went on, “Of course, we’d all be happier still if the war weren’t on and we were sitting in a tavern drinking ale or wine laced with orange juice, but there’s cursed little we can do about that, eh?”

“Powers above,” Talsu whispered in astonishment. “He’d better be careful, or people will think he’s a human being.”

“What have they sent you up to the front for, sir?” Vartu asked the mage. By his tone, he wondered if the mage had been forced to come up as a punishment.

If the sorcerer noticed that, he gave no sign, answering, “I’m going to see what I can do to make it harder for the Algarvians to detect exactly where these forward positions are. Can’t promise it’ll do any enormous amount of good, because the redheads will have mages, too, and what one mage can do, another can undo, but it may help some. The generals back on the other side of the mountains think so, anyhow.”

“Fat lot of good magecraft did Valmiera,” Smilsu said, but the soldierly gripe came out sounding halfhearted: this was more, and friendlier, attention than the front-line soldiers had got up till now from the high nobles who led them.

And Talsu answered, “That’s the point, I think. The king’s got to be scared green that what happened to Valmiera will happen to us, too. If he can find anything that’ll keep Algarve from riding roughshod over us, looks like he’s going to try it.”

“Hitting the redheads harder from the start would have been nice, but you’ve been complaining about that for months,” Smilsu said. He pointed at the mage with his short-handled spade. “What’s he doing out there?”

“Working magic, I expect,” Talsu said. “That’s what they pay him for, anyhow.” Smilsu snorted and flipped dirt on to his boots.

Out in front of the trench line, the mage paced back and forth. Had the Algarvians been in an aggressive mood, they would have had their line up close to that of the Jelgavans, and could easily have blazed the blond sorcerer. But, for the time being, King Mezentio’s men were busy elsewhere, and seemed content to let the Jelgavans settle down in the foothills.

As the Jelgavan mage paced, he waved a large, fine opal that gleamed blue and green and red as the sun struck it at different angles. The charm he chanted was in a Kaunian dialect so archaic that Talsu, who had learned the classical tongue as part of what schooling he’d had, could make out only a few words. That impressed him: great virtue would surely fill such an ancient spell.

If it did, he couldn’t discern it. When the mage stopped chanting and returned the jewel to a trouser pocket, nothing seemed to have changed. Talsu still saw the rolling hills ahead of him, and out beyond them the plains of northern Algarve, the plains the Jelgavan army hadn’t quite reached.

He wasn’t the only one who saw them, and saw they remained as they had been. A soldier farther down the trench line called, “Begging your pardon, sir, but what did you just do?”

“Eh?” The sorcerer seemed worn, as his kind commonly did after working some considerable magic. Then he brightened. “Ah. Of course—you can’t see it from that side. Come out here and look at your position, those of you who care to.”

Looking at the trenches was easier and more enjoyable than digging them. Talsu scrambled up on to level ground. So did a good many of his comrades. He walked backwards toward the mage, staring at the entrenchments. They kept right on looking like entrenchments. He wondered whether the wizard was as smart as he thought he was.

Then Talsu’s backward peregrination carried him past the sorcerer. He and several other soldiers exclaimed, all more or less at the same time. He could still see the trenches he’d helped dig, but at the same time he also saw the ground undisturbed. He took another couple of steps away from the entrenchments, and they grew less distinct to his eye. He took a few more steps, and they almost vanished.

“There’s a clever device—a Kuusaman discovery, actually—called a half-silvered mirror,” the mage said. “If what’s in front of it is brighter than what’s in back, it reflects like any other mirror. But if what’s in back of it is brighter than what’s in front, it lets light through and turns into a window instead. This is sorcery on the same principle.”

Talsu said, “Pity we didn’t have something like this to protect us when we were moving forward against the Algarvians.”

“No one’s ever been able to make it a kinetic sorcery,” the mage said. Seeing that Talsu didn’t understand, he explained: “One that can move along with a party of soldiers. It’s better suited to static defense. Even here, it’s far from perfect. At too close an approach or at strong search sorcery, it fails. But it’s better than nothing.”

“Aye,” Talsu said. He walked back toward the entrenchments, which returned to clear view as he stepped within the inner limit of the spell. It was indeed better than nothing. It was certainly better than any protection he and his comrades had had up till now. More than anything else, that told him how worried King Donalitu and his counselors were.

On the mainland of Derlavai, spring was giving way to summer. In the country of the Ice People, winter reluctantly admitted spring might be coming. Such chill, gloomy weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. He’d managed to smuggle King Penda of Forthweg out of Yanina, but the only ship on which he’d been able to gain passage for them had been one sailing south across the Narrow Sea to Heshbon, the chief town—indeed, almost the only town—in the seaside stretch of the austral continent that Yanina controlled.

Here, Fernao was not Fernao. He styled himself Fernastro, and spoke Algarvian rather than Lagoan. Penda had shaved his beard and was going by the name of Olo, an Unkerlanter appellation. Forthwegian was close enough to the northeastern dialects of Unkerlanter to let him pass for one of King Swemmel’s subjects. Fernao had also worked small sorceries on them, so neither looked quite as he had in Yanina.

Penda had not proved a good traveling companion. Used to palaces, he found distinctly less than appealing the grimy hostel in Heshbon where he and Fernao lodged. “Swemmel’s dungeon would be more comfortable,” he grumbled.

Fernao answered in Forthwegian: “I am sure it could be arranged.”

The fugitive king shuddered. “Perhaps I was mistaken.” His belly rumbled, loudly enough that he couldn’t pretend Fernao hadn’t heard it. Instead, he sighed and said, “We may as well go downstairs and eat something, if the kitchen can turn out anything worth eating.”

“Or even if it can’t,” Fernao said.

The odds, he knew, were not much better than even money. Yaninans ran the hostel. They did their best to cook in the hearty style of their homeland, but what they had to work with was what the Ice People ate: camel meat, camel milk, camel blood, and tubers that tasted like paste. They came up with all manner of stews, but few of them, to Fernao’s mind, were hearty.

He ate, anyway, spooning up meat and boiled tubers, drinking a spirit the folk of Heshbon distilled from the tubers. It also tasted like paste, but kicked like a unicorn. He found he enjoyed most meals more with his tongue numbed.

As quickly as they could, he and Penda left the hostel and headed for the market square. “Maybe today we shall find a caravan faring east,” Penda said, as he did every day when they headed for the market square.

“Aye, maybe we shall,” Fernao answered absently. For one thing, he was tired of hearing Penda say that. For another, he was looking south, toward the Barrier Mountains. Whenever he was on the streets of Heshbon, he looked toward the mountains. Tall and jagged, they serrated the southern skyline. Snow and ice covered them from their peaks more than halfway down to the lower ground that ran toward the sea. Adventurers had died climbing those peaks. Others had pushed past them into the frigid interior of the austral continent. Some had escaped the Ice People and mountain apes and other, lesser, dangers and written books about what they’d found.

About half the people on the street were short, swarthy Yaninans, most of them with wool cloaks over their big-sleeved tunics and tights. The rest, except for a scattering of aliens like Fernao and Penda, were Ice People. They wore hooded robes of fur or woven camel hair that covered them from head to foot. Their beards, which they never trimmed, grew up to their eyes; their hairlines started less than an inch above their eyebrows. The women, unlike those of other races, had faces no less hairy than those of the men.

They never bathed. The climate gave them some excuse, but not, to Fernao’s mind, enough. Their stink filled the cold, crisp air, along with that of the camels they led. Those camels were as unlike those of Zuwayza as beasts sharing a name could be. They had two humps, not one, and thick coats of shaggy brown hair. Only their nasty tempers matched those of their desert cousins.

Ice People had nasty tempers, too. A woman cursed a camel in her own guttural language. Fernao had no idea what she was saying, but it sounded hot enough to melt half the ice on the Barrier Mountains. Penda stared at her. “Do you suppose they’re that hairy all over?” Before Fernao could reply, he went on, “Who would want one of them enough to try to find out?”

“I think they are,” Fernao told him. “And because they are, they’re all the go for a certain kind of customer, shall we say, at the very fanciest brothels in Priekule and Trapani and, I have to admit, in Setubal, too.”

Penda looked revolted. “I wish you had not told me that, sir mage.” Fernao hid a smile. By his standards, Forthweg was a provincial land. Compared to this miserable stretch of semifrozen ground, though, Penda’s kingdom suddenly looked a lot better.

Fernao sighed. “If it weren’t for the cinnabar here, the Ice People would be welcome to the whole miserable continent.”

“Were there no Derlavaians here, we should have had a much harder time escaping from Yanina,” Penda said.

“That is so.” Fernao admitted what he could scarcely deny. “Now, instead, we are having a hard time escaping from Heshbon.”

They strode into the market square. It was something like the lively one in the center of Patras, the capital of Yanina, but only something. As in much of Heshbon, camels remained the dominant theme. Ice People and Yaninans bartered flesh, milk, cheese, hair, the beasts themselves, and what they brought into Heshbon on their backs: furs and cinnabar, which came packed in camel-leather sacks.

Yaninans and Ice People dickered in different ways. Yaninans were, as usual, even more excitable, or more sincerely excitable, than Algarvians. They clapped their hands to their foreheads, rolled their eyes, jumped up and down, and often seemed on the point of suffering fits of apoplexy.

“Call this cinnabar?” one of them roared, pointing to a sack full of the crushed orange-red mineral.

“Aye,” answered the man of the Ice People with whom he was dealing. Every line of his body bespoke utter indifference to his opponent’s fury.

That only made the Yaninan more furious. “This is the worst cinnabar in the history of cinnabar!” he cried. “A dragon would flame better if you fed him beans and lit his farts than if you gave him this stuff.”

“Then don’t trade for it,” the man of the Ice People said.

“You are a thief! You are a robber!” the Yaninan shouted. The nomad in the long dirty robe just stood there, waiting for the allegedly civilized man from Derlavai to make his next offer. After the Yaninan calmed down enough to stop screeching for a moment, he did.

Penda said, “Most of the cinnabar the Yaninans buy here goes straight to Algarve.”

“I know,” Fernao said unhappily. Before the Six Years’ War, Algarve had held trading towns along the coast of the austral continent, to the east of Heshbon. Now those towns were in the hands of Lagoas or Valmiera (although, with Valmiera fallen to King Mezentio’s men, who could guess what would happen to the towns the Kaunian kingdom had controlled?). If Fernao and Penda could get to Mizpah, the closest Lagoan-ruled town, they would be safe.

If. The war on the mainland of Derlavai had disrupted caravan routes down here. Yanina remained formally at peace with Lagoas, but was so close to alliance with Algarve that she had all but cut off commerce with her larger neighbor’s foe.

But there stood a man of the Ice People with laden camels he was not unloading in the market square. Fernao and Penda went up to him. “Do you speak this language?” Fernao asked him in Algarvian.

“Aye,” the nomad answered. His dirty, hairy face was impossible to read.

“Do you travel?” Fernao asked, and the man of the Ice People nodded. “Do you travel east?” the Lagoan mage persisted. The nomad stood silent and motionless. Given the way things were in Heshbon these days, Fernao took that for affirmation. He said, “My king will pay well to see my friend and me installed in Mizpah.”

He did not say who his king was. If the man of the Ice People assumed he followed Mezentio, he was willing to let the fellow do that. After a moment’s thought, the fellow said, “The big talkers”—by which, Fernao realized, he meant the Yaninans—“will not make such a trip easy.”

“Can you not befool them?” Fernao asked, as if inviting the man of the Ice People to share a joke. “And is profit ever easy to come by?”

A light kindled in the nomad’s eyes. One of those questions, at least, had struck his fancy. He said, “I am Doeg, the son of Abishai, the son of Abiathar, the son of Chileab, the son of…” The genealogy continued for several more generations. Doeg finished, “My fetish animal is the ptarmigan. I do not slay it, I do not eat of it if slain by others, I do not allow those who travel with me to do it harm. If they do, I slay them to appease the bird’s spirit.”

Ignorant, superstitious savage, the mage thought. But that was beside the point now. He asked, “Do you tell me this because my friend and I are traveling with you?”

“If you wish it,” Doeg answered with a shrug. “If you pay enough to satisfy me. If you are ready to move before the sun moves far.”

They dickered for some time. Fernao did his best not to burst into Yaninan-style hysterics. That seemed to make a good impression on Doeg. Good impression or not, the nomad was an implacable bargainer. Fernao fretted; what the man of the Ice People wanted was about as much as he had, and Doeg seemed uninterested in promises of more gold and silver after reaching Mizpah. He saw only what lay right before him. “I am a mage,” Fernao said at last, an admission he had not wanted to make. “Bring your price down by a quarter and I will work for you on that journey.”

“You would anyway, if danger came,” Doeg said shrewdly. “But you may have some use, so let it be as you say. But be warned, man of Algarve”—a misapprehension Fernao did not correct—“your sort of sorcery may not work so well in this country as it does in your own.”

“It works here in Heshbon,” Fernao said.

“Heshbon is in my country. Heshbon is no longer of my country,” Doeg said. “So many Yaninans and other hairless folk”—his dark eyes swung to the clean-shaven Penda—“have come that its essence has changed. Away from the towns, the land is as it once was here. Sorcery is as it once was here. It does not look kindly on the ways of hairless ones.”

Fernao didn’t know how seriously to take that. It accorded with his own experience, but not with what some of the theoretical sorcerers of Lagoas and Kuusamo had been saying just before the war broke out. He shrugged. “I will do what I can, whatever it proves to be. And you will be seeking to evade the Yaninans, whose magic is not so different from mine.”

“This is true. This is good.” Doeg nodded. He thrust out his filthy hand. Fernao and, a moment later, Penda clasped it. The man of the Ice People nodded once more. “We have a bargain.”

Krasta was going from one shop on the Avenue of Equestrians to the next when the Algarvian army staged its triumphal procession through Priekule. That the procession could have anything to do with her had not crossed her mind. She was glad she had so many of the shops to herself, but annoyed that about every third one was closed.

She had just bought an amber brooch from a shop girl obsequious enough to suit even her and was coming out on to the sidewalk with the new bauble pinned to her tunic when a blast of martial music made her turn her head. Here came the Algarvians, the band at the head of the procession blaring away for all it was worth. The sun gleamed off their trumpets and the metal facings of their drums. Like a jackdaw, Krasta was fascinated with bright, shiny things. She started to stare because of the reflections from the instruments. She kept staring because of the soldiers who carried those instruments.

When she thought of Algarvians, the word that echoed in her mind was barbarians. She was a typical enough Valmieran—a typical enough Kaunian—there. Maybe the troopers marching along the Avenue of Equestrians toward her were King Mezentio’s finest. Or maybe I was wrong all along, she thought: a startling leap of imagination for her.

The Algarvian troopers—first the band, then a couple of companies of footsoldiers, then a squadron of unicorn cavalry, then warriors mounted on snorting, lumbering behemoths, then more footsoldiers, and on and on—impressed her much more favorably than she’d imagined they could, and also much more favorably than the Valmieran soldiers she’d seen coming through Priekule on the way to the war. It wasn’t that these warriors were tall and straight and handsome: the same held true for many of her countrymen. It wasn’t that their kilts displayed admirable calves; she knew all she needed to know about how men were made.

No, what struck her was partly their discipline—not something she was used to thinking about when she thought of Algarvians—and partly their attitude. They strode down the Avenue of Equestrians as if certain beyond the possibility of doubt that they deserved the victory they had won, deserved it because they were better men than the Valmierans they had beaten. The Valmieran soldiers she’d seen hadn’t looked that way. They’d seemed sure they were heading for trouble—and they’d been right.

Having known that feeling of lordly superiority all her life, Krasta naturally responded to it in others. She even let Algarvians—surely commoners, almost to a man—stare at her as she stared at them without showing (indeed, without feeling) the furious resentment such lascivious looks from Valmieran commoners would have roused in her. But even these stares were well disciplined, especially by Algarvian standards: the soldiers’ eyes turned toward her, but not their heads.

A handful of other Valmierans stood on the sidewalk watching the procession, but only a handful. Most of Priekule was doing its best to pretend the conquest had not happened and the conquerors did not exist. Krasta had intended to act the same way if and when she encountered any Algarvians, but this display of might and splendor caught her by surprise.

At last, though the procession was far from over, she tore herself away and went down the side street where her carriage waited. The driver was swigging from a flask he hastily put away when he saw his mistress. He descended from the carriage and handed her up into it. “Take me home,” she said.

“Aye, milady.” The driver hesitated, then volunteered speech, something he rarely did: “Was you watching the redheads pass by, milady?”

“Aye,” Krasta answered. “Things may not be so dreadful as the doomsayers have been quacking.”

“Not so dreadful?” the driver said as he got the horses going. “Well, here’s hoping you’re right, but nothing good comes of losing a war, I fear.”

“Just drive!” Krasta snapped, and her servant fell silent.

The streets were almost deserted. Many of the men Krasta saw on them were more Algarvian soldiers, moving into place to take possession of Priekule. They were also well behaved. Unlike their parading comrades, they did turn their heads to look her over, but that was all they did. They didn’t say anything, and they didn’t come close to committing any outrages on her person. Frightened rumor in the city had credited King Mezentio’s men with savagery to match their ancient ancestors’.

By the time Krasta neared her mansion, her mood was as good as it ever got. All right: Valmiera had lost the war (she did hope Skarnu was hale), but the Algarvians looked to be far more civilized victors than anyone had expected. After things settled down again, she expected she would be able to enjoy good times with her fellow nobles once more.

As the driver swung the carriage off the street and on to the path that led up to the mansion, that good mood blew out like a candle flame. She pointed angrily. “What are those horses and unicorns doing there?” she demanded, as if the driver not only knew how they’d arrived but could do something about it. He only shrugged; with Krasta, least said was usually wisest.

Then she saw the kilted Algarvian soldier standing by the animals. Before she could shout at him, he turned and went into the mansion. That only made her angrier—how dared he go in there without her leave?

“Bring me right up to the front entrance,” Krasta told the driver. “I aim to get to the bottom of this, and right away, too. What business do these intruders have in my ancestral home?”

“I obey, milady,” the driver answered, which was the best thing he could possibly have said.

He halted in front of the Algarvians’ unicorns and horses. Krasta sprang from the carriage before he could come around and hand her down. She was storming toward the mansion when the door opened and a pair of Algarvians—officers, she realized by the badges on their tunics and hats—came toward her.

Before she could start screaming at them, they both bowed low. That surprised her enough to let the older of them speak before she did: “A splendid good day to you, Marchioness. I am delighted to have the honor to make your acquaintance.” He spoke fluent Valmieran, with only a slight accent. Then, surprising her again, he shifted into classical Kaunian: “If you would rather, we can continue our conversation in this language.”

“Valmieran will do,” she said, hoping her haughty tone would keep him from realizing his grasp of the classical tongue was considerably better than hers. Anger welled up through surprise: “And now, I must require that you tell me the reason for this intrusion upon my estate.”

Servants stared out from the windows on either side of the doorway, and from those of the second story as well. Krasta noticed them only peripherally; to her, they were as much a part of the mansion as the kitchen or the stairways. Her attention was and remained on the Algarvians.

“Allow me to introduce myself, milady,” the older one said, bowing again. “I have the honor to be Count Lurcanio of Albenga; my military rank is colonel. My adjutant here, Captain Mosco, has the good fortune to be a marquis. By order of Grand Duke Ivone, commander of the Algarvian forces now occupying Valmiera, we and our staff are to be billeted in your lovely home.”

Captain Mosco also bowed. “We shall do our best to keep from inconveniencing you,” he said in Valmieran slightly less fluent than Colonel Lurcanio’s.

Billeted was not a word Krasta often heard; she needed a moment to realize what it meant. When she did, she marveled that she didn’t leap on the Algarvians with nails tearing like claws. “You mean you intend to live here?” she said. Lurcanio and Mosco nodded. Krasta threw back her head, a magnificent gesture of contempt. “By what right?”

“By order of the Grand Duke Ivone, as my superior told you,” Captain Mosco replied. He was earnest and good-looking and patient, none of which, right this minute, mattered a jot to Krasta.

“By right of the laws of war,” Colonel Lurcanio added, still polite but unyielding. “Valmierans billeted themselves on my estate after the Six Years’ War. I would be lying if I told you I did not take a certain amount of pleasure in returning the favor. My adjutant had the right of it: we shall inconvenience you as little as we can. But we shall stay here. Whether you stay here depends on your getting used to that idea.”

No one had ever spoken to Krasta like that in her entire life. No one had ever had the power to speak to her so. Her mouth opened, then closed. She shivered. The Algarvians weren’t acting like barbarians in Priekule. But, as Lurcanio had just reminded her, they could act like barbarians if they chose, and like triumphant barbarians at that.

“Very well,” she said coldly. “I shall accommodate you and your men, Colonel, in one wing. If you wish to inconvenience me as little as possible, as you claim, you and your men will have as little to do with me as possible.”

Lurcanio bowed again. “As you say.” He was willing to be gracious now that he’d got his way—in that, he was much like Krasta. “Perhaps, as time goes by, you will come to change your mind.”

“I doubt it,” Krasta said. “I never change my mind once I make it up.”

Mosco said something in Algarvian, a language Krasta had never had the least interest in learning. Lurcanio laughed and nodded. He pointed to Krasta and said something else. They’re talking about me, she realized with no small outrage. They’re talking about me, and I don’t know what they’re saying. How rude! They are barbarians after all.

She stalked past them, back stiff, nose in the air. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw their heads swivel to watch her backside as she strode toward the door. That made her nose go higher than ever. It also gave her a small, sneaking satisfaction of a different sort. Let them watch, she thought. It’s the only thing they’ll ever have the chance to do. To inflame them, she put a little extra hip action in her walk.

When she got inside, the servants converged on her as if they were children and she their mother. “Milady! What shall we do, milady?” they cried.

“The Algarvians are going to quarter themselves here,” she said. “I see nothing to be done about that. We shall put them in the west wing—first removing anything of value there. After that, as best we can, we shall ignore them. They will not be welcome in any other part of the mansion, which I shall make quite clear to their officers.”

“What if they come anyhow, milady?” Bauska asked.

“Make them so unwelcome, they will not wish to come again,” Krasta said. “They are nothing but Algarvians—not worth the notice of civilized people.” She rounded on a couple of redheaded troopers who were looking at pictures and knickknacks. “Get out,” she told them. “Go on, get out.” She gestured to show what the words meant.

They left slowly, and laughing as they went, but they did leave. The servants looked gratified—all but one, whom a soldier patted on the bottom as he went by. And she didn’t look so irate as she might have.

Krasta shook her head. What would she do if a servant let an Algarvian have his way with her? How could she stop it? If Bauska was any indication, commoners these days had no moral fiber whatever. Krasta clicked her tongue between her teeth. One way or another, she’d just have to manage.

Marshal Rathar threw himself down on his belly before King Swemmel. He made the usual protestations of loyalty with more than the usual fervor. He knew the king of Unkerlant was angry with him. He knew why, too. The king often got angry at his subjects for reasons no one but he could see. Not this time.

Swemmel let—made—Rathar stay on his belly, his head knocking against the carpet, far longer than usual. At last, evidently deciding Rathar was humiliated enough, the king spoke in a deadly voice: “Get up.”

“Aye, your Majesty,” the marshal of Unkerlant said, climbing to his feet. “I thank you, your Majesty.”

“We do not thank you,” Swemmel snarled, stabbing out a finger at Rathar as if his fingernail were the business end of a stick. Had it been, he would have blazed his marshal down. His voice, already high and thin, went higher and thinner as he mocked Rathar: “ ‘Wait till the Algarvians are tied down against Valmiera,’ you said. ‘Wait till they’re fully committed in the east. Then strike them, when they cannot easily move reinforcements against us.’ Were those your words, Marshal?”

“Those were my words, your Majesty,” Rathar said stolidly. “I judged that the most efficient course. It seems I was wrong.”

“Aye, it seems you were.” Swemmel returned to his normal tones. “Had we wanted a fool, a dunce, to lead the armies of Unkerlant, rest assured we could have found one. We hoped we had chosen a marshal who would know what might happen, not one who was wrong.” He made the word a curse.

“Your Majesty, in my own defense, my only possible reply is that no one here, no one in the east, and, I daresay, no one in Algarve imagined the redheads’ armies could overthrow Valmiera in the space of a month,” Rathar answered. “Aye, I was wrong, but I am far from the only man who was.”

He waited for Swemmel to sack him, to order him sent to dig coal or salt or brimstone, to order him killed on the spot. Swemmel was capable of any of those things. Swemmel was capable of things much worse than any of those. Anyone who served him lived on the edge of a precipice. Sooner or later, anyone who served him fell off. How the crows and vultures would gather to tear pieces from the fallen Rathar!

King Swemmel said, “Not that you deserve it, but we will give you a tiny chance to redeem yourself before meting out punishment. What will Mezentio do next? Will he strike Lagoas? Will he strike Jelgava? Will he strike our kingdom?”

Rathar’s first thought was, I had better be right. Swemmel allowed few men the chance to be wrong twice. That he would allow anyone to be wrong three times struck Rathar as absurd. Picking his words with great care, he said, “I do not see how Algarve can attack Lagoas without control of the sea between them, which her navy does not have. The Lagoans will not be fooled as the Sibians were. And there are no signs in Forthweg that Mezentio is building to assault us.”

“Jelgava, then,” Swemmel said, and Rathar reluctantly nodded. Now he was pinned down. Swemmel could—Swemmel would—hold him to what he said here. The king went on, “And when Algarve fights Jelgava—what then?”

“Your Majesty, the war should be long and difficult,” Rathar said. “But then, I said the same about the war against Valmiera, and the Algarvians surprised their foes with a thrust through rough country. I do not see how they can surprise the Jelgavans—there are only so many passes through the mountains between them. But that I do not see something does not have to mean Mezentio’s generals are likewise blind.”

“Your advice, then, is to wait for Algarve to become fully embroiled with Jelgava and then strike?” Swemmel asked.

“Aye, that is my advice,” Rathar answered. He knew better than to say, That is what I would do if I were king, as some luckless courtier had done a few years before. Swemmel took that to mean the poor, clumsy-tongued fool was plotting against him. That poor fool was now shorter by a head, and no one had made his mistakes since.

Swemmel said, “And what if Algarve beats Jelgava as quickly and easily as she beat Valmiera? What then, Marshal?”

“Then, your Majesty, I will be surprised,” Rathar said. “Algarvians have the arrogance to make good soldiers and good mages, but they are only men, as we are, as the Jelgavans are as well.”

“Why not fling our armies at them the minute they start to fight with Jelgava, if this be so?” Swemmel said.

“Your Majesty, you are my sovereign. If you order this, I will do my best to carry out your orders,” Rathar replied. “But I think King Mezentio’s men will be ready and waiting for us if we try it.”

“You think we will fail.” Swemmel sounded like an inspector accusing a peasant in a law court.

What happened to peasants haled before such tribunals was usually anything but pleasant. Nevertheless, Rathar said, “The best plan in the world is useless at the wrong time. We struck too soon against the Zuwayzin, and paid a high price for that. We would pay more and suffer worse if we struck the Algarvians while they were ready and waiting for us.”

“You have already complained that we struck too soon against Zuwayza,” King Swemmel said. “We do not agree; our view is that we struck years too late. But never mind that. Because of your complaints, we delayed ordering our armies forward against Algarve, and the result has been worse than if we had attacked.”

“Not necessarily,” Rathar replied. “We might have been badly beaten. The Zuwayzin hurt us badly when that war began, but they were not strong enough to follow up on their early victories. That does not hold with Algarve, especially not after what the redheads showed first in Forthweg and then in Valmiera.”

“A moment ago, you said the Algarvians were only men,” Swemmel said. “Now you say you fear them. Are Unkerlanters, then, suddenly made into mountain apes in your mind?”

“By no means, your Majesty,” Rathar said, although for hundreds of years Unkerlanters had felt the same blend of admiration and resentment for Algarvians that Algarvians felt for folk of Kaunian stock. Gathering himself, he went on, “When we attack, though—if we attack—I would want it to be at the moment I judge best.”

“Will you ever judge any moment best?” Swemmel asked. “Or will you delay endlessly, like the old man in the fable who could never find the time to die?”

Rathar risked a smile. “He didn’t have such a dreadful fate, did he? And the kingdom is at peace for now, which is also not such a dreadful fate. As a soldier who has seen much of war, I say peace is better.”

“Peace is better, when those around you grant your due,” Swemmel said. “But when we should have been raised to the throne, no one would recognize what was rightfully ours. We had to fight to gain the throne, we had to fight to hold the throne, and we have been fighting ever since. During our struggle with the usurper”—his usual name for his twin brother—“the kingdoms neighboring Unkerlant took advantage of her weakness. We have made Gyongyos respect us. We have humbled Forthweg. We have taught Zuwayza half a lesson, at any rate.”

“All that you say is true, your Majesty,” Rathar replied, “yet Algarve has done us no harm during your glorious reign.” Like other courtiers, he’d had to learn the art of gently guiding the sovereign back from his memories—real or imaginary—of injustice and toward what needed doing in the here and now.”

Sometimes King Swemmel refused to be guided. Sometimes he had his reasons for refusing to be guided. He said, “Algarve harmed us gravely during the Six Years’ War. The kingdom requires vengeance, and the kingdom shall have it.”

Algarve had indeed gravely harmed Unkerlant then. Had the redheads been fighting Unkerlant alone rather than all their neighbors, they might well have paraded through the streets of Cottbus in triumph, as they had just paraded through the streets of Priekule. If the Algarvians fought Unkerlant alone now, they might yet parade through the streets of Cottbus. Rathar understood the danger, which King Swemmel pretty plainly did not.

Again speaking with great care, the marshal said, “Taking vengeance is all the sweeter when it’s certain.”

“All our servants tell us reasons why we cannot do the things we must do, the things we want to do,” Swemmel said testily.

“No doubt this is so: it is the way of courtiers,” Rathar said. “But how many of your servants will dare to tell you there is a difference between what you want to do and what you must do?”

Swemmel looked at him from hooded eyes. Sometimes the king could stand more truth than most people thought. Sometimes, too, he would destroy anyone who tried to tell him anything that went against what he already believed. No one could be sure which way he would go without making the experiment. Few took the chance. Every once in a while, Rathar did.

“Do you defy us, Marshal?” the king asked in tones of genuine curiosity.

“In no way, your Majesty,” Rathar replied. “I seek to serve you as well as I may. I also seek to serve the kingdom as well as I may.”

“We are the kingdom,” Swemmel declared.

“So you are, your Majesty. While you live—and may you live long—you are Unkerlant. But Unkerlant endured for centuries before you were born, and will endure for hundreds of years to come.” Rathar was pleased he’d found a way to say that without mentioning Swemmel’s death. He went on, “I seek to serve the Unkerlant that will be as well as the Unkerlant that is.”

King Swemmel pointed to his own chest. “We are the only proper judge of what is best for the Unkerlant that will be.”

When he put it like that, Rathar found no way to contradict him without also seeming to defy him. The marshal bowed his head. If Swemmel demanded anything too preposterous from him, he could either threaten to resign (although that was a threat best used sparingly) or pretend to obey and try to mitigate the effects of the king’s orders through judicious insubordination (a tactic with obvious risks of its own).

Swemmel made an impatient gesture. “Go on, get you gone. We do not wish to see your face any more. We do not wish to hear your carping any more. When we judge the time ripe for attacking Algarve, we shall order the assault. And we shall be obeyed, if not by you, then by another.”

“Choosing who commands the armies of Unkerlant is your Majesty’s privilege,” Rathar answered evenly. Swemmel glared at him. His calm acceptance of the king’s superiority left Swemmel’s anger nowhere to light—and left Swemmel angrier on account of it.

Rathar prostrated himself once more. Then he rose and bowed himself out of the audience chamber. He retrieved his ceremonial sword from Swemmel’s guards, who stood between him and the door to the audience chamber while he belted it on. As he left the anteroom, he allowed himself a long sigh of relief. He’d survived again—or thought he had. But all the way back to the office where everyone else in Unkerlant imagined him to be so powerful, he kept waiting for a couple of King Swemmel’s human bloodhounds to seize him and lead the way. And even after he got back there, he still shivered. That Swemmel’s bloodhounds hadn’t seized him didn’t mean they couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Whenever Leofsig went out on to the streets of Gromheort, he kept waiting for a couple of King Mezentio’s human bloodhounds to seize him and lead him away. I won’t go back to the captives’ camp without a fight, he told himself fiercely, and carried a knife longer and stouter than the Algarvians’ regulations allowed to Forthwegians in the area they occupied.

But the redheaded soldiers who patrolled his city paid no more attention to him than to any other Forthwegian man. Maybe that was because his father knew whom to bribe. No doubt it was, in part. A bigger part, though, was that the Algarvians seemed to have little interest in any Forthwegians save pretty girls, to whom they would call lewd invitations in their own language and in what bits of Forthwegian they’d learned.

That made the girls’ lives harder, but it made Leofsig’s easier. Before entering King Penda’s levy, he had been training to cast accounts, as his father did. These days, Hestan barely had work enough for himself, and none for an assistant even of his own flesh and blood. When Leofsig worked—and he needed to work, for food and money were tight—he worked as a day laborer.

“Coming on! Doing better!” an Algarvian soldier bossing his crew shouted as they cobblestoned the road leading southwest from Gromheort. The fellow spoke Forthwegian in two-word bursts: “Coming on! You lazy! Like Kaunians! Working harder!” Several men in the gang were Kaunians. As far as Leofsig could see, they worked as hard as anybody else.

“Screwing you!” he muttered to Burgred, one of the other young men in the work gang, doing his best to imitate the redhead’s way of speaking.

Burgred chuckled as he let a round stone thump into place. “You’re a funny fellow,” he said, also in a low voice. The laborers weren’t supposed to talk with one another, but the Algarvian, a decent enough man, usually didn’t give them a hard time about it.

“Oh, aye, I’m funny, all right.” Leofsig also dropped a stone in the roadway. “Funny like a unicorn with a broken leg.”

Burgred headed back toward a cart piled high with cobblestones and rubble. The animals that drew it were not unicorns but a couple of scrawny, utterly prosaic mules. Returning with a new stone, Burgred said, “It’s all the cursed Kaunians’ fault, anyway.” He fitted the stone into place. “There we go. That whore’s in good.”

Leofsig grunted. He swiped at his sweaty forehead with a tunic sleeve. “I don’t quite see that,” he said. A moment later, he wished he’d kept quiet. Even so little might have been too much.

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Burgred said. “If it wasn’t for the Kaunians, we wouldn’t have gotten into the war in the first place. If we hadn’t gotten into it, we couldn’t very well have lost it, now could we?”

Broadsheets plastered all over Gromheort said the same thing in almost the same words. The Algarvians had put them up; a Forthwegian who presumed to put up a broadsheet in his own city was liable to be executed on the spot if the redheads caught him doing it. Leofsig wondered if Burgred even knew he was spitting back the pap the Algarvians fed him.

Burgred went on, “And a plague take the Kaunians, anyway. They may live here, but they aren’t Forthwegians, not really. They keep their own language, they keep their own clothes—and their women don’t come close to dressing decently—and they hate us. So why shouldn’t we hate them? Powers above, I haven’t had any use for Kaunians since I first knew they were different than regular people.”

Leofsig sighed and didn’t answer. He saw no point to it. Burgred, plainly, hadn’t needed the redheads to shape his opinion of Kaunians. Like a lot of Forthwegians—maybe even most Forthwegians—he’d despised them long before the Algarvians overran Forthweg.

“You work!” the Algarvian straw boss yelled. “No standing! No talking! Talking—trouble!” He spoke Forthwegian with a horrible accent. He had no grammar and next to no vocabulary. No one ever had trouble understanding him, though.

As the day wound to an end, Leofsig queued up with the rest of the laborers to get his meager pay from an Algarvian sergeant who looked as pained at handing out the silver as if it came from his own belt pouch. At first, the Algarvians hadn’t paid anyone even a copper to work for them. In tones of dry amusement, Hestan had said, “They didn’t take long to discover people will work better if they have some reason to do it.”

Wearily, Leofsig and the others in the gang trudged back toward Gromheort, the Kaunians (who earned only half as much as Forthwegians) a little apart from the rest. Most of the men walked by the side of the cobblestoned road, not on it. “Stupid redheads,” Burgred remarked. “A road like this is harder on people’s feet than a regular one made of dirt. Harder on horses’ hooves, too, and on unicorns’.”

“They can use it during the rain, though, when a regular road turns to mud,” Leofsig said. With a certain sardonic relish, he added, “The Kaunian Empire had roads like these.”

“And much good it did the cursed Kaunians, too,” Burgred said, a better comeback than Leofsig had expected from him. “May it do the cursed Algarvians as much good as it did the blonds however long ago that was.”

Inside Gromheort, the work gang scattered, each man heading off toward his own home—or toward a tavern, where he could drink up in an hour what he’d made in a day. Some of the men who did that were their families’ sole support. Being very much his father’s son, Leofsig looked on them with nothing but scorn.

Not that he would turn down a glass of wine—or a couple of glasses of wine—when he got home. But no one would go without food or firewood because he had some wine. He could even have afforded to spend a copper at the public baths beforehand. But the baths were always short of hot water these days. The Algarvians starved them for fuel—what did they care if Forthwegians stank? Leofsig didn’t care so much as he would have before the war. He’d discovered in the field and in the captives’ camp that no one stank when everyone stank.

Leofsig was almost home when a Kaunian youth in ragged trousers darted out of an alley and past him, plainly running for his life. Four or five Forthwegian boys pounded after him. One of them, Leofsig saw, was his cousin Sidroc.

Tired though he was, he started running after Sidroc before he quite realized what he was doing. At first, he thought he was mortified because he was Sidroc’s close kin. After a few strides, he decided he was mortified because he was a Forthwegian. That hurt worse.

Because it hurt, he wanted to hurt Sidroc, too. And he did, bringing his cousin down with a tackle that would have got him thrown off any football pitch in Forthweg—or even in Unkerlant, where they played the game for blood. Sidroc squalled most satisfactorily.

“Shut up, you little turd,” Leofsig said coldly. “What in blazes do you think you were doing, chasing that Kaunian like a mad dog foaming at the mouth?”

“What was I doing?” Sidroc squeaked. He was bleeding from both elbows and one knee, but didn’t seem to notice. “What was I doing?”

“Has someone put a spell on you, so you have to say everything twice?” Leofsig demanded. “I ought to beat you so you can’t even walk, let alone run. My father will be ashamed of you when I tell him what you’ve done. Powers above, I hope Uncle Hengist will, too.”

He thought Sidroc would cringe. Instead, his cousin shouted, “You’re crazy, do you know that? The little blond-headed snake cut the belt pouch right off me, curse him, and now I bet he’s got away clean. Of course I was chasing him. Wouldn’t you chase a thief? Or are you too high and mighty for that?”

“A thief?” Leofsig said in a small voice. So often, people chased Kaunians through the streets for no reason at all. That people might chase a Kaunian through the streets for a perfectly good reason had never crossed his mind. If Forthwegians could be thieves, Kaunians certainly could, too.

“Aye, a thief. You’ve heard the word?” Sidroc spoke with sarcasm Leofsig’s father might have envied. He also realized he’d been hurt. “What were you trying to do, murder me? You almost did.”

Since Leofsig had been trying for something not far short of murder, he didn’t answer directly. He said, “I thought you were going after him for the sport of it.”

“Not this time.” Sidroc got to his feet and put hands on hips; blood trickled down his forearms. “You’re worse than your brother, do you know that? He’s a Kaunian-lover, too, but he doesn’t kill people on account of it.”

“Oh, shut up, or you’ll make me decide I’m glad I flattened you after all,” Leofsig said. “Let’s go home.”

When they got home and went into the kitchen, Leofsig’s mother and sister both exclaimed over Sidroc’s battered state. They exclaimed again when he told them he’d had his belt pouch stolen, and once more when he told them how he’d come to get battered. “Leofsig, you should ask questions before you hurt someone,” Elfryth said.

“I’m sorry, Mother—there wasn’t time,” Leofsig said. He realized he hadn’t apologized to Sidroc yet. That needed doing, however little he relished it. “I am sorry, cousin. Kaunians get the short end of the stick so often when they don’t deserve it, I just thought this was once more.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Conberge said. Leofsig sent his sister a grateful glance. Sidroc sniffed loudly.

As she might have to one of her own sons, Elfryth said, “Come here, Sidroc. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She wet a rag and advanced on Sidroc. “This may sting, so stand still.” Sidroc did, but yelped as she got to work.

Drawn by the yelps, Ealstan came in to find out what was going on. “Oh,” was all he said when he found out why Sidroc was bleeding. “That’s too bad.”

Leofsig had expected more from him, and was obscurely disappointed not to get it. After supper, when the two of them went out to the courtyard together, Leofsig said, “I thought you’d figured out that Kaunians were people, too.”

“They’re people, all right.” His younger brother did not try to hide his bitterness. “When they get the chance, sonic of them lick the Algarvians’ boots the same way some of our people do.”

Leofsig had already seen how some Forthwegians were perfectly content to do business with the occupying redheads. That disgusted him, but didn’t especially surprise him. But Kaunians—“Where could you find an Algarvian who’d want a Kaunian to lick his boots?” He could think of some other possibilities along those lines, but forbore from mentioning them in case his brother couldn’t.

“It happens.” Ealstan spoke with great conviction. “I’ve seen it happen. I wish I hadn’t, but I have.”

“You’ve already said that much. Do you want to tell me about it?” Leofsig asked.

His younger brother surprised him again, this time by shaking his head. “No. It’s not your affair. Not mine, either, really, but I know about it.” Ealstan shrugged, a weary motion Hestan might have used. Leofsig scratched his head. Some time after he’d gone into King Penda’s levy, his little brother had indeed turned into a man, a man he was beginning to realize he barely knew.

“Come on.” Hestan shook Ealstan out of bed. “Get moving, sleepyhead. If you don’t go to school, what will you be?”

“Asleep?” Ealstan suggested, yawning.

His father snorted. “If you won’t wake up for me, you will when the master for your first class brings the switch down on your back because you were tardy. The choice is yours, son: my way or the master’s.”

“Forthweg has a choice, too, these days: Algarve’s way or Unkerlant’s,” Ealstan said as he got to his feet and stretched. “If they had a true choice, the Forthwegians would take neither the one nor the other. If I had a true choice, I would go back to bed.”

“Forthweg has no true choice. Neither do you, however well you argue.” Hestan no longer sounded amused. “You are the last one in the house up and moving. If you don’t make up for it, you may get my way and the master’s switch both.”

Thus encouraged, Ealstan put on a clean tunic and his sandals and hurried to the kitchen. Conberge gave him porridge with almond slivers stirred through it and a cup of wine flavored with enough resin to put fur on his tongue, or so he thought. “If I can’t speak Algarvian today, I’ll blame it on this horrible stuff,” he said.

“Better to blame it on not studying enough,” Hestan said. “You should be learning Kaunian instead, but you can learn whatever your master sets before you.” He turned to Ealstan’s cousin. “The same applies to you, young man.”

With his mouth full, Sidroc had an excuse for not answering. He took advantage of it. Ealstan’s marks had always been higher than his. Lately, they’d been a good deal higher than his. Sidroc’s father was imperfectly delighted with that.

Despite having sat down later than Sidroc, Ealstan finished his porridge and wine before his cousin did. He did not rub that in, which rubbed it in more effectively than anything else could have done. Hengist almost threw Sidroc out the door after him. They hurried off to school together.

They’d gone only a couple of blocks when they passed four or five Algarvian soldiers half leading, half dragging a Kaunian woman into an empty building. One of them held a hand over her mouth. Sidroc chuckled. “They’ll have a good time.”

“She won’t,” Ealstan said. Sidroc only shrugged. Angry at his cousin’s indifference, Ealstan snapped, “Suppose it was your mother.”

“You keep my mother out of your mouth, or I’ll put my fist in it,” Sidroc said hotly. Ealstan thought he could lick his cousin, but this wasn’t the time or place to find out. He didn’t know why he bothered trying to make Sidroc see things as he did. Sidroc didn’t and wouldn’t care about Kaunians.

Ealstan stopped caring about Kaunians for the time being the moment he walked into Master Agmund’s class. On the blackboard, someone had written—in what looked to him like grammatically impeccable Algarvian—KING MEZENTIO HAD NINE PIGLETS BY THE ROYAL SOW. “Powers above!” he cried. “Get rid of that before the master sees it and beats us all to death.” He tried to figure out whose script it was, but couldn’t; whoever had written it had done so as plainly as possible.

Echoing that thought, one of his classmates said, “It was up there when we started coming in. Somebody must have snuck in during the night and put it up.”

Maybe that was true; maybe it wasn’t. Either way, though… “It doesn’t matter who wrote it. Erase it!”

“You think we haven’t tried?” Three boys said it at the same time.

“Haven’t tried what?” Master Agmund strode into the classroom. Nobody answered. Nobody needed to answer. When the master’s head turned, he naturally saw the message on the blackboard. Despite his swarthy skin, he turned red. “Who wrote this seditious trash?” he rumbled. His finger shot toward Ealstan. “Was it you, young man?”

That meant he judged Ealstan did not love the Algarvian occupiers. He was right, but Ealstan would sooner not have made such an obvious target. He was lucky here; he had only to tell the truth: “No, Master. My cousin and I just came in now, and saw it there as you did. I said we ought to erase it.”

Agmund’s thick, dark eyebrows lowered like stormclouds, but several of Ealstan’s classmates spoke up in support of him. “Very well, then,” the master of Algarvian said. “Your suggestion was a good one. Those who came in earlier should have acted on it.” He seized the eraser and rubbed vigorously.

But, however hard he rubbed, the message refused to disappear. If anything, the white letters got more distinct against their dark background. “Magecraft,” someone said softly.

Agmund also spoke softly, but his quiet words held only danger. “Anyone daring to use magecraft against Algarve will pay dearly, for the occupiers reckon it an act of war. Someone—perhaps someone in this chamber now—will answer for it, and may answer with his head.” He stalked out.

“Maybe we ought to run,” somebody said.

“What good would it do us, unless we took to the hills?” Ealstan said. “Master Agmund knows who we are. He and the headmaster will know where we live.”

“Besides, if anyone runs, Agmund will think he did it,” Sidroc added. He had a gift for intrigue, if not for scholarship. Once he’d spoken, everyone could hear the likely truth in his words.

Footfalls in the hall warned that Agmund was returning. The students sprang to their feet, not wanting any show of disrespect to feed his suspicions. That proved wise, for with him came Swithulf, the headmaster of the academy. Agmund looked as if he disapproved of everything and everyone. So did Swithulf; as he’d practiced the expression for twenty or twenty-five more years, his gaze was downright reptilian.

He read the graffito aloud to himself. Had he been a student, Agmund would have corrected his pronunciation, probably with a switch. As things were, the master of Algarvian said only, “The students deny responsibility.”

“Aye—they would,” Swithulf grunted. As Agmund had, he tried to erase the rude words. As Agmund had, he failed.

“Because of the magecraft I mentioned and you have now seen for yourself, sir, I tend to believe them in this instance.” Agmund sounded anything but happy at having to admit such a thing. That he admitted it anyhow made Ealstan, though equally reluctant, give him some small credit.

Swithulf spoke to the scholars for the first time: “No gossip about this, mind you.” Ealstan and his classmates all nodded solemnly. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Swithulf might as well have ordered the boys not to breathe.

“What shall we do about this, sir?” Agmund asked. “I can hardly instruct with such a crude distraction behind me.”

“I shall go get Ceolnoth, the magecraft master,” Swithulf answered. “He is no first-rank mage, true, but he should be sorcerer enough to put paid to this. And he is discreet, and he will charge no fee.” The headmaster departed as abruptly as he’d arrived.

Agmund made a good game try at teaching in spite of the comment about King Mezentio’s taste in partners—or, perhaps, his taste in pork. With nine piglets in back of the master, though, verbs irregular in the imperfect sense did not sink deep into the students’ memories.

Master Ceolnoth stuck his head into the chamber. “Well, well, what have we here?” he asked. “The headmaster didn’t say much.” Agmund pointed to the blackboard and explained. Ceolnoth came all the way inside so he could read the offending words. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Aye, we need to be rid of that, don’t we? I doubt anyone in Gromheort would be in a position to know any such thing, I do, I do.”

Ealstan looked at Sidroc. That was a mistake. It meant he had even more trouble not snickering than he would have otherwise. Sidroc looked about ready to burst like an egg.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Agmund, whose sense of humor had been strangled at birth. “Just get the filth of my blackboard.”

“Quite, quite.” Ceolnoth started out the door.

“Where are you going?” Agmund demanded.

“Why, to get my tools, of course,” Ceolnoth replied. “Can’t work without ’em, no more than a carpenter can work without his. Swithulf just told me to come in here and look at what you had. Now I’ve looked at it. Now you’ve told me what the trouble is. Now I know I need to do something about it. So.” Out he went.

“More comings and goings here than I’ve seen since the redheads ran the Forthwegian army out of town,” Ealstan whispered to Sidroc.

His cousin nodded and whispered back: “I wonder if Ceolnoth worked that sorcery himself. He could look important that way, and say what he thought about the Algarvians at the same time.”

Ealstan hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t get much chance to think of it, either, for the smack of Master Agmund’s switch coming down on Sidroc’s back made him jump. “Silence in the classroom,” Agmund snapped. Sidroc glared at Ealstan, who’d spoken first but hadn’t got caught. The glare grew more pained when Agmund went on, “Since you enjoy talking so much, conjugate for me the verb to bear in all tenses.”

Sidroc floundered. Ealstan would have floundered, too; the verb was one of the most irregular in Algarvian, its principal parts seeming unrelated from one tense to another. Agmund kept after Sidroc till Ceolnoth returned. After that, he apparently decided Ealstan’s cousin had an excuse for being distracted and left off grilling him.

“Let’s see, let’s see,” Ceolnoth said cheerily. He produced a couple of stones, one pale green, the other a dull, grayish pebble. “Chrysolite to drive away fantasies and foolishness, and the stone called adamas in the classical tongue to overcome enemies, madness, and venom.”

“Adamas” Agmund echoed. “What would that be in Algarvian?”

“I neither know nor care,” Ceolnoth answered. “Not a very useful language, not for magecraft it isn’t.” Agmund looked furious. If the master of magecraft noticed, he didn’t care. Ealstan snickered, but took care to snicker silently.

Ceolnoth rattled the two stones together and began to chant in classical Kaunian. That made Agmund look even angrier. The mage pointed to the offending graffito and cried out a word of command. The letters on the blackboard flared brightly. Ealstan thought they would disappear. Instead, they kept right on flaming, in the most literal sense of the word. Smoke began to pour from the blackboard, or from the timbers on which it was mounted.

Ceolnoth cried out again, in horror. So did Agmund, in rage. “You blundering idiot!” he bellowed.

“Not so,” Ceolnoth said. “This was a spell set under a spell, so that quelling the first one set off the second.”

They would have gone on arguing, but Sidroc shouted “Fire!” and dashed out of the room. That broke a different sort of spell. All his fellow scholars and the two masters followed him. Everyone was shouting “Fire!” by then, that and “Get outside!” As Ealstan ran, he got the idea that he wouldn’t have to worry about the Algarvian imperfect tense for some time to come.