Out of the Darkness

Three

"Bauska!” Marchioness Krasta shouted from her bedchamber. “Powers below eat you, Bauska, where have you gone and hidden?”

“Coming, milady,” the maidservant said, hurrying in-and panting a little, to show how much she was hurrying. She dropped Krasta a curtsy. “What can I do for you, milady?”

“At least you sound properly respectful,” Krasta said. “Some of the servants these days…” She made a horrible face. The servants didn’t come close to giving her the respect she deserved. They all took their lead from her brother and that hateful cow of a farm girl he’d brought home with him. There were times when Krasta almost wished the Algarvians had managed to hunt Skarnu down. Then he wouldn’t have had the chance to rub his virtue in her face.

Bauska’s answering smile was bleak. “Well, milady, we’re in the same boat, you and I, aren’t we?”

“I should say not,” Krasta answered indignantly. “Your snot-nosed little brat has an Algarvian papa, sure as sure. One look at her would tell that to anybody. Viscount Valnu is father to my child.” She firmly believed it these days.

“Of course, milady,” Bauska said. The words were right. The tone called Krasta a liar-oh, not quite blatantly enough to let her bound up and slap Bauska’s face, but it did, it did. The maidservant went on, “And even if that’s so. .” She broke off, not quite in the nick of time. Even if that’s so, she didn’t say, everybody knows you opened your legs for Colonel Lurcanio for years and years.

Krasta tossed her head. “So what?” she said, as if Bauska had made the accusation out loud. But the rest of her impassioned defense was silent, too. What if I did? The Algarvians looked like winning the war. Everybody thought so. I was better off with a redhead in my bed than I would have been without. I wasn‘t the only one. I wasn’t even close to the only one. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

It had been a good idea at the time. Krasta remained convinced of that. Once she got an idea-which didn’t happen all that often-she clung to it through thick and thin. But she’d never expected times to change so drastically. Taking an Algarvian lover didn’t look like a good idea any more. What it looked like these days, in a Valmiera no longer occupied, was something very much like treason.

With her own sandy-headed little bastard, Bauska couldn’t very well say that. She had to count herself lucky that she hadn’t had her head shaved and her scalp daubed with red paint, as had happened to so many Valmieran women who’d given themselves to Mezentio’s soldiers. With a sigh, the maidservant repeated, “What can I do for you, milady?”

“My trousers don’t fit me anymore,” Krasta said peevishly. “Hardly any of them even come close to fitting any more. Look at me! I’m still in these summery silk pyjamas with the elastic waist, and I’m about to freeze my tits off. Maybe I ought to get a great big long loose tunic to cover all of me, the kind Unkerlanter women wear.” She shuddered at the mere idea.

But Bauska’s voice was serious as she answered, “Maybe you should, milady. The Unkerlanters have done so much to fight the Algarvians, everything about them is stylish these days. One of their tunics might be just the thing for a woman with child to wear.”

“Do you think so?” Krasta asked, intrigued. She considered, then shook her head. “No, I don’t want to. I don’t care whether their clothes are stylish or not. They’re too ugly to stand. I want trousers, but I want some that fit me properly.”

“Aye, milady.” Bauska sighed. But that sigh wasn’t aimed at Krasta, for she went on, more to herself than to the marchioness, “Maybe you’re right. When I think about Captain Mosco, I don’t suppose I want to see Unkerlanter-style clothes catch on here in Valmiera.”

Mosco had been Colonel Lurcanio’s aide-and was father to Bauska’s bastard daughter. He’d never seen his child by her, though. Before Brindza was born, he’d gone off to fight in Unkerlant. He was one of the first Algarvians pulled west by the ever more desperate battle against King Swemmel’s men, but far from the last. He’d never sent so much as a line back once ordered away from Priekule. Maybe that meant he’d been a heartbreaker from the start. Maybe, on the other hand, it meant he’d died almost as soon as he made the acquaintance of warfare so much more savage than any that had washed over Valmiera.

With a sniff, Krasta said, “Remember, you silly goose, he had a wife somewhere back in Algarve.”

“I know.” Bauska sighed again. What that meant was, she didn’t care. Had Mosco walked into the mansion right then-assuming he could have come anywhere close to it without getting blazed by vengeful Valmierans-she would have greeted him with open arms and, no doubt, open legs. Fool, Krasta thought. Little fool.

Lurcanio had a wife somewhere back in Algarve, too. He’d never denied it or worried about it. Krasta hadn’t cared. Men, in her considerable experience, got what they could where they could. She’d never imagined herself in love with Lurcanio, as Bauska had with Mosco. He’d given her skill in bed and protection from other redheads, and she hadn’t really looked for anything more.

Now that Lurcanio was gone from her bed, gone from Priekule, gone-she thought-from Valmiera (though he could have been one of the Algarvians hanging on in the rugged country of the northwest), there were times when Krasta missed him. Now that he was gone, she remembered with a warm glow what he’d been able to do for her. . and she conveniently forgot how he’d frightened and intimidated her. He being the only man who’d ever managed to do that, forgetting came all the easier.

But she couldn’t forget how even these pyjama bottoms were starting to grow cruelly tight. “Where in blazes do I go to find clothes I can wear?” she demanded. “As far as I know, there was only one shop on the whole Boulevard of Horsemen that catered to pregnant women, and it’s been closed up with night and fog scrawled across the window for two years now.”

The Boulevard of Horsemen was, far and away, the toniest street of shops in Priekule. That meant it was the only one Krasta cared about. Going anywhere else would have been stepping down in class, and she would sooner have been buried alive. But if the Boulevard didn’t have what she needed, she could look elsewhere without social penalty.

Bauska said, “I found the clothes I needed on Threadneedle Street, milady. Plenty of such shops there, some cheap, some not so.”

“Threadneedle Street,” Krasta echoed. She remembered Bauska’s clothes as being ugly. She could do better, though. She was sure of it. She had more taste and more money. How could she go wrong? Musingly, she said, “I’ve never been down to Threadneedle Street.”

“Never, milady?” Bauska looked astonished. “But everybody buys clothes there.”

“I don’t do what everybody else does,” Krasta said in lofty tones. And if I hadn’t taken an Algarvian lover when so many other women did. . But it was much too late to worry about that.

After some rummaging, Bauska found her a pair of trousers she could at least wear. Her tunics were getting tight, too, both at what was left of her waist and at the chest. She reckoned only part of that a drawback; the rest was an asset, especially when dealing with men.

Her driver gave her a bleary look when she told him she wanted to go out. He was drinking much too much these days. Krasta couldn’t even yell at him, the way she wanted to. Who could guess what would happen if she antagonized the servants? They were liable to go to her brother, and she had enough trouble with Skarnu as things were.

The day was clear and cold and crisp as the carriage rattled into the heart of Priekule. People on the streets looked shabby, but they looked happy, lively, in a way they hadn’t when the Algarvians held the city. Krasta still wasn’t used to not seeing redheads strolling along and taking in the sights. When Algarvian soldiers in Unkerlant got leave, they often came east to rest and relax in the capital of a kingdom that had, at least for a while, truly yielded to them.

No Valmieran wore kilts these days, either. They’d grown moderately popular among those who wanted to curry favor with the occupiers or just wanted to show off shapely legs. No more, though. Now, if the Algarvian-style garments weren’t thrown out, they lay at the bottom of clothes chests and in the back of closets. For a Valmieran to put on a kilt today might well be to risk a life.

“Threadneedle Street, milady,” Krasta’s driver said glumly. “Best you get out now, so I can find a place to put the carriage.”

“Oh, very well,” Krasta said. The street was crowded, not only with carriages but also with goods wagons and with a swarm of foot traffic. Tradesmen and shopgirls and riffraff like that, Krasta thought scornfully. If these are the people Bauska thinks of as everybody, powers above be praised that I have some idea of what true quality is worth.

But her maidservant had been right: plenty of the cramped little shops along Threadneedle Street sported names like for a mother and clothes for you both and even-dismayingly, as far as Krasta was concerned-maybe it’s twins. She rolled her eyes. She didn’t particularly want one baby. If she were to have two. . She wondered if Valnu could have sired one and Lurcanio the other. Wouldn’t that be a scandal? She had no idea if it were possible, and even less idea of whom to ask. Not asking anyone struck her as a pretty good plan.

Shopping here, she rapidly discovered, was different from shopping on the Boulevard of Horsemen. No fawning shopgirls guided her from one elegant creation to the next. Instead, clothes were crammed onto racks. In shops with sale! painted on their windows, getting anything took harder fighting than most of what the Valmieran army had done. Commoner women much more extravagantly pregnant than Krasta elbowed her aside to get at a pair of loose-fitting trousers or a baggy tunic they wanted. She didn’t need many lessons along those lines. Before long, she gave as good as she got, if not better. After all, wasn’t elbowing commoners aside a proper sport for a noblewoman?

The clothes were cheaper than she’d expected. They were also none too sturdily made. When she complained about that to a shopkeeper, he said, “Lady, use your head. You think you’re gonna be in ‘em long enough to wear ‘em out?”

What he said made good sense, but his tone infuriated her. “Do you know who I am?” she demanded.

“Somebody trying to waste my time, and I ain’t got it to waste,” he answered, and turned to a woman holding out some trousers to him. “You like these, darling? That’s two and a half in silver. . Thank you very much.”

Krasta didn’t buy anything there: the only revenge she could take. She did get what she needed, and she hunted down her driver, who stowed away his flask when he saw her coming. “Home,” she said, and escaped Threadneedle Street with nothing but relief.

Back at the mansion, though, Merkela happened to be walking outside when Krasta came up the drive. The farm woman’s son toddled beside her, holding her hand for balance. “What have you got in the sacks?” Merkela snapped, as if suspecting Krasta of smuggling secrets to the Algarvians.

“Clothes,” Krasta answered shortly. She had as little to do with Merkela as she could. It was either that or claw her, and Merkela would delight in clawing back.

She clawed now, with words instead of nails: “Oh, aye, for your bulging belly. At least I know who my son’s father is. Don’t you wish you could say the same?” Krasta snarled an unpleasantry at her and stalked-as well as a pregnant woman could stalk-into the mansion.

Fernao’s head ached. Like a lot of the mages at the hostel in the Naantali district, he’d had too much to drink bidding Ilmarinen farewell the night before. He looked at the mirror above the sink in his room-looked at it and winced. “Powers above,” he muttered. “My eyes are as red as my hair.”

Pekka came up beside him. The bed they’d shared was narrow for two to sleep in, but they’d both poured down enough spirits to keep them from moving much. Pekka also winced. She said, “My eyes are red, too, and I haven’t even got red hair.”

He draped an arm around her shoulder. “I like what you have,” he said. “I like everything you have.”

“Including red eyes?” She made a face at him. “I don’t like that, and I don’t care what you think. I need strong tea, maybe with just a splash of spirits in it, to take the edge off.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Fernao limped over to the closet and chose a tunic and kilt. He would limp for the rest of his life, and one shoulder wasn’t everything it might have been, either. He’d almost died down in the land of the Ice People, when an Algarvian egg burst much too close to him. For quite a while, he wished he had. No more. Time-and falling in love-had changed that.

Pekka kept a couple of outfits in his closet these days, as he had a couple in hers. That helped them spend nights together and maintain the polite fiction that they were doing no such thing. She changed her clothes while he got his cane. He wasn’t an old man-far from it. Not so long before, he would have shaken his head in sorrow at the sight of someone his age who needed a cane to get around. Now, he counted himself lucky. For a long time, he’d been on crutches. Compared to that, a single stick didn’t seem so bad.

After running a brush through her hair, Pekka looked in the mirror again. “It will have to do,” she said sadly.

“You always look good to me,” Fernao said.

“I hope you have better taste than that,” Pekka said. “My one consolation is, everybody who was at the farewell will be feeling the same way we do.”

“I have trouble believing Ilmarinen is really gone,” Fernao said as he went to the door. “The project won’t be the same without him.”

“That’s why he left-he said the project already wasn’t the same,” Pekka answered. “It won’t be the same for me now, I’ll tell you that. With Master Siuntio dead, with Master Ilmarinen gone..” She sighed. “It’s as if the adults had all left, and now things are in the children’s hands.” She walked out into the hallway. Fernao followed and closed the door behind them.

As they headed for the stairs that would take them to the refectory, he said, “We aren’t children, you know.”

“Not for everyday things,” Pekka agreed. “In this, next to Siuntio and Ilmarinen-what else are we?”

“Colleagues,” Fernao answered.

Pekka squeezed his hand. “You do sound like a Lagoan,” she said fondly. “Your people have their share of Algarvic arrogance.”

“I wasn’t thinking about me so much,” Fernao said. “I was thinking about you. You were the one who made the key experiments. Siuntio knew it. Ilmarinen knew it. They tried to give you credit. I honor them for that-a lot of mages would have tried to steal it instead.” Several of his own countrymen sprang to mind, starting with Grandmaster Pinhiero of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. He doggedly plowed ahead: “But you don’t seem to want to take it. What’s the opposite of arrogance? Self-abnegation?” The last word, necessarily, was in classical Kaunian; he had no idea how to say it in Kuusaman.

Pekka started to get angry. Then she shrugged and laughed instead. “Kuusamans see Lagoans as one thing. I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that you should see us as the opposite. To a mirror, the real world must look backwards.”

Irked in turn, Fernao started to growl, but checked himself and wagged a finger at her. “Ah, but who is the mirror-Lagoans or Kuusamans?”

“Both, of course,” Pekka answered at once. That made Fernao laugh. He’d never known a woman who made him laugh so easily. Must be love, he thought. One more sign of it, anyhow.

When they walked into the refectory, he saw right away that Pekka had known whereof she spoke. All the mages already there looked subdued. Some of them looked a good deal worse for wear than merely subdued. No one moved very fast or made loud noises of any sort. When a mug slipped off a serving girl’s overloaded tray and shattered, everybody flinched.

Fernao pulled out a chair for Pekka. She smiled at him as she sat. “I could get used to these fancy Lagoan manners,” she said. “They make me feel. . pampered, I think, is the word I want.”

“That’s what they’re for,” Fernao agreed. His leg and hip yelped as he too went from standing to sitting. Little by little, he was getting used to the idea that they would probably do that as long as he lived.

After a quick nod, Pekka frowned. “Maybe you have them and we don’t because we have an easier time with the idea that women and men can mostly do the same jobs than you Lagoans do. Do the fancy manners and the deference men show your women help keep them from thinking about things they can’t have?”

“I don’t know,” Fernao confessed. “I haven’t the faintest idea, to tell you the truth. I never would have thought of connecting manners and anything else. Manners are just manners, aren’t they?” But were they just manners? Now that Pekka had raised the question, her remark made a disturbing amount of sense.

Before he could say so, one of the serving girls came up and asked, “What would you like this morning?”

“Oh, hello, Linna,” Fernao said. “How are you today?”

“My head hurts,” she answered matter-of-factly. She’d been at Ilmarinen’s farewell celebration. For all Fernao knew, she’d given the master mage a special farewell of her own once the celebration wound down. Fernao wondered just what Ilmarinen had seen in her: to him, she wasn’t especially pretty or especially bright. But Ilmarinen had bristled like a young buck whenever anyone else so much as gave her a good day. Now she sighed and went on, “I’ll miss the old so-and-so, powers below eat me if I won’t.”

“He’ll miss you, too,” Pekka said.

“I doubt it,” Linna replied with casually devastating cynicism. “Oh, maybe a little, till he finds somebody else to sleep with him up in Jelgava, but after that?” She shook her head. “Not likely. But I will miss him. I’ve never known anybody like him, and I don’t suppose I ever will.”

“There isn’t anybody like Ilmarinen,” Pekka said with great conviction. “They only minted one of that particular coin.”

“You’re right there,” Linna said. “He’s even good in bed, would you believe it? I finally told him aye as much to shut him up as for any other reason I can think of. He’d been pestering me for so long-I figured we might as well get it over with, and then I could let him know I wasn’t interested any more. But he fooled me.” She shook her head again, this time in slow wonder. “Once he got started, I never wanted him to stop.”

Fernao coughed and looked down at his hands. That was more than he’d expected or wanted to hear. Kuusamans-especially their women-were a lot franker about some things than Lagoans. Casting about for some sort of answer, he said, “Ilmarinen would be good at anything he set his mind to.”

“He probably would,” Pekka agreed.

Linna didn’t say anything, but the look on her face did argue that Ilmarinen had indeed been good at something. Recalling herself-she needed a moment to do so-she said, “What can I bring you? You never did tell me.”

“Tea. Hot tea. Lots of hot tea, and a jar of spirits to splash into it,” Fernao said.

“Same for me,” Pekka added. “And a big bowl of tripe soup to go alongside.” Linna nodded and hurried off toward the kitchens.

“Tripe soup?” Fernao echoed, wondering whether he’d heard right. But Pekka nodded, so he must have. He gave her an odd look. “Do Kuusamans really eat things like that? I thought you were civilized.”

“We eat all sorts of strange things,” Pekka answered, a twinkle in her eye. “We just don’t always do it where foreigners can see us. Chicken gizzards. Duck hearts. Reindeer tongue, boiled with carrots and onions. And tripe soup.” She laughed at him. “Turn up your nose all you like, but there aren’t many things better when you’ve had too much to drink the night before.”

“I’ve had tongue,” Fernao said. “Beef tongue, not reindeer. They sell it smoked and sliced in fancy butcher’s shops in Setubal. It’s not bad, as long as you don’t think about what you’re eating.”

The twinkle in Pekka’s eye only got more dangerous. “You’ve never had brains scrambled together with eggs and cream, where what you’re eating thinks about you.”

Fernao’s stomach did a slow lurch, as it had been known to do when waves started pounding a ley-line ship on which he was serving. Only one way to deal with this, he thought. When Linna came back with the tea and the strengthener and a big steaming bowl of soup, he pointed to it and said, “Let me have some of that, too.”

Pekka’s eyebrows flew up like a couple of startled blackbirds. Linna just nodded. “Good for what ails you,” she said, “though who would’ve thought a Lagoan had wit enough to know it?”

“Are you sure?” Pekka asked, pausing with a spoonful of soup-and a chunk of something thin and grayish brown in the bowl of the spoon-halfway to her mouth.

“No,” Fernao answered honestly. “But if it’s nastier than I think, I don’t have to eat it all.” He spooned honey into his tea, and poured in a splash of spirits, too. Hot and sweet and spiked, the brew did make him feel better. He gulped it down.

Pekka drank fortified tea, too, but concentrated on the soup. Linna brought Fernao’s bowl back almost at once. “Cook did up a big pot of it this morning,” she said, setting it down in front of him. “After what all went on last night, he figured people would need it. I had some myself, back in the kitchen.”

Looking around the refectory, Fernao saw several Kuusamans with bowls like his in front of them. If it doesn’t hurt them, it probably won’t kill me, either, he thought. Pekka eyed him inscrutably as he picked up his spoon.

Of all the things he’d expected, actually liking the soup was among the last. “That’s good!” he said, and sounded suspicious even as he spoke: as if he suspected someone of tricking him. But it was. The broth was hot and greasy and salty and full of the flavors of garlic and chopped scallions. And the tripe, while chewy, didn’t taste like much of anything. His headache receded, too. Maybe that was the tea. But, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.

He beamed at Pekka. “Well, if this is barbarism, who needs civilization?” She laughed. Why not? Her bowl was already empty.

Like all the Forthwegians in Plegmund’s Brigade, Sidroc hated winters in the south. This was the third one he’d been through, and they got no easier with practice. He didn’t think Yanina was quite so cold as southern Unkerlant had been, but it was a lot worse than Gromheort, his home town. There, snow had been a curiosity. It was nothing but an eternal nuisance here.

He remembered throwing snowballs with his cousins, Ealstan and Leofsig, one day when white did cover the ground up there. He’d been perhaps nine, the same age as Ealstan, with Ealstan’s older brother in his early teens. Sidroc grunted in his frozen hole in the ground. No more playing with them. Ealstan had done his best to break his head, and he himself had broken Leofsig’s- broken it with a chair. Whoreson gave me one hard time too many, Sidroc thought. Good riddance to him. The whole family’s a pack of filthy Kaunian-lovers.

Somebody called his name-an Algarvian, by the trill he put in it. “Here, sir!” Sidroc sang out, speaking Algarvian himself. Even now, after more than two years of desperate fighting, there wasn’t a Forthwegian officer in Plegmund’s Brigade-nobody higher than sergeant. The redheads reserved the top slots for themselves.

Lieutenant Puliano wasn’t an Algarvian noble, though. He was a veteran sergeant who’d finally become an officer for the most basic and desperate reason of all: there weren’t enough nobles left to fill the places that needed filling. All but invisible in a white snow smock, Puliano slithered along the ground till he dropped into the hole next to Sidroc. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “A present, you might say.”

“What kind of present?” Sidroc asked suspiciously. Some of the presents officers gave, he didn’t want to get.

Puliano laughed. “You weren’t born yesterday, were you?” With his gravelly voice and no-nonsense attitude, he sounded like a sergeant. In fact, he put Sidroc in mind of Sergeant Werferth, who’d been his squad leader-and, without the rank, his company commander-till he got blazed outside a Yaninan village.

That village didn’t exist anymore; Sidroc and his comrades had slaughtered everybody there in revenge for him. Puliano went on, “It’s nothing bad. No extra sentry-go. No volunteering to storm the enemy bridgehead over the Skamandros singlehanded.”

Sidroc just grunted again. “What is it, then?” He remained suspicious. Officers didn’t go around handing out presents. It felt unnatural.

But Lieutenant Puliano dug into his belt pouch and gave Sidroc a straight cloth stripe for the shoulder straps of his tunic and two cloth two-stripe chevrons for the tunic sleeve-Forthwegian and Algarvian blazons of rank. Men of Plegmund’s Brigade wore both when they could get them, though the Algarvian insignia were more important. “Congratulations, Corporal Sidroc!” Puliano said, and kissed him on both cheeks.

Sergeant Werferth never would have done that. ““Well, dip me in dung,” Sidroc said, startled into Forthwegian. He was more polite in Algarvian: “Thank you, sir.”

“You are welcome,” Puliano said. “And who knows? You may make sergeant yet. You may even make officer yet.”

That startled Sidroc. In fact, it startled him right out of politeness. “Who, me?” he said. “Not fornicating likely-uh, sir. I am a Forthwegian, in case you had not noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed. You’re too ugly to make a proper Algarvian.” Puliano spoke without malice, which didn’t necessarily say he meant it for a joke. Before Sidroc could sort that out, the redhead went on, “If they made me into an officer, who knows where they’ll stop?”

He had something there. The only kingdom that really didn’t care whether its officers were noblemen or not was Unkerlant. Swemmel had got rid of old nobles much faster than he’d created new ones. If the Unkerlanters hadn’t let commoners become officers, they wouldn’t have had any.

Puliano grinned and pointed west. “Now, Corporal”-Sidroc didn’t care for the way the redhead emphasized his shiny new rank-”we have to see what we can do about that bridgehead on this side of the Skamandros.”

“What, you and me and nobody else?” Sidroc said. The Unkerlanters had spent lives like water to force their way across the river after being balked for some considerable while. Most of the lives they’d spent forcing the crossing were those of Yaninans. That’ll teach Tsavellas to turn his coat, Sidroc thought savagely.

“No, lackwit,” Puliano answered. “You and me and everything the fellows in the fancy uniforms can scrape together.” He might have been reading Sidroc’s mind, for he went on, “It’s not the nasty little whoresons in the pompom shoes in the bridgehead any more. I wish it were; we could deal with them.” He spat in fine contempt. “But it’s Unkerlanters in there now, Unkerlanters and as many stinking behemoths as they can cram into the space. And if we wait for them to bust out. .”

Sidroc made a very unhappy noise. He’d seen too often what happened when the Unkerlanters burst from their bridgeheads. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that again. But he asked, “Have we got any real chance of flinging them back across the river?”

Puliano’s shrug was as theatrical as his scornful spitting. To a Forthwegian’s eyes, Algarvians overacted all the time. “We have to try,” he said. “If we don’t try, we just sit here waiting for them to futter us. If we try, who knows what might happen?”

He had a point. Most of the time, the Unkerlanters were as stubborn in defense as any general could want. Every so often, though, especially when they got hit at a time or from a direction they didn’t expect, they would panic, and then the men attacking them got victories on the cheap.

“We have enough behemoths of our own to throw at them?” Sidroc persisted. “We have enough Kaunians to kill to put some kick in our attack?”

“Behemoths?” Puliano gave another shrug, melodramatic and cynical at the same time. “We haven’t had enough behemoths since the battles in the Durrwangen bulge. This won’t be any different from any other fight the past year and a half. Blonds. . Powers above, we’re even short on blonds.” But his battered features didn’t seem unduly disheartened. “Of course, since Tsavellas isn’t on our side any more, we don’t have to worry about what happens to these stinking Yaninans. Their life energy works as well as anybody else’s.”

“Heh,” Sidroc said. “I would sooner kill Kaunians. I never did like Kaunians. We are better off without them. But nobody will miss these Yaninan bastards, either.”

“Just so,” Puliano agreed. “Kaunians are the great enemies of Algarve, of real Derlavaian civilization, always and forever. But, as you say, the Yaninans betrayed us. They’ll pay for it. Indeed they will.” He clapped Sidroc on the back one more time, then went off to spread the news elsewhere.

Sidroc waited in his hole, wondering if the Unkerlanters would spend some more Yaninans, or even some of their own men, in a spoiling attack to disrupt whatever the Algarvians had in mind. It didn’t happen before his relief came to take his place. “Hullo, Sudaku,” he said. “Everything is pretty quiet there for now. It won’t last, though, not if the lieutenant has the straight goods.”

“We have to take out the bridgehead,” Sudaku answered seriously. “If we do not, the Unkerlanters will come forth and take us out.”

They both spoke Algarvian. It was the only tongue they shared. Sudaku was no Forthwegian. He and a good many others like him had attached themselves to Plegmund’s Brigade in the grim fighting during the breakout from the Mandelsloh pocket in the eastern Duchy of Grelz. No one had bothered to detach them since; the Algarvians had more important things to worry about. By now, some of the men from the Phalanx of Valmiera could curse fluently in Forthwegian.

And, by now, Sidroc had stopped worrying about the obvious fact that Sudaku and his countrymen were tall and blond and blue-eyed-were, in fact, every bit as Kaunian as the blonds from Forthweg whom Mezentio’s men massacred whenever they needed to. He did sometimes wonder why the Valmierans fought for Algarve. The reasons they’d given didn’t seem good enough to him- but then, his own probably looked flimsy to them, too. All he really worried about was whether he could count on them in a tight place. He’d seen, again and again, that he could.

Sudaku asked, “Do we hear right? Are you promoted?”

“Oh. That.” Thinking about assailing the Unkerlanter bridgehead, Sidroc had almost forgotten about his new rank. “Aye, it’s true.”

“Good for you,” the Valmieran said. Sidroc shrugged. He didn’t know whether it was good or not, not really. Then Sudaku smiled a sly smile and added, “Now you will be able to tell Ceorl what to do.”

“Ah,” Sidroc said, and smiled. He hadn’t thought of that. He and the ruffian had been giving each other a hard time for a couple of years. Now, at last, he had the upper hand. Of course, if he rode Ceorl too hard, he was liable to end up dead in the attack on the bridgehead regardless of whether the Unkerlanters blazed him. Neither the Phalanx of Valmiera nor Plegmund’s Brigade worried overmuch about keeping hard cases from their ranks.

When Sidroc got back to his squad-his squad indeed, now-Ceorl greeted him with, “Well, here’s a fine outfit ruined.”

“Plegmund’s Brigade’s been in trouble ever since it took you in,” Sidroc retorted. But he went on, “We may be ruined, if we really do have to try and smash the Unkerlanter bridgehead. It won’t be easy. That job never is.”

Lieutenant Puliano hadn’t been joking. Sidroc wished it were otherwise. He didn’t get so much as the chance to sew his new insignia of rank to his tunic before he and the men with him got ordered forward. Some behemoths came with them. The beasts wore snowshoes to help them get over and through the drifts: an Unkerlanter notion that had dreadfully embarrassed the Algarvians the first winter of the war, and that Mezentio’s men had since stolen. Seeing behemoths with Algarvians aboard them raised Sidroc’s spirits. It proved the redheads were serious about this attack.

They also brought up egg-tossers to pound the Unkerlanter positions on the east side of the Skamandros. The pounding didn’t last long. All too soon, officers’ whistles shrilled. “Forward!” Puliano shouted, along with his fellow commanders. To his credit, he went forward, too. Algarvian officers led from the front, one reason Mezentio’s men needed so many replacements.

Sidroc ran past a few dead and dying Unkerlanters whose blood stained the snow. For a heady moment, he thought the attack might have surprised Swemmel’s soldiers. Then they struck back. Dragons-some of them painted Yaninan red and white-streaked over from the west side of the river. The Algarvians didn’t have nearly enough beasts in the air to hold them off. Despite the Algarvian behemoths stiffening the attack, far more Unkerlanter animals trudged forward to oppose them. As always, the Unkerlanters turned a bridgehead into a spiky hedgehog as fast as they could.

This time, they didn’t wait for the Algarvians to start killing Kaunians or Yaninans before striking back in kind. The ground shuddered beneath Sidroc’s feet. Violet flames shot up from it. Men shrieked. Behemoths bellowed in mortal agony. And, when the Algarvian mages did resort to their own murderous magic, it was to defend against what Swemmel’s sorcerers were doing, not to aid in the attack.

Crouching behind a great gray stone, Sidroc called out to Puliano: “We cannot do this.”

“We have to,” the Algarvian lieutenant answered. “If we don’t, they’ll futter us later.”

“If we do, they will futter us now,” Sidroc retorted.

He hoped Puliano would tell him he was full of nonsense, but the redheaded veteran only grimaced. Another attack did go in. The Unkerlanters held it off and beat it back. After that, sullenly, the Algarvians-and the Forthwegians and Valmierans and Grelzers and the handful of Yaninans who couldn’t stomach serving Swemmel-drew back. Sidroc knew what that meant. It meant trouble; Puliano was dead right. And it means we aren’t strong enough to stop the trouble, he thought. He shrugged a broad-shouldered shrug. He’d been in a lot of trouble in this war. What was once more?

In all his life, Garivald had never gone through-had, in fact, never imagined- a winter without snow. He came from a little village called Zossen, down in the Duchy of Grelz. Blizzards there were so much a fact of life that every peasant hut had its doorway facing north or northeast, away from the direction from which the bad weather was likeliest to come. Even in his time as an irregular in the woods west of Herborn, the Grelzer capital, he’d known no different winters. Zossen, these days, no longer existed. The Algarvians had made a stand there when Unkerlanter armies fought their way back into Grelz, and nothing was left of the village or of the family Garivald had had there. And Swemmel’s impressers, a few months later, had efficiently dragged him into the army, even though he and Obilot, the woman with whom he’d taken up while in the irregulars, were working an abandoned farm well away from any other village.

An Algarvian egg burst, not too far from Garivald’s hole in the ground in the Unkerlanter bridgehead south of Eoforwic. No snow here: just rain through the fall and into the winter. People had told Garivald it would be like that, but he hadn’t believed it till he saw it himself.

Another egg burst. He saw the flash as all the sorcerous energy trapped inside the egg was released at once, and the fountain of mud and dirt that rose. The redheads had tried several times to drive the Unkerlanters back across the Twegen River, tried and failed. They hadn’t mounted any full-scale attacks against this bridgehead lately, but they didn’t let the Unkerlanters rest easy here, either.

From the rear, somebody called, “Sergeant Fariulf!”

“I’m here,” Garivald answered. Swemmel’s impressers hadn’t been perfectly efficient when they swept him into their net. They’d got him into the army, but they didn’t know who they had. As Fariulf, he’d just been one peasant recruit among many. As Garivald the leader of an irregular band, the composer of patriotic songs, he was a target. He’d led men, he’d influenced men, without taking orders directly from King Swemmel. That made him dangerous, at least in Swemmel’s eyes.

“Lieutenant Andelot wants you, Sergeant,” the soldier said.

“I’m coming,” Garivald told him. A couple of more eggs burst in front of his hole as he scrambled out and went back toward his company commander. Even had the Algarvians been pounding the bridgehead just then with everything they had, he still would have had to go. No one in Swemmel’s army got away with disobeying orders.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Andelot said. He was several years younger than Garivald, but he was an educated man, not a peasant, and spoke with a cultured Cottbus accent. Garivald liked him as well as he could like anyone set in authority over him.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Garivald asked now.

Andelot set his hand on some papers. “I just wanted to say, this report you wrote after the last time the redheads tapped us is quite good.”

“Thank you, sir.” Garivald grinned his pleasure at the praise.

With a chuckle, Andelot said, “Anyone could tell you’re new to having your letters. Once you’ve been writing for a while, you’ll come to see what a nuisance putting reports and such together can be.”

“It’s your own fault, sir, for teaching me,” Garivald replied. Only a handful of people in Zossen had been able to read and write; the village had had no school, and not much of anything else. He’d shaped and carried all his songs in his head. He still did, for that matter-putting them down on paper would have put Swemmel’s inspectors on his trail faster than anything else he could think of.

“I don’t think we’ll have the leisure for reports and such for very much longer,” Andelot said.

“Ah?” Garivald leaned toward him. “Are we finally going to break out?”

Andelot nodded. “That’s the idea.”

“Good,” Garivald said. “I’m sick of looking at this same little chunk of Forthweg day after day-especially since it gets more torn up every single day.” His nostrils flared. “If it weren’t winter-or as close to winter as they get around here-we wouldn’t be able to stand the stink. It’s pretty bad even so.”

“Mezentio’s men have hurt us,” the company commander agreed. “But we’ve hurt them, too, and we’re going to hurt them more. When we do break out of here-and out of our other bridgehead north of Eoforwic-the city will fall.”

“Aye, sir.” Now Garivald nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

But Andelot hadn’t finished. “And that’s not all, Fariulf,” he went on, as if Garivald hadn’t spoken. “Once we break the hard crust of their line, we storm eastward with everything we’ve got. And do you know what? I don’t think they can stop us, or even slow us down much, this side of the Algarvian border.”

“The Algarvian border,” Garivald echoed in dreamy tones. Then he asked a question that showed his ignorance of the world outside Zossen and the Duchy of Grelz: “How far is it from here to the Algarvian border?”

“A couple of hundred miles,” Andelot answered lightly. Garivald gaped, but only for a little while. Even though he’d been dragged into the army relatively late, he’d seen how fast it could move when things went well. Andelot went on, “We strike them at sunrise day after tomorrow. Have your men ready.”

“Aye, sir.” Garivald saluted and went up to his muddy hole in the ground once more. He knew dismissal when he heard it.

Behemoths came forward that evening under cover of darkness. Some of them sheltered under what trees still stood. Others stayed out in the open, but with great rolls of mud-colored cloth spread over them to make them harder for Algarvian dragons to spot from the air. The deception must have worked, for the redheads flung no more eggs than usual at the bridgehead the next day. The following night, still more behemoths tramped up toward the fighting front.

And, some time in the dark, usually quiet hours between midnight and dawn, that calm was shattered when every Unkerlanter egg-tosser in the bridgehead suddenly started hurling eggs at the Algarvians as fast as it could. The din, the flashes of light, the quivering of the earth beneath Garivald were all plenty to terrify him. What they were doing to the redheads among whom the eggs were landing was something he didn’t care to think about. The worse they get hit, the better, did go through his mind. The worse the Algarvians got hit at the beginning, the more trouble they would have fighting back.

As dawn stained the sky ahead with pink, officers’ whistles shrilled. “Forward!” The cry echoed all through the bridgehead.

“Forward, men!” Garivald yelled at the top of his lungs. “Forward! Urra! King Swemmel! Urra!” And then he added a new cry, one that had just occurred to him: “On to Algarve!”

“On to Algarve!” the men in his squad echoed. Moving on to Algarve was easier when whole regiments of behemoths thundered forward alongside the footsoldiers.

Here and there, Algarvian resistance was tough. Garivald had discovered that, however much he hated them, the redheads made brave and resourceful foes. Wherever they hadn’t been smashed flat, they clung to strongpoints, held on, and pushed back the advancing Unkerlanters as best they could. That was what the behemoths advancing with his countrymen were for. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks they bore on their backs made short work of positions the foot-soldiers couldn’t possibly have cleared by themselves.

“Come on! Keep moving!” Garivald shouted till he grew hoarse. “We’ve got to keep up with the behemoths.”

In spite of the pounding the egg-tossers had given the Algarvian lines, the first day’s advance went slowly. Mezentio’s men had put as many rings of field-works around the rim of the Unkerlanter bridgehead as they could, and had to be dug out of them one battered set of trenches at a time. Whatever reserves they had close by, they threw into the fight. They knew what was at stake here no less than the Unkerlanters did.

Toward evening, Garivald found himself huddled behind a burned-out barn only a few feet from Andelot. He couldn’t quite remember how he’d got there. All he could feel was relief that nobody was blazing at him for the moment. Panting, he asked, “How do you think we’re doing, sir?”

“Not too bad,” Andelot answered. “I think we might be better off if they hadn’t managed to murder General Gurmun. He was one of our good ones, our really good ones. But we have room to spare, and the redheads don’t.”

“How did they do that, sir?” Garivald asked.

“Nobody knows, because we never caught the whoreson who killed him,” Andelot answered. “My guess is, they did something like what they tried to do here in the bridgehead, only you caught it and Gurmun’s guards cursed well didn’t.”

“They sent in a redhead sorcerously disguised as a Forthwegian, sir?” Garivald asked.

“Maybe. More likely, though, they sent in an Algarvian disguised as one of us,” Andelot said. “We don’t look much different from Forthwegians, and they have people who speak our language. Somebody like that could get in to see Gurmun without much trouble. He’d come out and disappear-and after a while, somebody would have gone in and found Gurmun dead. I don’t know that’s how it happened, mind you. I’m just a lieutenant-nobody tells me these things. But it’s my best guess. We’ll go slower than we would have with Gurmun in charge. I’m sure of that.”

Garivald snatched a little sleep in the dubious shelter the barn gave. Screeching whistles roused him well before dawn. He got his men up and moving. Beams from the business end of Unkerlanter and Algarvian sticks flashed and flickered like fireflies.

He wondered if Mezentio’s men would loose their fearsome, murder-based magic. They didn’t. Maybe the Unkerlanter attacks had killed most of their mages or wrecked the camps where they kept Kaunians before slaughtering them. He knew less about that than Andelot knew about how General Gurmun had died, but it seemed a reasonable guess.

What Garivald did know was that, midway through the second day of the breakout, Unkerlanter men and behemoths smashed past the last prepared Algarvian positions and out into open country. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Let’s see them try and stop us now!” He trotted east, doing his best to keep up with the behemoths.

Peering west, Leino had no trouble seeing the Bratanu Mountains, the border between Jelgava and Algarve. On the Algarvian side of the border, they were called the Bradano Mountains. But, since the Kaunian ancestors of the Jelgavans had given them their name, the Kuusaman mage preferred the blonds’ version.

Looking ahead to the mountains made him wistful, too. “See?” He pointed to the snow that, at this season of the year, reached halfway down from the peaks. “You can find winter in this kingdom, if you go high enough.”

He spoke classical Kaunian, the only language he had in common with Xavega. The Lagoan sorcerer tossed her head, sending coppery curls flying. “So you can. But we are still down here in the flatlands. And powers above only know when we shall drive the cursed Algarvians back beyond their own frontier.”

“Patience.” Leino stood up on his toes to give her a kiss; she was taller than he. “It was only this past summer that we came ashore on the beaches near Balvi, and here we are at the other side of the kingdom. I do not see how the Algarvians can keep us from crossing the mountains. They do not have the men, the behemoths, or the dragons to do it.”

“Patience.” Xavega spoke the word as if it were an obscenity. “I have no patience. I want this war to be over and done. I want to go back to Setubal and pick up the pieces of my life. I hate the Algarvians as much for what they have done to me as for what they have done to Derlavai.”

“I believe that,” Leino murmured; Xavega was invincibly self-centered. He hadn’t been going to bed with her because he admired her character. He didn’t. He’d been going to bed with her because she was tall and shapely, somewhere between very pretty and outrageously beautiful, and as ferociously talented while horizontal as anyone looking at her vertical could have hoped. With a small sigh, he said, “I want to go back to Kajaani and start over, too.”

“Kajaani.” Xavega sniffed. “What is a Kuusaman provincial town, when set beside Setubal, the greatest city the world has ever known?”

The capital of Lagoas was indeed a marvel. Leino had gone there a couple of times for sorcerers’ convocations, and had always been amazed. So much to see, so much to do … Even Yliharma, Kuusamo’s capital, couldn’t really compare. But Leino had an answer with which even short-tempered Xavega couldn’t quarrel: “What is Kajaani? Kajaani is home.”

He missed Pekka. He missed Uto, their son. He missed their house, up a hill from the ley-line terminal stop. He missed the practical magecraft he’d been doing at Kajaani City College.

Would he miss Xavega if the chances of war swept them apart? He chuckled under his breath. Some specific part of him would miss her; he could hardly deny that. But the rest? He ruefully shook his head. Xavega didn’t even like Kuusamans, not as a general working rule. That she made an exception for him was almost as embarrassing as it was enjoyable.

And how would he explain her to his wife? If the powers above were kind, he’d never have to. If they weren’t? I’d been away from you for a long, long time, sweetheart, was about as good as he could come up with. Would Pekka stand for that? She might; Kuusamans did recognize that men and women had their flaws and foibles. But she wouldn’t be very happy, and Leino didn’t see how he could blame her.

He almost wished she were carrying on an affair of her own-nothing serious, just enough so that she couldn’t beat him about the head and shoulders with tales of glistening, untrammeled virtue. He didn’t find that likely; he didn’t really think his wife was the sort to do such things. And he didn’t really wish she were that sort. Just. . almost.

Oat of tl)e Darkness

Kuusaman dragons, eggs slung under their bellies, flew by heading east to pound the Algarvian positions in front of the Bratanu Mountains. Aye, Kuusaman and Lagoan dragons ruled the skies over Jelgava. The Algarvians had a lot of heavy sticks on the ground, but those didn’t help them nearly so much as dragons of their own would have done.

Painted sky blue and sea green, the Kuusaman dragons were hard to spot. Kuusamans had never believed in unnecessary display. Kuusamans often didn’t believe even in necessary display, Algarvic peoples, with their love for swagger and opulence, had a different way of looking at things. Algarvian dragons were painted green, red, and white; the colors of Sibiu were red, yellow, and blue; and those of Lagoas red and gold. Algarvian soldiers had gone into the Six Years’ War in gorgeous, gaudy, impractical uniforms. The slaughter in the early days of that fight, though, had forced pragmatism on them in a hurry.

Before long, the muted roar of eggs bursting in the distance came back to Leino’s ears. In an abstract way, he pitied the-Algarvian soldiers who had to take such punishment without being able to give it back. But, as a practical mage, he knew abstraction went only so far. He much preferred dishing out misery to taking it.

When he said that aloud, Xavega nodded. “Against the combined might of Lagoas and Kuusamo, they are all but powerless to resist,” she replied.

The combined might of Lagoas and Kuusamo here in Jelgava was two or three parts Kuusaman to one part Lagoan. The Kuusamans were also fighting, and winning, a considerable war against Gyongyos across the islands of the Both-nian Ocean. Xavega didn’t like to think, didn’t like to admit, that the short, swarthy, slant-eyed folk she looked down on both metaphorically and literally were a good deal more powerful than her own countrymen. Few Lagoans did. And, because Lagoas looked west and north across the Strait of Valmiera toward Derlavai while the Kuusamans concentrated on shipping and trade, they didn’t often have to. Leino smiled. Often was different from always.

But then his smile slipped. “The Algarvians cannot match us in men or beasts, no. But in magecraft. .” By the time he finished, he looked thoroughly grim.

Xavega scowled, too. “Aye, they are murderers. Aye, they are filthy. But that is why we are here, you and I. The magecraft we learned can make their own wickedness come down on their heads, not on those against whom they aim it.”

“Indeed.” Leino had to work to hold irony from his voice. It wasn’t that Xavega hadn’t told the truth. It was just that, as she had a way of doing, she turned things so they looked best to her. The sorcery she was talking about came from Kuusamo, not Lagoas. If fact, unless Leino was entirely wrong, Pekka had had a lot to do with devising it. She hadn’t said so-but then, she hadn’t been able to talk about what she was doing for quite some time. The few hints Leino had picked up all pointed in that direction.

Before his thoughts could glide much further down that ley line, a crystallo-mancer burst out of a nearby tent and came running toward him and Xavega. “Master mages! Master mages!” the fellow cried. “One of our dragonfliers reports that the Algarvians are stirring at their special camp near the mountains.”

“Are they?” Leino breathed. Mezentio’s men called the camps where they kept Kaunians before killing them by an innocuous name, not least, Leino suspected, so they wouldn’t have to think about what they did. Names had power, as any mage knew. And the Algarvians’ enemies had adopted this euphemism, too, not least so they wouldn’t have to think about what the Algarvians were doing, either.

“What is he saying?” demanded Xavega, who’d stubbornly refused to learn any Kuusaman. There were days when Leino found himself surprised she’d ever learned classical Kaunian.

He explained, adding, “You would think they would have learned their lesson.”

“Algarvians are arrogant,” Xavega said. By all the signs she gave, she’d never noticed her own arrogance. She went on, “Besides, their murderous sorcery is the strongest weapon Mezentio’s men have. If they use it when no mages are in position to strike back at them, they can work no small harm. Here, I would say, they judge the risk to be worth it.”

“I would say you are right,” Leino answered. “I would also say we are going to teach them they have miscalculated.”

The crystallomancer seemed to follow classical Kaunian only haltingly. He spoke to Leino in the Kuusaman that was their common birthspeech: “Shall I tell the men at the front that they will have sorcerous protection?”

“Aye, you can tell them that,” Leino answered, also in Kuusaman. The crystallomancer saluted and dashed back to his tent. Leino fell back into classical Kaunian: “This time, at least, we have some little warning. That must have been a sharp dragonflier. Usually, we have to start the counterspells when we feel the jolt as the Algarvians start killing.”

Xavega nodded. She put her arms around Leino and gave him a long, thorough kiss. When at last they broke apart, she murmured, “Use my strength as your own when we give them what they deserve.”

Heart pounding, Leino nodded, too. On the cot and in matters magical, Xavega gave of herself without reserve. Everywhere else, she was as spoiled a creature as had ever been born. Leino knew that. He could hardly help knowing it. But it didn’t make any difference to what he would do now. Here, he almost had to lead, for the spells were in Kuusaman; no one had yet had the leisure to render them into classical Kaunian or Lagoan. Xavega had learned the rituals well enough to support him, and she did that very well.

“Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here,” he murmured in his own tongue, a ritual as old as organized magecraft in his land. “Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.” He’d used the traditional phrases whenever he incanted in Jelgava, even though they weren’t strictly true here, as they were back in his homeland.

Once they’d passed his lips, he went through all the preliminary phases of the spell he would hurl at Mezentio’s sorcerers. Xavega nodded approval. “Good,” she said. “Very good indeed. As soon as they start killing, as soon as they reveal their direction and distance, we shall drop on them like a pair of constables seizing a band of robbers.”

“They are robbers, by the powers above,” Leino said. “And what they steal cannot be made good, for who can give back a life once lost?”

A few minutes later, he sensed the disturbance in the world’s energy grid as the Algarvians began killing Kaunians. He took savage pleasure in casting the rest of the spell and flinging it at the mages who had gone back to the most barbarous days of wizardry to try to support their kingdom in a losing war. Xavega’s hand rested on his shoulder. He felt her strength flowing into him, flowing through him, and flowing out of him against the Algarvians. And he felt the power Mezentio’s men had unleashed now crumpled, bent back, turned against them.

“This is easy!” Triumph filled Xavega’s voice. “It must be because we were ready in advance.”

“I suppose so,” Leino said when he could snatch a moment between cantrips. “It almost feels. . too easy?”

Xavega laughed and shook her head. But suddenly, as Leino began a new charm, he felt another upsurge of sorcerous energy from the west, this one far stronger than the one before. I’ve been outfoxed, he thought as the ground shuddered beneath him. Xavega screamed. The Algarvians used one sacrifice to get us to show where we were, then had more Kaunians and more mages waiting to strike us when we revealed ourselves. Now how do we get out of this?

Red-purple flames shot up all around them. The crystallomancers’ tent caught fire. Xavega screamed again. Cracks in the ground yawned wide beneath her and Leino. Leino screamed, too, as he felt himself falling. The cracks slammed shut.

Ilmarinen’s bones creaked as he got off the ley-line caravan in the western Jelgavan town of Ludza. Carrying a carpetbag heavier than it might have been because it was full of papers and sorcerous tomes, he descended to the platform. The depot was battered but still standing, which proved the Algarvians hadn’t turned and fought here, as they’d done in a good many places he’d seen on his journey across King Donalitu’s realm.

A Kuusaman mage about half Ilmarinen’s age stood waiting on the platform. “Welcome, Master!” he exclaimed, hurrying forward to take the carpetbag. “It’s a great privilege to make your acquaintance, sir. I’m called Paalo.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Ilmarinen answered. “You have a carriage waiting?”

“I certainly do, sir,” Paalo said. “And we may speak freely as we go. My driver is cleared to hear secrets.”

“I’m so sorry for him,” Ilmarinen murmured. Paalo gave him a puzzled look. Ilmarinen stifled a mental sigh. Another bright young man born without a funny bone, he thought. Too many of them these days. But he would have to deal with this one, at least for a while. “I heard in-Skrunda, was it? — that something had gone wrong up here. What can you tell me about it?”

“I’m afraid that’s right, sir,” Paalo said. “It doesn’t do to depend on the Algarvians to keep trying the same thing over and over. They caught a couple of our mages-well, actually, one of ours and a Lagoan-in as nasty a trap as you’d never want to see.”

“Started killing Kaunians for a lure, then killed a bunch more once we’d begun the counterspell, the second time aiming at our mages?” Ilmarinen asked.

“Er-aye.” Paalo frowned. “Did you hear that back in Skrunda, sir? They weren’t supposed to know that much about it. If somebody back there is asking questions where he isn’t supposed to, I want to know who. We’ll put him someplace where he can ask questions of the geese that fly by, and of nobody else.”

“No, no, no-nothing like that.” Ilmarinen shook his head. “I had all that time to think while I was sailing up from Kuusamo. One of the things I was thinking about was, if I were one of fornicating Mezentio’s mages, how could I get back at the nasty Kuusamans and Lagoans who were giving me such a hard time?”

Paalo stared. “I hope you won’t be angry at me for saying so, sir, but you seem to have outthought the entire sorcerous high command of our army and that of the Lagoans, too.” He slung Ilmarinen’s carpetbag in the carriage, then turned to see if the master mage needed a hand getting in himself. When he discovered Ilmarinen didn’t, he asked, “How did you do that?”

“I suspect it wasn’t very hard,” Ilmarinen answered, and Paalo’s narrow, slanted eyes got about as wide as they could. Ilmarinen went on, “No doubt all the army mages were so full of themselves-and so full of what their fancy spells could do-that they never bothered thinking about what the other bastards might do to them. Stupid buggers, but I don’t suppose it can be helped.”

“Er. .” Paalo said again. Ilmarinen realized he might have sounded too harsh; criticizing military mages to another military mage was almost bound to prove a waste of time. Perhaps to disguise what he was feeling, Paalo gave the driver minute instructions on how to get back to a place he’d surely come from. Then, sighing, he went on, “I wish Leino and Xavega had foreseen such consequences as accurately as you did, Master Ilmarinen.”

“They probably should have-” Ilmarinen broke off. “Leino?”

“That’s right.” Paalo nodded. “Did you know him, sir?”

“I’ve met him a few times.” Ilmarinen shook his head in bemusement. “I’ve done a good deal of work with his wife, though. They had-they have-a little boy.” And what will Pekka and her Lagoon lover do when they find out about this? I wish I were back there in the Naantali district, so I could see for myself. A better piece of melodrama than most of the playwrights come up with, by the powers above.

“His. . wife?” Paalo said. “Are you sure, sir?”

“I’ve been to their home. I’ve met their boy. He looks like his father,” Ilmarinen replied. “I never saw them naked in bed together and screwing, if that’s what you mean, but I have no doubt they were guilty of it. Why?”

Paalo turned as red as a golden-skinned Kuusaman could. “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but. . ”

“But you’re going to,” Ilmarinen said. “After a buildup like that, my friend, you’ll blab or I’ll turn you into a sparrow and me into a sparrowhawk. Talk!”

Instead of talking, Paalo suffered a coughing fit. “Well, sir, it’s only that. . Anyone who knew Leino and Xavega here in Jelgava knew they.. they.. ”

“Were lovers?” Ilmarinen suggested.

Paalo nodded gratefully. “So they were. And so we all assumed Leino had no, ah, impediments that would have kept him from. .”

“Screwing her,” Ilmarinen supplied, and got another grateful nod from Paalo, who struck him as a very straitlaced man. “Xavega,” Ilmarinen murmured. “Xavega. I saw her at a sorcerers’ colloquium or two, I think. Bad-tempered woman, if I recall, but pretty enough to get away with it a lot of the time.”

“That’s her,” Paalo said. “Drawn straight from life, that’s her.”

Ilmarinen hardly heard him. “And put together?” he added, his hands shaping an hourglass in the air. “I wouldn’t have thrown her out of bed, even if I’d been married to two of my wives at the same time.” He eyed Paalo, who’d gone from red to a color not far removed from chartreuse, and patted him on the back. “There, there, my dear fellow, I’ve upset you.”

“It’s nothing, sir,” the other wizard said stiffly. He was plainly lying through his teeth, but Ilmarinen rather admired him for it here. After a moment, gathering himself, Paalo added, “You aren’t. . quite what I expected in a master mage, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I’m a raffish old son of a whore, is what I am,” Ilmarinen said, not without a certain pride. “What you expected was Master Siuntio-but even he had more juice in him than people who didn’t know him would guess. But, juice or no juice, plaster or no plaster, he’s dead now, and you’re bloody well stuck with me. And if I don’t match what you think a master mage should be-I am a master mage, so maybe you’d do better revising your hypothesis.”

“Er. .” Paalo said yet again. He laughed a nervous laugh. “You aren’t what I expected, not at all.”

“Too bad.” Ilmarinen leaned forward to tap the driver on the shoulder. “How much longer till we get where we’re going?”

“Half an hour, sir,” the fellow answered, “if the Algarvians don’t go and drop any eggs on our heads.”

“Are they in the habit of doing that?” Ilmarinen glanced at Paalo. “Your head still looks moderately well stuck on.”

He’d expected the younger mage to go, Er, for the fourth time. Instead, solemnly, Paalo said, “I do begin to wonder, the more I sit by you.” That startled a laugh out of Ilmarinen. Paalo went on, “No, the Algarvians haven’t got many dragons in the air here. We rule the skies. They’re trying to hold our beasts on Sibiu away from Trapani and the south, and most of their dragons that aren’t doing that are fighting the Unkerlanters.”

“Ah, the Unkerlanters,” Ilmarinen said. “Swemmel’s paid the butcher’s bill for this war, even if we islanders may come out of it looking better than he does. I’m sorry for him. I’d be even sorrier if he weren’t such a nasty, miserable bastard in his own right. An ally, aye, but a nasty, miserable bastard all the same.”

“Best thing that would happen would be for Mezentio’s men to wreck Unkerlant as badly as Swemmel’s men wreck Algarve,” Paalo said. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about either one of them for a generation.”

That fit in quite well with Ilmarinen’s view of the world. But all he said was, “How likely is it? The things we want most, the things we need most-those are the things we’re least likely to get.”

“What do we do, then?” Paalo asked, his tone not far from despairing.

Ilmarinen set a hand on his shoulder. “The best we can, son. The best we can.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do I hear eggs bursting up ahead? The first thing we’d better do is, we’d better finish whipping the Algarvians. What they think is the best thing that could happen isn’t what we want, believe you me it isn’t.”

“I know that,” Paalo said. “Every single Kuusaman has known it since they used their filthy magic against Yliharma.”

“And ever single Kuusaman should have known it since they started using their filthy magic against the Unkerlanters,” Ilmarinen said. “Killing people for the sake of their life energy is just as nasty aimed at the Unkerlanters as it is when it’s aimed at us.”

“I suppose so,” the other mage said. “It doesn’t hit home the same way, though. I guess it should, but it doesn’t.” Since he was right, Ilmarinen didn’t argue with him.

The carriage rolled past olive trees and almonds and the oranges and lemons the Jelgavans used to flavor their wine and the vineyards in which they raised the grapes for that wine. None of those crops would have grown in Kuusamo. Oh, a few cranks raised a few grapes on north-facing hills in the far, far north of Ilmarinen’s homeland, and in warm years they got a few bottles of thoroughly indifferent wine from those grapes. They were proud of themselves. That didn’t mean they weren’t cranks.

Ilmarinen enjoyed the spicy, aromatic scent of the citrus leaves. Even in wintertime, birds hopped here and there through the trees, searching for bugs. That would have been plenty to tell the master mage he wasn’t home any more. Pink-flowered oleanders added their sweet, slightly cloying scent to the mix. Then the breeze shifted a little. Ilmarinen’s nose wrinkled.

So did Paalo’s. “Dead behemoths,” he explained. “The Algarvians had a few around here. We surrounded them and pounded them with dragons, and that’s what you smell. They’re very good with the beasts. Our own behemoth crews go on and on about that. They’ve had plenty of practice fighting the Unkerlanters, I suppose. But all the practice in the world won’t help you if you’re as outnumbered as they were and if you haven’t got any dragons of your own overhead.”

“Good,” Ilmarinen said. “Nobody ever said the Algarvians weren’t fine soldiers. Nobody ever said they weren’t brave soldiers. That doesn’t mean they don’t need beating. If anything, it means they need beating more than ever, because it makes them more dangerous than they would be otherwise.” He pointed ahead, to a ragtag collection of tents. “Is that where I go to work?”

“It is, sir, aye,” Paalo said. “I’m sorry. I wish it were finer.”

“Don’t worry,” Ilmarinen said. “Let the Algarvians worry instead.” He hoped they would.