Into the Darkness

8.

Krasta sipped cherry brandy laced with wormwood. A band thumped away in the background: tuba and accordion, bagpipes and thudding kettledrum. On the dance floor, Valmieran nobles swayed and spun to the loud, insistent beat.

“This is the place to be,” Valnu said, leering across the table at her. “Even if the Algarvians drop eggs on Priekule, they can’t knock the Cellar down. We’re already underground.” He giggled as if he’d said something very funny.

“This is the place to be because it’s the place to be,” Krasta replied with a shrug. Had the Cellar been built atop the Kaunian Column of Victory, she still would have frequented the nightspot. Anyone who was, or who had pretensions of being, someone came here. People who weren’t someone looked on from a distance and envied. That was the way the world worked.

Valnu lifted his mug of porter. “So good to find you thinking as clearly as ever.” Malice flavored the affection in his voice as the wormwood embittered Krasta’s sweet brandy. “I hope your brother is still safe, there in the west.”

“He was well, last letter I had from him.” Krasta tossed her head, sending pale gold curls flying: old imperial styles had suddenly become the rage. “But this is too much talk about the war. I don’t want to think about the war.” The truth of the matter was, she didn’t want to think at all.

“Very well.” Valnu’s smile turned him into the most charming skull Krasta had ever known. “Let’s dance, then.” He got to his feet.

“All right, why not?” Krasta said carelessly. The room spun a little as she rose: that spiked brandy was potent stuff. She laughed as Valnu slid an arm around her waist and guided her out on to the floor.

Valnu was a thoroughgoing predator. His principal virtue was that he never pretended to be anything else. As he and Krasta danced, his hand slid from the small of her back to close on the smooth curve of her left buttock. He pressed her tight against him, so tight that she could not possibly doubt he had more than dancing on his mind.

She might have loosened some of his white, pointed teeth for him because of the liberties he took with her noble person. She contemplated it, in fact, as well as she could contemplate anything in her rather fuddled state. But his mocking smile said he was waiting for her to do just that. Except when making sure commoners stayed in their place, she hated doing anything someone else expected of her. And, she realized, she was feeling randy herself. She’d decide later how far she intended to let him go. For the moment, she simply enjoyed herself.

And it wasn’t as if she were the only woman in the Cellar whose companion was feeling her up on the dance floor. It was not a place to which women who minded being rumpled in public commonly came. I can always blame it on the brandy, she thought. But she didn’t really need to blame it on anything. She did as she pleased. No one could make her do anything else.

The music stopped. Krasta set her hand on the back of Valnu’s head and pulled his face down to hers. She kissed him, open-mouthed. He tasted of porter: bitter, but not so bitter as the wormwood in her brandy. Halfway through the kiss, she opened her eyes. Valnu was staring at her. He was so close, his features blurred, but she thought he looked astonished. She laughed, down deep in her throat.

He broke the kiss and twisted away. Now she had no trouble reading his expression. He was angry. Krasta laughed again. He must have realized he’d gone from predator to prey, realized it and not cared for it at all. “You’re a fire-breather, aren’t you?” he said, his voice rougher than usual.

“What if I am?” Krasta tossed her head again, as she had back at the table. She pointed toward the musicians. “They’re going to start again in a minute. Do you want to dance some more, or have we already done everything we can do standing up?”

Valnu did his best to rally. “Not quite everything,” he answered, more self-collected now. Bold as brass, he reached out and cupped her breast through the fabric of her tunic. His thumb and forefinger unerringly found her nipple. He teased it for a few seconds, then let her go.

Maybe he hadn’t understood how hot and reckless Krasta was feeling. Maybe she hadn’t realized it herself, not till those knowing fingers further inflamed her. She reached out, too, at a lower level.

Had he pulled off his trousers and lain down on the floor, she might have mounted him then and there. Such things were said to happen at the Cellar now and again, though Krasta had never seen them there. But Valnu, after shaking himself like a wet hound, went back to the table in four or five long strides. Krasta followed him. Her cheeks burned. Her heart raced. She breathed quickly, as if she’d just run a long way.

Valnu gulped the porter left in his mug. He was looking at Krasta as if he’d never seen her before. “Brimstone and quicksilver,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Dragon-bitch.”

After what she’d drunk, she took it as a compliment: indeed, she never thought to wonder whether it might be anything else. Her own goblet, smaller than the earthenware mug from which he’d drunk, held brandy yet. She poured it down. An egg might have burst in her belly. But warmth flowed out of it: to her face, to her breasts, to her loins.

With a rumbling blast from the tuba player and a thunder of drumbeats, the band started up again. The rhythm seemed to be inside her, filling her to the brim; the laced brandy kicked like a wild ass. As if from very far away, Valnu asked, “Do you want to go out on the floor again?”

“No.” Krasta shook her head. The room seemed to keep moving after she stopped. “Let’s ride around the town in my carriage—or even out into the country.”

“In your carriage?” Valnu frowned. “What will the coachman think?”

“Who cares?” Krasta said gaily. “Powers above! He’s only a coachman.”

Valnu silently clapped his hands. “Spoken like the true woman of nobility you are,” he exclaimed, and got to his feet. So did Krasta, hoping the process looked smoother to him than it felt to her. They retrieved their cloaks from the little antechamber just outside the main room—the night had its full share of autumn chill—then went upstairs and out into the darkness.

That darkness was well-nigh absolute. Though no Algarvian war dragons had yet appeared over Priekule, the city encaped itself in black. A good many carriages waited outside the Cellar while their noble owners reveled the night away. Krasta had to call several times before she could sort out which one was hers.

“Where to, milady?” her driver asked when she and Valnu climbed up into the seat behind him. “Back to the mansion?”

“No, no,” Krasta said. “Just drive about for a while. If you happen to come on a road that leads out of the city—well, so much the better.”

The coachman stayed quiet longer than he should have. When at last he spoke, all he said was, “Aye, milady. It shall be as you command.” He clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The carriage began to move. Krasta hardly noticed his words. Of course it would be as she commanded. How could it be otherwise, when she was dealing with her own servitors? She turned to Valnu, a vague shape in the darkness beside her. She reached out for him as he was reaching out for her. The coachman paid no attention. He knew better than to pay attention … or, at least, to be seen paying attention.

Under the cover of their cloaks, Valnu’s hand found the bone toggles that held her tunic closed. He undid a couple of them and reached inside the tunic to fondle her bare breast. Careless of the coachman, Krasta moaned. When her mouth met Valnu’s this time, the kiss was so fierce, she tasted blood: his or hers, she could not tell.

His hand slid out of her tunic. He rubbed at the crotch of her trousers. She thought she would burst like an egg then. Valnu chuckled. His hand dived under her waistband. His fingers, long and slim and clever, knew exactly where to go and exactly what to do when they got there. Krasta gasped and shuddered, for a moment blind with pleasure. Valnu chuckled again, as pleased with himself as he was with having pleased her. The horses plodded on, hooves clopping on cobbles. Stolid as the animals he drove, the coachman minded the reins.

Krasta thought of ordering Valnu out of the carriage now that he’d given her what she wanted. But, sated and tipsy, she felt more generous than usual. She rubbed him through the wool of his trousers. After an abrupt inhalation, he murmured, “I do hope you won’t make me explain myself to my laundryman.”

She laughed and rubbed harder. Nothing could have made her more inclined to do just that than his hoping she wouldn’t. After a moment, though, still in that uncommonly kindly mood, she unbuttoned his fly and drew him forth. She stroked him some more.

“Ahhh,” he said softly.

Had Krasta gone on for another minute or two, she would have made Valnu explain himself to his laundryman: of that she had no doubt. Instead, she lowered her head, saying, “Here. I will give you a treat you could have only from a noblewoman.” She took him in her mouth. His flesh was hot and smooth.

His fingers tangled in her hair. Above her busy lips and tongue, he laughed. “You are quite a lot of woman, my sweet,” he said, “but what you’re doing there hasn’t been a secret of the nobility for a long, long time, if it ever was. Why, only last week this pretty little shopgirl—”

In spite of his hands, she raised up so suddenly that the back of her head caught him in the chin. “What?” she hissed as he yelped in pain. Fury filled her as quickly and completely as lubriciousness had. Before he could even start to set himself to rights, she pushed him with all her strength. He had time for only a startled squawk before he tumbled out on to the cobbles.

“Milady, what on earth—?” he began.

“Shut up!” Krasta snarled. Careless of her left breast peeping out from the undone tunic, she leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Take me home this instant. Make your stupid beasts move or you’ll be sorry for it, do you hear me?”

“Aye, milady,” the coachman answered: not a word more, which was wise of him. He flicked the reins. After what sounded like surprised snorts, the horses moved up into a trot. Krasta looked back over her shoulder. Valnu took a couple of steps in pursuit of the carriage, then gave up. He vanished in the darkness behind her.

Absently, Krasta did up the toggles he had opened. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, again and again. Disgust filled her, so much that she almost had to lean out of the carriage and vomit it forth into the roadway. It wasn’t what she’d been doing; she’d done that before, and always been amused how such a small thing could make a man behave as if treacle filled his veins.

But that her mouth had gone where a commoner’s—a pretty little shopgirl’s, Valnu had said—mouth went before… She could imagine nothing more revolting. She felt ritually unclean, like a man of the Ice People who had accidentally slain his fetish animal.

After she got back to the mansion, she routed Bauska out of bed and had the servant fetch her a bottle of brandy. She rinsed her mouth several times, then imperiously thrust the bottle back. Bauska took it away without a word. Like the coachman, she’d learned better than to ask questions of her mistress.

With his comrades, Tealdo tramped along the wooden quay in the harbor of Imola toward the Ambuscade, from whose flagpole fluttered the Algarvian banner. All the army that had spent so long training was now filing aboard the ships that filled the harbor in the former Duchy of Bari.

Tealdo marveled to see the men all together. He marveled even more to see the ships all together. “We haven’t put together a fleet like this for a cursed long time,” he said over his shoulder to Trasone, who marched along behind him.

“Not for a thousand years, the officers say,” his friend agreed.

“Silence in the ranks there!” Sergeant Panfilo bellowed. Someone—fortunately, someone well away from Tealdo—made a noise that probably came from his mouth but sounded as if it had a different origin. Panfilo stormed off to see if he could catch and terrorize the miscreant.

Up the gangplank Tealdo went. His feet thudded on the timbers of the deck. The sailors scurrying around there and the men who traveled the lines of the rigging like outsized spiders did not strike him as an ordinary naval crew. That was only fair—they weren’t an ordinary naval crew, nor anything close to it. Every one of them was a highly trained yachtsman, adept at the otherwise obsolete art of sailing.

But that art was no longer obsolete, thanks to the ingenuity of Algarve’s generals and admirals. Tealdo wished he would be able to watch the great sails fill with wind as the fleet weighed anchor. Instead, he went down to a poorly lit compartment with whose cramped dimensions he was all too familiar. There he and his company would stay till their journey ended … or till something went wrong.

Maybe Captain Larbino had something similar on his mind, for he said, “Men, what we do here tonight will go a long way toward winning the war for Algarve. The Sibians shouldn’t realize we’re coming till we shop up on their doorstep—we’ll catch them with their kilts down. Nobody has gone to war with a fleet of sailing ships for hundreds of years. They’ll never expect it, and their mages likely won’t be able to give ’em much warning, either. If we sail over a ley line … so what? We don’t draw any energy from it, so they won’t notice us. We’ll be as safe as we would on dry land till we get into Tirgoviste harbor. Make yourselves comfortable and enjoy the trip.”

Tealdo made himself as comfortable as he could, which wasn’t very. He listened to more soldiers tramping into their assigned compartments, and to sailors running around and shouting things the thick oak timbers that surrounding him kept him from understanding. But tone carried, even if words didn’t. “They sound like they’re having a mighty good time, don’t they?” he said to Trasone.

“Why shouldn’t they?” Trasone answered. “Once they get us to Sibiu, their job is done. They can sit back and drink wine. We’re the ones who get to pay the bill after that.”

He wasn’t quite being fair. If the Sibs got the chance, they’d blaze at ships as well as soldiers. Before Tealdo could point that out, the motion of the Ambuscade changed. The pitching from bow to stern became more emphatic, and the ship began to roll from side to side as well. “We’re off,” Tealdo said.

His stomach took the ship’s motion in stride. Before long, though, he discovered that, as painstaking as the company’s combat rehearsals had been, they hadn’t covered everything. Several soldiers started puking. The compartment did have buckets to cope with such emergencies, but the emergency often arrived before the bucket did. In spite of everyone’s best efforts, the compartment became a very unpleasant place.

The amused contempt the yachtsmen showed as they carried buckets away did not endear them to their passengers. “If I could move, I’d kill those bastards,” a sufferer groaned.

Nobody could move much. The compartment held too many men for that. Tealdo hoped no one would heave up dinner on to his shoes. Past that, he squatted and chatted with the men around him and took breaths as shallow as he could.

Time dragged on. He supposed it had grown dark outside. He couldn’t have proved it, not down here. Every so often, someone fed the lantern oil. Those flickering flames were all the light he and his comrades had. For all he knew, they were below the waterline, which would have made portholes a bad idea.

He wished he were a horse or a unicorn, so he could sleep while he wasn’t lying down. A couple of soldiers did start to snore. He envied them. Because he envied them, he laughed all the louder when a roll bigger than usual made them topple over.

After what seemed like forever, the Ambuscade heeled sharply. Sailors shouted in excitement. “Get ready, boys,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “I think the shop is about to open for business.”

While Captain Larbino was saying the same thing in more elegant words, the Ambuscade proved him right by thudding against a quay—Tealdo hoped that was what had happened, at any rate, and that the ship hadn’t struck a rock instead. The door to the compartment flew open. “Out! Out! Out!” a yachtsman screamed.

Out the company went, and up the narrow stairway that led to the deck. “Nobody falls!” Panfilo bellowed. “Nobody falls, or he answers to me.” And nobody did fall. The men had rehearsed going up stairs like these so many times, they might have been stairs to the houses in which they’d grown up.

Cold, fresh air smelling of sea salt and smoke slapped Tealdo in the face. Not far away, another Algarvian ship burned brightly, lighting up the darkened harbor of Tirgoviste. Tealdo hoped the soldiers had been able to get off the ship. Every man counted in this assault. If the Algarvians did not conquer Sibiu, they would not be going home again.

After that, he stopped worrying about anything except what he was supposed to do. He followed the man in front of him over the gangplank and on to the quay. That too went off as it should have done. No one fell into the water. Had anybody done so, the weight of his kit would quickly have dragged him under.

“Move!” Captain Larbino shouted. “We have to move fast! Don’t stand there gaping. We’ve still got the headquarters building to take.”

No one was standing around gaping, either. That would have been handing the Sibians an invitation to blaze the men. Nobody with sticks had set up at the landward end of the quay, and Tealdo and his comrades didn’t propose to wait till someone did. “Easier than practice, so far,” he said.

“So far, maybe,” Trasone answered. “But nobody who got killed in practice stayed dead. Won’t be like that here.”

Sure enough, the Sibians began to wake up. They started blazing at the invaders from buildings by the port. But it was too late then, with Algarvians flooding into Tirgoviste from all their ships. Tealdo wondered how things were going at the other Sibian ports. Well, he hoped. Hope was all he could do.

Shouts rose, up ahead. He could understand most of them. Sibian was very close to the southern dialects of Algarvian, and not tremendously far removed from his own more northerly accent. The Sibs were yelling about stopping his pals and him. “Good luck,” he snarled, a carnivorous grin on his face.

He hadn’t realized how meticulously his superiors had reproduced the environs of Tirgoviste harbor at the rehearsal sites near Imola. When Sibians popped up to blaze at his comrades and him, they did so in the places from which Algarvian “defenders” had fought during those long, tedious practice runs. Tealdo knew where they would be almost before they got there. He knew where to take cover, and where to aim his stick. He didn’t have to think. He just had to do, and to go on doing.

“Keep moving!” Larbino yelled. “Don’t let them gather themselves. Don’t let them make a stand. If we press them hard now, they’ll break. We have to keep them back on their heels!”

“Listen to the captain!” Sergeant Panfilo bellowed, almost in Tealdo’s ear. “He knows what he’s talking about.” Panfilo shook his head and spoke again, this time in a much lower voice: “Never thought I’d say that about an officer.”

The strongpoint Larbino’s company had been trained to capture turned out to be the naval offices at Tirgoviste. Till he flopped down behind some rubble not far away, Tealdo hadn’t known what the target was, nor cared much, either. His superiors told him what to do, and he went out and did it. The arrangement struck him as equitable.

“Covering blazes!” Larbino roared, and Tealdo aimed his stick at a second-story window from which a Sibian was liable to do some blazing of his own. No sooner had he done so than he saw, or thought he saw, motion behind that window. His stick sent a beam into the offices. No Sibian blazed at the Algarvians from that spot, so Tealdo concluded he hadn’t been imagining things after all.

Under the protection of the storm of blazes, a couple of men ran forward and set an egg against the iron door of the naval offices. One of them fell as he dashed away from the doors. His comrade stopped and picked him up and started to carry him toward something more like safety. Then he too went down.

Tealdo cursed to see such courage wasted. He hoped somebody would try to get him away if he got hurt. He hoped whoever it was would have better luck than the fellow from the egg crew, too.

The egg burst then. Tealdo blinked frantically, trying to clear away the fuzzy, glowing green-purple spot in the center of his field of vision. When he could see straight ahead again, he whooped: the doors had not been able to withstand the energies unleashed against them. One leaned drunkenly on its hinges, while the other had been hurled into the building, with luck smashing a good many Sibians in the corridor behind it.

“Forward!” Larbino and Panfilo cried the order at the same time. Larbino added “Follow me!” and dashed toward the opening torn in the naval offices. Tealdo scrambled to his feet and did follow the captain. An officer who led from the front could pull his men after him: that was a lesson as old as war. An officer who led from the front was also horribly likely to die before his time: that was a lesson driven home during the Six Years’ War.

It held here, too. Larbino got through the riven doorway, but no more than a couple of strides farther. Then he crumpled bonelessly, blazed through the head. But the soldiers on his heels killed the Sibian who’d blazed him. Howling like wolves and calling Larbino’s name along with King Mezentio’s, the Algarvians fought their way into and through the naval offices.

“Hold it right there!” Tealdo screamed as a Sibian hurried toward a window to escape. Firelight coming in through the window showed a lot of gold braid on the fellow’s sleeves: an officer, but one intent on leaving the front, not leading from it.

For a moment, Tealdo thought he would try to jump out the window. That would have been a mistake, a particularly fatal mistake. The Sibian officer must have realized it. He raised his hands. “I am Count Delfinu; my rank is commodore,” he said in slow, clear Algarvian. “I expect to be used with all the dignity due my rank and station.”

“That’s nice,” Tealdo said. He might have to act polite around his own nobles. He didn’t care a fig for the fancy titles foreigners carried, though. Gesturing with the stick, he went on, “You come along with me, pal. Somebody’ll figure out what to do with you.” A captive commodore was an excuse plenty good enough to let him leave the fighting for a little while. And if the rest of the fight was going as smoothly as this… Tealdo laughed. “Come on, pal,” he repeated. “Tirgoviste’s ours. Way it looks to me, your whole cursed kingdom’s ours.”

Cornelu cursed. He and Eforiel had been out on a routine patrol, finding nothing much. When the leviathan brought him back toward Tirgoviste harbor, though… He cursed again, cursed and wept, mingling his salty tears with the salt sea. “The harbor is theirs,” he groaned. “The city is theirs.”

Fires burning up in Tirgoviste silhouetted the masts and spars of the Algarvian invasion fleet. Cornelu did not need long to figure out what King Mezentio’s men had done. In an abstract way, he admired their nerve. Had a couple of Sibian ley-line cruisers happened on that fleet of sailing ships, they could have worked a ghastly slaughter. But they hadn’t. The galleons, or whatever the old-fashioned name for them was, had ghosted across the ley lines with no one the wiser. The rest of the Algarvian navy, no doubt, would follow now.

“Costache,” Cornelu said: another groan. All he could do was hope his wife remained safe, and the child to whom she would soon give birth. He didn’t think the Algarvians would deliberately outrage her—were they not civilized men?—but anything could happen during a battle.

Eforiel rolled a little in the water, so she could look up at him from one large, dark eye. The leviathan let out what sounded like a puzzled grunt. Cornelu understood why: he wasn’t behaving as he usually did when the two of them returned to their home port. Eforiel didn’t understand that, if she blithely swam into Tirgoviste harbor now, Cornelu would get blazed and she would either have eggs tossed at her or would be captured and pressed into the service of King Mezentio’s men.

Instead of having her go into the harbor, Cornelu started to guide her toward a little beach just outside Tirgoviste. There he could slip off her back, gain the shore, and… And what? he asked himself. What would he do then? Go into town, rescue his wife, bring her back to Eforiel, and flee? The hero of an adventure romance might have managed that, pausing somewhere in there to make love to her, too. In real life, unfortunately, Cornelu had no notion how to bring off such a coup.

If he couldn’t rescue Costache, could he head inland and join whatever resistance to the Algarvian invaders might be brewing there? He wondered how strong that resistance could be. Algarve was a much bigger kingdom than Sibiu, and boasted a much, much bigger army. Sibiu had relied upon her ships to keep her safe, and Mezentio had found a way to hoodwink them.

Besides, as a soldier Cornelu was nothing out of the ordinary. He was far more useful to King Burebistu as part of a team with Eforiel than by himself. He wished the leviathan had several eggs in the harness under her belly. Were that so, he might have done the invaders some real damage. Eforiel grunted again, sensing his indecision: unlike dragons, leviathans liked men and understood them pretty well. “I need to know more,” Cornelu said, almost as if he were talking to Costache. “That’s what I need more than anything else. For all I know—powers above grant it be so—the invasion has failed on the other four islands. If it has, I can help reconquer Tirgoviste.”

He patted the leviathan, steering her west toward Facaceni, the island closest to his own. Eforiel obeyed, but more slowly than she might have. Had she been able to speak, she might have said something like, Are you sure this is what you want me to do? She was even more skeptical of anything that smacked of innovation than the briniest old salt in the Sibian navy.

Cornelu wished with all his heart that some better course lay before him. He could see none, though. With no chance to be useful around Tirgoviste, he had to hope the island and port of Facaceni remained in Sibian hands. If they did, well and good. If not… He would not let himself worry about that now.

Dawn broke while Eforiel was still swimming west. Dragons flew high overhead—far too high for him to tell whether they bore Sibian colors or those of Algarve. None of them swooped down to drop an egg on the leviathan. For that, at least, Cornelu was grateful.

It was the first thing he’d found for which he might be grateful since discovering his kingdom invaded. Before long, he became convinced it was the last thing for which he might be grateful for some time to come. Before he saw the hills at the center of Facaceni rise over the horizon, he spotted a great cloud of smoke towering higher than those hills. Unless Facaceni had suffered a natural disaster, it had suffered disaster at the hands of the Algarvians.

Cornelu had never wished so hard for an earthquake. But wishes, no matter how fervent, were sorcerous nullities. Cornelu had no skill in magecraft, any more than a mage was likely to have skill in riding leviathans. Learning to do one thing well was hard enough in this world; learning to do more than one thing well often pressed the limits of the possible.

Not that even magecraft could annul what had already happened. As Eforiel drew Cornelu ever nearer the harbor of Facaceni, he saw for himself that King Mezentio’s men were there before him. Sailing ships had emptied soldiers out on to the quays, as they had at Tirgoviste—as they had, probably, at every Sibian port.

And, just as Cornelu had guessed, the rest of the Algarvian navy had followed the invasion fleet south. Algarvian and Sibian ships were tossing eggs at each other outside the harbor, and blazing with powerful sticks. Every time a beam went low, a great cloud of steam rose from the ocean.

Eforiel shuddered beneath Cornelu. She paid no attention to the beams, but eggs bursting in the water frightened her. She had reason to fear, too; a burst too near might kill her. Cornelu dared approach Facaceni no closer.

A puff of steam rising only a couple of hundred yards away warned that he might already have come too close. It came not from a stick but from another leviathan spouting. A moment later, leviathan and rider broke the surface. “Who are you?” the rider called to Cornelu.

Was he speaking Algarvian or Sibian? With only three words to go on, Cornelu had trouble being sure. “Who are you?” he called back. “Give me the signal.” He did not know what the signal was, but hoped to learn more by the way the other leviathan rider responded.

Learn he did, for the fellow said, “Mezentio!”

“Mezentio!” Cornelu answered, as if he too were an Algarvian, and delighted to find another one in this part of the world. But, while his mouth spoke the name with every sign of gladness, his hand delivered a different message to Eforiel: attack!

The leviathan’s muscles surged smoothly beneath him as she arrowed through the water toward the other rider and his mount. Calling Mezentio’s name must have lulled the Algarvian, for he let Cornelu and Eforiel approach without taking any precautions against them.

He learned his mistake too late. Eforiel’s pointed snout rammed his leviathan’s side, not far behind the creature’s left flipper. The impact almost pitched Cornelu off Eforiel’s back, though he was as well strapped and braced as he could have been. The Algarvian leviathan twisted and jerked in startled agony, much as a man might have done if unexpectedly hit in the pit of the stomach.

After delivering that first blow with her jaws closed, Eforiel opened them and bit the other leviathan several times. Blood turned seawater crimson. Cornelu laughed to see the Algarvian rider splashing in the ocean, separated from his mount. Eforiel did the Algarvian no harm. She had not been trained to hunt men in the water—too much likelihood of her turning on her own rider, should some mischance have separated the two of them.

Had circumstances differed, Cornelu might have captured the other rider. But he doubted he had any place on Sibiu to which he could bring the Algarvian for interrogation. And he spied other spouts not far away. He had to assume they came from Algarvian leviathans.

When he ordered Eforiel to break off the attack, he thought for a moment she would refuse to obey him. But training triumphed over instinct. She allowed the leviathan she’d wounded to flee into the depths of the sea. Cornelu did not think a Sibian-trained animal would have abandoned its rider like that—but the Algarvians, as he’d seen to his sorrow, had tricks of their own up their sleeves.

And they had these leviathans. “Mezentio!” their riders called, hurrying toward the commotion at least one of them had spotted.

Cornelu did not think he could fool them as he had the first Algarvian he’d encountered; few tricks worked twice. Nor, being outnumbered, was he ashamed to flee. He hoped to escape them and then go on looking for Sibians still resisting the invaders.

In war, though, what one hopes and what one gets are often far removed from each other. The Algarvians pursuing Eforiel were better riders than most of their countrymen, and mounted on sturdier leviathans. They chased Cornelu far to the south of Facaceni, and seemed intent on driving him from Sibian waters altogether.

To make matters worse, a dragon flew high over Eforiel, helping the Algarvians and their leviathans keep track of her. The dragonflier was sure to be speaking into a crystal. If one of the riders was likewise equipped… If that was so, the Algarvians had devoted a great deal of effort to tying their forces together in ways no one had thought of before.

Another dragon came flapping up behind the first. This one carried a couple of eggs slung under its belly, and did its best to drop them on Eforiel. The flier’s aim, though, was not so good as it might have been. Both eggs fell well short of their intended target; one, in fact, came closer to hitting the Algarvian leviathan riders than it did to Cornelu.

He hoped that would make the enemy lose him, but it didn’t. Cursing the Algarvians, he kept Eforiel headed southeast, the only direction in which they permitted him to travel. He shook his fist at them. “Force me to Lagoas, will you?” he shouted.

Lagoas was neutral. If he came ashore there, he would be interned, and out of the fighting till the war was over: a better fate than surrendering, but not much. He cursed the Lagoans even more bitterly than he did the Algarvians. In the Six Years’ War, Lagoas had fought alongside Sibiu, but this time around her merchants had loved their profits too well to feel like shedding any blood.

And then, as if thinking of Lagoans had conjured them up, a patrol boat came speeding along a. ley line from out of the south. He could have escaped it. The ocean was wide, and the ship could not leave the line of energy from which it drew its power. But, if he was going to be interned, sooner struck him as being as good as later. This way, as opposed to his coming ashore on their soil, the Lagoans might heed his wishes about Eforiel. And so he waved and had the leviathan rear in the water and generally made himself as conspicuous as he could.

The Algarvian leviathan riders turned and headed back toward Sibiu. Cornelu shook his fist at them again, then waited for the Lagoan warship to approach. “Who might you be?” an officer called from the deck in what might have been intended for either Sibian or Algarvian.

Cornelu gave his name, his rank, and his kingdom. To his surprise, the Lagoans burst into cheers. “Well met, friend!” several of them said.

“Friend?” he echoed in surprise.

“Friend, aye,” the officer answered in his accented Sibian. “Lagoas wars with Algarve now. Had you no heard? When Mezentio your country invaded, King Vitor declares war. We all friends together now, aye?”

“Aye,” Cornelu said wearily.

Skarnu stood up before his company and said the words that had to be said: “Men, the redheads have gone and invaded Sibiu. You’ll have heard that already, I suppose.” He waited for nods, and got them. “You ask me,” he went on, “they were fools. Lagoas is a bigger danger to them than Sibiu ever could have been. But if the Algarvians weren’t fools, they wouldn’t be Algarvians, eh?”

He got more nods, and even a couple of smiles. He would have been gladder of those smiles had they come from the best soldiers in the company, not the happy-go-lucky handful who in the morning refused to worry about the afternoon, let alone tomorrow.

“We can’t swim over to Sibiu to help the islanders,” he said, “so we have to do the next best thing. King Mezentio must have pulled a lot of his soldiers out of the line here when he invaded Sibiu. That means there won’t be enough men left in the redheads’ works to hold us back when we hit them. We are going to break through, and we are going to go rampaging right into the Algarvian rear.”

Some of the men who’d smiled before clapped their hands and cheered. So did a few others—youngsters, mostly. Most of the soldiers just stood silently. Skarnu had studied the Algarvian fortifications himself, studied them till he knew the ones in front of him like the lines on his palm. As long as they held any men at all, they would be hard to break through. He knew it. Most of the men knew it, too. But he had his orders about what to tell them.

He also had his pride. He said, “Remember, men, you won’t be going anywhere I haven’t gone myself, because I’ll be out in front of you every step of the way. We’ll do all we can for our king and kingdom.” He raised his voice to a shout: “King Gainibu and victory!”

“King Gainibu!” the men echoed. “Victory!” They cheered enthusiastically. Why not? Cheering cost them nothing and exposed them to no danger.

Seeing that Skarnu had finished, Sergeant Raunu strode out in front of the company. He glanced at Skarnu for permission to speak. Skarnu nodded. The company would have got on fine without him, but he couldn’t have run it without Raunu. The veteran underofficer affected not to know that. Skarnu understood perfectly well that the pose was an affectation. He wondered how many company officers really believed their sergeants thought them indispensable. Too many, odds were.

Raunu said, “Boys, we’re lucky. You know it, and I know it. A lot of officers would send us forward but stay in a hole themselves. If we won, they’d take the credit. If we lost, we’d get the blame—only we’d be dead and they’d try again with another company. The captain’s not like that. We’ve all seen as much. Let’s give him a cheer now, and let’s fight like madmen for him tomorrow.”

“Captain Skarnu!” the men shouted. Skarnu waved to them, feeling foolish. He was used to accepting the deference of commoners because of his blood. Like his sister Krasta, he’d taken it for granted. The deference he got here in the field was different. He’d earned it. It made him proud and embarrassed at the same time.

“Whatever we can do, sir, we’ll do tomorrow,” Raunu said.

“I’m sure of it,” Skarnu said. That was a polite commonplace. He started to add something to it, then stopped. Sometimes Raunu, if given the chance to talk, came out with things he wouldn’t have otherwise, things an officer would have had trouble learning any other way.

This proved to be one of those times. “Do you really think we’ll break the Algarvian line tomorrow, sir?” the sergeant said.

“We’ve been ordered to do it,” Skarnu said. “I hope we can do it.” He went no further than that.

“Mm.” Raunu’s wrinkles refolded themselves into an expression less forbidding than the one he usually wore. “Sir, I hope we can do it, too. But if there’s not much chance… Sir, I saw a lot of officers with a lot of courage get themselves killed for nothing during the Six Years’ War. It’d be a shame if that happened to you before you figured out what was what.”

“I see.” Skarnu nodded brightly. “After I figure out what’s what, it will be all right for me to get myself killed for nothing.”

“No, sir.” Raunu shook his head. “After you know what’s what, you’ll know better than to go rushing ahead and get yourself killed for nothing.”

Skarnu quoted doctrine: “The only way to make an attack succeed is to go into it confident of success.”

“Aye, sir.” Raunu frowned again. “The only trouble is, sometimes that doesn’t help, either.”

Skarnu shrugged. Raunu looked at him, shook his head, and walked off. Skarnu understood what the veteran was trying to tell him. Understanding didn’t matter. He had his orders. His company would break through the Algarvian line ahead or die trying.

All through the night, egg-tossers hurled destruction at the Algarvian positions. Dragons flew overhead, dropping more eggs on the redheads. Skarnu had mixed feelings about all that. On the one hand, slain enemy soldiers and wrecked enemy works would make the attack easier. On the other, the Valmierans couldn’t have done a better job of announcing where that attack would go in if they’d hung out a sign.

The Algarvians made little reply to the eggs raining down. Maybe they’re all dead, Skarnu thought hopefully. He couldn’t make himself believe it, try as he would.

He led his men to the ends of the approach trenches they’d dug over the previous couple of days. That new digging might also have warned the Algarvians an attack was coming. But Skarnu and his men would not have to cross so much open ground to close with the enemy when the assault began, and so he reluctantly decided it was likely to be worthwhile.

“This is how we did it in the Six Years’ War,” Raunu said as the soldiers huddled in the trenches, waiting for the whistles that would order them forward. “We licked the redheads then, so we know we can do it again, right?”

Some of the youngsters under Skarnu’s command grinned and nodded at the veteran sergeant. They were too young to know about the gruesome casualties Valmiera had endured in that victory. Raunu deliberately didn’t mention those. The men hadn’t suffered badly in this war, not yet, not least because their leaders did remember the slaughters of the Six Years’ War and had avoided repeating them. Now the risk seemed acceptable … to men who weren’t facing it themselves.

Off in the west, behind Skarnu, the sky went from black to gray to pink. Peering over the dirt heaped up in front of the approach trenches, he saw the enemy’s field fortifications had taken a fearful battering. He dared hope that no Algarvian position during the Six Years’ War had been so thoroughly smashed up.

He said as much to Raunu, who also stuck his head up to examine the ground ahead. The sergeant answered, “Just where it looks like there couldn’t be even one of the bastards left alive, that’s where you’ll find whole caravans full of’em, and they’ll all be doing their best to blaze you down.”

Raunu had been loud and enthusiastic while heartening the common soldiers in the company. He spoke quietly to his superior, not wanting to dilute the effect he’d had on the men.

More eggs and still more eggs fell on the Algarvian entrenchments and forts. And then, without warning, they stopped falling. Skarnu pulled a brass whistle from his trouser pocket and blew a long, echoing blast, one of hundreds ringing out along several miles of battle line. “For Valmiera!” he cried. “For King Gainibu!” He scrambled out of the approach trench and trotted toward the Algarvians’ works.

“Valmiera!” his men shouted, and followed him out into the open. “Gainibu!” He looked to either side. Thousands of Valmierans, thousands upon thousands, stormed west. It was a sight to make any soldier proud of his countrymen.

Only a few hundred more yards, Skarnu thought. Then we’ll be in among the redheads, and then they’ll be ours. But already flashes ahead warned that some Algarvians had survived the pounding the Valmierans had given them. More and more enemy soldiers began blazing at Skarnu and his comrades. Men started falling, some without a sound, others shrieking as they were wounded.

The Algarvians had endured all the eggs the Valmierans tossed at them without responding—till this moment, when the men attacking them were most vulnerable. And now they rained eggs down on the Valmierans. Skarnu found himself on the ground without any clear memory of how he’d got there. One moment, he’d been upright. The next—

He scrambled to his feet. His trousers were torn. His tunic was out at the elbow. He wasn’t bleeding, or didn’t think he was. Lucky, he thought.

He waved to show his men he was all right, arid looked back over his shoulder to see how they were doing. Even as he did so, a couple of them went down. They hadn’t come very far—surely not halfway—but he’d lost a lot of them. If he kept losing them at that rate, he wouldn’t have any men left by the time he got to the forwardmost Algarvian trenches. He probably wouldn’t live to get to those trenches himself, an unpleasant afterthought to have.

The headlong charge was simply too expensive to be borne. “By squads!” he shouted. “Blaze and move by squads!”

Half his men—half the men he had left—dove into such cover as they could find—mostly the holes burst eggs had dug in the ground. The rest raced by them. Then they flattened out and blazed at the Algarvians while the others rose and dashed past. Little by little, they worked their way toward the trenches from which the redheads were blazing at them.

Skarnu took shelter in a hole himself, waiting for his next chance to advance. He looked around, hoping the order he’d had to give hadn’t slowed his company too badly. What he saw left him wide-eyed with dismay. As many Valmierans were running back toward their own lines as were still going forward against the enemy. Of the ones still advancing, most paid no attention to tactics that might have cut their losses. They kept moving up till they went down. When they could bear no more, they broke and fled.

“You see, sir?” Raunu shouted from a hole not far away. “This is how I feared it would be.”

“What can we do?” Skarnu asked.

“We aren’t going to break through their lines,” Raunu answered. “We aren’t even going to get into their lines—or if we do, we won’t come out again. Best we can do now is hang tight here, hurt ’em a bit, and get back to where we started from after nightfall. If you order me forward, though, sir, I’ll go.”

“No,” Skarnu said. “What point to that but getting us killed to no purpose?” He assumed that, if he ordered Raunu forward, he would have to try to advance, too. “This is what you warned me about before the attack began, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir. Good to see you can recognize it,” Raunu said. “I only wish our commanders could.” Skarnu started to reproach the sergeant for speaking too freely. He stopped with the words unspoken. How could Raunu have spoken too freely when all he did was tell the truth?

Leofsig still retained the tin mess kit he’d been issued when mustered into King Penda’s levy. As captives went, that made him relatively lucky. Forthwegian soldiers who’d lost their kits had to make do with bowls that held less. The Algarvians might have issued their own kits to men who lacked them, but that didn’t seem to have entered their minds.

What had crossed their minds was carefully counting the captives in each barracks in the encampment before those captives got anything in their mess kits or bowls. Leofsig would not have bet that the Algarvian guards could count to ten, even using their fingers. The endless recounts to which the captives had to submit argued against it, at any rate.

Every so often, a captive or two really did turn up missing. That meant the redheads tore the encampment apart till they found out how the men had disappeared. It also meant a week of half rations for the escapees’ barracksmates. No one got fat on full rations. Half rations were slow starvation. Half rations were also an argument for betraying anyone thinking of getting away.

This morning, everything seemed to add up. “Powers above be praised,” Leofsig muttered. He was cold and tired and hungry; standing in formation in front of the barracks was not his idea of a good time. Standing in line and waiting for the meager breakfast the cooks would dole out didn’t strike him as delightful, either. Eventually, though, he’d get food in his belly, which came close to making the wait worthwhile.

Plop! The sound of a large ladle of mush landing in his mess kit was about as appetizing as the stuff itself. The mush was mostly wheat porridge, with cabbage and occasional bits of salt fish or pork mixed in. The captives ate it breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was never very good. This morning, it smelled worse than usual.

Leofsig ate it anyhow. If it made him sick—and it did make people sick every so often—he’d go to the infirmary. And if anybody claimed he was malingering, he’d throw up in the wretch’s lap.

The handful of Kaunians in his barracks ate in a small knot by themselves, as they usually did. He would sometimes join them. So would a few of his fellow Forthwegians. Most, though, wanted nothing to do with the blonds. And a few, like Merwit, still stirred up trouble every chance they got.

“Hey, you!” Merwit said now. Leofsig looked up from his mush. Sure enough, Merwit was staring his way with a smile that made him look neither friendly nor attractive. “Aye, you, yellow-hair lover,” the burly captain went on. “You going on latrine duty after breakfast? That’d give you the chance to hang around with your pals?”

“You ought to try it yourself, Merwit,” Leofsig answered. “There’s nobody else I know who’s half so full of shit.”

Merwit’s eyes went big and wide. He and Leofsig had quarreled before, but Leofsig hadn’t given back insult for insult till this moment. Carefully, Merwit set down his own mess kit. “You’re going to pay for that,” he said in matter-of-fact tones. He charged forward like a behemoth.

Leofsig kicked him in the belly. It was like kicking a plank. Merwit grunted, but he slammed one fist into Leofsig’s ribs and the other into the top of Leofsig’s head. He’d meant to hit him in the face, but Leofsig ducked. Merwit howled then. With any luck at all, he’d broken a knuckle or two.

Being smaller and lighter, Leofsig knew he’d need all the help of that sort he could get. He tried to end the fight in a hurry by kneeing Merwit in the crotch, but Merwit twisted away and took the knee on the hip. He seized Leofsig in a bearhug. Leofsig knocked his feet out from under him. They went down together, each doing the other as much damage with fists and elbows and knees as he could.

“Halting! You halting!” somebody shouted in accented Forthwegian. Leofsig did nothing of the kind, having a well-founded suspicion that Merwit wouldn’t. “You halting!” This time, the command had teeth: “You halting, or we blazing!”

That must have convinced Merwit, because he stopped trying to work mayhem on Leofsig. Leofsig gave him one more inconspicuous elbow, then pushed him away and got to his feet. His nose was bleeding. A couple of his front teeth felt loose, but they were all there. None was even broken—pure luck, and he knew it.

He looked over at Merwit. Merwit looked as if he’d been in a fight: one of his eyes was swollen shut, and he had a big bruise on the other cheek. Leofsig felt as if he’d been pummeled with boulders. He hoped Merwit did, too.

The Algarvian guards who’d stopped the brawl were shaking their heads. “Stupid, stupid Forthwegians,” one of them said, more in sorrow than in anger. He gestured with his stick. “You coming, stupid Forthwegians. Now you seeing just how stupid you being. Come!” Glumly, Leofsig and Merwit came.

Sometimes, the Algarvians chose not to notice captives fighting among themselves. Sometimes, without rhyme or reason Leofsig could see, they chose to make examples of them. He eased a little when he saw they were taking him and Merwit to Brigadier Cynfrid, the senior Forthwegian officer in camp, rather than to their own commandant. Cynfrid had far less power to punish than did the Algarvian authorities.

“What have we here?” the brigadier asked, looking up from some paperwork. With his gray hair and snowy mustache and beard, he seemed more a kindly grandfather than a soldier. Had he been a better soldier—had a lot of Forthwegian commanders been better soldiers—he might not have ended up in a captives’ camp, but might instead have kept the war going.

“These two, they fighting,” one of the Algarvian guards said.

“Oh, aye, I can see that,” Cynfrid said. “The question is, why were they fighting?” The guard gave back an extravagant Algarvian shrug, one that declared he not only didn’t know but found beneath him the idea of wondering why Forthwegians did anything. The brigadier sighed, evidently having encountered that attitude before. He examined Leofsig and Merwit. “What have you men got to say for yourselves?”

“Sir, this stinking Kaunian-lover called me a filthy name,” Merwit said, his voice dripping with righteous innocence and indignation. “I got sick of it, so when he started the fight, I did my best to give him what-for.”

“I didn’t start the fight,” Leofsig exclaimed. “He did! And he’s been calling me names since we got here—you just heard him do it again now. I finally called him one back. He didn’t like that so much. Most bullies are better at giving it out than taking it.”

“Conflicting stories,” Cynfrid said with another sigh. He glanced over toward the guards. “I don’t suppose you gentlemen know who did start the fight?” The redheads laughed, not so much at the idea that they should know, but at the notion that they might care. The Forthwegian brigadier sighed yet again. “Any chance of witnesses?”

Now Leofsig had all he could do not to start laughing himself. His fellow captives wanted as little to do with the guards as they could. They would make themselves scarce and deny seeing anything … or would all of them? Slowly, he said, “Sir, I think the Kaunians in my barracks would tell the truth about what went on.”

“They’d lick your arse for you, you mean, like you lick theirs,” Merwit snarled, his eyes blazing.

Leofsig had succeeded in gaining the guards’ attention. He wasn’t nearly sure he wanted it. To Cynfrid, one of the Algarvians said, “The Kaunians, they is no to being trusted, eh?”

“No, probably not,” the Forthwegian brigadier said, “although they haven’t done nearly so much to Forthweg as you Algarvians, wouldn’t you think?”

If the Algarvians thought any such thing, their faces didn’t show it. With a dismissive gesture, the one who did most of the talking said, “You no can trusting nothing no yellowheads telling you.”

“That’s right,” Merwit said. “That’s just right, sir.”

“Is it?” Cynfrid didn’t sound convinced. “You seem none too trustworthy yourself there, soldier.” But he failed to follow through, just as Forthwegian officers had failed to follow through on their early victories over Algarve. “Well, if we’ve got no trustworthy witnesses, these two chaps will have to share and share alike. A week’s latrine duty each ought to teach them to keep their hands to themselves.”

Merwit jerked a thumb toward Leofsig. “He likes latrine duty. He gets to hang around with his Kaunian chums.”

“They’re better company than you are,” Leofsig retorted. “They smell better than you do, too.”

Only the presence of the Algarvian guards kept the fight from flaring again. “That will be quite enough, both of you,” Brigadier Cynfrid said sternly. “The order holds—a week’s latrine duty for each of you. Any further incidents between you two, and we shall see what sort of view the Algarvian authorities take of such business.”

“Aye, sir,” Merwit and Leofsig said together. Leofsig did not want to go before the redheads, not after he’d got a name for sticking up for Kaunians. The Algarvians lorded it over his own people, aye, but their feud with folk of Kaunian blood went back into the ancient days of the world.

He hoped Merwit wouldn’t be clever enough to see that. Merwit, fortunately, had never struck him as very clever. Merwit had struck him, though—struck him with fists like rocks. He knew no small pride at having come close to holding his own against the other captive.

“You hearing the brigadier,” the talky Algarvian guard said. “Now you coming, you do your deservings. You do the shovelings of shits, aye?” He and his comrades both gestured with their sticks. Leofsig and Merwit left. Looking back over his shoulder, Leofsig saw Brigadier Cynfrid return to the paperwork he’d had interrupted.

Merwit did as little as he could on latrine duty, or perhaps a bit less. Leofsig had expected nothing else; he’d already seen that Merwit was a shirker even by the lax standards of the captives’ camp. He did his own work, not as if he were in a race but steadily nonetheless.

Late that afternoon, a shout made his head whip around. Somehow, Merwit had contrived to fall into a slit trench about due to be covered over. When he scrambled out again, he was as magnificently filthy a man as Leofsig had ever seen. He glared at Leofsig, but Leofsig hadn’t been anywhere near him.

At the moment, none of the Kaunians who did most of the latrine work was anywhere near him, either. Leofsig hadn’t noticed any of them hurrying away. Maybe Merwit had been clumsy. Maybe some Kaunian had been sneaky. By the way Merwit stared wildly around him, he thought some Kaunian had been sneaky.

The Kaunians ignored him. They didn’t even suggest that he pour a bucket of water over himself because he stank. If they looked pleased with themselves—well, Kaunians often looked pleased with themselves, that being one of the characteristics that failed to endear them to their neighbors. If they’d been sneaky enough to dump Merwit into the slit trench without getting caught: if they’d been that sneaky, Leofsig wondered how sneaky they might be in other ways. That might be worth finding out one of these days, if he could figure out how.

Down in the farming villages of the Duchy of Grelz, fall gave way to winter early. Most of Unkerlant had a harsh climate; that in the south was far worse than the rest. Animals that hibernated went into their burrows sooner there than anywhere else in the kingdom.

People in those farming villages went into their burrows sooner than anywhere else in the kingdom, too. Like dormice and badgers and bears, Garivald and his fellow farmers had stuffed themselves and filled their larders. Now, with the harvest gathered, they had little to do but keep themselves and their livestock alive till spring eventually returned.

Garivald had mixed feelings about the long winters. On the one hand, he didn’t have to work so hard as he did when the weather was better. If he felt like pulling out a jug of raw spirits and spending a day—or a couple of days, or more than a couple of days—drunk, he could. It wouldn’t mean starvation because he hadn’t done something that vitally needed doing. The worst it would mean was a disastrously thick head when he stopped drinking. He was used to those, and sometimes even took a certain melancholy pleasure in them. They were one more way of helping time go by in winter.

As far as he was concerned, making time go by was the biggest trouble winter offered. Unlike a dormouse or a badger or a bear, he couldn’t sleep away the whole season. Except when very drunk, he remained aware: aware he was cooped up in a none-too-big farmhouse with his wife and son and daughter and with a lot of livestock that would otherwise have starved or frozen.

Annore, his wife, liked it even less than he did. “Can’t you keep anything clean?” she shouted when he threw the shell of a hard-boiled egg on the floor after scooping out white and yolk with a horn spoon.

“I don’t know what you’re fretting about,” he answered in what he thought were reasonable tones. “There’s cow shit over there”—he pointed—“and pig shit over there”—he pointed again—“and the hens shit all over everywhere, so why are you shouting at me over an eggshell?” Trying to be helpful, he ground it into the dirt floor with the sole of his boot.

Annore put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes, so maybe he hadn’t been so helpful after all. “Can I make the cows do their business where I tell them to? Can I do that for the pigs? Can I do that for the miserable, stinking chickens? They won’t listen to me. Maybe you will.”

Garivald didn’t feel like listening. He’d been drunk up until the day before, and was still feeling the effects. He’d beaten Annore only a couple of times, which made him a prodigy, as husbands in the village of Zossen went. That was only partly because he had a milder temper than most of the other village men. The other side of the coin was that Annore had a fiercer temper than most of the other village women. If he beat her too hard or too often, she was liable to cut his throat or break his head while he lay in a drunken stupor. Almost every winter, someone in Zossen met an untimely demise.

Garivald’s son Syrivald grunted like a pig. He was looking at Garivald as he did it, mischief on his face. Garivald grunted, too, and got to his feet. The mischief vanished from Syrivald’s face; alarm replaced it. Garivald caught him and thumped him a couple of times. “Don’t call me a hog—have you got that?” he demanded.

“Aye, Father,” Syrivald blubbered. Had he been rash enough to say anything else, his father would have made him regret it.

As things were, Garivald found a different way to make him regret getting out of line: “Since you haven’t got anything better to do with yourself, you can clean up after the animals. And while you’re at it, you can pick up my eggshell, too.”

Syrivald got to work, not with any enormous enthusiasm but with a very plain sense that he’d be sorry if he didn’t go at it fast enough to suit his father. In that, he was absolutely right. Garivald kept a sharp eye on him till he was almost done, then turned to Annore and said, “There. Are you happier now?”

“I’d be really happy if this house didn’t turn into a sty every winter,” she said. She wasn’t looking at the pigs. She was looking at Garivald.

Her words could have held any of several meanings. Having been married to her a good many years, Garivald knew which one was likeliest. He also knew he would be foolish to acknowledge that one. He said, “Only way I can think of to keep a house clean through winter is by magic.”

“I believe that,” Annore said, a reply not calculated to warm his heart. Before she could elaborate on it, Leuba woke from her nap and started to cry. Annore took care of the baby, whose soiled linen added to the winter atmosphere of the farmhouse. But, after Annore put her daughter to her breast, she resumed: “How much magic can anyone work here?”

“I don’t know,” Garivald answered grouchily. “Enough, maybe.”

Annore shook her head. Leuba, following the motion, found it very funny. “Not likely,” Annore said. “This far from a power point, this far from a ley line, you’d need a first-rank mage. Where would we get the silver to pay a first-rank mage?” Her bitter laugh said she knew that question had no answer even as she asked it.

Garivald said, “I like living without much magic fine, thanks. If we had power points and ley lines coming out of our ears, this place would be just like Cottbus, you know that? We’d have inspectors and impressers peering at us every minute we weren’t squatting on the pot, and half the time we were, too.”

Syrivald wrinkled up his nose at that idea. So did Garivald. In a couple of sentences, he’d summed up everything he knew about the capital of Unkerlant: that it was full of magic and full of people who spied on other people for King Swemmel. He had no notion that that wasn’t a full and complete portrait of Cottbus. How could he? He’d never seen a city, and had been to the market town nearest his village only a couple of times. That didn’t make his opinions any less certain—on the contrary.

“Hurry up there, Syrivald,” he snapped, also having definite opinions on how much work his son ought to be doing. Syrivald’s occasional failure to meet his standards made him add, “Of course, if we offer a sacrifice, we don’t need a power point, let alone a first-rank mage.”

“Stop that!” Annore said at Syrivald’s horrified stare. Garivald laughed; he’d succeeded in getting his son’s attention. “It isn’t funny,” his wife told him.

“Oh, I think it is,” Garivald said. “Look—I’ve worked a magic of my own, and the farmhouse is getting clean. If you think you can get better sorcery around these parts, you’d better to talk to Waddo or to Herka.”

“I don’t want to talk to the firstman or his wife, thank you,” Annore said tartly. “They wouldn’t be able to help me, anyhow. If they knew anything about getting real magic out here, don’t you think they’d have a crystal in their own house?”

“Maybe they don’t want one.” But Garivald shook his head before Annore could correct him. “No, you’re right; never mind. Waddo and Herka always want things. If they didn’t, would they have built that second floor on to their house?” He chuckled. “I bet Waddo has fun getting up there these days, on his bad ankle.”

But that second floor let the firstman and his family live above the livestock during the winter, not with it, as everyone else in the village did. Building a second floor on to his own home would have let Garivald satisfy Annore’s longing for a clean house, or at least part of a clean house, without magic and without threatening to make Syrivald a blood sacrifice. But he and Annore both thought Waddo’s addition a piece of big-city pretentiousness. Doing anything like it had never crossed his mind, nor his wife’s, either.

Annore sighed and said, “It’s no use. I know it’s no use. But I couldn’t help wishing sometimes…” She sighed again. “I might as well wish you were a baron.”

“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” Garivald got off the stool on which he was sitting and puffed out his chest. “Baron Garivald the Splendid,” he boomed in a deep voice bearing little resemblance to the one he usually used.

Syrivald snickered. Annore laughed out loud. Leuba didn’t understand why her mother was laughing, but she laughed, too. So did Garivald. The idea of him as a baron was even funnier than the idea of a farmhouse that stayed clean through the winter. It would need a stronger magic, too.

“Maybe I’d better be happy with things the way they are now,” Annore said.

Garivald snorted. “You think I’d make a lousy baron.” He scratched. He was probably lousy now. People got that way when winter closed down on the land. Nobody bathed often enough to hold the nasty little pests at bay. Sitting in the steam bath till you couldn’t stand being baked any more and then running out and rolling in the snow felt wonderful—once a week, or once every other week. More often than that, it felt like death. And that often wasn’t enough to kill lice and nits. Garivald scratched some more. Can’t be helped, he thought.

Annore didn’t answer him, which might have been just as well. Instead, she put Leuba on her shoulder till the baby rewarded her with a belch. “There’s a good girl,” Annore said. “Don’t you feel better now that that’s out?” She seemed to feel better now that she’d got her complaints out, too.

“Winter,” Garivald said, more to himself than to anyone else. Here he was, in the house with his family and his livestock, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere—or nowhere far, and not for long—for quite a while. Neither would Annore. No wonder she felt like complaining sometimes.

One of the cows dropped more dung on the floor. The only thing Annore said was, “Clean that up, Syrivald.”

She still held Leuba. Syrivald knew better than to think that meant she wouldn’t get up and wallop him if he didn’t hop to it. He’d made that mistake a couple of times. He wouldn’t make it any more.

“Just as well Waddo and Herka don’t have a crystal,” Garivald said. “We’d get endless yattering about the war against the black people up in the north, and how we’d won another smashing battle.” He snorted again. “Don’t they know we know the war would be over by now if it were really going well? And besides”—he added the clincher—“if they had a crystal, the inspector and impressers would be able to give them orders without bothering to come out here.”

“Powers above!” Annore exclaimed. “We wouldn’t want that. I think I am happier with things the way they are now.”

“I think I am, too.” Garivald knew perfectly well he was happier with things as they were. He couldn’t imagine a peasant in Unkerlant who wasn’t happier with things as they were. The only thing change and fancy magic got Unkerlanter city folk was going right under King Swemmel’s thumb. Nobody could want that. He was sure of it.