Into the Darkness

16.

Tealdo and his company tramped down a road through fields fragrant with fennel. The Jelgavans used the spice to flavor sausage. Tealdo gnawed on a hard, grayish length of the stuff he’d taken from a farmhouse a few miles back. At first, he hadn’t been sure he liked it; it gave the chopped and salted meat a slightly medicinal taste. Now that he’d grown used to it, though, it wasn’t bad.

Here and there in the fields, Jelgavan farmers stood staring at the Algarvian soldiers advancing past them. Tealdo pointed to one of them, a thickset, stooped old man leaning on a hoe. “Wonder what’s going through his head right now. He never expected to see us on this side of the Bradanos, I’ll lay.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting laid myself,” his friend Trasone answered. That wasn’t what Tealdo had meant, but it didn’t strike him as the worst idea in the world, either. Trasone went on, “I bet the Kaunian bastard is hoping he locked up his daughters well enough so we can’t find ’em or maybe”—he took another look at the farmer—“maybe his granddaughters.”

Sergeant Panfilo glared at both of them. “We don’t have the time to waste for you cockproud whoresons to pull the pants off every Jelgavan slut we find. We finish this occupation, they’ll set up brothels for us, set ’em up or more likely take over some that are already going. Till then, keep your pricks under your kilts.”

In a low voice, Tealdo said, “Panfilo’s an old man. Doesn’t matter to him if he has to wait for his fun.” Trasone laughed and nodded. Unfortunately for Tealdo, his voice hadn’t been quite low enough. Panfilo spent the next mile and a half scorching his ears.

By the time the sergeant was through, Tealdo thought he could smell the organs in question sizzling. The only thing that kept him from being sure was the smoke already drifting in the air. Behemoths and dragons had gone ahead of the main force of footsoldiers, following the same pattern in Jelgava as they had farther south in Valmiera. Here, once they’d forced their way through the passes and down on to the plain, they’d met little resistance.

Four or five Jelgavans got out of the road to let the Algarvian soldiers march past them. The Jelgavans wore dirty, tattered uniforms, but none of them was carrying a weapon. “Sir, shouldn’t we round them up and send them back to a captives’ camp?” somebody asked Captain Galafrone.

“I don’t see any point to bothering,” replied the commoner who’d risen from the ranks. “The war’s over for them. They’re heading for home, no place else but. When they get there, they’ll tell everybody who’ll listen that we’re too tough to lick. That’s what we want the Jelgavans to hear.”

He showed a hard common sense a lot of officers with bluer blood would have been better off having. Tealdo nodded approval. These Jelgavans weren’t going to do any more fighting; they looked so tired and worn, they might have been some of the handful who’d made it back from the Algarvian side of the mountains. Indeed, why waste time and detail a man to escort them off into captivity?

One of them shook his fist toward the east. “Blaze our noblemen!” he said in accented Algarvian. Then he dropped back into Jelgavan to tell his pals what he’d said. Their blond heads bobbed up and down.

“Don’t worry about it, chum,” Trasone said. “We’ll take care of it for you.”

Tealdo couldn’t tell whether the Jelgavans understood his friend or not. It mattered little, one way or the other. King Donalitu hadn’t surrendered yet, but the war was as good as over even so. Some more Jelgavans would get blazed because their king was stubborn, and a few Algarvians, too, but that also mattered little, as far as Tealdo could see. Once the mountain shell was cracked, Jelgava had proved easy meat.

“Come on, you miserable, lazy bastards,” Galafrone called to his own men. “Keep moving. The deeper we push the knife in, the less room the blonds will have to wriggle and the more they’ll bleed.” He did his best to drive his company forward with the force of his words and will, but Tealdo noted that he didn’t sound so urgent as he had in the campaign against Valmiera. Even he thought the Algarvians were on the point of wrapping things up.

As if to prove as much, an hour or so later a few Algarvian guards led a great many more Jelgavans west toward captivity. The Jelgavans were not glum or downhearted. Instead, they smiled and laughed and joked with the men who guarded them. To them, a captives’ camp looked good.

“Degenerate Kaunians,” Trasone said scornfully.

“Well, maybe,” Tealdo answered, “but maybe not, too. I don’t think it’s against the law to show you’re glad to be alive.”

“You could be right,” Trasone said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it. “You’re more generous than I am, though, I’ll tell you that.”

Tealdo only shrugged and kept plodding east. Jelgavans weren’t worth arguing about. But he remained convinced he had it straight. If he’d been a Jelgavan soldier—especially a Jelgavan soldier east of the mountains, who wouldn’t have expected to do much fighting till just before the fighting found him—he wouldn’t have needed to be a degenerate to be happy he’d come through in one piece.

Toward evening that day, a couple of diehard Jelgavans blazed at Tealdo and his comrades from a brushy field. Galafrone turned his company loose, saying no more than, “You know what to do, boys. Hunt ’em down.”

Methodically as if they were digging a trench, the Algarvians did. The trouser-wearing foes were fine soldiers, and made them work hard. But two against a company was not betting odds, even if the two did have good cover. One of the Jelgavan soldiers indeed died hard, blazed down from the flank as he in turn kept blazing away at the Algarvians in front of him. The other threw down his stick as the Algarvians closed in on him. He stood up with his hands high, smiling and speaking good Algarvian: “All right, boys, you’ve got me now.”

He did not go west toward a captives’ camp.

“Can’t play that kind of game with us,” Trasone rumbled as he picked his way through the bushes and back toward the road.

“Oh, you can play it,” Tealdo answered, “but you’re a fool if you expect to win. It’s not like football or draughts—it’s for keeps. You don’t just up and quit when it’s not going your way.”

“Aye, by the powers above,” Trasone said. “You blaze at me and my pals, you’re going to pay.”

“This whole kingdom is going to pay,” Tealdo said. His friend nodded, then threw back his head and laughed, plainly enjoying the idea.

They camped by a village where the Jelgavans must have shown fight, for about half of it had burned. Eggs had smashed a good many houses, while others showed the scars of beams from the heavy sticks behemoths carried. Along with the sour stink of stale smoke, the sickly-sweet smell of death clogged Tealdo’s nostrils.

A few Jelgavans still slunk around the village, their postures as wary and fright-filled as those of the dogs that kept them company. They weren’t worth plundering; whatever they might have had before the first waves of Algarvians went through their village, they had nothing now. A couple of them, bolder than the rest, came up to the camp and begged for food. Some of the Algarvians fed them; others sent them away with curses.

Tealdo drew a midnight sentry turn. For one of the rare times since breaking into Jelgava, he felt like a soldier on hazardous duty. If some stubborn Kaunians like the ones the company had met that afternoon were sneaking up on him, they might give him a thin time of it. Shaken out of his blanket in the middle of the night, he should have been sleepy. He wasn’t.

Every rustle of a mouse scurrying through the grass made him start and swing his stick in that direction, lest it prove something worse than a mouse. Every time an owl hooted, he jumped. Once, something in the wrecked Jelgavan village collapsed with a crash. Tealdo threw himself flat, as if a wing of wardragons were passing overhead.

He got to his feet again a moment later, feeling foolish. But he knew he’d flatten out again at any other sudden, untoward noise. Better safe than sorry made a good maxim for any soldier who wanted to see the end of the war.

A little later, a Jelgavan did approach him, but openly, hands held up so he could see they were empty. Even so, he barked out a sharp order: “Halt!” He had no reason to trust the folk of this kingdom, and every reason not to.

The Jelgavan did stop, and said something quiet and questioning in the local language. Only then did Tealdo realize it was a woman. He still kept his stick aimed at her. You never could tell.

She spoke again. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” he answered.

She spread her hands—she didn’t understand him, either. Then she pointed to her mouth and rubbed her belly: she was hungry. He couldn’t have missed that if he tried. When he only stood there, she pointed elsewhere and twitched her hips, after which she rubbed her belly again. He didn’t need words for that, either: if you feed me, you can have me.

Afterwards, he wondered whether he might have responded differently had he not spent so much time marching and so little sleeping. Maybe—when he felt the urge, he satisfied it, even if he had to pay. But maybe not, too. Laying down silver was one thing. This was something else again. And he did feel worn down to a nub.

He took from his belt pouch a hard roll and a chunk of that fennel-flavored sausage and held them out to the woman. Nervously, she approached. Even more nervously, she took the food. Then, with the sigh of one completing an unpleasant but necessary bargain, she began to unbutton her tunic.

Tealdo shook his head. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “Go on, get out of here. Go away and eat.” He spoke Algarvian—it was the only language he knew. To leave her in no doubt of what he meant, he made as if to push her away. She got that. She bowed very low, as if he were a duke, perhaps even a king. Then she did up her tunic again, leaned close to kiss him on the cheek, and hurried away into the night.

He didn’t tell his relief what had happened. He didn’t tell any of his friends the next morning, either. They would have laughed at him for not taking everything he could get. He would have laughed at one of them the same way.

Not long after sunrise, the long slog east began again. But the company hadn’t been marching long before a messenger from Colonel Ombruno, the regimental commander, rode up to Captain Galafrone. Galafrone listened, nodded, listened some more, and then threw up his hands to halt the men he led.

“We’ve licked ’em,” he said. “King Donalitu has fled his palace, like Penda did in Forthweg when the Unkerlanters closed in on him. I hope we catch the son of a whore; if we don’t, he’ll end up in Lagoas, sure as sure. But whatever duke or minister he left in charge has yielded up the whole kingdom to us. Let’s give a cheer for King Mezentio—aye, and for not having to fight any more, too.”

“Mezentio!” Tealdo shouted, along with his happy comrades.

Galafrone knew how an ordinary soldier thought, all right.

“Fool!” King Swemmel cried in a great voice. “Idiot! Jackanapes! Bungler! Get thee gone from our presence. Thou hast fallen under our displeasure, and the sight of thee is a stench in our nostrils. Begone!” The second-person familiar was almost extinct in Unkerlanter. Lovers sometimes used it. More rarely, so did people in the grip of other towering passions, as Swemmel was now.

Marshal Rathar got to his feet. “Your Majesty, I obey,” he said crisply, as if the king had given him leave to rise some while before, rather than summoning him not to the audience chamber but to the throne room and humiliating him by forcing him to stay on his belly before the assembled courtiers of the kingdom for that concentrated blast of hate.

As if back at the royal military academy, Rathar did a smart about-turn and marched away from the king. Though he heard courtiers whispering behind their hands, he kept his face stolidly blank. He couldn’t make out all the whispers, but he knew what the men in tunics covered with fancy embroidery would be saying: they’d be betting when King Swemmel would order his execution, and on what form the execution would take. Those questions were on Rathar’s mind, too, but he was cursed if he would give anyone else the satisfaction of knowing it.

Eyes followed him as he strode out of the throne room. He wondered if the guards would seize him the moment he passed through the great brazen doors. When they didn’t, he clicked his tongue between his teeth, a gesture of relief as remarkable in him as falling down in a faint would have been in some other man.

A hallway separated the throne room from the chamber in which the nobility of Unkerlant had to store their weapons before attending King Swemmel. Rathar stopped there and pointed to the blade that symbolized his rank. “Give it to me,” he told the servitor who had no function but watching over all the gorgeous cutlery and looking gorgeous himself.

The fellow hesitated. “Uh, my lord Marshal—” he began.

Rathar cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. Had he had the sword in his hand then, he might have used it, too. “Give it to me,” he repeated. “I am the Marshal of Unkerlant, and the king did not demote me.” Swemmel had done everything but that. He had, in a way, done worse than that. But Rathar was technically correct. He went on, “If his Majesty wants my sword, I will yield it to him or to his designee. You, sirrah, are not that man.”

He spread his feet and leaned forward a little, plainly ready to lay into the servant if he did not get his way. Biting his lip, the man took the marshal’s sword from the wall brackets that held it and handed it to Rathar.

“I thank you,” Rathar said, as if he’d been obeyed without question. He slid the blade on to his belt and went off.

He created no small consternation as he tramped through the palace on his way back to his own chamber there. People stopped and stared and pointed at him: not only cooks and serving maids and other such light-minded folk but also guardsmen and nobles not important enough to have been invited to witness his excoriation. They might not have seen it, but they knew about it. Everyone in Cottbus doubtless knew about it. Peasants down in the Duchy of Grelz would hear about it no later than day after tomorrow.

He might have been a man who’d come down with a deadly disease but not yet perished of it. And so, in fact, he was, for the king’s disfavour killed more surely and more painfully than many a phthisic against which mages and healers might struggle with some chance of success.

Even his own officers, once he was back among them, seemed at a loss over how to treat him. A few looked relieved that he had been allowed to return from the throne room. More looked astonished. Still more looked annoyed: now that he had been allowed to return, everyone else’s advancement would necessarily have to wait till the axe fell.

He had trouble telling whether his adjutant, a major named Merovec, looked relieved or astonished. Merovec seldom showed expression of any sort; had he not chosen the army for his career (and had his blood not been high enough to ensure a commission), he would have made some noble house in Cottbus a splendid majordomo. All he said was, “Welcome back, my lord Marshal.”

“For this I think you,” Rathar answered. “You give me a warmer welcome than I had in the throne room, which is, I daresay, a truth you will already have heard.”

That got even the impassive Merovec to raise an eyebrow. “My lord?” Around King Swemmel’s court, such frankness was a commodity in short supply.

Every now and then, Rathar tired of dissembling. He’d survived such a dangerous eccentricity up till now. “Come with me,” he said abruptly, and took Merovec by the arm to make sure his adjutant could do nothing else. Once they were inside Rathar’s own sanctum, the marshal of Unkerlant closed and barred the door behind them.

“My lord?” Merovec said again.

“Are you wondering whether you’ll have to pay for being too close to me, Major?” Rathar asked, and had the dour pleasure of watching Merovec flush beneath his swarthy skin. Rathar went on, “You may well have to, but it’s too late in the game to fret over it, wouldn’t you say?”

Merovec said nothing of the sort. Merovec, in fact, said nothing at all. He stood like a statue, revealing nothing of whatever went on behind his eyes.

Aye, a perfect majordomo, Rathar thought. As often as not, never saying much was a good way to get ahead. No one could think you disagreed with him if you acted that way. Such was certainly the key to survival at Swemmel’s court—as far as anything was the key to survival at Swemmel’s court. But Rathar, though as stolid a man as any ever born, had dared tell Swemmel to his face he thought the king was wrong. He would not keep silent now, either.

Sweeping out a hand toward the map on the wall behind his desk, he demanded of Merovec, “Do you know what my sin is in King Swemmel’s eyes?”

“Aye, my lord Marshal: you were wrong.” From Merovec, that was astounding frankness. After licking his lips, Rathar’s adjutant added, “Even worse, my lord: you were wrong twice.”

Few survived being wrong once around King Swemmel. Rathar knew as much. No courtier in Cottbus could help knowing as much. “And how was I wrong, Major?” he inquired, not altogether rhetorically.

Again, Merovec gave him a straight answer: “You underestimated Algarve. Twice, you underestimated Algarve.”

“So I did.” Rathar pointed to the map, to the new crosshatching showing that Algarve occupied Valmiera. “His Majesty wanted to assail King Mezentio while the redheads fought in the southeast, but they beat Valmiera faster than I thought they could, before we were ready. I advised waiting until they were fully embroiled with Jelgava.” He pointed to the even newer crosshatching that showed Algarve occupied Jelgava. “Now they have beaten King Donalitu faster than I thought they could. And his Majesty is furious at me for having held him back, for having held Unkerlant back.”

“Even so, my lord Marshal,” Merovec replied. “In your own words, you have stated the king’s grievance against you.”

“So I have.” Rathar nodded. “But consider this, Major: if Algarve was strong enough to overrun Valmiera faster than anyone could have imagined, if Algarve was strong enough to serve Jelgava the same way despite the mountains between them—if Algarve was strong enough to carry out those feats of arms, Major, what would have happened to us had we in fact assailed King Mezentio’s men?”

Merovec’s face went blank. Now, though, Rathar could see below the surface. Under that mask, his adjutant’s wits were working. At last, carefully, Merovec said, “It could be, my lord, that the Algarvians would have been too heavily engaged in the east to stand against us.”

“Oh, aye, it could be,” Rathar agreed. “Would you care to bet the fate of the kingdom on its being so?”

“That is not my choice to make,” Merovec answered. “That is the king’s choice to make.”

“So it is, and he made it, and he is furious at having made it, and furious at me for having kept him from rushing ahead into a war of uncertain outcome,” Rathar said. “If I fall, I will console myself with the thought that I may well have kept the kingdom from falling instead.”

“Aye, my lord,” Merovec said. By his tone, he worried more about himself than about Unkerlant. Most men thought thus.

“I have not fallen yet,” Rathar said. “His Majesty could have taken my head in the throne room. Blood has flowed there before when the king grew wrathy enough at a former favorite. I am still here. I still command.”

“What you say is true, my lord,” Merovec replied with another bow. That was a safe answer, safe and noncommittal. Rathar’s adjutant went on, “And long may you continue to command me, my lord.” That showed a little more spirit, but only a little, for Merovec’s continued good fortune—indeed, quite possibly, Merovec’s continued survival—depended on Rathar’s.

“And, while I command, I do obey the king, even if he sometimes has trouble seeing as much,” Rathar said. “I have never said we should not war against Algarve.” No matter how much I think so, I have never said so.

“That is not my place. My place is making sure we win the war once it begins.” If I can. If King Swemmel lets me.

Merovec nodded. “The only one who could possibly disagree with you, my lord, is his Majesty.” He paused to let that sink in. As it did, Rathar’s mouth tightened. Merovec was, unfortunately, correct. If Swemmel took a different view of what Rathar’s position should be—if, for instance, he took the view that Rathar’s position should be kneeling, with his head on a block—that view would prevail.

“You have my leave to go,” Rathar said sourly. His adjutant bowed and departed.

Rathar turned back to the map. Maps were simple, maps were straightforward, maps made good sense. This map said—all but shouted—that, come spring, he (or whoever was Marshal of Unkerlant by then) would have no excuses left for delaying the attack against Algarve. Rathar assumed he would still command then, for no better reason than that, if he turned out to be wrong, he would probably be dead.

The war would come. Rathar saw no way of avoiding it. If he could not avoid it, he would have to win it. At the moment, he saw no sure way of doing that, either. But the sun was swinging farther north every day. Fall was here. Winter was coming. He would not have to fight then. That gave him half a year to come up with answers.

In his desk sat a squat bottle of spirits. He took it out and looked at it. He wished he could stay drunk all winter instead, as so many Unkerlanter peasants did. With a sigh, he put the bottle back. For as long as King Swemmel let him, he had plenty of work to do.

Bauska bowed to Krasta. “Here is the morning’s news sheet, milady,” she said, handing it to her mistress.

Krasta snatched it away from her. Then, peevishly, she said, “I don’t know why I bother. There’s no proper scandal in here these days. It’s all pap, the sort of pap you’d feed a sickly brat.”

“Aye, milady,” Bauska said. “That’s how the Algarvians want it to be. If the news sheets are quiet, that helps keep us quiet, too.”

Such a thought had never crossed Krasta’s mind. To her, what showed up in the news sheets simply appeared on those pages. How it got there, why it got there, what else might have got there in its place—those were questions to trouble servants, or at most tradesmen: certainly not nobles.

And then Krasta’s eye fell on a small item most of the way down the front page. It wasn’t pap, at least not to her. She read it all the way through, in mounting horror and outrage. “They dare,” she whispered. Had she not whispered, she would have shrieked. “They dare.”

“Milady?” Bauska’s face showed puzzlement. “I didn’t notice anything that would—”

“Are you blind as well as stupid?” Krasta snapped. “Look at this!” She held the news sheet so close to Bauska’s nose, the servant’s eyes crossed as she tried to read it.

“Mistress,” Bauska said in a hesitant voice, “the Algarvians won the war in the north, the same as they did here. King Donalitu fled from Jelgava. Of course the redheads would pick a new king in his—”

Krasta’s hand lashed out and caught her serving woman across the cheek. With a hoarse cry, Bauska staggered back across the marchioness’s bedchamber. “Fool!” Krasta hissed. “Aye, the redheads had the right to name a new king in Jelgava after Donalitu abandoned his palace. They had the right to name a king—from among his kin, or at most from among the high nobility of Jelgava. But this? Prince Mainardo? King Mezentio’s younger brother? An Algarvian? It is an outrage, an insult, that cannot be borne. I shall complain to the Algarvians who have forced themselves upon my household.” News sheet in hand, she swept toward the bedchamber door.

Bauska was rubbing at her cheek, already too late to have kept a red handprint from appearing. “Milady, you are still in your nightcl—” she began. Krasta slammed the door on the last part of the word.

Colonel Lurcanio, Captain Mosco, and their aides and guards and messengers were breakfasting in the wing of the mansion they had appropriated for their own. They stopped eating and drinking as suddenly as if turned to stone when Krasta burst in on them. Waving the news sheet, she cried, “What is the meaning of this?”

“I might ask the same question,” Mosco murmured, “but I think I will be content to count myself lucky instead.”

Krasta looked down at herself. She wore a simple tunic-and-trousers set of white silk—was she a commoner, to endure linen or wool when she slept? If her nipples thrust against the thin fabric, it was from outrage, not from any tender emotion. She knew no particular embarrassment at displaying herself before the Algarvians, as she knew none displaying herself before the servants—they were all equally beneath her notice.

What the Algarvians had done, though, was another matter altogether. She advanced on them, brandishing the news sheet like a cavalry saber. “How dare you set a barbarian on the ancient throne of Jelgava?” she shouted.

Colonel Lurcanio got to his feet. Bowing, he held out a hand. “If I may see this, milady?” he asked. Krasta jabbed the news sheet at him. He skimmed through the story then gave the sheet back to her. If his eyes lingered on her heaving bosom—heaving with indignation, of course—a little longer than they might have, she was too irate to notice. He said, “I trust you do not think I personally deposed King Donalitu or forced him to run away and installed Prince Mainardo in his place?”

“I don’t care what you personally did,” Krasta snapped. “That throne belongs to a Jelgavan noble, not to an Algarvian usurper. The royal family of Jelgava traces its line back to the days of the Kaunian Empire. You have no right to snuff out its claims like a stick of punk—none, do you hear me?”

“Milady, I admire your spirit,” Captain Mosco said. By the way his eyes clung, her spirit wasn’t all he admired. “I must tell you, however, that—”

“Wait,” Lurcanio said. “I will deal with this.” Mosco bowed in his seat, acknowledging his superior’s prerogative. Turning back to Krasta, Lurcanio went on, “Milady, let us understand each other. I care not a fig whether or not the king—the former king, the fled king—of Jelgava traces his descent back to the days of the Kaunian Empire or, for that matter, back to the egg from which the world hatched. Algarvians overthrew the Kaunian Empire, and our chieftains became kings. Now we have overthrown Jelgava, and our prince becomes a king. We have the strength, so of course we have the right.”

Krasta slapped him, just as she had slapped Bauska moments before. The reaction was completely automatic. He had displeased her, and therefore deserved whatever she chose to give him.

Her servants accepted that as a law of nature almost to the same degree she did. Lurcanio was cut from a different bolt of cloth. He hauled off and slapped Krasta in return, hard enough to send her staggering back several steps.

She stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. Her parents had died when she was quite small. Since then, no one had presumed to lay a hand on her, or indeed to check her in any way. Bowing to her, Lurcanio said, “I assure you, milady, that I would never be so rude as to strike a woman unprovoked. But I also assure you that I do not suffer myself to be struck, either. You would do well—you would do very well—to remember as much from now on.”

Slowly, Krasta raised a hand to her mouth. She tasted blood; one of her teeth had torn the inside of her cheek. “How dare you do that?” she whispered. The question held more simple curiosity than anger: so novel was receiving what she’d been in the habit of giving out.

Colonel Lurcanio bowed again, perhaps recognizing as much. When he replied, he might have been a schoolmaster: “It is as I said before, milady. I have the will and I have the strength, both in my own person and in my kingdom, to punish insults offered me. Having the strength gives me the right, and I am not ashamed to use it.”

At first, he might have been speaking the horrid language of the Ice People for all the sense he made to Krasta. And then, suddenly, his words hit her with a force greater than that of his hand. Valmiera had lost the war. Krasta had already known that, of course. Up till now, though, it had been only an annoyance, an inconvenience. For the first time, what it meant crashed down on her. Up till now, she’d granted deference only to the tiny handful above her in the hierarchy: counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses, the royal family. But the Algarvians, by virtue of their victory, also outranked her in this strange new Valmiera. As Lurcanio had said—and had proved with his hard right hand—they had the power to do as they pleased here. That power had been hers and her ancestors’ since time out of mind. It was no longer, unless the redheads chose to allow it.

Colonel Lurcanio might be a count in his own kingdom. Here in Valmiera, he counted for a prince or at least a duke, for he was King Mezentio’s man. Krasta tried to imagine what would have become of her had she slapped a duke in King Gainibu’s palace: a duke, that is, who had not tried to slide his hand inside her tunic or under the waistband of her trousers.

She would have been ruined. There was no other possible answer. Which meant she’d run the risk of ruin by slapping Lurcanio. He might have done far worse to her than he had. “I—I’m sorry,” she said. The words came hard; she was not in the habit of apologizing.

She took a deep breath, preparatory to saying more. Colonel Lurcanio and Captain Mosco appreciatively watched her taking that deep breath. She saw them watching her, and looked down at herself once more. If they were her superiors in rank and she stood in dishabille before them.

She let out a small, mortified squeak and fled the dining hall.

Back in the part of the mansion still hers, servitors gaped at her. Not till she passed a mirror did she understand why. Printed on her cheek was the mark of Colonel Lurcanio’s hand. She examined her image with a fascination different from the one it usually held for her. She’d marked the servants often enough. Why not? They had no recourse against her. Now she was marked herself. And what recourse had she against Lurcanio, against Algarve.

None. None whatever. Lurcanio had made that plain with a scorn all the more chilling for being so polite. If he decided to ravish her and have all his aides line up behind him, the only person to whom he would answer was Grand Duke Ivone, his Algarvian superior. Nothing any Valmieran said or did would affect his fate in the least.

She shivered and brought her left hand up to touch the scarlet imprint of Lurcanio’s palm and fingers. The flesh on that part of her cheek was hot, and tingled under the pressure of her fingers. She’d never been one to mix pain—not her own pain, anyhow—with lubricious pleasure. She still wasn’t. She felt sure of that. What she felt now was…

Angrily, she shook her head. She didn’t even have a word for it. Respect might have come close, but she was used to requiring that from others, not to granting it herself. Awe probably hit nearer still to the center of the target. Awe, after all, was what one gave to forces incomparably more powerful than oneself. Having dared lay a hand on her and having demonstrated he could do so with impunity, Colonel Lurcanio had proved himself just such a force.

Still shaking her head, Krasta went upstairs. Bauska awaited her at the top of the stairway. Servant and marchioness stared at the marks on each other’s faces. In a voice empty of all feeling, Bauska said, “Milady, I have set out a daytime tunic and trousers for you. They await your pleasure.”

“Very well,” Krasta said. But instead of going in to change, she continued, “Have the butler convey to the Algarvians that from now on they are welcome to use every part of the mansion, not only the wing they have taken for themselves.”

Bauska’s eyes went even wider than they had when she saw her mistress with a mark on her cheek. “Milady?” she said, as if wondering whether she could possibly have heard right. “Why, milady?”

“Why?” Krasta’s temper remained volatile. It would always remain volatile. Her voice rose to a shout not far from a scream: “Curse you, I’ll tell you why, you stupid little twat! Because they won the war, that’s why!” Bauska gaped, gulped, and incontinently fled.

Mushroom season again. Vanai relished the chance to escape Oyngestun from sunup to sundown. For one thing, most of the Kaunians and many of the Forthwegians in her village still thought her and Brivibas traitors to their people—or traitors to the Kingdom of Forthweg, depending—for their association with Major Spinello, even though that association had broken up in acrimony. For another, because that association had broken up in acrimony, she and Brivibas were once more as hungry as anyone else in Oyngestun. The mushrooms they gathered would help feed them through the winter.

Tramping with a basket under her arm through the stubbled fields, through groves of almonds and olives, through thickets of oak, took Vanai back to the happier days before the war. She found herself whistling a tune that had been all the rage the autumn before fighting broke out.

In fact, she didn’t find herself doing it. She didn’t consciously notice she was doing it till Brivibas said, “My granddaughter, I am compelled to tell you that your taste in music leaves a great deal to be desired.”

“My—?” Vanai discovered her lips were puckering to whistle some more. Feeling foolish, she forced them to relax. “Oh. I’m sorry, my grandfather.”

“No great harm done,” Brivibas said, magnanimous in his dusty way. “I do not disapprove of high spirits, mind you, merely of the monotonous and irksome expression of same.”

You think I’m monotonous and irksome, do you? went through Vanai’s mind. Have you seen yourself in a glass lately? She did not say it. She saw no point to saying it. She had to live with Brivibas. If she made an armed camp of the house they shared, she would regret it as much as he.

What she did say was, “Why don’t we split up for a while? We’ll find more and different mushrooms separately than we would sticking together.”

Brivibas frowned. “You must understand, I have a certain amount of concern about letting you wander the woods by yourself. Had I not been there to protect you from that Forthwegian lout last year—”

“He was not a lout, my grandfather,” Vanai said with an exasperated sniff. “All we did was trade a few mushrooms back and forth.” Had the Forthwegian—Ealstan; aye, that was his name—tried to do anything from which she needed protecting, she did not think Brivibas would have been much help. She also remembered her humiliation when Ealstan had seen her with her grandfather and Major Spinello. That made her defend him: “He spoke Kaunian very well, if you’ll recall.”

“He did no such thing,” Brivibas said. “A typically barbarous accent.”

Vanai shrugged. “I thought he spoke quite well.” Out came her claws: “Maybe not so well as the redhead you reckoned such a splendid scholar for so long, but quite well even so.”

“The Algarvian deceived me, deceitfully deceived me,” Brivibas said, and then suffered a coughing fit. Once he recovered, he stopped arguing against their going separate ways. If anything, he looked glad to escape Vanai.

She knew she was glad to escape him. Thanks to Major Spinello, he had the taint of Algarve on him, too—and, even were that not so, she didn’t care to be lectured while looking for mushrooms. She’d got to the point where she didn’t care to be lectured at all: unfortunate, when the lecture was Brivibas’s usual form of address.

Every so often, Vanai would see Forthwegians and Kaunians, sometimes in small groups, more frequently alone, plucking or digging up mushrooms or slicing them from tree trunks. She spied no Algarvians; the redheads did not care for mushrooms and could not understand why anyone else would. Not seeing Algarvians also helped give her the illusion of freedom. She would have enjoyed it even more had she not known it was an illusion.

As she walked farther east from Oyngestun, some of the mushroom hunters waved when she went by. She knew what that meant: they weren’t from her home village and didn’t know of Brivibas’s cozying up to Spinello. That also gave her a feeling of freedom, and one rather less illusory than the other. Among strangers, she didn’t have to be ashamed of what her grandfather had done.

She found some garlic mushrooms and then, not far away, a fairy ring in the grass. Like anyone with a modern education, she knew fairies had nothing to do with fairy rings, no matter what people—even scholars—might have thought back in the days of the Kaunian Empire. That didn’t mean the mushrooms weren’t good. She gathered a handful before going on.

When she got to an oak thicket on the other side of the field, she nodded to herself. This was where she’d met Ealstan the year before. No matter what her grandfather said about him, she found him pleasant enough—and how she wished he hadn’t found her with Brivibas and Spinello!

The other thing she remembered about the grove was the oyster mushrooms she’d taken from him. Sure enough, more of them waited on the trunks of the trees. She cut them away with a paring knife and put them into her basket one after another. Some of them, older than the rest, were getting tough, but they’d do fine in slow-cooked stews.

She nibbled at a fresh young one. She’d never had real oysters; Oyngestun was too small a village to make any sort of market for such fancy, faraway foods. If they were as good as these mushrooms, though, she could understand why people thought so highly of them.

Her feet scuffed through fallen leaves while she went looking for more mushrooms. Abruptly, she realized hers weren’t the only feet she heard scuffing through leaves. Her hand tightened on the handle of the paring knife. Most people, even strangers met gathering mushrooms, were harmless enough. In case she ran into one who wasn’t…

But the Forthwegian who stepped out from between a couple of trees not far away wasn’t a stranger, or not quite a stranger. “Vanai,” he said, and then stopped, as if wondering where to go from there.

“Hello, Ealstan.” Rather to Vanai’s surprise, she answered in Kaunian. Was she putting him in his place? Or was she simply reminding him of who and what she was?

“I wondered if I would see you here,” he said, also in Kaunian. “I thought of you when I came here to hunt mushrooms.” His mouth tightened. “I did not know if I would see you here with an Algarvian.”

Vanai winced. “No! Powers above, no! He wanted to persuade my grandfather to do something to serve Algarve’s purposes. When my grandfather would not, he stopped bothering us.”

“Ah?” It was a noncommittal noise, one almost altogether devoid of color. After a short pause, Ealstan went on, “He did not look as if he were bothering you or your grandfather.” He used the subjunctive correctly. “He looked very friendly, in fact.”

“He was very friendly,” Vanai said. “He almost fooled my grandfather into being friendly in return. But he did not, and I am glad he did not.”

“Ah,” Ealstan said again. “And was he friendly to you, too?”

Vanai did not care for the emphasis he gave that word. “He might have liked to be friendly to me, but I was not friendly to him.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize Ealstan really had no business asking such an intimate question. She was relieved it didn’t have an intimate answer.

Ealstan certainly seemed glad of the answer he’d got. He said, “Some Forthwegians are hand in glove with the redheads. I suppose some Kaunians could be, too, but I will say I was surprised at the time.”

“I was surprised when Major Spinello knocked on our door,” Vanai said. “I wish he’d never done it.” That was true, no matter how well she and Brivibas had eaten for a while. Then she recognized that Ealstan had admitted some of his own blood collaborated with the occupiers. That was more generous than he’d had to be.

He scratched his chin. The down there was darker than it had been the year before, closer to real whiskers. Slowly, he said, “Your grandfather must be a man of some importance, if the Algarvians wanted him to do something for them even though he is a Kaunian.”

“He is a scholar,” Vanai answered. “They thought his word had weight because of that.”

Ealstan studied her: more nearly a grown man’s sober consideration than the way he’d looked at her the last time they met. Then, of course, all he’d been trying to decide was whether he thought she was pretty or not. Now he was figuring out whether to believe her, which was rather more important. He evidently thought it was more important, too. That earned him a point in her book. If he didn’t believe her, though, whether he earned a point in her book wouldn’t matter.

She discovered that his believing her mattered quite a lot to her. If he didn’t, then odds were he’d spoken her fair the autumn before for no better reason than that he’d thought she was a pretty girl—which would, in essence, prove her grandfather right about him. Brivibas was sometimes able to admit he’d made a mistake. When he turned out to be right, though, she found him insufferable.

Slowly, Ealstan said, “All right. That makes sense. I suppose the redheads are out to make themselves look good any way they can.”

“They certainly are!” Vanai exclaimed. Ealstan never found out how close his comment came to getting him kissed; Vanai, just then, found anything like approval so seldom, she was doubly delighted when she did. But the moment never quite came to fruition. After a deep breath, all she ended up saying was, “Do you want to swap some mushrooms, the way we did last year?” That would let her score points off her grandfather, too.

His smile almost made her sorry she hadn’t kissed him. “I was hoping you’d ask,” he said. “Trading them can be about as much fun as finding them yourself.” He handed her his basket. She gave him hers.

They stood close by each other, heads bent over the mushrooms, fingers sometimes brushing as they traded. It was at the same time innocent and anything but. Vanai didn’t know about Ealstan, but she was noticing the anything but more and more when someone called out in Forthwegian from not far away: “Ealstan? Where in blazes have you gotten to, cousin?”

By the way Ealstan jumped back from Vanai, maybe he’d been noticing anything but, too. “I’m here, Sidroc,” he called back, and then, in a lower voice, explained, “My cousin,” as if Vanai couldn’t figure that out for herself.

Sidroc came crunching through the dry leaves. He did share a family look with Ealstan. When he saw Vanai, his eyes widened. She didn’t care for the gleam that came into them. “Hello!” he said. “I thought you were hunting mushrooms, cousin, not Kaunian popsies.”

“She’s not a popsy, so keep a civil tongue in your head,” Ealstan snapped. “She’s—a friend.”

“Some friend.” Sidroc’s eyes traveled the length of Vanai, imagining her shape under her tunic and trousers. But then he checked himself and turned to Ealstan. “Bad enough to have Kaunian friends any old time, you ask me. Worse to have Kaunian friends now, with the redheads running things here.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ealstan said wearily; it sounded like an argument they’d had before.

“I’d better go,” Vanai said, and did.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” Ealstan called after her. She didn’t answer.

The worst of it, by far the worst of it, was that his cousin—Sidroc—was so likely to be right. Vanai was out of the oak grove and halfway across the field before she realized she still had Ealstan’s mushroom basket. She didn’t turn back, but kept on walking west toward Oyngestun.

“I ought to pop you one,” Ealstan growled as he and Sidroc tramped east toward Gromheort.

“Why?” His cousin leered. “Because I broke things up before you got her trousers down? I’m so sorry.” He pressed his hands over his heart.

Ealstan shoved him hard—hard enough to send a couple of yellow horseman’s mushrooms flying out of his basket. “No, because you say things like that,” Ealstan told him. “And if you say any more of them, I will pop you one, and it’ll curse well serve you right.”

Sidroc picked up the mushrooms. He looked ready to fight, too, and Ealstan, despite his hot words, wasn’t quite sure he’d come out on top if they did tangle. Then Sidroc pointed and started to laugh. “Go ahead, first-rank master of innocence, tell me that’s the basket your mother gave you when you set out this morning.”

Ealstan looked down. When he looked up again, he was glaring at his cousin. “She’s got mine, I guess. That’s because you couldn’t have done a better job of driving her away if you’d hunted her with hounds.”

Whatever Sidroc started to say in response to that, the look on Ealstan’s face persuaded him it would not be a good idea. Side by side, they walked on in grim silence. The Algarvian soldiers at the gate looked at their baskets of mushrooms, made disgusted faces, and waved them into Gromheort.

Once they were out of earshot of the guards, Sidroc said, “Suppose I told them you got that basket from a Kaunian hussy? How do you think they’d like that?”

“Suppose I told your father what you just said?” Ealstan answered, looking at his cousin as if he’d found him under a flat rock. “How do you think he’d like that?” Sidroc didn’t reply, but his expression was eloquent. They didn’t say another word to each other till they got back to Ealstan’s house. Silence seemed a better idea than anything they might have said.

“You’re back sooner than I thought you would be,” Conberge said when they brought their laden baskets into the kitchen. Neither Ealstan nor Sidroc said anything to that, either. Ealstan’s sister glanced from one to the other. She looked as if she might be on the point of asking some sharp questions, but the only one that came out was, “Well, what have you got for me?”

Sidroc set his basket on the counter. “I did pretty well,” he said.

“So did I,” Ealstan said, and set his basket beside his cousin’s. Only then did he remember that it wasn’t his basket—it was Vanai’s. Too late to do anything about that, too. He’d only look like a fool if he snatched the basket away now. He waited to see what would happen.

At first, Conberge noticed only the mushrooms. “I thought the two of you went out together. Except for some oyster mushrooms and a couple of others, it doesn’t look like you were within miles of each other.”

Sidroc didn’t say anything. Ealstan didn’t say anything, either. So much silence from them was out of the ordinary. Conberge eyed them both again, and let out a sniff before going back to her sorting.

Some things were almost too obvious to notice. She’d nearly finished the job before she stopped, a mushroom in her hand. “This isn’t the basket Mother gave you, Ealstan.” She set the mushrooms on the counter, frowning as she did so. “In fact, this isn’t any of our baskets, is it?”

“No.” Ealstan decided to put the best light on things he could: “I was trading mushrooms with a friend, and we ended up trading baskets, too. We didn’t even know we’d done it till we’d both headed for home. Do you think Mother will be angry? It’s as nice as any of our baskets.”

His innocent tones wouldn’t have passed muster even if Sidroc hadn’t been standing there like an egg about to burst. “Trading mushrooms with a friend, were you?” his sister said, raising an eyebrow. “Was she pretty?”

Ealstan’s mouth fell open. He felt himself flushing. Forthwegians were swarthy, but not, he was mournfully sure, swarthy enough to keep a blush like his from showing. Before he could say anything, Sidroc did it for him—or to him: “I saw her. She’s pretty enough—for a Kaunian.”

“Oh,” Conberge said, and went back to sorting through the last few mushrooms.

Her other eyebrow had risen at Sidroc’s announcement, but that wasn’t a big enough reaction to suit him. “Didn’t you hear me?” he said loudly. “She’s a Kaunian. She wears her trousers very tight, too.” He ran his tongue over his lips.

“She does not!” Ealstan exclaimed. He found himself explaining to his sister: “Her name’s Vanai. She lives over in Oyngestun. We swapped mushrooms last year, too.”

“She’s a Kaunian,” Sidroc repeated yet again.

“I heard you the first time,” Conberge told him, an edge to her voice. “Do you know what you sound like? You sound like an Algarvian.”

If that was supposed to quell Sidroc, it failed. “So what if I do?” he said, tossing his head. “Everybody in this house sounds like a Kaunian-lover. You ask me, the redheads are going down the right ley line there.”

“Nobody asked you,” Ealstan growled. He was about to point out that Kaunians had helped his brother escape from the captives’ camp. At the last instant, he didn’t. His cousin had already spoken of something that sounded like blackmail. Ealstan didn’t think Sidroc meant it seriously, but didn’t see the need to give him more charges for his stick, either.

It was Sidroc’s turn to go red. Whatever he might have said then, he didn’t, because someone pounded on the front door. “That will be Leofsig,” Ealstan said. “Why don’t you go let him in?”

Sidroc went, looking glad to escape. Ealstan was glad to see him go before things started blazing again. By her sigh, so was Conberge. She said, “Powers above, but I wish Uncle Hengist would find someplace else to stay. He’s not so bad—in fact, he’s not bad at all, but Sidroc …” She rolled her eyes.

“They’re family,” Ealstan said.

“I know,” Conberge said. “We could be staying with them as easily as the other way round. I know that, too.” She sighed again. “But he is such a …” Her right hand folded into a fist. She’d been able to thump Ealstan right up to the day, a few years before, she’d decided it was unladylike. He didn’t think she could now, but he wouldn’t have cared to make the experiment.

“He knows everything,” Ealstan said. “If you don’t believe me, ask him.”

“He wants to know everything.” His sister’s fist got harder and tighter. In a low, furious voice, she blurted, “I think he’s tried to peek at me when I’m getting dressed.” Ealstan whirled in the direction Sidroc had gone. Maybe he had murder, or something close to it, on his face, because Conberge caught him by the arm and held him back. “No, don’t do anything. I don’t know for sure. I can’t prove it. I just think so.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ealstan said, but he eased enough so that Conberge let him go. “Does Mother know?”

She shook her head. “No. I haven’t told anybody. I wish I hadn’t told you, but I was fed up with him.”

“I don’t blame you,” Ealstan said. “If Father knew, though, he’d wallop him. Powers above, if Uncle Hengist knew, he’d wallop him, too.” He didn’t say what Leofsig might do. He was afraid to think about that it might be lethal. He took death and dying much more seriously than he had before the start of the war.

“Hush,” Conberge said now. “Here they come.” Ealstan nodded; he heard the approaching footsteps, too.

In Leofsig’s presence, Sidroc was more subdued than he was around Ealstan; Leofsig, visibly a man grown, intimidated him in ways Ealstan could not. At the moment, Leofsig was visibly a man grown tired. “Give me a cup of wine, Conberge,” he said, “something to cut the dust in my throat before I go down to the baths and get clean. The water will be cold, but I don’t care. Mother and Father won’t want me around smelling the way I do—I’m sure of that.”

As Conberge poured the wine, she said, “Mother and Father are glad to have you around no matter what—and so am I.”

Being Leofsig’s brother, Ealstan could say, “I’m not so sure I am,” and wrinkle his nose. Leofsig didn’t do anything but punch him in the upper arm, not too hard. But when Sidroc presumed to guffaw, both Ealstan and Leofsig gave him such stony stares, he took himself elsewhere in a hurry.

Leofsig drank down the rough red wine in three or four gulps. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. It was already so filthy, a little wine would do it no further harm. “That’s good,” he said. “The only trouble with it is, it makes me want to go to sleep, and I do need to bathe first.”

“You’re wearing yourself out, working as a laborer,” Conberge said worriedly. “You know enough to be Father’s assistant. I don’t see why you wear yourself out with a pick and shovel instead.”

“Aye, I know enough to be his assistant—and I know enough not to be, too,” Leofsig answered. “For one thing, he doesn’t really have so much work that he needs an assistant. For another, he’s good at what he does; he even casts accounts for some of the Algarvians in Gromheort these days. Remember, a lot of people quietly know I’m home. I want to make sure it stays quiet. If he takes me along to help him in front of the Algarvian governor, say, it won’t.”

“Well, that’s so,” Conberge admitted with a sigh. “But I hate to watch you wasting away to a nub.”

“Plenty of me left, never fear,” Leofsig said. “Remember how I was when I first got out of the camp? Then I was a nub, not now. Now all I do is stink, and I can take care of that.” He kissed his sister on the cheek and headed out again.

Conberge sighed once more. “I wish he’d stay in more. No matter how well we’ve paid off the redheads, they will notice him if he makes them do it.”

“That’s what he just told you,” Ealstan answered. Conberge made a face at him. He didn’t feel too happy about it himself, because he knew his sister had a point. He said, “If he stayed in all the time, he’d feel like a bear in a cage at the zoological gardens.”

“I’d rather have him be a live bear in a cage than a bearskin rug in front of some Algarvian’s divan,” Conberge said. Ealstan stood there looking unhappy; she’d turned his own figure against him too neatly for him to do anything else.

The metaphorical bear came back about half an hour later, clean but looking thoroughly grim. Before Ealstan or Conberge could ask him what was wrong, he told them: “The Algarvians have hanged a Kaunian in the market square in front of the baths. He was one of the fellows who escaped with me.”

Leofsig reported to his labor gang the next morning wondering if he should be lying low instead. If the redheads had squeezed the Kaunian hard enough before they hanged him, or if the fellow had sung on his own, trying to save his own skin, the new masters of Gromheort would be able to scoop him up with the greatest of ease.

Had the escaped and recaptured captive sung, though, the Algarvians could have surrounded his house and dragged him away in irons the night before. He took that to mean the Kaunian had kept quiet, or maybe that the redheads hadn’t known the right questions to ask.

No kilted soldiers shouted his name and pointed sticks at him. A couple of them, the friendlier ones, nodded as he came up to report. The one who bossed his group gave forth with another of his two-words bursts of Forthwegian: “Working good!”

“Aye,” Leofsig said. He sounded unenthusiastic. The soldier laughed a laugh that said he wasn’t slamming down cobblestones himself.

But Leofsig, unlike a lot of his comrades, honestly did not mind the work. Before he’d gone into King Penda’s levy, he’d been a student and an apprentice bookkeeper: he’d worked with his head, not with his hands and back. In the Forthwegian army, though, he’d discovered, as some bright young men do, that work with the hands and back had satisfactions of its own. A job wasn’t right or wrong, only done or undone, and getting it from undone to done required only time and effort, not thought. He could think about other things or, if he chose to, about nothing at all.

And, in the army and on the labor gang, he’d hardened in a way he’d never imagined. Only muscle lay between skin and bone, but more muscle than he’d dreamt of carrying. He’d been on the plump side before going into the army. His service there and in the gang would have taken care of that even without the intervening months in the captives’ camp. He doubted he’d ever be plump again.

“All right!” the Algarvian straw boss shouted. “We go. Work hard. Plenty cobblestones.” Sure enough, he sounded perfectly happy. A lot of people got even more satisfaction from watching others do hard physical labor than from doing it themselves.

Under his two-word bursts of what he thought was enthusiasm, the labor gang tramped down a road leading northwest till they got to the point where the cobbles stopped. They’d worked on the road leading southwest till they’d gone too far for them to march out from Gromheort, do a decent day’s work, and then march back. Laborers—a lot of them probably Kaunian laborers—from towns and villages farther on down that road would be paving it now.

Mule-drawn wagons hauled the labor gang’s tools and the stones with which they would be paving this stretch of road. The wagons’ iron tires rattled and banged over the cobblestones already in the roadway. Leofsig’s comrade Burgred winced at the racket. “Shouldn’t have had so much wine last night,” he said. “My head wants to fall off, and I bloody well wish it would.”

“Wagons wouldn’t make so much noise on a dirt road, sure enough,” Leofsig said, showing more sympathy than he felt—nobody’d held a stick to Burgred’s head and made him get drunk, and if this was the first hangover he’d ever had, then Leofsig was a slant-eyed Kaunian. He went on, “Of course, they’d go hub-deep in mud when it rained. The redheads don’t want that.”

“I wish I’d go hub-deep in mud about now,” Burgred said—sure enough, he was much the worse for wear this morning.

Passing by some meadow mushrooms, Leofsig stepped out into the field in which they grew to pick them and store them in his belt pouch. “Meadow mushrooms are better than no mushrooms at all,” he said to Burgred. He had to repeat himself, because the noise from the wagons was particularly fierce. Burgred looked as if the only mushrooms he would have wanted then were some of the lethal variety, to put him out of his misery.

Like most Algarvians, the straw boss had a low opinion of what Forthwegians and Kaunians reckoned delicacies. “Mushrooms bad,” he said, sticking out his tongue and making a horrible face. “Mushrooms poisonous. Mushrooms disgusting.” He spat on a cobblestone.

“Powers above,” Leofsig said softly. “Even the yellow-hairs know better than that.” Kaunians and local delicacies were both on his mind; he’d heard rather different versions from Sidroc and from his own brother about the Kaunian girl Ealstan had met in the woods while out hunting mushrooms. Sidroc had them all but betrothed, but Sidroc’s mouth generally outran his wits.

Leofsig eyed Burgred. Mentioning Kaunians to him was a calculated jab. He responded to it, sure enough, but not in the way Leofsig had expected, saying, “Ought to hang all the stinking Kaunians, same as the redheads hanged that one bugger back in town. Serve ’em right.”

“They’re not that bad,” Leofsig said, which was about as far as he could go without putting himself in danger. “What did they ever do to you?”

“They’re Kaunians,” Burgred said, which seemed to be the only answer he thought necessary. Several of the men in the labor gang were Kaunians, too, but Burgred didn’t bother trying to keep his voice down. He took it for granted that the blonds would know what he thought of them. Maybe they took it for granted, too, because, while a couple of them must have heard him, they didn’t get angry.

No. In the captives’ camp, Leofsig had got to know Kaunians better than he had before. They got angry. They didn’t show it. Had they dared show it in Forthweg, they would soon have become a tinier minority than they already were.

Before he could take that thought any further, they came to the end of the cobbled stretch of road. When the wagons stopped, Burgred let out a theatrical sigh of relief. The Algarvian soldier pointed dramatically toward the northeast. “Moving on!” he cried. Even in his bits of Forthwegian, he made the prospect of setting stones in the roadbed more exciting than one of Leofsig’s countrymen could do.

Not all the stones in the wagon were proper rounded cobblestones. A lot of them came from the rubble left over from the fighting in Gromheort. Whenever Leofsig picked up one of those, he tried to see if he could figure out from what building it had come. He’d succeeded a couple of times, but only a couple. Most of them were just anonymous chunks of masonry.

He laughed at himself. He couldn’t help thinking, even on a job as mindless as roadbuilding. He watched Burgred carry a stone from the wagon to the roadway, dig out the roadbed so his stone would lie more or less level with its neighbors, and then slam it into place. Was Burgred doing much in the way of thinking while he did that? Leofsig had his doubts. Leofsig doubted Burgred did much in the way of thinking any time.

Leofsig was carrying a stone—another anonymous bit of rubble—of his own to what would be its place in the roadbed when the Algarvian straw boss let out a furious shout. “Who doing?” he demanded, pointing to a stone some ten or twenty feet away from the present border between paving and dirt. “Who doing?” From his point of view, he had a right to be exercised: the stone jaggedly projected half a foot above its fellows.

No one in the labor gang said anything. No one had been close to the stone when the Algarvian noticed it. Any one of four or five different men might have set it there. Nobody’d paid any attention.

“Must have been one of the Kaunians,” Burgred said. “Hang ’em all.”

“Sabotage bad,” the straw boss said. Sabotage was a fancy word, but one that tied in with his job. He shook his head. “Very bad. Killing sabotagers.”

“Oh, aye,” Leofsig murmured. “That’s clever, isn’t it? Now whoever did it is sure to admit it.”

“Hang a couple of Kaunians,” Burgred repeated loudly. “Nobody will miss the whoresons, and then we can get on with the fornicating road.”

One of the blond men in the labor gang took a couple of steps toward him. “I have a wife,” he said. “I have children. I have a mother. I have a father. I know who he is, too, which is more than you can say.”

Burgred needed a bit to get that. For a couple of heartbeats, Leofsig thought he wouldn’t, which would have been convenient. Probably because it would have been convenient, it didn’t happen. “Call me a bastard, will you?” Burgred roared, and started toward the Kaunian.

Leofsig brought him down with a tackle as fierce and illegal as the one he’d used to level Sidroc. He’d regretted that one, because he should have let his cousin keep going. He wasn’t the least bit sorry about knocking Burgred over. Burgred wasn’t very happy about it, though. They rolled on the cobbles and then off the cobbles and on to the dirt, pummeling each other.

“You stopping!” the Algarvian yelled at them. They didn’t stop. Had either of them stopped, the other would have gone right on doing damage. The straw boss turned to the laborers. “Stopping they!”

The men from the work gang pulled Leofsig and Burgred apart. Leofsig had a cut lip and a bruised cheek. Burgred, he saw, had a bloody nose and a black eye. Leofsig’s ribs ached. He hoped Burgred’s did, too.

“Kaunian-lover,” Burgred snarled.

“Oh, shut up, you cursed fool,” Leofsig answered wearily. “When you start talking about hanging people, you can’t really be surprised if they insult you. Besides”—he spoke quietly so the Algarvian soldier wouldn’t follow—“when we quarrel, who laughs? The redheads, that’s who.”

Had he just talked about Kaunians, he never would have got Burgred to pay him any attention. But Burgred did glance over at the straw boss. When he shrugged off the hands that restrained him, it wasn’t so he could get at either Leofsig or the Kaunian. “A pestilence take ’em all,” he muttered.

“No pay.” The Algarvian pointed at Leofsig. “No pay.” He pointed at Burgred. “No pay.” He pointed at the Kaunian who’d questioned Burgred’s legitimacy.

“I don’t lose much,” the Kaunian said.

Ignoring that, the Algarvian went on, “No treason. No sabotage.” He’d learned the Forthwegian words he needed to know, all right. He pointed back at the offending chunk of stone. “Fixing that. One more? Losing heads.” This time, he pointed to everyone in the work gang in turn. By the expressions on the laborers’ faces, none of them, Forthwegians or Kaunians, thought he was joking.

A tall, blond Kaunian and a couple of stocky, swarthy Forthwegians broke up the offending stone. They didn’t quarrel about who did what. In the face of the straw boss’s threat, that didn’t matter. Getting the work done mattered, and they did it. Leofsig watched them with a certain sour satisfaction. Under the threat of death, they might have become brothers. Without it…? He sighed and went back to work.