Out of the Darkness

Two

Bembo strutted through the ravaged streets of Eoforwic twirling his bludgeon by its leather strap, as if he were the king of the world. Once upon a time, Algarvians on occupation duty in Forthweg might as well have been kings of the world. The constable sighed, pining for the good old days. He put on his show at least as much to keep up his own spirits as to impress the Forthwegians around him.

From behind him, somebody called out in pretty good Algarvian: “Hey, tubby, the Unkerlanters’ll press you for oil when they cross the Twegen!”

By the time Bembo and his partner, Oraste, had whirled, nobody back there looked to have opened his mouth. None of the Forthwegians on the street so much as smiled. That left the constable with nobody to blame. “Smartmouthed son of a whore,” Bembo said. He started to set his free hand on his belly, as if to deny he had too much of it. Then, as if afraid the gesture would call attention to his ample flesh, he left it uncompleted.

Oraste, unlike Bembo, was not the typical high-spirited, excitable Algarvian. He was, in fact, dour as an Unkerlanter most of the time. But he was laughing now, laughing at Bembo. “He got you good, he did.”

“Oh, shut up,” Bembo muttered. He didn’t say it very loud. Oraste had a formidable temper, and Bembo didn’t care to have it aimed at him. One of the reasons he enjoyed being a constable was that it meant he could dish out trouble without having to take it.

All that had broken down during the Forthwegian uprising here. Constables and soldiers had fought side by side then, what with the rebels giving almost as much trouble as they were getting. And, with the Unkerlanters indeed just on the other side of the river, nobody could feel safe at night-or, for that matter, during the daytime. If they started tossing eggs again.. Bembo looked around for the closest hole into which to jump. As he’d expected, he wouldn’t have to run far. Eoforwic, these days, was little but holes and rubble.

He and Oraste turned a corner. A couple of Forthwegians had been shouting at each other. When they saw the constables, they abruptly fell silent. Bembo let out a small sigh. He might have had the chance to shake them down if they’d kept squabbling. Oraste sighed, too. He probably would sooner have beaten them up than put a bribe in his belt pouch, but no accounting for taste.

A squad of Algarvian soldiers tramped by, on their way down to the Twegen. One of them pointed to Bembo and Oraste and called, “You constable bastards thought you were lucky, all safe and comfy back here in Forthweg away from the western front. Well, now the Unkerlanters have bloody well come to you since you didn’t have the balls to go to them.” His pals laughed.

There were a dozen of them. Because there were a dozen of them, Bembo replied in a whisper only Oraste could hear: “If you soldier bastards hadn’t got run out of Unkerlant, we wouldn’t be worrying about Swemmel’s buggers now.”

His partner grunted and nodded and said, “If I ever see that particular son of a whore by himself, he’ll be sorry his mother let the next-door neighbor in for a quickie whenever her husband went to work.”

Bembo guffawed. A couple of soldiers looked back suspiciously. “Come on, you lugs, get moving,” called the corporal in charge of them. “What do we care about a couple of fornicating constables?”

“I wish I was a fornicating constable right now,” Bembo said. “It’d be a lot more fun than what I am doing.”

Oraste laughed less than Bembo thought the joke deserved. That made Bembo sulk instead of strutting as he and Oraste paced off their beat. A lot of Algarvians would have jollied him along till he was in a good humor again. Oraste, a sullen fellow himself, didn’t care-indeed, didn’t notice-what sort of humor the people around him were in.

“They ought to send us all back to Algarve,” Bembo said after a while, looking for something new to complain about. “All us constables, I mean.”

That made Oraste laugh, but not in the way Bembo had intended. “Oh, aye, the soldiers would really love us then,” he said. “Wake up, fool. Sleepy time’s over.”

“But what good are we doing here?” Bembo demanded. Now that he’d started, his complaints made perfect sense-to him, at least. “This whole miserable city is under military occupation and martial law. What are constables good for, then?”

“For whatever soldiers don’t feel like doing,” Oraste answered. “I know what’s eating you, old pal. You can’t fool me. You just don’t want to be here when Swemmel’s bastards finally get around to swarming over the Twegen.”

“Oh, and you do?” Bembo retorted. “I’ll just bet you do, sweetheart.”

Oraste didn’t answer that. Because he didn’t, Bembo concluded he had no answer. There was no answer. No Algarvian in his right mind-probably no crazy Algarvian, either-wanted to be in a town the Unkerlanters overran. If you were in there then, either you wouldn’t come out or you’d come out a captive. Bembo wondered which was worse. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

A Forthwegian labor gang went by, herded by a couple of Algarvians with sticks. “Wonder how many of those whoresons are Kaunians in sorcerous disguise,” Bembo said.

“Too many,” Oraste answered. “One’d be too many. However this stinking war turns out, we’ve got rid of a whole great raft of blonds. That was worth doing.”

Bembo shrugged. Back before the war, he hadn’t thought much about Kaunians one way or the other. A few blonds had lived in Tricarico, as a few- sometimes more than a few-had lived in a lot of cities in the north of Algarve: reminders of where the Kaunian Empire had once stretched. But they’d been taken away while the war was new. Bembo supposed that made sense. How loyal would blonds in Algarve be when King Mezentio was at war with Jelgava and Valmiera, both Kaunian lands, and with Forthweg, a kingdom where blonds had more than their share of money and power?

His own notions about Kaunians had changed after the Derlavaian War broke out. He remembered that, now that he thought about it a little. How could they have helped but change, when the bookstores were filled with romances about the slutty blond women of imperial days and other choice bits, and when every fence and wall sprouted broadsheets telling the world-or at least the Algarvian part of it-what a pack of monsters Kaunians were?

He blinked. “You know something?” he said to Oraste. “We were made to hate the blonds. It didn’t just happen.”

His partner’s shoulders, broad as a Forthwegian’s, went up and down in a businesslike shrug altogether different from the usual Algarvian production. “Speak for yourself,” Oraste said. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Me, I never needed any help.”

A lot of Algarvians-and, from everything Bembo had seen, even more Forthwegians-felt the same way. “Before the war,” Bembo began, “what was the-?”

He didn’t finish, for bells began clanging all over Eoforwic. “Dragons!” Oraste exclaimed. “Futtering Unkerlanter dragons!” He looked around, his eyes wild, as did Bembo. “Now where in blazes is a cellar?”

“I don’t see one.” Bembo wasn’t the least ashamed of the fear in his voice.

Most, almost all, the buildings hereabouts were wrecks, their cellars, if they’d ever had them, buried under rubble. He moaned. “But I see the dragons.”

They flew low, as they usually did on raids like this, only a couple of hundred feet above the waters of the Twegen. The rock-gray paint Swemmel’s men gave them made them all the harder to spot, but Bembo could see how many of them there were, and that no Algarvian beasts rose to challenge them. One or two tumbled out of the sky, hit by beams from heavy sticks, but the rest came on, eggs slung under their bellies.

“No cellars,” Oraste said as some of those eggs began to fall and to release bursts of the sorcerous energy trapped inside them.. “Next best thing is the deepest hole in the ground we can find.” He started to run.

So did Bembo, his belly jiggling. Oraste jumped into a hole, but it was plainly too small for a pair of good-sized men. Bembo kept running, while the roars from bursting eggs came closer and closer as the Unkerlanter dragons penetrated deeper and deeper over Eoforwic. Bembo spotted a likely hole and dashed towards it. He was only a couple of strides away when an egg burst much too close-and then he wasn’t running any more, but flying through the air.

It wasn’t anything like his dreams of flying. For one thing, he had no control over it whatever. For another, it didn’t last more than half a heartbeat-and when he hit a pile of rubble, he hit hard. He felt something snap in his leg. He heard it, too. That was almost worse-at least till the pain reached his mind, which took a couple of extra heartbeats.

Somebody close by was screaming. Whoever he was, he had to be close by: Bembo could hear him through the din of the eggs. After a moment, he realized those screams came from his own mouth. He tried to make them stop, but it was like trying to recork a fizzing bottle of sparkling wine-once that stopper was out, no getting it in again. He bawled on and on, and hoped an egg would burst on him and kill him. Then, at least, it would be over.

No such luck. What did I ever do to deserve this? wondered some small part of his brain still able to think. Unfortunately, he had no trouble coming up with answers. Few Algarvians who’d served in Forthweg would have.

The dragons kept dropping eggs for what seemed like forever. Bembo kept screaming all that while, too. And he kept screaming after the Unkerlanter dragons flew back toward the west.

“Oh, shut up,” Oraste told him. “Let’s have a look at you.” He did, with rough competence, the accent being on rough. When he finished, he said, “Well, Bembo my lad, you are one lucky son of a whore.”

That startled Bembo enough to make him stop screaming for a moment. “Lucky?” he howled. “Why, you-” He called Oraste every name he knew.

Considering the decade or so he’d spent in the constabulary, he knew a lot of names.

Oraste slapped him in the face. “Shut up,” he said again, this time in a flat, angry voice. “I said lucky, and I meant fornicating lucky. You’re hurt bad enough, they won’t keep you around here, on account of you won’t be good for a fornicating thing for a long time. That means you won’t be here when the Unkerlanters finally do come over the Twegen. And if that’s not lucky, what in blazes is? You want me to try splinting your leg, or you want me to wait for a healer?”

Bembo cursed him again, not quite so savagely as before. Then the pain made everything blurry for some little while. When he fully returned to himself, someone he didn’t recognize was leaning over him, saying, “Here, Constable, drink this.”

He drank. It tasted nasty-a horrible blend of spirits and poppy seeds. After a bit, the pain ebbed-or he felt as if he were floating away from it. “Better,” he mumbled.

“Good,” the healer said. “Now I’m going to set that leg.” Go ahead, Bembo thought vaguely. I won’t care. But he did. The decoction he’d drunk wasn’t strong enough to keep him from feeling the ends of the broken bone grinding against each other as the healer manipulated them. Bembo shrieked. “Almost done,” the healer assured him. “And you’ll be going back to Algarve to get better after that. They’ll take good care of you.”

“Oraste was right,” Bembo said in drowsy, drugged wonder. A couple of Forthwegians put him on a litter-and hauled him off toward the ley-line caravan depot. When he got there, another healer poured more of the decoction down him. He never remembered getting carried aboard the caravan. When he woke up, he was on his way back to Algarve.

Outside the royal palace in Patras, a blizzard howled. Marshal Rathar had little use for the palace or for the capital of Yanina. He wore a heavy cloak over his knee-length rock-gray tunic, and was none too warm even with it. “Why do you people not heat your buildings in the wintertime?” he growled at King Tsavellas.

The king of Yanina was a skinny little bald man with a big gray mustache and dark, sorrowful eyes. “We do,” he answered. “We heat them so we are comfortable. We do not turn them into ovens, as you Unkerlanters like to do.”

Both the King of Yanina and the Marshal of Unkerlant spoke Algarvian. It was the only tongue they had in common; classical Kaunian was much less studied in their kingdoms than farther east on the continent of Derlavai. Rathar savored the irony. Tsavellas had had no trouble talking with his erstwhile allies, the redheads. Now he could use his command of their language to talk with the new masters of Yanina.

“If you are indoors, you should be warm,” Rathar insisted. He enjoyed telling a king what to do, especially since Tsavellas had to listen to him. King Swemmel. . This time, Rathar’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly halls through which he walked. The King of Unkerlant was a law unto himself. All Kings of Unkerlant were, but Swemmel more so than most.

“Warm is one thing,” Tsavellas said. “Warm enough to cook?” His expressive shrug might almost have come from an Algarvian.

Rathar didn’t answer. He was eyeing the painted panels that ornamented the walls. Yaninans in old-fashioned robes-but always with pompoms on their shoes-stared out of the panels at him from enormous, somber eyes. Sometimes they fought Algarvians, other times Unkerlanters. Always, they were shown triumphant. Rathar supposed the artists who’d created them had had to paint what their patrons wanted. Those patrons had lost no sleep worrying about the truth.

He couldn’t read the legends picked out in gold leaf beside some of the figures on the walls. He couldn’t even sound them out. Yanina used a script different from every other way of writing in Derlavai. Rathar reckoned that typical of the Yaninans, the most contrary, fractious, faction-ridden folk in the world.

“Here we are,” Tsavellas said, leading him into a room with more Yaninans painted on the walls and with maps on the tables. A Yaninan officer in a uniform much fancier than Rathar’s-his short tunic over kilt and leggings glittered with gold leaf, and even his pompoms were gilded-sprang to his feat and bowed. Tsavellas went on, “I present to you General Mantzaros, the commander of all my forces. He speaks Algarvian.”

“He would,” Rathar rumbled. He was hardly fifty himself-burly, vigorous, and dour. Any man who’d spent so much time dealing with King Swemmel had earned the right to be dour. When he held out his hand, Mantzaros clasped his wrist instead, in the Algarvian style. Rathar raised an eyebrow. “Have you forgotten whose side you’re on these days, General?”

“By no means, Marshal.” Mantzaros drew himself up to his full height, which was a couple of inches less than Rathar’s. “Do you seek to insult me?” Yaninans were some of the touchiest people on earth, too, without the style Algarvians brought to their feuds.

“No. I seek to get some use out of the rabble you call an army,” Rathar said brutally.

That made both Mantzaros and King Tsavellas splutter. The general found his voice first: “Our brave soldiers are doing everything they can to aid our allies of Unkerlant.”

“You have not got more than a handful of brave soldiers. We saw that when you were fighting against us,” Rathar said. Ignoring the Yaninans’ cries of protest, he went on, “Now that you are on our side, you had better get your men moving against the cursed redheads. That was the bargain you struck when you became our allies”-our puppets, he thought-”and you are going to live up to it. Your men will spearhead several attacks we have planned.”

“You will use them to weaken the Algarvians so you can win on the cheap,” Tsavellas said shrilly. “This is not war. This is murder.”

“If you try to go back on your agreement, your Majesty”-Rathar used the title with savage glee-”you will find out what murder is. I promise you that. Do you understand me?”

Tsavellas and Mantzaros both shivered and turned pale beneath their swarthy skins. The Algarvians killed Kaunians for the life energy that powered their strongest, deadliest sorceries. To fight back, Swemmel ordered the deaths of criminals, and of the old and useless of Unkerlant. But, now that his soldiers held Yanina in a grip of iron, what was to stop him from killing Tsavellas’ folk instead? Nothing at all, as anyone who knew him had to realize.

“We are … loyal,” Tsavellas said.

“To yourselves, perhaps,” Rathar answered. The king looked indignant- indeed, almost shocked. No Yaninan would have dared speak to him so. But Marshal Rathar was no Yaninan-for which he thanked the powers above-and had to deal with a king ever so much more fearsome than Tsavellas. He went on, “King Swemmel still recalls how you would not turn over King Penda of Forthweg to him when Penda fled here early in the war.”

General Mantzaros said something in Yaninan. If it wasn’t, I told you so, Rathar would have been mightily surprised. Tsavellas snapped something pungent in his own language, then returned to Algarvian: “King Penda escaped my palace. I still do not know how he came to Lagoas.”

On the whole, Rathar believed him. But that had nothing to do with anything. In a voice like sounding brass, he said, “But you had Penda here in Patras, here in your palace, and you would not give him to Swemmel when my sovereign demanded his person.”

“He was a king,” Tsavellas protested. “He is a king. One does not surrender a king as one does a burglar.”

“Is a king who has no kingdom still a king?” Rathar asked.

“I did not give him to Mezentio of Algarve, either, and he wanted him, too.”

Rathar’s shrug held a world of indifference. “You did not surrender him to King Swemmel. Swemmel reckons that a slight. I speak no secrets when I tell you King Swemmel’s memory for slights is very long indeed.”

Tsavellas shivered again. “It is easy for your king to have a long memory. He is strong. For a man who rules a small kingdom, a weak kingdom, trapped between two strong ones, things are not so easy.”

“Unkerlant was-is-trapped between Gyongyos and Algarve-and Yanina,” Rathar said. “You may redeem yourself, but you will pay whatever price King Swemmel demands. If you balk, you shall not redeem yourself, and you will pay much more. Do you understand that, your Majesty?” Once more, he enjoyed using the king’s formal title as he dictated to him.

King Tsavellas wilted. Rathar had expected nothing less. The King of Yan-ina found himself in an impossible situation. He’d saved his throne by switching sides at just the right moment, but he’d left himself a hostage to Unkerlant in doing so. If he didn’t obey, Swemmel could easily find some pliant Yaninan noble-or an Unkerlanter governor-who would. “Aye,” Tsavellas said sullenly. “Tell us what you require, and we shall do it. Is it not so, General?”

“It is so,” General Mantzaros agreed. “It will bleed our kingdom white, but it is so.”

“Do you think Unkerlant has not been bled white?” Rathar said. “Do you think Yanina did not help bleed Unkerlant white? This is what you bought, and this is the price you will pay for it. You know the Algarvians are holding along the line of the Skamandros River?”

“Aye,” the king and his general said together.

Rathar wasn’t so sure how much they knew, but accepted their word for the time being. He said, “I intend to throw Yaninan armies across the river here and here”-he pointed to the spots he had in mind-”in three days’ time. You will have them ready, or it will go hard for you and your kingdom.”

“In three days?” Mantzaros croaked. “That is not possible.”

“This is your last chance to keep Yaninan armies under Yaninan officers, General,” Rathar said coldly. “If you do not move the men as we require, we shall do it for you. That will be the end of your army as an army. We will use it as part of ours-as a small part of ours. Have you any questions?”

“No,” Mantzaros whispered. He spoke in Yaninan to King Tsavellas, who replied in the same tongue. Mantzaros dipped his head, as Yaninans usually did in place of nodding. Returning to Algarvian, he said, “We obey.”

“Good. That is what is required of you, no more-and no less.” He turned his back on the general and the king and strode out of the map room. The painted Yaninans on the hallway walls stared reproachfully from their big, round, liquid eyes. He ignored them, as he had ignored the king and the general once they gave him what he wanted. He also ignored the anxious Yaninan courtiers who tried to get him to tell them what was going on. After fawning, they cringed.

Rathar’s carriage waited outside the palace. “Take me to our headquarters,” he told the driver. The soldier, a stolid Unkerlanter, nodded and obeyed without a word. That suited Rathar fine.

The headquarters was an appropriated house, quite fine, in a district full of fancy shops-certainly fancier than any in Cottbus. The Yaninans couldn’t fight worth a lick, but they lived well. When Rathar walked in, he smelled a pungent, smoky odor he’d never met before and heard General Vatran coughing. “Powers above, what’s that stink?” he demanded.

“I’m breathing the smoke of these leaves I got from the grocer across the street,” Vatran answered between wheezes. He was stocky and white-haired, almost twenty years older than Rathar: one of the few truly senior officers to have survived a generation of Swemmel’s rages, but a solid soldier nonetheless. “Varvakis says they come from some island in the Great Northern Sea, and the natives there all swear by them.”

“For what?” Rathar asked. “Fumigation?”

“No, no, no. Health,” Vatran said. “None of these natives ever dies before he’s a hundred and fifty years old, if you believe Varvakis. And even if you cut what he says in half, that doesn’t sound too bad to me.” He coughed again.

So did Rathar. “Nasty stench,” he said. “If you have to breathe this cursed smoke all the time, I think I’d sooner die. It’ll probably rot your lungs. And if these natives are so bloody wonderful, why do they belong to some Derlavaian kingdom nowadays? All those islands do, you know.”

“You haven’t got the right attitude,” Vatran said reproachfully.

“I don’t care,” Rathar answered “I’ll tell you this, though: Tsavellas and Mantzaros would agree with you.”

“I’ll bet they would,” Vatran said. “You got what you wanted from them, I expect?”

“Of course I did,” Rathar told him. “It was that or pull this kingdom down around their ears. We’ll throw Yaninans over the Skamandros till they bridge it with their bodies if we have to. Then we’ll clean out the stinking redheads ourselves.” He paused. “They don’t stink any worse than those leaves.”

“Sorry, sir.” Vatran didn’t sound sorry. He was grinning. So was Rathar. Why not, when they were pushing the Algarvians back?

Rain blew out of the west, into Colonel Spinello’s face. It could be worse, the Algarvian officer thought as he peered from his riverfront hole in the ground in Eoforwic across the Twegen toward the Unkerlanter positions on the west bank. When he said that aloud, one of the men in his brigade gave him an odd look. “How could it be worse, sir?” the trooper asked, real curiosity in his voice.

“For one thing, it could be snowing.” Spinello had no trouble coming up with reasons. He’d seen the worst the Unkerlanters and the weather could do. “Down in the south, it would be snowing. It probably is, right this minute. And Swemmel’s whoresons could have us surrounded, the way they did down in Sulingen. They could have snipers as close to us as you are to me. One of those bastards blazed me down there, straight through the chest. I’m lucky I’m here. So you see, things aren’t so bad.”

He was a prancing, handsome little gamecock of a man, one who stayed dapper even when things were at their worst. As always, he spoke with great conviction. He believed what he was saying when he said it, and usually made others believe it, too. That was one of the reasons he had such good luck with women. That and technique, he thought smugly.

Every once in a while, of course, even conviction didn’t pay off. The trooper said, “Oh, aye, some luck, sir. You were so lucky, they got you repaired and sent.you up here to give the Unkerlanters another chance at doing you in. You can call that luck if you want, but it’s the kind of luck you can keep, if you ask me.”

“Well, who did ask you?” Spinello said. But that was a gibe, not a reprimand. Freeborn Algarvians, even common soldiers, would speak their minds. That was part of what made them better soldiers than Unkerlanters, who were liable to end up sacrificed if they talked out of turn.

And if we’re such splendid soldiers, what are we doing fighting way back here in the middle of Forthweg? he asked himself. He knew the answer perfectly well: enough indifferent soldiers could overwhelm a smaller number of good ones. They could, aye. But, when King Mezentio ordered the Algarvian army into Unkerlant, who had imagined that they might? Mezentio hadn’t. Spinello was sure of that.

Shouldn’t he have? Spinello wondered. He just assumed Unkerlant would fall to pieces, the way all our other enemies did when we hit them. He peered across the river again. He couldn’t see any Unkerlanter soldiers stirring about, but he knew they were there. It didn‘t work out quite the way Mezentio and the generals thought it would. Too bad.

A few eggs burst on this side of the Twegen, but not close enough to make him do anything but note them. It was, on the whole, a quiet day. Before long, he feared, Swemmel’s men would burst out of their bridgeheads north and south of Eoforwic. They would probably try to cut off and surround the city, as they had with Sulingen. He wondered if the battered Algarvian forces in the neighborhood could stop them. He had his doubts, though he would have gone on the rack before admitting as much.

And if the Unkerlanters do cut us off? Well, then things will be. . pretty bad.

Motion he caught out of the corner of his eye made him whirl, stick swinging up ready to blaze. But it was only a couple of Hilde’s Helpers, the Forthwegian women who worked hard to keep the Algarvians in Eoforwic fed. Some of them-not all-kept the Algarvians happy other ways, too. But a man had to listen if one of them said no. Offending them might mean going hungry, and that would have been very bad.

They wore hooded cloaks over their long, baggy tunics. One of them came up to Spinello and the trooper in the hole with him. She took a loaf from under the cloak and gave it to Spinello. “Bread with olive,” she said in bad Algarvian. “I myself to bake.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.” Spinello bowed as if she were a duchess. He tried talking with her for a little while, but she didn’t speak enough of his language to follow much, and he had next to no Forthwegian.

We could probably get along in classical Kaunian, he thought. He was fluent in the language of scholarship and sorcery, and in Forthweg, as nowhere else, it remained a living language, too. Many Forthwegians had learned it to deal with their Kaunian neighbors.

But Spinello didn’t try it. Most Kaunians who had lived in Forthweg were dead by now, slain to fuel Algarve’s sorcerous onslaught against Unkerlant. And most Forthwegians weren’t particularly sorry about that. Had they been, the Algarvians would have had a much harder time doing what they’d done. So no, classical Kaunian didn’t seem like a good idea.

He tore the loaf in half and gave one piece to the soldier in the hole with him. They both ate greedily. “Powers above, that’s good!” Spinello exclaimed. The trooper nodded, his cheeks as full of bread as a dormouse’s could get full of seeds.

The clouds were thick enough that nightfall took Spinello by surprise. He hadn’t expected it to get dark for some little while yet, and hadn’t seen anything in the least resembling a sunset. “Have to keep our eyes open,” he called to his men. “Swemmel’s buggers are liable to try to sneak raiders across the river.” They’d done that a couple of times lately, and created more chaos than the small number of soldiers who’d paddled across the Twegen should have been able to spawn.

But, a couple of hours later, two Algarvians came up to the river not far from where Spinello still kept his station. When he climbed out of his hole to find out what they were doing, one of them shook his head. “You haven’t seen us,” the fellow said. “We’ve never been here.”

“Talk sense,” Spinello snapped. “I command this brigade. If I say the word, you bloody well won’t have been here.”

Muttering, the man who’d spoken stepped closer to him, close enough to let him see the mage’s badge on the fellow’s tunic. “If you command this brigade, get us a little rowboat. I have work to do,” he said. “And if you try interfering with me, you’ll end up envying what happens to the cursed blonds, I promise you.”

Spinello almost told him to go futter himself. Outside the army, he would have. He’d come close to a couple of duels in his time. But discipline and curiosity both restrained him. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“My job,” the mage answered, which stirred Spinello’s temper all over again. “Now get me that boat.”

“Aye, your Highness,” Spinello said. The wizard only laughed. Spinello called orders to his men. They came up with a rowboat. It was, undoubtedly, stolen from a Forthwegian. Spinello cared nothing about that. He bowed to the mage and to the fellow with him, who’d said not a word. “Welcome to the Royal Algarvian Navy.”

He got not even a smile, let alone a laugh, and set them down for a couple of wet blankets. The mage began to incant. Some of his charms were in old-fashioned Algarvian, others in classical Kaunian, still others in what sounded like Unkerlanter. Spinello could follow the first two, not the third. The mage finished, cocked his head to one side, and nodded. “The confusion spell should hold for a while-they aren’t expecting it,” he said. “Now let’s tend to you.” His comrade only nodded. He got to work again, this time with a simple charm in classical Kaunian. Before Spinello’s eyes, the silent Algarvian’s appearance changed-he took on the seeming of an Unkerlanter. He then stripped off his own uniform and took from his pack that of an Unkerlanter major. He got into the rowboat and started rowing west across the Twegen.

“Good luck,” Spinello called after him. “Bite somebody hard.” Why send a man in sorcerous disguise into Unkerlanter-held territory if not to bite somebody hard?

From the boat, the fellow gave back the only three words Spinello ever heard from him: “I intend to.” Then he vanished from sight, sooner than Spinello expected. The confusion spell, he thought. He looked around for the mage to show off his own cleverness, but the fellow had already disappeared.

Spinello wondered if the disguised Algarvian would return to his stretch of the riverfront, but he never saw the man again. The next day, the Unkerlanters stirred and milled around in a way that made him hope the fellow had accomplished something worth doing, but no one to whom he talked seemed to know.

More of Hilde’s Helpers came by to give the Algarvians dishes they’d cooked. A rather pretty girl-pity she’s got that blocky Forthwegian build, Spinello thought-with a blue-and-white armband gave him a bowl with a spoon stuck in it. He sniffed and nodded. “Smells good, darling. What’s in it?”

“Barley. Olives. Cheese. Little sausage,” she answered in halting Algarvian. Her voice was sweet, and might have been familiar.

Laughing, Spinello wagged a finger at her. “I’ll bet you put some mushrooms in, too, just to drive me mad.”

He had to repeat himself before she understood. When she did, she jerked in surprise, then managed a nod of her own, a halting one. “Aye. For to taste. To flavor. Chop very fine.” She mimed cutting them. “Not to notice. Only for to taste. For to taste good.”

Spinello considered. After some of the things he’d had to eat in Unkerlant, what were a few mushrooms? He grinned at the girl. “Kiss me and I’ll eat ‘em.”

She jerked again, harder than she had before. He wondered if some other Algarvian had given her a hard time, who could guess when? You‘ve got to be careful with Hilde’s Helpers, he reminded himself. Treat ‘em like noblewomen, even if they are just shopgirls. This one, though, hesitated only a moment. She nodded and leaned toward him. He did a good, thorough job of kissing her. “Now,” she said, “you to eat.”

Eat he did. “It is good,” he said in some small surprise after the first mouthful, and wolfed down the rest of the bowl. The Forthwegian girl was right; except for the flavor they added, he hardly knew the mushrooms were there. He’d dreaded biting into some big, fleshy chunk, but that didn’t happen at all. When he’d eaten every bit of the stew, he got to his feet, bowed, and made a production of returning bowl and spoon. “Another kiss?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Go to make more. For others.” She hurried off.

A crystallomancer shouted, “Hey, Colonel, I’ve just picked up some emanations from the fornicating Unkerlanters. Sounds like somebody just bumped off General Gurmun. I bet that was our pal last night.”

“I bet you’re right,” Spinello breathed. “And I bet they’d trade a couple of brigades of ordinary men for that Gurmun whoreson, too. He was far and away the best they had with behemoths.”

The confusion on the other side of the Twegen continued the whole day long. The Unkerlanters hardly bothered harassing Eoforwic. Spinello didn’t take that for granted. His guess was, they would start pummeling the city hard when they began to recover. But he enjoyed the respite while he had it.

His own respite didn’t last so long as Eoforwic’s. He woke in the middle of the night with belly pains and an urgent need to squat. “A pox!” he grumbled. “I’ve come down with a flux.” But squatting didn’t help, and the pain only got worse.

When morning came, his men exclaimed in horror. “Powers above, Colonel, get to a healer,” one of them said. “You’re yellow as a lemon!”

“Yellow?” Spinello stared down at himself. “What’s wrong with me?” He scratched his head. He didn’t argue about going to a healer; he felt as bad as he looked, maybe worse. “I wonder if it was those mushrooms. Plenty of reasons we don’t eat them, I bet.”

He got a powerful emetic from the healers. That just gave him one more misery, and did nothing to make him feel better. Nothing the healers did could make him feel better, or even ease his torment. It ended for good three days later, with him still wondering about those mushrooms.

Vanai splashed hot water, very hot water, water as hot as she could stand it, onto her face again and again, especially around her mouth. Then she rubbed and rubbed and rubbed at her lips with the roughest, scratchiest towel she had. Finally, when she’d rubbed her mouth bloody, she gave up. She could still feel Spinello’s lips on hers even after all that.

But then she snatched Saxburh out of her cradle and danced around the flat with the baby in her arms. Saxburh liked that; she squealed with glee. “It was worth it. By the powers above, it was worth it!” Her little daughter wouldn’t have argued for the world. She was having the time of her life. She squealed again.

“Do you know what I did?” Vanai said. “Do you have any idea what I did?” Saxburh had no idea. She chortled anyhow. Still dancing, ignoring the sandpapered state of her lips, Vanai went on, “I put four death caps in his stew. Not one, not two, not three. Four. Four death caps could kill a troop of behemoths, let alone one fornicating Algarvian.” She kept right on dancing. Saxburh kept right on laughing.

Fornicating Algarvian is right, Vanai thought savagely. Her mouth was sore, but she didn’t care. I’d’ve put my lips on his prong to get him to take that bowl of stew. Powers below eat him, why not? It’s not as if he didn’t make me do it before. Teach me tricks, will you? See how you ‘II like the one I just taught you!

Spinello, without a doubt, felt fine right now. That was one of the things that made death caps and their close cousins, the destroying powers, so deadly. People who ate them didn’t feel anything wrong for several hours, sometimes even for a couple of days. By then it was far too late for them to puke up what they’d eaten. The poison stayed inside them, working, and no healer or mage had ever found a cure for it. Soon enough, Spinello would know what she’d done.

“Isn’t that fine?” Vanai asked Saxburh. “Isn’t that just the most splendid thing you ever heard in all your days?” The baby didn’t have many days, but, by the way she gurgled and wriggled with glee, it might have been.

All Forthwegians hunted mushrooms whenever they got the chance. In that, if in few other things, the Kaunians in Forthweg agreed with their neighbors. No one-not even Algarvian soldiers, not any more-paid much attention to people walking with their heads down, eyes on the ground. And who was likely to notice what sort of mushrooms went into a basket? One thing Vanai’s grandfather had taught her was how to tell the poisonous from the safe. Everyone in Forthweg learned those lessons. This once, Vanai had chosen to stand them on their head.

“And so you too have some measure of revenge, my grandfather,” she whispered in classical Kaunian. Brivibas would never have approved of her saying any such thing to him in mere Forthwegian.

Saxburh’s eyes-they would be dark like Ealstan’s, for they were already darkening from the blue of almost all newborns’ eyes-widened. She could hear that the sounds of this language were different from those of the Forthwegian Vanai and Ealstan usually spoke.

“I will teach you this tongue, too,” Vanai told her daughter, still in classical Kaunian. “I do not know if you will thank me for it. This is a tongue whose speakers have more than their share of trouble, more than their share of woe. But it is as much yours as Forthwegian, and you should learn it. What do you think of that?”

“Dada!” Saxburh said.

Vanai laughed. “No, you silly thing, I’m your mama,” she said, falling back into Forthwegian without noticing she’d done it till after the words passed her lips. Saxburh babbled more cheerful nonsense, none of which sounded like either Forthwegian or classical Kaunian. Then she screwed up her face and grunted.

Knowing what that meant even before she caught the smell, Vanai squatted down, laid Saxburh on the floor, and cleaned her bottom. Saxburh even thought that was funny, where she often fussed over it. Vanai laughed, too, but she had to work to keep the corners of her mouth turned up. She wouldn’t have used Forthwegian so much before she started disguising herself. It really was as if Thelberge, the Forthwegian semblance she had to wear, were gaining at the expense of Vanai, the Kaunian reality within.

Even if the Algarvians lose the war, even if the Unkerlanters drive them out of Forthweg, what will it be like for the blonds left alive here? Will they-will we-go on wearing sorcerous disguises and speaking Forthwegian because it’s easier, because the Forthwegians-the real Forthwegians-won’t hate us so much then? If we do, what happens to the Kaunianity, the sense of ourselves as something special and apart, that we’ve kept alive ever since the Empire fell?

She cursed softly. She had no answer for that. She wondered if anyone else did, if anyone else could. If not, even if the Algarvians lost the Derlavaian War, wouldn’t they have won a great battle in their endless struggle against the Kaunians who’d been civilized while they still painted themselves strange colors and ran naked through their native forests throwing spears?

The familiar coded knock Ealstan used interrupted her gloomy reverie. She snatched up Saxburh and hurried to unbar the door. Ealstan gave her a kiss. Then he wrinkled his nose. “I know what you’ve been doing,” he said. He kissed Saxburh. “And I know what you’ve been doing, too.” He took her from Vanai and rocked her in his arms. “Aye, I do. You can’t fool me. I know just what you’ve been doing.”

“She can’t help it,” Vanai said. “And it’s something everybody else does, too.”

“I should hope so,” Ealstan answered. “Otherwise, we’d all burst like eggs, and who would clean up after us then?” Vanai hadn’t thought of it like that. When she did, she giggled. Ealstan went on, “And what did you do with your morning?”

Before Vanai realized she would, she answered, “While Saxburh was taking a nap, I put on a blue-and-white armband and went out and pretended I was one of Hilde’s Helpers.”

“Powers above, you’re joking!” Ealstan exclaimed. “Don’t say things like that, or you’ll make me drop the baby.” He mimed doing just that, which made Vanai start and made Saxburh laugh.

Vanai said, “I really did. And do you want to know why?”

Ealstan studied her to make sure she wasn’t kidding him. What he saw on her face must have satisfied him, for he replied, “I’d love to know why. The only reason that occurs to me right now is that you’ve gone crazy, and I don’t think that’s right.”

“No.” Vanai said that in Forthwegian, but then switched to classical Kaunian. “I wore the armband because I wanted to give a certain officer of the redheaded barbarians a special dish-and I did it.”

“A special dish?” Ealstan echoed in his own slow, thoughtful classical Kaunian. “What kind of-? Oh!” He didn’t need long to figure out what she meant. His eyes glowed. “How special was it?”

“Four death caps,” she answered proudly.

“Four?” He blinked. “That would kill anybody ten times over.”

“Aye. I know.” Vanai wished she could have killed Spinello ten times over. “I hope he enjoyed them, too. People who eat them say they’re supposed to be tasty.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Ealstan answered, falling back into Forthwegian. “Not something I ever wanted to find out for myself.” He carefully set Saxburh in her little seat, then came back and took Vanai in his arms. “You told me not to take chances, and then you went and did this? I ought to beat you, the way Forthwegian husbands are supposed to.”

“It wasn’t so risky for me as it would have been for you,” she answered. “I just gave him the food, took back the bowl, and went on my way. He still feels fine-I’m sure of it-but pretty soon he won’t. What was I to him? Just another Forthwegian.” Just another wench, she thought, remembering the feel of his lips on hers. But the last wench, the very last.

“It’s a good thing you did get the bowl-and the spoon, too, I hope,” Ealstan said. Vanai nodded. He went on, “If you hadn’t, the Algarvian mages could have used the law of contagion to trace them back to you.”

“I know. I thought of that. It’s the reason I waited for them.” Vanai didn’t tell Ealstan about the couple of quizzical looks Spinello had sent her while he ate her tasty dish of death. Had he half recognized, or wondered if he recognized, her voice? Back in Oyngestun, they’d always spoken classical Kaunian. Here, of course, Vanai had used what scraps of Algarvian she had. That, and the difference in her looks, had kept Spinello from figuring out who she was.

“Well, the son of a whore is gone now, even if he hasn’t figured it out yet. Four death caps?” Ealstan whistled. “You could have killed off half the redheads in Eoforwic with four death caps. Pity you couldn’t have found some way to do it.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Vanai said. “But I got rid of the one I most wanted dead.” That was as much as she’d ever said since Ealstan found out about Spinello.

Ealstan nodded now. “I believe that,” he said, and let it go. He’d never pushed her for details, for which she was grateful.

Saxburh started to cry. Ealstan joggled her, but this time it didn’t restore her smile. “Give her to me. I think she’s getting fussy,” Vanai said. “She’s been up for a while now.” And I’ve been dancing with her, dancing because of what I just did to Spinello. And I still feel like dancing, by the powers above.

She sat down on the couch and undid the toggles that held her tunic closed. Ealstan reached out and gently cupped her left breast as she bared it. “I know it’s not for me right now,” he said, “but maybe later?”

“Maybe,” she said. By her tone, it probably meant aye. As Saxburh settled in and began to nurse, Vanai wondered why that should be so. Wouldn’t seeing Spinello have soured her on men and anything to do with men? Till she first gave herself to Ealstan, she’d thought the Algarvian had soured her on lovemaking forever. Now. . Now I just fed him four death caps, and I want to celebrate. “Come on, sweetheart,” she crooned to Saxburh. “You’re getting sleepy, aren’t you?”

Ealstan, who’d gone into the kitchen, heard that and laughed. He came back with a couple of mugs of something that wasn’t water. He gave Vanai one. “Here. Shall we drink to … to freedom!”

“To freedom!” Vanai echoed, and raised the cup to her lips. Plum brandy slid hot down her throat. She glanced toward Saxburh. Sometimes the baby was interested in what her mother ate and drank. Not now, though. Saxburh’s eyes started to slide shut. Vanai’s nipple slid out of the baby’s mouth. Hoisting her daughter to her shoulder, Vanai got a sleepy burp from her, then rocked her till she fell asleep. Saxburh didn’t wake up when she set her in the cradle, either.

Her tunic still hanging open, Vanai turned back to Ealstan. “What were you saying about later?”

He raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t usually so bold. I don’t kill a man I hated every day, either, she thought. Back in the bedchamber, she straddled Ealstan and rode herself-and him with her-to joy with short, hard, quick strokes, then sprawled down on his chest to kiss him. I wish I did, if only it would make me feel like this every time. Even the afterglow seemed hotter than usual. Laughing, she kissed him again.

Winter roared into the Naantali district of Kuusamo as if it were part of the land of the Ice People. The blizzard outside the hostel howled and shrieked, blowing snow parallel to the ground. Pekka’s home town of Kajaani didn’t usually get quite such wretched weather, even though it lay farther south: it also lay by the sea, which helped moderate its climate.

Pekka had hoped to be able to experiment in the scant hours of daylight that came here, but scrubbed the idea when she saw what the weather was like. No matter how much Kuusamans took cold, nasty weather in stride, everything had its limits.

And it’s not as if I’ve got nothing else to do, she thought, brushing a lock of coarse black hair back from her eyes as she waded through paperwork. The greatest drawback she’d found to running a large project was that it transformed her from a theoretical sorcerer, which was all she’d ever wanted to be, to a bureaucrat, a fate not quite worse than death but not enjoyable, either.

Someone knocked on the door to her chamber. She sprang to her feet, a smile suddenly illuminating her broad, high-cheekboned face. Any excuse for getting away from that pile of papers was a good one. And it might be Fernao. That idea sang in her. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with the Lagoan mage, especially when she hadn’t fallen out of love with her own husband. But Leino was far away-in Jelgava now, battling against the Algarvians’ bloodthirsty magic-and had been for a long time, while Fernao was here, and working side by side with her, and had saved her life more than once, and. . She’d stopped worrying about reasons. She just knew what was, knew it and delighted in it.

But when Pekka opened the door, no tall, redhaired Lagoan with narrow eyes bespeaking a touch of Kuusaman blood stood there. “Oh,” she said. “Master Ilmarinen. Good morning.”

Ilmarinen laughed in her face. “Your lover’s off somewhere else,” he said, “so you’re stuck with me.” With Master Siuntio dead, Ilmarinen was without a doubt the greatest theoretical sorcerer in Kuusamo, probably in the world. That didn’t keep him from also being a first-class nuisance. He leered and laughed again at Pekka’s expression. The few wispy white hairs that sprouted from his chin-Kuusaman men were only lightly bearded-wagged up and down.

Getting angry at him did no good. Pekka had long since learned that. Treating him as she did Uto, her little boy, worked better. “What can I do for you?” she asked, as sweetly as she could.

Ilmarinen leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. That was going too far, even for him. Then he said, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Pekka echoed, as if she’d never heard the word before.

“Goodbye,” Ilmarinen repeated. “To you, to this hostel, to the Naantali district. It took some wangling-I had to talk to more than one of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo-but I did it, and I’m free. Or I’m going to be free, anyhow, as soon as this ghastly weather lets me escape.”

“You’re leaving!” Pekka said. Ilmarinen nodded. She wondered if her senses were failing her or if, more likely, he was playing one of his horrid practical jokes. “You can’t do that!” she blurted.

“You’d better revise your hypothesis,” Ilmarinen said. “I’m going to falsify it with contradictory data. When you see that I’m gone, you will also see that you were mistaken. It happens to us all now and again.”

He means it, she realized. “But why?” she asked. “Is it anything I’ve done? If it is, is there anything I can do to change your mind and make you stay?”

“No and no,” the master mage answered. “I can tell you exactly what’s wrong here, at least the way I look at things. We’re not doing anything new and different any more. We’re just refining what we’ve already got. Any second-rank mage who can get to ten twice running when he counts on his fingers can do that work. Me, I’d sooner look for something a little more interesting, thank you kindly.”

“What is there?” Pekka asked.

“I’m going to the war,” Ilmarinen answered. “I’m going to Jelgava, if you want me to be properly precise, and I’m sure you do-you’re like that. If those fornicating Algarvian mages start killing Kaunians and aiming all that sorcerous energy at me, I aim to boot ‘em into the middle of next week. Time to really use all this sorcery we’ve dreamed up. Time to see what it can do, and what more we need to do to fancy it up even more.”

“But. .” Pekka floundered. “How will we go on without you?”

“You’ll do pretty well, I expect,” the master mage said. “And I’ll have a chance to play with my own ideas. Maybe I really will figure out a way to knock the Algarvians into the middle of next week. I still say the potential for that lies at the heart of the experimental work we’ve done.”

“And I still say you’re out of your mind,” Pekka answered automatically.

“Of course you do,” Ilmarinen said. “You’re the one who opened this hole in the ice, and now you don’t want to fish in it for fear a leviathan will take hold of your line and pull you under.”

“Those are the kinds of forces you’re talking about,” Pekka said. “Even if you were right-and you’re not, curse it; you almost killed yourself and took half of Kuusamo with you because you’d miscalculated, if you recall-even if you were right, I tell you, you’d never be able to come up with a usable sorcery. Paradoxes would prevent it.”

“Whenever a mage says a spell is possible, he’s likely right,” Ilmarinen replied. “Whenever he says a spell is impossible, he’s likely wrong. That’s an old rule I just made up, but it covers the history of pure and applied sorcery over the past hundred and fifty years pretty well, I think.”

He had a point, though Pekka didn’t intend to admit it. She said, “I think you’re being very foolish. You were talking about second-rank mages, Master. What will you be able to do in Jelgava that any second-rank mage can’t?”

“I don’t know,” he answered cheerfully. “That’s why I’m going there: to find out. I know everything I can do here and”-he yawned with almost as much theatrical flair as an Algarvian might have-”I’m bored.”

“That shouldn’t be reason enough to abandon something of which you’re such an important part,” Pekka insisted.

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but for me it is.” Ilmarinen’s foxy features donned that leer once more. “If I happen to run into your husband while I’m in Jelgava, what shall I tell him?”

Not a thing! Not a fornicating thing! Pekka wanted to shout. Just before she did, she realized that was the worst thing she could possibly say. With studied indifference, she answered, “Tell him whatever you please. You will anyway.”

That took the leer off his face. It got her what might have been a respectful glance. “You’re cooler about the whole business than I thought,” Ilmarinen said.

Pekka, just then, felt anything but cool. Letting him know that, though, didn’t strike her as a good idea. She said, “If you’re bound and determined to do this, powers above keep you safe.”

“For which I thank you,” Ilmarinen said. “I will miss you, curse me if I won’t. Your heart’s in the right place, I think, even if I can’t imagine what you see in that overgrown Lagoan mage.”

“He’s not overgrown!” Indignation crackled in Pekka’s voice. “And you’re a fine one to talk. What do you see in Linna the serving girl?”

“A pretty face and a tight twat,” he answered at once. “I’m a man. Men aren’t supposed to need any more than that, are they? But women, now, women should have better sense, don’t you think?”

Actually, Pekka did think that, or something like that, anyway. But Ilmarinen was the last person with whom she wanted to talk about it. Instead of talking, she hugged him hard enough to make him wheeze as the air came out of him. Then, for good measure, she kissed him, too. “I still think you’re being a fool, but you’re a fool I’m fond of.”

“You’re stuck with me a while longer,” he said, “till this accursed weather eases up. But then I’m flying-or more likely sailing-north for the winter.” Off he went down the hallway. Pekka wondered why she’d even tried to change his mind. He was no more inclined to listen to her than she was to pay attention to the advice she got from a clerk at a grocer’s shop. He did what he wanted, and reveled in it.

If he wants to tell Leino, I’ll kill him, she thought. But that worried her less than it had when he first asked his sardonic question. Had Ilmarinen really intended to blab to her husband if he saw him, he wouldn’t have teased her about it first. She was sure-well, she was pretty sure-of that.

Still shaking her head in astonishment, she went back to the paperwork. A few minutes later, another knock on the door interrupted her. This time, it was Fernao: tall and redheaded and, but for his eyes, most un-Kuusaman looking. Even the neat ponytail in which he wore his hair shouted that he was a Lagoan.

But, over the past couple of years, he’d got pretty fluent in Kuusaman. “You’ll never guess what,” he said now. He even had something of a Kajaani accent, which only showed he’d done a lot of talking and listening to Pekka.

“About Ilmarinen disappearing?” she said, and watched his jaw drop. “He came to me first,” she told him. “How did you find out about it?”

“He’s in the refectory, pouring down ale and boasting about the wires he pulled to get away,” Fernao answered.

“That sounds like him,” Pekka said sourly.

“He’s really off to Jelgava?” Fernao asked.

“That’s what he says,” Pekka replied. “He has connections with the Seven Princes that go back longer than either one of us has been alive, so I suppose he is. I haven’t seen the paperwork, but he wouldn’t carry on like that without it.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Fernao didn’t sound particularly happy. After a moment, he showed Pekka why: “If he goes to Jelgava, if he sees your husband there, will he talk? You Kuusamans are such a straitlaced folk, I fear he might.”

“We’re no such thing!” Pekka exclaimed. Then, a little sheepishly, she asked, “Is that how Lagoans see us?”

“A lot of the time, aye,” he said. “You. . often take such things too seriously.”

“Do we?” Pekka suddenly remembered fleeing his bedchamber in tears after the first time they’d made love. “Well, maybe we do. But I don’t think Ilmarinen will talk too much to Leino. He’s not an ordinary Kuusaman, you know.”

“Really?” Fernao’s voice was dry. “I never would have noticed. What did you do, tell him you’d put a lifetime itching spell on his drawers if he ever opened his mouth?”

Pekka giggled. “It’s a pretty good idea, but no. If I’d threatened him, he would blab to Leino if he ever saw him. He may not see him, of course. He probably won’t, in fact-Jelgava is a good-sized kingdom. But when he teased me about it, I told him to do whatever he wanted, so he won’t feel he has to run off at the mouth.”

“Good thinking.” Fernao quirked up an eyebrow. “And what do you want to do?”

“It’s more fun than paperwork,” Pekka said. Realizing a heartbeat too late how imperfect that was as praise, she did her best to show him-and herself- exactly how much more fun than paperwork it really was.

A new broadsheet went up all over the Jelgavan town of Skrunda. Talsu read a copy pasted to the front wall of the crowded block of flats where he and his family had moved, exchange of currency, the headline read. Below it, in almost equally large characters, it declared, All coins bearing the impress of the false king, usurper, and vicious tyrant, Mainardo the cursed Algarvian, must be exchanged for those minted under the auspices of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, Donalitu III, by-the date named was less than two weeks away. The broadsheet continued, Any attempt to pass the monies of the false king and vicious tyrant after the date aforesaid shall be punished with the greatest possible severity. By order of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, long may he reign.

Talsu, his wife Gailisa, his younger sister, and his mother and father shared one room, none too large, and a tiny, cramped, kitchen. Bathroom and toilet were at the end of the hall. That was, Talsu supposed, better than sharing a tent, as they’d done after a Lagoan or Kuusaman dragon raid burned down Traku’s tailor’s shop and the rooms above it where the family had lived. Still, it did produce its share of friction.

When Talsu climbed the stairs to the flat, he found his father doing some hand stitching on a pair of trousers before using a spell to extend the stitchery down along the entire length of the hem. Traku set the work down when Talsu came in.

“Hello, son,” he said in his gravelly voice: he looked-and sounded-more like a bruiser than a tailor. “What’s new in the outside world? I don’t get to see it much.”

“A new broadsheet went up,” Talsu answered, and explained what was on it.

From the kitchen, his mother called, “That’s good. That’s very good, by the powers above. If I never see Mainardo’s cursed pointy nose on another piece of silver, I’ll stand up and cheer. The faster we forget the redheads ever conquered us, the happier I’ll be.”

“I don’t know, Laitsina,” Traku said. “Did you hear what Talsu said they’ll do to you if you make a mistake? We’ll have to sift through all our silver. I don’t want to spend a stretch in the dungeons just because I was careless.”

“King Donalitu is still King Donalitu,” Talsu said, and he didn’t mean it as praise. “If the redheads had picked one of our nobles instead of Mezentio’s brother, they would have had an easier time getting people to put up with them.”

“They didn’t care a fart whether we put up with ‘em or not,” Traku said. “They thought they had the world by the short hairs, and that what we thought didn’t matter. What were we? Just a pack of Kaunians. That’s why the arch on the far side of the square isn’t standing any more, even though it had been there since the days of the Kaunian Empire.”

“That’s right,” Talsu said. “I was taking some clothes across town when the redheads wrecked the old arch. They said it insulted them, because it talked about how the Kaunians of long ago beat the old-time Algarvians.”

“They did things like that all over Jelgava-all over Valmiera, too.” Traku lowered his voice. “And they did a lot worse to the Kaunians of Forthweg, by what everybody says.”

Talsu’s sister Ausra came out of the kitchen wearing an apron over her tunic and trousers and said, “What do you want to bet they find some way to cheat us when we turn in the money the Algarvians issued?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Talsu said.

“Neither would I,” Traku agreed. “I’m glad we don’t have King Mainardo and the redheads running things any more, but I’d be almost gladder if we didn’t have Donalitu back.”

That was treason. If anybody besides his family heard it, Traku might end up in a dungeon regardless of whether he exchanged Mainardo’s coins for Donalitu’s. Back before the Algarvians ran Donalitu out of Jelgava, his dungeons had had an evil reputation all over Derlavai. He wasn’t a madman or the next thing to it, as Swemmel of Unkerlant was said to be, but no one loved him.

Wistfully, Talsu said, “The Kuusamans have seven princes. Maybe they could spare one for us? The Kuusaman soldiers I dealt with when I was with the irregulars were all good people. They didn’t act like they were afraid of their officers, either.”

“Neither did the redheads, come to that,” Ausra said.

“No, they didn’t,” Talsu admitted unhappily. “But they had other things wrong with them-starting with thinking everybody who had yellow hair was fair game. Donalitu’s bad. They were worse.”

Neither his sister nor his father argued with him. Traku said, “They aren’t gone yet, either, the whoresons. They’re still hanging on in the western part of the kingdom. The sooner we’re rid of them forever, the better.”

“But if they leave, they know the Lagoans and Kuusamans will follow them right into Algarve,” Talsu said.

Traku grunted. “Good. I wish we’d gone deeper into Algarve, back before we got beat. Then maybe all this never would have happened to us.”

For a long time, Talsu’s father had blamed him almost personally for Jelgava’s lost war against Algarve. Traku had been too young to fight in the Six Years’ War, and didn’t know what the army-especially the Jelgavan army-was like. Talsu said, “If our officers had been any good, we would have gone deeper. But if our officers were any good, a lot of things about this kingdom would be different.” That was about as much as he cared to say about that, even in the bosom of his family.

Ausra said, “They’re putting together a new army for the kingdom, now that we have our own king back again. That was the last set of broadsheets, before this one about exchanging Mainardo’s money.”

“I saw it,” Talsu said. “It won’t be a new army-you wait and see. It’ll be the same old army, with the same old noble officers who don’t know their-” He broke off before using a phrase from that same old army in front of his sister. In spite of having to stop, he’d got out what had been wrong with the Jelgavan army in which he’d served. As in most armies, nobles held almost all officers’ slots. . and Jelgavan nobles, from King Donalitu on down, were some of the most hidebound, stubborn, backwards-looking men the world had ever seen.

Gailisa came into the flat then. Talsu was glad to break off and give her a hug and a kiss. She returned them a little absently. She hadn’t been quite the same since her father got killed when Kuusaman and Lagoan dragons dropped eggs on Skrunda about a week before the Algarvians had to clear out of the town for good. Talsu had shown Kuusaman footsoldiers and behemoths an undefended way through the redheads’ lines. He wished he’d done it sooner. Maybe the islanders’ dragons wouldn’t have flown that night.

His late father-in-law had been a grocer. Gailisa had helped him. These days, she was working for another grocer, one named Pumpru, whose shop had survived. She said, “Do you know about the new money-changing decree?”

“We were just talking about it a few minutes ago,” Talsu answered. “I saw the broadsheets on my way home from delivering a cloak.”

“It’s a cheat,” Gailisa said.

“What? Have they turned out light coins that are supposed to be worth the same as the older, heavier ones?” Talsu asked. “That’s what Mainardo did. Donalitu’s not too proud to steal tricks from an Algarvian, eh?”

“Close, but not quite,” Gailisa said. “Pumpru took some of Mainardo’s money in to be changed as soon as he saw one of the broadsheets. If King Donalitu told everybody to jump off a roof, he’d do that just as fast-he’s one of those people. But he wasn’t happy when he came back to the store. He wasn’t happy at all.”

“What’s wrong with the new money?” Traku asked.

“It is new money.” Gailisa nodded. “If they’d given old silver, weight for weight, that would have been fair. But all the coins Pumpru got are shiny new. And they’re too hard, and they don’t sound right when you ring them on a counter. You don’t have to be a jeweler to figure out there’s not as much silver in them as there’s supposed to be.”

“And Donalitu puts the difference in his pocket,” Talsu said. Gailisa nodded again. Talsu made as if to pound his head against the wall of the flat. “What a cheap trick! He didn’t waste much time reminding people what he is, did he?”

“He’s the king, that’s what he is,” Traku said. But he didn’t blindly follow King Donalitu, the way Pumpru the grocer did, for he went on, “And if you get on his wrong side, you’ll find yourself in a nice, cozy dungeon cell, too, so watch what you say.”

“I will, Father,” Talsu promised. “I’ve already spent more time in a dungeon cell than I ever want to.”

“But that was for making the Algarvians angry, not the proper king,” Ausra said.

“Same dungeon,” Talsu replied dryly. “And it wasn’t the redheads running it, either-it was Jelgavans just like you and me. They’d worked for Donalitu before Mainardo came in. One of them said he’d go back to working for Donalitu if Mainardo ever got thrown out. He meant it.”

“That’s terrible!” his sister exclaimed.

“Son of a whore ought to be dragged out of his fornicating dungeon and blazed,” his father growled.

“Of course he should,” Talsu said. “But what do you want to bet he was right? What do you want to bet he’s still just where he always was, except now he’s making things hot for people who got in bed with the Algarvians instead of for people who wanted us to get our own rightful king back?”

Slowly, one at a time, Gailisa, Traku, and Ausra nodded. Talsu’s wife said, “Ausra’s right. That is terrible. It isn’t the way the world’s supposed to work.”

“Do you know what the worst part of all is, though?” Talsu said. This time, his family shook their heads. He went on, “The worst part of all this is, none of you argued with me. No matter how terrible it is, you think it’s pretty likely, too, the same as I do.”

“It shouldn’t be this way,” Gailisa insisted. But then her courage wilted. “It always seems to be, though-here in Jelgava, anyhow. The people who have a lot keep grabbing more and more.”

“That’s the story of this kingdom, sure enough,” Traku said. “Always has been, just like you said, Gailisa. Powers below eat me if I think it’ll ever change. And it’s likely the same way everywhere. When Mezentio’s buggers were holding us down, they weren’t shy about grabbing everything they could get their hands on.”

“From what I saw of the Kuusamans, they’re different,” Talsu said. “Their officers and men seemed to be friends, and the ones with the higher ranks didn’t ride roughshod over the ordinary soldiers. Come to think of it, I even had one regimental commander like that, back when we were still in the war.”

“What happened to him?” Gailisa asked.

“Colonel Adomu?” Talsu said. “About what you’d expect-he actually went out to do some real fighting, so he got killed pretty quick. I never knew another officer like him: not in our army, anyhow.” The Algarvians had had a fair number of that stripe, too, but he didn’t care to say so out loud. He didn’t want to praise the redheads, not after everything they’d done.

“Supper’s ready!” his mother called, and that gave him something happier to think about.