Into the Darkness

20.

When the hard knock came on the door, Vanai shivered. She thought—she feared—it had an Algarvian sound. Maybe, if she didn’t answer, whoever was out there would go away. It was, of course, a forlorn hope. The knock sounded again, sharper and more insistent than ever.

“Powers above, Vanai! Go see who that is, before he breaks down the door,” Brivibas called irritably. In a softer voice, he went on, “How is a person to think with distractions that never cease?”

“I am going, my grandfather,” Vanai said, resignation in her own tone. Brivibas didn’t deal with distractions. That was her job.

She unbarred the door and threw it wide. Then she shivered again—not only was the day about as chilly as weather ever got in Oyngestun, but there stood Major Spinello, a squad of Algarvian soldiers behind him. “Good day,” he said in his fluent Kaunian, looking her up and down in a way she did not like. But, despite his eyes, he kept his voice businesslike: “I require to see your grandfather.”

“I shall fetch him, sir,” Vanai said, but she could not resist adding, “I still do not think he will aid you.”

“Perhaps he will, perhaps he won’t.” Spinello sounded indifferent. Vanai did not believe he was, not for a moment. He went on, “I have, I admit, discovered a new inducement. Bring him here, that I may speak of it.”

“Please wait.” Vanai did not invite him into the house. If he came in uninvited, she could not do anything about that. Going into Brivibas’s study, she said, “My grandfather, Major Spinello would have speech with you.”

“Would he?” Brivibas said. “Well, I would not have speech with him.” The expression on Vanai’s face must have been eloquent, for, with a grimace, he set down his pen. “I gather the choice is not mine?” Vanai nodded. Brivibas sighed and rose. “Very well, my granddaughter. I shall accompany you.”

“Ah, here you are,” Spinello said when Brivibas appeared before him. “The next question is, why are you here?”

“Men have been looking to answer that question since long before the days of the Kaunian Empire, Major,” Vanai’s grandfather said coldly. “I fear that no satisfactory response has yet come to light, though philosophers do continue their work.”

“I was not speaking of philosophy,” the Algarvian officer said. “I was asking why you, Brivibas, are here, at this house. We have been recruiting laborers in this district for some time. Only an oversight can have kept you from being one of them. I have been ordered to correct the said oversight, and I shall. Come along with me, old man. There are roads that need building, bridges that need repairing, piles of rubble that need clearing. Your scrawny Kaunian carcass isn’t worth much, but it will have to do. Come on. Now.”

Brivibas looked down at his hands. They were pale and soft and smooth; the only callus he had was by the nail of his right middle finger: a writer’s callus. He turned to Vanai. “Take care of my books, if you possibly can—and of yourself, of course.” In character to the last, she thought—books first, then her. Before she could say anything, Brivibas nodded to Major Spinello. “I am ready.”

Spinello and the soldiers led him away. He did not look back at Vanai, who stood in the doorway. The Algarvian major did look back. Just before he and Brivibas and the troopers turned a corner, he waved gaily to her. Then they were gone.

She stood there for another couple of minutes, letting heat leak out of the house through the open door, before she finally closed it. The chill around her heart made the weather hardly worth noticing. She didn’t know exactly how old her grandfather was, but he had to be up past sixty. He’d never done a day’s labor—not the kind of labor Spinello was talking about—in his life. How long would he, how long could he, last? Not long. She was sure of that.

There had been times—more than a few of them—when she wished he would go away and leave her alone and not bother her again. Now he was gone. The house they’d shared since she was tiny seemed much too big and much too empty without him. She wandered aimlessly from room to room.

Eventually, long after she took her midday meal most days, she realized she was hungry. She ate some bread and some dried figs, having no energy to make anything more ambitious. For supper, she started a thick soup with barley and what little sausage she found in the larder. She had no appetite, but her grandfather would be hungry.

Brivibas came home almost two hours later than she thought he would. She’d never seen him so filthy in all her life, nor half so worn. Most of his fingernails were broken; they all had black crescents ground under them. His palms were nothing but blisters and blood.

Vanai took one look at him and burst into tears. “There, there, my granddaughter,” he said in what she heard for the first time as an old man’s voice, brittle as dry grass. “Spinello thinks his logic keen, but it shall not persuade me.”

“Eat,” Vanai said, as he had so often said to her. Eat he did, and lustily, but he fell asleep a little more than halfway through the bowl of soup. Vanai shook him, but he would not wake. Had he not been breathing, she would have wondered if he was dead.

At last, she managed to rouse him and half carry him to the bedroom. “I must be up and away from here before sunrise tomorrow,” he said, his voice distant but clear. Vanai violently shook her head. “Oh, but I must,” Brivibas insisted. “I rely on you for it: if I am not, they will beat me and I shall have to labor anyhow. I rely on you, my granddaughter. You must not fail me.”

Through tears, Vanai said, “I obey, my grandfather,” and then, because she could not help herself, “Wouldn’t it be easier to give Spinello, curse him, what he wants from you?”

“Easier? No doubt.” Brivibas yawned enormously. “But it would be wrong.” His head hit the pillow. His eyes closed. He began to snore.

Vanai felt like a murderer when she woke him the next morning. He thanked her, which only made things worse. She gave him the remains of the evening’s soup for breakfast and bread and cheese and dried mushrooms—some from Ealstan’s basket—to eat while he worked. And then he was off, and she was alone in a house where the wind rattling a shutter was enough to make her leap in the air like a startled cat.

He came back late again that night, and the next one, and the next. Every day of labor seemed to age him a month, and he had not so very many months to spare. “It gets easier as I grow accustomed to it,” he would say, but it was a lie. Vanai knew it. Every day, the flesh thinned on his face, until she thought it was a staring skull that looked back at her out of bright blue eyes and spoke pedantic reassurances that did not reassure.

One morning after he staggered off, Vanai stood stock-still, as if a mage had suddenly made her into marble. I know what I have to do. The realization held an almost mystical clarity and certainty.

But it would be wrong. Brivibas’s sleep-sodden voice sounded inside her head.

“I don’t care,” she said aloud, as if her grandfather were there to argue with her. It wasn’t quite true. But she knew what was more important to her, and what less. If she could win the one, what did the other matter?

In that house, finding paper and pen was a matter of a moment. She knew what she wanted to say, and said it. The purity of the Kaunian she used would have brought a nod of approval from her grandfather, regardless of what he thought of certain other aspects of the note.

After she’d folded the paper on herself and sealed it with wax and her grandfather’s seal, she threw on a cloak and carried the note to the Forthwegian barrister’s home where the Algarvians made their headquarters in Oyngestun. She left it there, with a sergeant who leered at her and ran a red, red tongue over his lips. She fled.

“Still a whore for the redheads,” a Kaunian woman hissed at her. She hung her head and hurried back to her home. There she waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing out of the ordinary happened the next day, or the day after that. Each morning, before first light, Brivibas shambled off to labor for the Algarvians. Each morning, he was more a crumbling ruin of the man he had been.

In the middle of the afternoon on the third day, the knock Vanai had been waiting for, the knock she recognized, came. She started, spilling some of the peas she’d been putting into water to soak. Even though she’d been waiting for that knock, she moved toward the door with the slow, reluctant steps she might have taken in a bad dream. If I don’t answer, he will think I am not at home, and go away, went through her mind. But so did another thought; if I don’t answer, my grandfather will surely die.

She opened the door. Major Spinello stood there, as she’d known he would. He bowed to her. “I greet you, my lady Vanai. May I come in?”

His formality surprised her. Had he got the note? He had. Oh, he had.

She saw it in his eyes. “Aye,” she whispered, and stood aside to let him.

He closed and barred the door. That done, he turned to her. “Did you know what you were saying when you said you would do anything to keep your worthless old grandfather from going off and doing what he should have been doing this past year and more?” he asked.

“Aye,” Vanai whispered again, even lower this time. She looked at the floor to keep from looking at Spinello. Again to her surprise, he waited to see if she would say more. After a moment, she did: “He is all I have.”

“Not all.” The Algarvian shook his head. “Oh, no, my dear, not all.” He stretched out a hand and undid the three wooden toggles that closed the neck of her tunic, then reached down to the hem and pulled it up over her head. Hating him, hating herself more, she raised her arms to help him. He looked at her for what felt like forever. “Brivibas is very far from all you have.” He reached out again. This time, his hands stroked bare flesh.

He surprised her once more by not mauling her. His touch was knowing, assured. Had she freely chosen him, she might—she thought she would—have enjoyed it. As things were, she stood still and endured.

“To your bedchamber, then,” he said after a while. Vanai nodded, thinking it would be easier there than on the floor, where she’d more than half expected him to drag her down. Pausing only to pick up her tunic, she took him where he wanted to go.

The bed would be narrow for two. The bed was none too wide for her alone. She waited beside it. If he wanted her out of her trousers, he would have to take her out of them. He did, and seemed to enjoy the doing. Then, amazingly fast, he undressed himself. She looked away. She knew how a man was made. She did not want to be reminded.

But even a brief glimpse reminded her that Algarvians were made rather differently—or made themselves rather differently. She’d known of their ritual mutilation, a custom that had persisted since ancient days. Till now, she’d never imagined it would matter to her.

“Lie down,” Spinello said, and Vanai obeyed. He lay beside her. “It gives a man more pleasure if a woman takes pleasure, too,” he remarked, and did his best with hands and mouth to give her some. When he told her to do something, she did it, and tried not to think about what she did. Otherwise, as she had in the hall, she endured.

When his tongue began to probe her secrets, she twisted away toward the wall. “Come back,” he said. “If you will not kindle, you will not. But the wetter you are, the less it will hurt.”

“A considerate ravisher,” Vanai said through clenched teeth.

Spinello laughed. “But of course.” Presently, he went into her. “Ah,” he murmured a moment later, discovering no one had been there before him. “It will hurt, some.” He pushed forward. It did hurt. Vanai bit down on the inside of her lip. She tasted blood: blood to match the blood the Algarvian was drawing down below. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore his weight on her.

He grunted and quivered and pulled out. That hurt, too. Vanai tolerated it, though, because it meant this was finally over. “My grandfather—” she began.

Major Spinello laughed again. “You know what you did this for, don’t you?” he said. “Aye, a bargain: the wordy old bugger can come home and stay home—for as long as you keep giving me what I want, too. Do we understand each other, my dear?”

Vanai twisted toward the wall once more. “Aye,” she said, huddling into a ball. Of course once would not be enough to suit him. She should have known that. She supposed she had known it, even if she’d hoped… But what good was hope? She listened to him dress. She listened to him leave. Whore for the redheads, the Kaunian woman had called her. It hadn’t been true then. It was now. Vanai wept, not that weeping helped.

Winter on the island of Obuda brought endless driving rainstorms roaring off the Bothnian Ocean. Istvan hadn’t cared for them when he could take shelter in his barracks. He honestly preferred blizzards. He knew how to get around on snow. Anyone who grew up in a Gyongyosian valley knew everything he needed to know about snow.

Rain was a different business. Bad enough in the barracks—far worse when the only shelter he had was a hole in the ground. His cape still shed some water. That meant he was only soaked, not drenched. He slept very little, and that badly. Being soaked was only part of it. The other part was a healthy fear that some sneaking Kuusaman would get through the lines and slit his throat so he’d die without ever waking. It wasn’t an idle fear. Those little bastards could slip through cracks in the defenses a weasel couldn’t use.

He peered down the side of Mt. Sorong toward the Kuusaman trenches and holes. He couldn’t see very far through the trees and rain, but that didn’t stop him from being wary. He kept his stick close by him every moment, awake or asleep. He also had a stout knife on his belt. In weather like this, the knife might do him more good than the stick. Beams couldn’t carry far through driving rain.

Squelching noises behind him made him whirl—no telling from what direction a Kuusaman might come. But that big, tawny-bearded trooper was no Kaunian. “What now, Szonyi?” Istvan asked.

“Still here,” Szonyi said.

“Oh, aye, still here,” Istvan agreed. “The stars must hate us, don’t you think? If they didn’t, we’d be somewhere else. Of course”—he paused meditatively—“they might choose to send us somewhere worse.”

“And how would they do that?” the younger soldier demanded. “I don’t think there is a worse place than this.”

“Put it that way and you may be right,” Istvan said. “But you may be wrong, too.” He wasn’t sure how, but he’d seen enough bad to have a strong suspicion worse always waited around the corner. His stomach growled, reminding him bad was still bad. “What have you got in the way of food?” he asked Szonyi.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Szonyi answered, so regretfully that Istvan suspected he had more than he was admitting. The youngster was turning into a veteran, all right. But, short of searching his pockets and pack, Istvan couldn’t make a liar of him. He wasn’t desperate enough to do that, not yet. And maybe Szonyi wasn’t lying, too, for he said, “Maybe we ought to raid the slanteyes again.”

“Aye, maybe we should,” Istvan said. “They aren’t a proper warrior race, not even close—they think soldiers have to have full bellies to fight well. If we spent a quarter of the trouble on provisioning our men as they do, we’d be too fat to fight at all.” Rain dripped from the hood of his cape down on to his nose. “Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”

“Can’t do it,” Szonyi said. “Here’s one, though: if they aren’t a warrior race and we are, how come we haven’t kicked ’em off Obuda once and for all?”

Istvan opened his mouth, then abruptly closed it again. That was a good question, such a good question that a man could break teeth on it if he was unwary enough to bite down hard. At last, Istvan said, “The stars know,” which was undoubtedly true and which also undoubtedly did not come close to answering the question. He took the talk back in the direction it had gone before: “What do you say we slide down the hill and see if we can knock over a couple of Kuusamans? They’ll have more food than we do—you can bet on that.”

“Aye,” Szonyi said. “They couldn’t very well have less, could they?”

“I hope not, for their sake,” Istvan said. “Come to think of it, I hope not for our sake, too.” He slung his stick on his back and pulled his knife from its sheath. “Come on.” I am going to risk my life for no better reason than filling my belly, he thought as he crawled out of his shelter and down the mountainside. Then he wondered if there could ever be any better reason than filling his belly.

He moved as silently as he could. The drumming rain helped muffle any sounds he did make. It also helped hide him from the Kuusamans’ narrow eyes. At the same time, though, it muffled their noises and helped conceal them from him. He hadn’t stayed alive as long as he had by being careless. Szonyi might have been a shadow behind him. If bad luck didn’t kill the youngster, he would make a fine soldier.

The rain came down harder and harder, so that Istvan could see only a few yards in front of him. Spring wasn’t that far away; before long, the storms would ease. Istvan had seen it happen before. He knew it would happen again. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the storm didn’t seem to think it ever would.

He crawled past the stinking, sodden corpse of a Gyongyosian trooper—no Kuusaman born had ever had hair that shade of yellow. The corpse warned him he was nearing the Kuusaman line. It also warned him he might not come back.

No sooner had that unpleasant thought crossed his mind than eggs started dropping out of the sky on and around the Kuusaman position. He looked up, but of course the low, thick gray clouds hid the dragons that carried the eggs. He hoped they were Gyongyosian, but they might almost as readily have had Kuusamans riding them. Gyongyosian dragons had dropped eggs on their own footsoldiers before; he did not think the enemy immune from such mischances.

He flattened himself out on the ground. Bursts of energy near him tried to pick him up and throw him away. He clung to the bushes for all he was worth.

A Kuusaman, either wild with panic or more likely caught away from shelter and running in search of some, tripped over one of his legs and crashed to the ground. That was the first either of them knew of the other’s presence. They both cried out. Istvan’s knife rose and fell. The Kuusaman cried out again, this time in anguish. Istvan drove the knife into his throat. His cries cut off. He thrashed for a couple of minutes, ever more weakly, they lay still.

Istvan let out a rasping sigh of relief and went through the fellow’s pockets and pack. He found hard bread, smoked and salted salmon—a Kuusaman specialty—and dried apples and pears. The dead soldier’s canteen proved to hold apple brandy, something else of which the Kuusamans were inordinately fond. Istvan took a nip. He sighed with pleasure as fire ran down his throat.

“Szonyi?” he called in a low voice. When he got no answer, he called again, louder this time. He could have shouted and not been heard far in the din of bursting eggs.

He peered around. The only company he had was the dead Kuusaman. He cursed under his breath. He couldn’t go back up Mt. Sorong without knowing what had happened to his comrade. One warrior did not abandon another on the field. The stars would not shine for any man who did so base a thing as that.

“Szonyi?” Istvan called once more.

This time, he got an answer: “Aye?” Szonyi came through the curtain of rain toward him. The youngster had a smile on his face and a Kuusaman canteen in his hand. “I nailed one of the little whoresons,” he said. “How about you?”

“This fellow here won’t need his supper any more, so I may as well eat it for him,” Istvan said, which drew a laugh from Szonyi. Istvan went on, “Now that we’ve got a little food, let’s slide back up the side of the mountain.”

“I suppose so.” Szonyi didn’t sound happy about it. “If we do, though, we’ll have to share it with people who didn’t get any of their own.”

“And nobody has ever shared with you?” Istvan asked. Szonyi hung his head. Istvan slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. We won’t starve for a while longer, anyhow, even if we do have to share.”

With eggs still falling almost at random, getting back up Mt. Sorong was easier than going down the sloping side of the low mountain had been. The Gyongyosian soldiers could make more noise, for with the bursting eggs it went largely unnoticed. But, just before they reached their own line, a sharp challenge rang out: “Halt! Who goes there?”

Istvan was glad to hear that challenge. If he couldn’t sneak up on his comrades, maybe the Kuusamans couldn’t, either. He gave his own name and Szonyi’s, then added, “Is that you, Kun?”

“Aye.” The mage’s apprentice sounded reluctant to admit it. He returned to soldierly formality: “Advance and be recognized.”

“Here we come,” Istvan said. “Don’t start blazing at us now, or we won’t give you any of the Kuusaman treats we’ve brought back.” Szonyi sent him a reproachful look. He pretended not to see it. With the rain, the pretense was easy enough.

Raindrops dappled the lenses of Kun’s spectacles as he too showed himself. “Salmon?” he asked hopefully. When he had the chance, he ate like a dragon, and his scrawny carcass never put on an ounce. When he couldn’t eat so much as he wanted, he got skinnier still.

“Aye, salmon, and bread and fruit, too. And that applejack the slanteyes brew,” Istvan said. “Szonyi and I have put a dent in what we got of that, but you can have a slug or two, and some of the food to go with it.”

What would have been plenty for two men wasn’t quite enough for three, but even Szonyi didn’t complain out loud. The two canteens held enough apple brandy to make complaint seem pointless to all three Gyongyosians. Presently, Szonyi landed back against the trunk of a tree and asked, “How did you spot us, Kun? You can’t be able to see much in the rain with your spectacles, and I don’t think we made any noise. Even if we did, the racket down the hill should have covered it.”

“I have my methods,” Kun said, and said no more.

His smile was so superior, Istvan wanted to kick him in the teeth. “Some fifth-rank magical trick, I don’t doubt,” he growled. “Would it have spotted Kuusamans, too? Tell me the truth, by the stars. Our necks may ride on what you know and what you don’t.”

“Unless they’re specially warded, it would,” Kun answered. “It spies men moving forward toward me.”

It didn’t spy men moving toward him from higher up Mt. Sorong, as a crashing in the brush proved a moment later. Istvan stared in astonishment at the apparition before him: an officer with the large six-pointed star of a major on each side of the collar of a uniform tunic surprisingly clean and fresh. He couldn’t have been living in that tunic for weeks, as Istvan had in his.

Istvan and Szonyi saluted without rising. Despite Kun’s assurances, Istvan didn’t know the Kuusamans hadn’t sneaked a sniper somewhere close. He noticed Kun didn’t spring to his feet, either. The major returned the salutes, then said, “Those goat-bearded lackwits said Istvan’s unit was somewhere around these parts. They had no sure notion where. Do you know of it? Am I close to it?”

“Sir—” Now, cautiously, Istvan did rise. “Sir, I am Istvan.”

“A common soldier?” The major’s eyes got wide. “By the way they spoke of you farther up the hill, I expected a captain.” He shrugged. “Well, no matter. Gather your warriors, Istvan, however many they be, and accompany me to the shipping that awaits. In this beastly weather, we need fear no Kuusaman dragons.”

“Shipping, sir?” Now Istvan was the one taken by surprise.

“Aye,” the major said impatiently. “We are transferring certain units back to the mainland, for purposes I need not discuss. Yours is among them; folk spoke highly of its fighting qualities. Now show me they were right.”

Numbly, Istvan obeyed. I’m escaping Obuda, he thought. The stars be praised. I’m escaping Obuda.

The sun shone blindingly on the snow-covered fields surrounding the village of Zossen. The glare did nothing to ease Garivald’s hangover. But he bore the pain more readily than he would have during the tail end of most winters. He’d spent less time drunk this season than in any winter since he’d started shaving.

He shook his head, even though it hurt. He’d spent less time drunk on spirits this past winter than any since he’d become a man. The rest of the time, though, he’d been drunk on words.

He glanced at the sun out of the corner of his eye. It climbed higher in the north every day. Spring wasn’t far away. The snow would melt, the ground would turn to muck, and, when the muck grew firm enough, it would be planting time. Most years, he’d looked forward to that. Not now. He’d have to work hard for a while. The more he worked, the less time he would have to make songs.

I never knew I could, he thought, and then, automatically, made a couplet of it: I never knew it could be so good. He felt like a middle-aged man who’d never had a woman till he married a young, beautiful, passionate bride: he was doing his best to make up for all the time he’d gone without.

Already, the villagers of Zossen sang his version of the now sacrificed captive’s song in preference to the one the luckless convict had known. They sang a couple of other songs of his, too, one his own try at a love song and the other an effort at putting into words what being cooped up through a longer winter in southern Unkerlant was like.

He wondered if he could make a song about what being worked to death most of the year felt like. No sooner had he wondered than words started lining up in neat rows inside his head, as if they were soldiers taking their formation at an officer’s command. Even so, he wondered if that song would be worth making. Everybody already understood everything there was to understand about working too much, understood it in the head and the heart and the small of the back, too. Songs were better when they told you something you didn’t already know.

He took a couple of steps, his boots crunching on crusted snow. Then he stopped again, a thoughtful expression on his face. He spoke the idea aloud. That helped him hold it in his mind: “I wonder if I could make a song that told people something they already know as well as the taste of black bread but made them think of something different, something they’d never thought of before.”

That would be something special, he thought. A song like that would last forever. He kicked at the snow, sending little clumps of it flying. Now he would be thinking about that to the exclusion of everything else. He saw it was a thing that might be done, but had no idea how to go about it. He wished he knew more. He had no formal training in music or song-making. He had no formal training in anything. He’d learned how to farm by watching his father, not by having a schoolmaster beat lessons into his back with a switch.

Standing out here at the edge of the village was peaceful. After so much time in the company of his wife and son and daughter and animals—in their company whether he wanted to be or not, for the most part—he savored as much peace as he could find.

He couldn’t find much, even on the outskirts of Zossen. Here came Waddo, waving his arms and bearing down on him like a behemoth in rut. A rhyme flew out of Garivald’s head, never to return. He glowered at the village firstman. “What is it now, Waddo? Whatever it is, couldn’t it have waited?”

He was, perhaps, lucky. Waddo was so full of himself, he paid no attention to anything Garivald said. “Have you heard?” he demanded. “Powers above, have you heard?” Then he shook his head. “No, of course you haven’t heard, and I’m an idiot. How could you have heard? I just got it off the crystal myself.”

“Why don’t you back up and start from the beginning?” Garivald asked. Whatever Waddo had heard had upset him beyond the mean.

“Aye, I’ll do that,” the firstman said, nodding. “What I heard is, the lousy, stinking Algarvians have gone and invaded Yanina, that’s what I heard. King Swemmel is hopping mad about it, too. He’s calling it a breach that will not stand, and he’s moving soldiers to the border with Yanina.”

“Why?” Garivald wondered. “From everything I’ve heard about Yanina”—he hadn’t heard much, but had no intention of admitting it—“Algarve is welcome to the place. People with pompoms on their shoes?” He shook his head. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anything to do with ’em.”

“You don’t understand,” Waddo said, which was likely to be true. “Yanina borders Algarve, right? And Yanina borders Unkerlant, too, right? If the redheads march into Yanina, what’s the next thing they’re going to do?”

“Catch the clap from all the loose Yaninan women,” Garivald answered, “and maybe from the loose Yaninan men, too, if half the stories they tell about them are true.”

Waddo exhaled in half scandalized exasperation. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, “and it’s not what his Majesty meant, either.” His chest swelled with self-importance; he’d heard King Swemmel with his own ears. “The next thing the Algarvians are going to do is keep right on marching, straight on into Unkerlant, and we aren’t going to let that happen.”

Impressers will be coming, Garivald thought. If Unkerlant got into a fight with Algarve, she’d need all the men she could find. The Six Years’ War had written out that lesson in letters of blood. Aside from that, though… “Zossen’s a long way from the border with Yanina,” he said. “I don’t see how it’s going to matter to us, any more than the war with Zuwayza did. Just another loud noise in a room far away.”

“It’s an insult to the whole kingdom, that’s what it is,” Waddo said, no doubt echoing the angry voice he’d heard in the crystal. “We won’t stand for it. We won’t take it lying down.”

“What will we do, then?” Garivald asked reasonably. “Sit on a bench? That’s about the only thing left for us, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re being absurd,” the firstman said, though Garivald wasn’t the one who’d used the figures of speech. “As soon as the ground is dry enough, we’re going to have to drive the Algarvians out of there.”

“Aye, that sounds efficient—if we can do it,” Garivald said. “Can we do it, do you think?”

“His Majesty says we can. His Majesty says we will,” Waddo said. “Who am I to argue with his Majesty? He knows more about the business than I do.” He fixed Garivald with a sour stare. “And, before your mouth runs away with you again, he knows more about this business than you do, too.”

“Well, that’s likely so,” Garivald admitted. “But talk with some of the older men here, Waddo. See how they like the idea of another war with the redheads.”

“Maybe I will,” said Waddo, who, like Garivald, was too young to have fought in the Six Years’ War. The firstman went on, “But whether they like it or not doesn’t matter. If King Swemmel says we’re at war with Algarve, why then, by the powers above, we’re at war with Algarve. And if we’re at war with Algarve, we’d better lick the redheads, or else they’ll lick us. Isn’t that right?”

“Aye, it is,” Garivald said. The only other choice was going to war against King Swemmel. Garivald was old enough to remember the Twinkings War. He didn’t see how fighting Algarve could be worse than civil war in Unkerlant. After what Swemmel ended up doing to Kyot, he didn’t see how any other challenger for the throne would dare try unseating the king, either.

“There you have it, then,” Waddo said. “What his Majesty tells us to do, we’ll do, and that’s all there is to it.”

Garivald couldn’t argue with that, either. Something else occurred to him: “How did the Algarvians go marching into Yanina just like that? Yanina’s down south, same as we are. The going can’t be easy there. I’m not a king and I’m not a marshal, but I wouldn’t want to go invading anybody at this time of year.” He waved at the snowdrifts covering the fields.

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Waddo, who plainly hadn’t thought about it, either. “King Swemmel didn’t say how the cursed redheads did it. He just said that they did it. How doesn’t matter. The king wouldn’t lie to us.”

Why not? Garivald wondered. He would have spoken that thought aloud with Annore. He might have spoken it aloud with Dagulf. Speaking to his wife or his trusted friend was one thing. Speaking to the firstman was something else again. Waddo was more Swemmel’s man than a proper villager.

“I’m off to tell some others now,” Waddo said. “You were the first man I saw, Garivald, so you were the first to get the news. But everyone in Zossen needs to hear.” Off he went, kicking up snow from the path with each step he took.

Some men of Garivald’s acquaintance would have gone with him, to spread the news farther and faster. Garivald liked his gossip as well as any man. Come to that, few old wives in Zossen liked gossip any better. But he did not follow Waddo. For one thing, this wasn’t gossip, or not exactly gossip: it was too big. He couldn’t think of anything much bigger than news of impending war. And, for another, he didn’t like Waddo well enough to help him with anything he didn’t have to.

Garivald stared east across the fields. He was glad a couple of hundred miles separated his village from Yanina’s western border. The Algarvians hadn’t come this far during the Six Years’ War, nor anywhere close. That made it a good bet they wouldn’t come so far this time, either.

Then he kicked up snow himself. That the war wouldn’t come to Zossen didn’t mean he wouldn’t go to the war, wherever it ended up being fought. He looked back toward Waddo’s two-story house and silently cursed the crystal the firstman had there. Evading the impressers would be much harder with that crystal here. They could report to Cottbus, get their orders for however many men the army required, and call for whatever help they needed, all right away.

He imagined an Unkerlanter dragon flying over the woods outside the village, dropping eggs on them to flush out the recalcitrants less than eager to fight in King Swemmel’s army. Impressers would do that sort of thing in a heartbeat—assuming they had hearts, which struck Garivald as unlikely.

Several lines casting scorn on impressers, inspectors, and everyone from Cottbus sprang into his mind, all unbidden. The whole village would laugh if he started singing such a song: the whole village except Waddo and the guards who kept the captives in the gaol cell from escaping. Garivald did not think they would be the least bit amused.

Reluctantly, he pushed his thoughts away from that sort of song. He could make it, aye. He could do any number of things he would be better off not doing. Life in Zossen was sometimes hard. That didn’t mean he had to go looking for ways to make it harder.

Behind him, he heard shouts of surprise. Those were the guards. Waddo must have given them the news. Garivald shook his head. He wouldn’t have shared gossip of any sort with the guards. It wasn’t as if they were villagers. Garivald shook his head again. Waddo had no sense of proportion.

“This is Patras,” Captain Galafrone said as the ley-line caravan sighed to a stop. “From here on, boys, we don’t ride any more. From here on, we march.” He looked as if he relished the prospect. Tealdo, who was something less than half his captain’s age, didn’t.

Neither did Tealdo’s friend Trasone. “I’ve already done enough marching to last me, thank you kindly,” he whispered.

“It’s not like we won’t be doing more anyhow soon enough,” Tealdo said. Like any soldier worth his pay, he was always ready to complain.

“What?” Trasone raised a gingery eyebrow. “You don’t figure us being here will scare King Swemmel out of gobbling up Yanina, the way he was going to do? I figure one look at you would be enough to make every Unkerlanter in the world run off screaming for his mother.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Galafrone said. “We want to impress Colonel Ombruno, right?” He pretended not to hear the jeers that rang through the car, continuing, “And some of the Yaninan women are supposed to be pretty cursed good-looking, too. I don’t know about you boys, but I don’t want ’em laughing at me on account of I can’t remember which is my left foot and which is my right when I’m marching.”

That put matters in a different light. Tealdo checked to make sure his tunic was perfectly straight and every pleat in his kilt knife-sharp. Trasone combed his mustache, not wanting a single hair out of place. Even Sergeant Panfilo set his hat on his head at a jauntier angle, and Tealdo would have sworn that only a blind woman, or one severely short of cash, could take the least interest in Panfilo.

“Get moving, you lousy lugs,” Panfilo rumbled as he surged to his feet. “Let’s show these foreign doxies what real men look like.”

A raw breeze blew through the streets of Patras. Tealdo was glad of the long, thick wool socks he wore, and would have been gladder had they been thicker and longer. Not far from the platform on which he was debarking, a Yaninan band played a vaguely familiar tune. After a while, he recognized it as the Algarvian royal hymn. “I’ve never heard it with bagpipes before,” he murmured to Trasone.

“I hope I never do again,” his friend whispered back.

Yaninans lined the route along which the Algarvian soldiers marched. Some of them held up signs in badly spelled, ungrammatical Algarvian. One said, WELL COME LIBERATATORS! Another proclaimed, DEETH FOR UNKERLANT! More signs and placards were in Yaninan, whose very characters were strange to Tealdo. For all he knew, they might have been advertising sausage or patent medicine or wishing that he and his countrymen might come down with a social disease.

But the Yaninans cheered too lustily to let him believe that. Set against Algarvians, they were short and wiry. The men favored mustaches that were thick and bushy rather than waxed to spiked perfection, as was the Algarvian ideal. Some of the older women had fairly respectable mustaches, too, which was much less common in Tealdo’s homeland.

He paid more attention to the young women. Like the men, they mostly had olive complexions and dark hair and eyes. Their features were sharply carved: wide foreheads; strong cheekbones and noses; narrow, pointed chins. They painted their lips red as blood.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said to Trasone, in a tone another man might have used to judge horseflesh.

“Oh, aye,” Trasone agreed. “And if we go into Unkerlant, you’ll see worse again. Think of Forthwegian women, only more so.”

Tealdo thought about it. He didn’t like what he was thinking. “Best argument for peace I’ve heard yet,” he said.

Trasone snickered, which brought Sergeant Panfilo’s wrath down on his head. “Silence in the ranks, curse you!” Panfilo growled.

Along with the rest of the brigade, Colonel Ombruno’s regiment assembled in front of King Tsavellas’s palace, a sprawling edifice whose onion domes painted in swirling patterns and bright colors loudly proclaimed what a foreign land this was. Algarvian banners—red, white, and green—flew alongside those of Yanina, which were simply red on white.

Another band struck up something vaguely resembling a tune. Tealdo supposed it was the Yaninan royal hymn, for a man in a domed crown and robes of scarlet and ermine ascended to a rostrum while the locals lining the edge of the plaza chorused, “Tsavellas! Tsavellas!”

King Tsavellas raised a hand. Had King Mezentio used such a gesture, he would have got silence. Tsavellas got more noise: Yaninans were anything but an orderly folk. The king waited. Slowly, very slowly, quiet came. Into it, Tsavellas spoke in accented but understandable Algarvian: “I welcome you brave men from the east, who will help shield my small kingdom from the madness of my other neighbor.” Then he said something—probably the same thing—in Yaninan. His subjects cheered. He waved to them and stepped down.

An Algarvian took his place. “That’s probably our minister here,” Tealdo said to Trasone, who nodded. Sure enough, the Algarvian spoke first not to the soldiers from his kingdom but to the assembled people of Patras in what sounded like fluent Yaninan. They cheered him with as much enthusiasm as they’d given their own sovereign.

Then he looked out over the ranks of Algarvian soldiers. “You are here for a reason, men,” he told them. “King Tsavellas invited you, begged King Mezentio to allow you, to enter Yanina to prove to King Swemmel of Unkerlant that we are determined to defend the small against the large. Just as the Kaunian kingdoms oppressed us when we were weak, so Unkerlant sought to oppress Yanina. But we are not weak now, and we shall not let our neighbors be molested. Men of Algarve, do I speak the truth?”

“Aye!” the Algarvian soldiers shouted. Some of them waved their hats. Some scaled their hats through the air. Tealdo waved his. However tempted he might have been to throw it, he refrained. Sergeant Panfilo’s comments would surely have been colorful, but might also have been imperfectly appreciative.

Two flagbearers went up on the rostrum. One held an Algarvian banner, the other a Yaninan. The flags blew in the breeze side by side.

“About-turn!” Colonel Ombruno called to his regiment. Along with his comrades, Tealdo spun on his heel. The regiment led the brigade out of the square. After one wrong turn—fortunately, out of sight of King Tsavellas and the Algarvian minister—they made their way to the barracks where they would spend the night.

Surrounding the barracks like toadstools were tents full of Yaninan soldiers. “Uh-oh,” Tealdo said. “I don’t much like that. We’re stealing their beds. They won’t love us for it.”

He liked it even less the next morning, when he woke up with bug bites. What the Yaninans served up for breakfast wasn’t very good. Tealdo had expected as much. Captain Galafrone had warned the whole company to expect as much. “Boys, they’re long on cabbage and they’re long on bread. You’ll be bored, but you won’t be hungry.”

Bored Tealdo certainly was, not that Algarvian army cooking was anything to send a noble connoisseur into flights of ecstasy. But Tealdo also ended up hungry, because the Yaninan cooks hadn’t done up enough to fill the bellies of their new Algarvian allies. Share and share alike was the rule. A few bites of black bread and not enough cabbage-and-beet soup made Tealdo’s stomach rumble and growl as if angry wild things dwelt there.

“I wonder what the Yaninans are eating,” he said as he finished the meager meal—not that finishing it took long. “I wonder if the poor whoresons are eating anything.”

“Aye. This isn’t good.” Trasone shook his head. Being a veteran, he knew how important questions of supply were. “If the Yaninans can’t do a proper job of feeding troops in their own capital, how will they manage out in the field.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Tealdo said. “We’ll pay the price of finding out, too.”

But Sergeant Panfilo shook his head. “It won’t be as bad as that,” he said. “Our supply services come along with us. Once we’re stationed, once the fighting starts—if the fighting starts—they’ll take care of us. Those boys can find a six-course supper hiding under dead leaves.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Tealdo said, somewhat reassured. It wasn’t quite so—Panfilo did exaggerate, but not by much. “Powers above pity the poor Yaninans, though. They haven’t got much, and they don’t know how to move what they do have.”

“Come on, boys,” Captain Galafrone called. “Lovely as this place is, we can’t hang around here any more. We’ve got to go out and see the big, wide world—or at least the little, narrow chunk of it that belongs to Yanina.”

Tealdo did more really hard marching that day than in any other he could remember. He’d marched farther a good many times, especially in the hectic fighting that led up to Valmiera’s collapse. But Valmiera, like Algarve, had a decent network of paved roads. A man or a horse or a unicorn or a behemoth could tramp over the cobblestones or gravel or slabs of slate at any season of the year.

He’d come into Patras by ley-line caravan, and hadn’t had to worry about what the roads were like. The streets of King Tsavellas’s capital were paved as well as those of any Algarvian town. The highway that led toward the west, toward the border with Unkerlant, was also well paved… for the first few miles.

About an hour after leaving the barracks behind, Tealdo and his comrades also left the cobblestones behind. His feet plunged into cold mud. The first time he lifted one up out of the roadbed, a lot of the roadbed came with it. The second time he lifted one out, even more mud came along. He cursed in disgust.

He wasn’t the only one cursing, either. A brimstone cloud might have surrounded the company, the regiment, the entire brigade. “These are our allies?” somebody not far away from Tealdo bellowed. “Powers below eat them, the Unkerlanters can have them and welcome!” He was more than usually exercised, but then, when he’d picked up a foot, his boot hadn’t come out of the muck with it.

“Shut up!” Galafrone shouted. “You fools haven’t got the faintest notion of what you’re talking about. I fought against the Unkerlanters in the last war, along with your fathers—if you know who your fathers are. You think this is bad, Unkerlant makes this look like Mad Duke Morando’s pleasure gardens outside of Cotigoro. You’ll find out.”

Algarvian soldiers obeyed orders. They kept marching, as best they could. That didn’t mean they didn’t speak their minds. The trooper who’d lost his boot spoke with great conviction: “I don’t care how lousy Unkerlant is. That still doesn’t make this stinking place any fornicating pleasure garden.”

On the Algarvians slogged. They came to their assigned campsite long after nightfall. Tealdo was amazed they came to it at all. Ever since the cobbles stopped, he’d felt as if he were marching in place.

The Yaninan cooks also seemed astonished the Algarvians reached the campsite. Again, they had something less than adequate rations for the brigade. Having gulped down what he was given, Tealdo started toward the west, toward Unkerlant. King Swemmel was responsible for the dreadful day he’d put in, and for other dreadful days that no doubt lay ahead. As far as Tealdo was concerned, that meant Swemmel’s subjects would pay. “Oh, how they’ll pay,” he muttered.

“Come on, curse you!” Leudast shouted to the ordinary troopers of his squad. He enjoyed being a corporal, sure enough. Being a corporal meant he got to do the shouting instead of having sergeants and corporals shout at him. “We have to move faster, curse it. You think the lousy redheads are going to stand around waiting for you to get your thumbs out of your arses?”

He left without the slightest twinge of regret the Forthwegian village in which his squad had been billeted. The locals hadn’t given his comrades and him any more trouble since the Unkerlanters blazed down the firstman and his wife, but the Forthwegians didn’t love his countrymen, and they never would.

Like rills and creeks and streams flowing together to form a great river, the Unkerlanter squads and companies that had been quartered on the countryside came together into regiments and brigades and divisions and flowed toward the east, toward the border with Algarvian-held Forthweg. Leudast smiled and nodded approval at every squadron of horsemen and unicorn-riders who kicked up dust on the newly dry roads. He felt like cheering at every section of behemoths he saw, and wished there were more of them to see.

In the fields between the roads, Forthwegian peasants plowed and planted as they had done for centuries since largely displacing the isolated Kaunians left behind when the Algarvians swept up from the south and wrecked the Kaunian Empire. The Forthwegian peasants did their best to ignore the Unkerlanter soldiers moving along the roads, just as, farther east, Forthwegian peasants were doubtless doing their best to ignore the Algarvian soldiers moving along the roads.

“They’ll be planting back in my village about now, too,” Leudast said to Sergeant Magnulf. He sniffed, then sighed. “Nothing like spring air, is there? It even smells green, you know what I mean?—like you ought to be able to grow crops from the smell without bothering with plowing and manuring and all that.”

“Don’t I wish!” Magnulf rolled his eyes. “Village I came out of is a lot farther south—matter of fact, it’s only a couple of days’ walk this side of the Gifhorn River, and on the other side of the Gifhorn they’re Grelzers first and Unkerlanters only when they bother remembering the Union of Crowns. Liable to be snowing down there even now—and if it’s not, people are still waiting for the mud to dry. Once it does, they’ll work their arses off, too. None of this moonshine about growing things with the air.”

“I didn’t say you really could,” Leudast protested. “I just said it smelled like you could.”

Magnulf, like any sergeant worth his pay, was constitutionally unable to recognize a figure of speech. He could recognize a crude joke, though, and did, pointing to a band of Unkerlanter unicorns riding across a field a Forthwegian farmer had just finished plowing. “Haw, haw, haw! Now that miserable whoreson’ll have to do it all over again. Haw, haw!”

Leudast chuckled, too; a Forthwegian peasant’s problems were none of his own. “I wish those unicorns were behemoths, is what I wish,” he said.

“Aye, that’d be good,” Magnulf agreed, laughing still. “Then he’d have bigger holes in the ground to worry about.”

That wasn’t why Leudast wished he saw more behemoths. All through Algarve’s victory over Forthweg, and then in her smashing wins against Valmiera and Jelgava, her behemoths had done more than their share of the damage. Everyone said so. The summer and autumn before, he’d spent a lot of time training against horses tricked out as behemoths. The more of the great beasts he saw with Unkerlanter crews atop them, the happier he’d be.

He kept looking up into the sky, and cocking his head to one side to try to catch the harsh cries of dragons overhead. As with the behemoths, he saw and heard some, but not so many as he would have liked. When he remarked on that to Magnulf, the sergeant said, “Be thankful you don’t see any flying out of the east. We’re getting too bloody close to the border now. Here’s hoping we’ve caught the redheads napping.”

“Aye, here’s hoping,” Leudast said in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. “Nobody else has managed to do that yet.”

Magnulf spat in the dirt. “They put one arm in a tunic sleeve at a time, same as we do. Remember”—he planted an elbow in Leudast’s ribs—“if they were as great as they think they are, they’d have won the Six Years’ War. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“You’re right, Sergeant. Can’t argue with that.” Leudast tramped on, feeling a little happier. His back ached. His feet ached. He wished King Swemmel’s impressers had never found his village. He’d spent a lot of time wishing that. He didn’t know why. It never did any good.

The regiment camped in the fields that night. That would give the Forthwegians who farmed them more work to do come morning—work likely to be undone when more Unkerlanter soldiers came through heading east. Leudast lost no sleep over that, or over the provenance of the chunks of mutton and chicken in the cookpots. Leudast lost no sleep over anything. As soon as he helped Magnulf make sure the squad was safely settled, he rolled himself in his blanket and plunged into slumber almost at once. He did not expect to wake till the rising sun pried his eyelids open.

But the first eggs fell out of the sky when morning twilight was barely beginning to stain the eastern horizon with gray. Now he heard dragons’ cries, fierce and raucous. The beasts swooped low above the Unkerlanter encampment, dropping their eggs and then gaining height once more with thunderous wingbeats. Some came close enough to the ground to flame before they flew higher. More flames sprang up from tents and wagons they set afire.

Leudast seized his stick and started blazing at them, but the sky was still so dark, he had no good targets. Even with a good target, he knew a foot-soldier had to be lucky—had to be more than lucky—to bring down a dragon. He kept blazing anyhow. If he didn’t, he had no chance at all to bring one down.

An egg burst close by him, knocking him off his feet and rolling him along the ground like a pin in a game of sixteens. He knocked over a couple of other soldiers, too, just as a well-struck pin would have done, though not enough to gain a good score. They shouted and cursed, as he did. Men were screaming, too, at the top of their lungs.

Some of those screams burst from the throats of wounded men. Others were shouts of anger or, more often, horrified astonishment: “The redheads!” “The Algarvians!” “King Mezentio’s men!”

They’ve got a lot of cursed nerve, hitting us first, Leudast thought. The ground shook beneath his feet as another egg burst nearby. We were supposed to hit them first, catch them by surprise.

That hadn’t happened. It wasn’t going to happen, not now. Remembering how his officers said the Algarvians liked to fight, Leudast had a sudden nasty premonition of what was likely to happen next. “Prepare to receive attack from the east!” he shouted to his squad and anyone else who would listen. “The redheads will be hitting us with foot and cavalry and those stinking behemoths, too!”

“Aye, that’s the truth!” No one who knew Sergeant Magnulf could mistake his bellow. “That’s what those cursed Algarvians think efficient fighting’s all about. Now that the dragons have knocked us cockeyed, they’ll send in the men on the ground to try and flatten us.”

Here and there in the madness—which did not cease, for Algarvian dragons kept on pounding the encampment—officers also tried to rally their men. But some officers were killed, some were hurt, and some, with action upon them, turned out to be worthless. Leudast watched one run for the west as fast as he could go.

He had no time for more than one quick curse aimed at that captain’s back. Then more eggs started falling on the tents. These were smaller than the ones the dragons carried, which meant the Algarvians had already got tossers over the border and into the part of Forthweg Unkerlant occupied. Leudast shook his head. No—the part of Forthweg Unkerlant had occupied.

A wild shout came from sentries posted east of the camp: “Here they come!”

“Come on, you whoresons!” Leudast yelled. “If we don’t fight the redheads, they’ll kill all of us.” Even if his comrades did fight the Algarvians, King Mezentio’s men were liable to kill them all. He chose not to dwell on that.

Now, instead of reaching for his stick, he grabbed his shovel off his belt and dug frantically. He had no time to make a proper hole from which to fight, but a little scrape with the dirt he’d dug thrown up in front of it was better than nothing. He lay flat in the scrape, rested his stick on the dirt parapet, and waited for the Algarvians to get close enough to blaze.

And then Colonel Roflanz, the regimental commander, shouted, “The attack must go on as ordered. Forward against the foe, men! King Swemmel and efficiency!”

“No!” Leudast and Magnulf yelled it together. Both of them had seen enough combat to know Roflanz was asking to get himself slaughtered, and everyone who followed him, too. The men in their squad, or the two or three of them close enough to hear their corporal, held their places. But far more men followed Roflanz. He was their leader. How could they go wrong if they followed him?

They found out. It did not take long. Algarvians on behemoths blazed them with heavy sticks at ranges from which they could not reply. Other behemoths bore light egg-tossers. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung Unkerlanter soldiers aside, broken and bleeding. And the behemoths themselves, armored against footsoldiers’ weapons, lumbered forward and trampled down King Swemmel’s men. The Algarvians swarmed into the holes torn in their ranks.

Leudast almost started blazing at the first men he saw running back toward him. With the new-risen sun shining in his face, they were hardly more than silhouettes. His finger was already halfway into the blazing hole when he realized the men wore long tunics, not short tunics and kilts.

“Fall back!” one of them shouted, stumbling past his position. “If you don’t fall back, everything’s lost. Powers above, if you do fall back, everything’s lost, too.” Away he went, at least as fast as the captain who had incontinently fled when Algarvian dragons started dropping eggs on the encampment.

Magnulf said, “If the redheads make us fall back, I’ll do it. But I’m cursed if I’ll run away just because some coward tells me to.”

“Aye, by the powers above,” Leudast said. There—there ahead of him were men in kilts. He blazed at them. They went down. Maybe he’d hit one or two, maybe they were battlewise like him, and knew enough to make themselves smaller targets. Either way, he whooped. “We can stop the whoresons!”

But the Algarvians, when they met steady resistance, did not try to overrun and overwhelm it, as any Unkerlanter force would have done. Instead, they flowed around it, and soon were blazing at Leudast and the other steady Unkerlanters from the flank as well as the front.

“We have to give way!” Magnulf shouted then. “If we don’t, they’ll get behind us in a minute, and then we’re dead.” When he retreated, Leudast went with him. Leudast didn’t want to move back, but he didn’t want to die, either. As far as he was concerned, for the moment survival and efficiency were one and the same.

Count Sabrino whooped with glee. He whacked his dragon with the goad. The great, stupid beast screamed fury at him. But then it dove on the Unkerlanter column on the road outside of Eoforwic. The Unkerlanters started to scatter, but it was already too late. Sabrino’s was not the only dragon falling out of the sky. His whole wing of dragonfliers plunged toward them.

When he saw five or six Unkerlanters tightly bunched, Sabrino whacked the dragon again, in a different way. Flame burst from its jaws. He heard the soldiers shriek as he flew by just above their heads. He didn’t whoop then. Savoring the enemy’s anguish might have been all very well for the Algarvian chieftains who’d toppled the Kaunian Empire, but listening to footsoldiers burn brought combat to a level too personal for his taste.

And then, off to the north, he spied a different sort of target, the sort of target of which dragonfliers usually but dreamt. For this campaign, the mages had given him a crystal attuned to his squadron and flight leaders. He spoke into it now: “Look, lads! Another Unkerlanter dragon farm. Shall we go pay them a visit?”

“Aye!” That was Captain Domiziano, sounding as fierce as any Algarvian chieftain from the ancient days. “If Swemmel’s men will give us presents, they can’t be surprised when we take them.”

The whole wing swung toward the dragon farm. Sabrino laughed under his breath. The Unkerlanters had intended to take Algarve by surprise. They’d moved strong forces very close to the front. But King Mezentio had had plans of his own, and now the Unkerlanters found themselves on the receiving end of the surprise they’d intended to give.

They weren’t responding well, either, any more than Forthweg or Valmiera or Jelgava had when Mezentio’s men struck them. There ahead, coming up fast, was a dragon farm whose dragons, on this second day of the attack, remained chained to the ground.

With a great roar, Sabrino’s dragon put on a burst of speed. Dragons had no sense of chivalry or fair play whatever. When they saw foes helpless in the ground, all that filled their tiny minds was killing them. Sabrino’s problem was not to urge his mount on, but to keep the dragon from flaming too soon and from landing to rend the Unkerlanter beast with its talons as well as burning them from above.

Unkerlanter fliers and keepers ran this way and that, trying to get a few dragons in the air either to oppose the Algarvians or simply to flee. They had little luck; Sabrino’s wing flamed them with almost as much gusto as his dragons gave to destroying their winged, scaly counterparts.

By the time the wing had made several passes above the dragon farm, it was as dreadful a shambles as Sabrino had ever seen. By then, his dragon could produce only little wheezes of flame. It still wanted to go back and do some more killing. Sabrino had to beat it savagely with the goad to get it to fly away from the Unkerlanter dragon farm. As long as it could see enemy dragons on the ground, it was ready to attack.

But, fortunately, it was, like any dragon, too stupid to own much in the way of a memory. After Sabrino had finally persuaded—and there was a splendid euphemism—it to leave the dragon farm, it flew on toward the east without a backwards glance. Sabrino, on the other hand, did look back, not for one more glimpse of the battered foe but to find out how the men and beasts of his wing had come through. He spied not a single hole in the formation. Pride filled him. The great force King Mezentio had built for revenge was performing exactly as its creator had intended.

Once Sabrino had made sure of that, he looked down to see how the fight on the ground was going. Pride filled him again. Here was the same pattern he’d seen in Valmiera. Wherever the Unkerlanters tried to make a stand, the Algarvians either used behemoths to pound them into submission with eggs and heavy sticks or went around them to strike from the side and rear as well as the front. And the Unkerlanters would have to retreat or surrender or die where they stood.

Some—quite a few, in fact—chose to do just that. No one had ever said the Unkerlanters were cowards: no one who’d fought them in the Six Years’ War, certainly. But many Valmierans had been brave, too, and it hadn’t helped them any. King Mezentio and his generals had out-thought them before they outfought them. The same drama looked to be unfolding on the plains of eastern Forthweg.

Every once in a while, the Unkerlanters would hole up in a village or a natural strongpoint too tough to be easily taken. Then, again as in Valmiera and Jelgava, the dragons would come in, dropping eggs on the enemy, softening him up so the men on the ground could finish him off.

When Sabrino’s wing came spiraling down to land at a hastily set up farm in what had been, up till that morning, Unkerlanter-occupied Forthweg, the keepers shouted, “How’s it going? How are we doing, up ahead there?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Sabrino said as he slid off his dragon once it was securely chained to a stake. “By the powers above, I really don’t see how anything could look finer. If we keep going like this, we’ll get to Cottbus almost as fast as we got to Priekule.”

The keepers cheered. One of them took a chunk of meat, rolled it in a bucket full of ground cinnabar and brimstone, and tossed it to the dragon. A snap, and the meat was gone. The dragon ate greedily. It had worked hard today. It would work hard again tomorrow. As long as it got enough food and close to enough rest, it would be able to do what was required of it.

“Eat, sleep, and fight,” Sabrino said. “Not such a bad life, eh?”

One of the keepers looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about screwing?”

“A reward for good service,” Sabrino answered easily. “That’d pull ’em into the army, wouldn’t it? ‘Serve your kingdom bravely and we’ll put you out to stud.’ Aye, they’d be storming to join up once they heard that.” He laughed. So did the keepers. Why not laugh? The enemy fled before them.

Captain Domiziano came up. “What’s so funny, sir?” he asked. Sabrino told him. He laughed, too. “Can I quit and join up again?”

“Up till now, my dear fellow, I haven’t noticed you having any problems finding a lady—or, in a pinch, merely a woman—who was interested, or at least willing, when you were,” Sabrino said.

“Well, that’s true enough,” Domiziano said complacently. “The hunting was better when we were on the eastern front, though. Those Valmieran and Jelgavan wenches acted almost the way the ones in the historical romances do. Most of the Kaunian women here won’t give us the time of day, and half the Forthwegians are built like bricks.

“It won’t get any better,” Sabrino said. “When we break into Unkerlant, they’ll be even dumpier than the Forthwegians.”

“My lord count!” Domiziano said in piteous tones. “Did you have to make me think in such doleful terms?”

“What’s so doleful about breaking into Unkerlant?” Captain Orosio asked. He’d come up too late to hear how the conversation started.

Domiziano needed only two words to fill him in: “Homely women.”

“Ah.” Orosio nodded. He looked west. “You had better get used to it, my dear comrade. Not even the powers above, I shouldn’t think, can keep us from smashing the Unkerlanters once for all. You can watch them crumble as we hit them.”

“They’re trying hard to fight back,” Sabrino said, giving credit where he thought it due. “They may even be fighting back harder than the Kaunian kingdoms did in the east. The Jelgavans just quit once we got the jump on them; they had no use for their own officers. The Valmierans did a little better, but they still haven’t figured out what hit them.”

“Do you think the Unkerlanters have, sir?” Orosio asked, his eyes wide.

Sabrino considered the day’s action, the column flamed on the road and the dragon farm caught with its animals still chained to the ground. A slow smile stole across his face. “Now that you mention it, no,” he said.

Orosio and Domiziano both laughed and clapped their hands. Domiziano said, “We’ll be in Cottbus, burning King Swemmel’s palace down around his crazy ears, before harvest time.”

“Aye.” Captain Orosio nodded again. “He’s going to have a lesson in what efficiency really means.” He paraded around very stiffly, as if he were afraid to make any movement not prescribed for him by some higher authority.

“You look like you’ve got a poker up your arse,” Sabrino said.

“Feels that way, too.” Orosio relaxed into a more natural posture. “But go ahead and tell me it’s not how Unkerlanters are.”

“I can’t do that,” Sabrino admitted. “Can’t even come close. “They’re the sort of people who wait for permission to come through on a crystal before they blow their noses.”

“And they haven’t got enough crystals to go around, either,” Domiziano added.

“Makes things easier for us,” Orosio said. “I’m in favor of whatever makes things easier for us.”

“What I’d be in favor of right now is some wine and some food,”

Sabrino said. “Our dragons are stuffing themselves”—he glanced back to where the keepers tossed more gobbets of meat to the great beasts—“and I want to do the same.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but brimstone and cinnabar give me heartburn,” Domiziano said with a grin.

“What would the back of my hand give you?” the wing commander asked, but he also grinned. Aye, grins were easy to come by in an army moving forward. Sabrino looked toward the west again. Faces would be long in the Unkerlanter encampments. He hoped they would get longer, too, in the days ahead. In a low voice, he murmured, “The tide is flowing our way.”

“Aye, it is,” Captain Orosio said. For his part, he looked toward the tents set to one side of the dragon farm. He was grinning, too. “And it looks like supper is finally flowing our way.”

Supper, plainly, had been foraged from the Forthwegian countryside. Sabrino gorged himself on crumbly white cheese, almost preserved with salt and garlic, olives even saltier than the almonds, and breads with wheat and barley flour dusted with sesame seeds. Had anyone back at his estate presumed to serve him such a rough red wine, he would have bitten the luckless fellow’s head off. Here in the field, he drank it without complaint. It might even have gone better with his simple fare than a more subtle vintage would have done.

As he ate, the stars came out. The Gyongyosians made them into powers, powers that could control a man’s destiny. Foolishness, as far as Sabrino was concerned. Powers or not, though, they were beautiful. He watched them for a while, till he caught himself yawning.

He sought his bed without the least embarrassment or the least desire for company. If young Domiziano had the energy to look for a companion and to do something with her once he found her, that was his affair. Sabrino needed sleep.

Some time in the middle of the night, Unkerlanter dragons dropped eggs not too far from the dragon farm. Sabrino woke up, cursed the Unkerlanters in a blurry voice, and fell asleep again. The next morning, the attack went on.