Out of the Darkness

Six

Drizzle on the island of Obuda was as natural and unremarkable as snow in Istvan’s home valley. The sergeant stood to attention in his place in the captives’ camp as the Kuusaman guards took the morning roll call and count. He stood in the same place every day, rain or shine. The guards made sure they got the numbers right; when anything went wrong with their count, everything stopped-including the captives’ breakfasts-till they straightened things out.

Beside Istvan, Corporal Kun whispered, “This would go a lot smoother if the goat-eaters could count to twenty-one without playing with themselves.”

That made Istvan laugh. A guard pointed at him and shouted, “To be quiet!” in bad Gyongyosian. He nodded to show he was sorry, then glared at Kun. It was just like his brief time in the village school: somebody else talked out of turn, and he got in trouble for it.

At last, the slanteyes seemed satisfied. Istvan waited for one of them to call out, “To queue up for feeding!” the way they usually did. Instead, though, the Kuusaman captain in charge of the guards said, “Sergeant Istvan! Corporal Kun! To stand out!”

Ice ran through Istvan. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kun start. But they had no choice. The two of them stepped away from their comrades, away from their countrymen. Istvan hadn’t imagined how terribly lonely he could feel with so many eyes on him.

The captain nodded. “You two,” he said, using the plural where he should have used the dual, “to come with me.”

“Why, sir?” Istvan asked. “What have we done?”

“Not know,” the Kuusaman answered with a shrug. “You to come for interrogation.”

He pronounced the word so badly, Istvan almost failed to understand it. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. Gyongyosian interrogations were nasty, brutal things. The Kuusamans were the enemy, so he couldn’t imagine they would play the game by gentler rules.

But it was their game, not his. Under the sticks of the guards, he could obey or he could die. I should have let Captain Frigyes cut my throat after all, he thought. It would have been over in a hurry then, and my life energy might have done something extra to the slanteyes. Now the stars are having their revenge on me.

One of the guards gestured with his stick. Numbly, Istvan started forward, Kun at his side. Kun’s face was a frozen mask. Istvan tried to wear the same look. If the Kuusamans thought he was afraid, it would only go worse for him. And if they don’t think I’m afraid, they’re fools.

But he would do his best to act like a man from a warrior race as long as he could. “You ought to give us breakfast before you question us,” he told a guard as the fellow led him toward one of the gates in the stockade.

“To shut up,” the guard answered.

Outside the gate, the Kuusamans separated him from Kun, leading him towards one tent on the yellow-brown grass and Kun to another. Istvan grimaced. That made telling lies harder.

He ducked his way into the tent. A couple of guards already stood in there. The Kuusamans didn’t believe in taking chances. One of the men who’d led him out of the captives’ camp walked in behind him. No, the slanteyes didn’t believe in taking chances at all. A moment later, he realized why: the bright-looking Kuusaman sitting in a folding chair waiting for him was a woman. She wore spectacles amazingly like Kun’s. It had barely occurred to him that the Kuusamans had to have women among them as well as men, or there wouldn’t have been any more Kuusamans after a while. He wished there hadn’t been.

“Hello. You are Sergeant Istvan, is it not so?” she said, speaking better Gyongyosian than any other slanteye he’d ever heard. She waited for him to nod, then went on, “I am called Lammi. May the stars shine on our meeting.”

“May it be so,” Istvan mumbled; he felt confused, out of his depth, but he’d be accursed if he would let a foreigner act more politely than he did.

“Sit down, if you care to,” Lammi said, pointing to another folding chair. Warily, Istvan sat. The Kuusaman woman-she was, he guessed, somewhere around forty, for she had a handful of silver threads among the midnight of her hair, the first fine wrinkles around her eyes-went on, “You were taken before breakfast, eh?”

“Aye, Lady Lammi,” Istvan answered, unconsciously giving her the title he would have given a domain-holder’s wife back in his home valley.

She laughed. “I am no lady,” she said. “I am a forensic sorcerer-do you know what that means?”

Forensic sounded as if it ought to be Gyongyosian-it wasn’t the funny sort of noises Kuusamans used for a language-but it wasn’t a word Istvan had heard before. He shrugged broad shoulders. “You’re a mage. That’s enough to know.”

“All right.” She turned to one of the guards and spoke in her own language. The man nodded. He left the tent. Lammi returned to Gyongyosian: “He is fetching you something to eat.”

What Istvan got must have come from the guards’ rations, not the captives’: a big plate full of eggs and smoked salmon scrambled together, with fried turnips swimming in butter off to the side. He ate like a starving mountain ape. Kuusaman interrogations certainly didn’t seem much like those his countrymen would have used.

While he shoveled food into his mouth, Lammi said, “What it means is, after something has happened, I investigate how and why it happened. You can probably guess what I am here to investigate.”

Istvan’s stomach did a slow lurch, as if he were aboard ship in a heavy sea. “Probably,” he said, and let it go at that. The less he said, the less Lammi could use.

She gave him back a brisk nod. Behind the lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were very sharp indeed. “It means one thing more, Sergeant: if you lie, I will know it. You do not want that to happen. Please believe me-you do not.”

Another lurch. Istvan almost regretted the enormous breakfast he was demolishing. Almost, but not quite. He’d eaten mush-and thin mush at that-for too long. Lammi waited for him to say something. Reluctantly, he did: “I understand.”

“Good.” The forensic mage waited till he’d chased down the last bit of fried turnip and given his plate to the guard who’d fetched it before beginning by asking, “You knew Captain Frigyes, did you not?”

“He was my company commander,” Istvan replied. She had to have already learned that.

“And you also knew Borsos the dowser?” Lammi asked.

“Aye,” Istvan said-why not answer that? “I fetched and carried for him here on Obuda, as a matter of fact, back when the war was young. And I saw him again when I was fighting in Unkerlant.”

Lammi nodded once more. “All right. He never should have come to an ordinary captives’ camp, but that was our error, not yours.” She had a pad of paper in her lap, and drummed her fingers on it. “Tell me, Sergeant, what do you think of what your countrymen did here?”

“It was brave. They were warriors. They died like warriors,” Istvan answered. Lammi sat there looking at him-looking through him-with those sharp, sharp eyes. Under that gaze, he felt he had to go on, and he did: “I thought they were stupid, though. They could not do you enough harm to make their deaths worthwhile.”

“Ah.” Lammi scribbled something in the notepad. “You are a man of more than a little sense, I see. Is that why you did not offer your throat to the knife?”

Istvan felt the ice under his feet getting thin. “I was ill that night,” he said. “I was in the infirmary that night. I couldn’t have done anything about it even if I’d thought it was a good idea.”

“So you were, you and Corporal Kun,” Lammi said. “And how did the two of you manage to be so, ah, conveniently ill?”

The ice crackled, as if he might fall through. And what was Kun saying, over in the other tent? “I had the shits,” Istvan said. Maybe the raw word would keep her from digging further.

He should have known better. He realized that even before her eyes blazed. “Did you think I was bluffing?” she asked quietly. “An evasion is also a lie, Sergeant. I will let you try again. How did you come to have the shits?” She spoke the word as calmly as a soldier might have. He supposed he should have guessed that, too.

But he evaded even so: “It must have been something I ate.”

Lammi shook her head, as if she’d expected better of him. He braced himself for whatever the guards would do to him. He hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. The slanteyes really were softer than his own folk. He saw Lammi raise her left hand and start to twist it-and then he suddenly stopped seeing. Everything went, not black, but no color at all. He stopped hearing. He stopped smelling and feeling and tasting. As far as he could prove, he stopped existing.

Have I died? he wondered. If he had, he knew none of the stars’ light. Or is it her wizardry? Thinking straight didn’t come easy, not when he was reduced to essential nothingness. His mind began to drift, whether he wanted it to or not. How long before I go mad? he wondered. But even time had no meaning, not when he couldn’t gauge it.

After what might have been moments or years, he found himself back in his body, all senses intact. By the way Lammi eyed him, it hadn’t been long. She said, “I can do worse than that. Do you want to see how much worse I can do?”

“I am your captive.” Istvan tried to calm his pounding heart. “You will do as you do.”

To his surprise, she gave him a nod of obvious approval. “Spoken like a warrior,” she said, just as a Gyongyosian might have. She went on, “I have studied your people for many years. I admire your courage. But, with war the way it is these days, courage is not enough. Do you see that, Sergeant?”

Istvan shrugged. “It’s all I have left.”

“I know. I am sorry.” Lammi gestured. The world disappeared for Istvan once more. He tried to get to his feet to spring at her, but his body would not obey his will. It was as if he had no body. After some endless while, his mind did drift free of the moorings of rationality. And when he heard a voice speaking to him, it might have been the voice of the stars themselves, leading his spirit toward them. He answered without the slightest hesitation.

The world returned. There sat Lammi, looking at him with real sympathy in her dark, narrow eyes. Realization smote. “It was you!” he exclaimed.

“Aye, it was me. I am sorry, but I did what was needful for my kingdom.” She studied him. “So you and this Kun knew ahead of time. You knew, and you did nothing to warn us.”

“I thought about it,” Istvan said, and the admission made Lammi jerk in surprise. “I thought about it, but, no matter how stupid I thought the sacrifice was, I might have been wrong. And I could not bring myself to betray Ekrekek Arpad and Gyongyos. The stars would go dark for me forever.”

Lammi scribbled notes. “That will do for now. I must compare your words to those of this other man, this Kun. I shall have more to ask you about another time.” She spoke to the guards in Kuusaman. They took Istvan back to the camp. He wondered if the forensic mage would feed him so well the next time she asked him questions. He hoped so.

Marshal Rathar lay in a warm, soft Algarvian bed in an Algarvian house in the middle of an Algarvian town. He could have had a warm, soft Algarvian woman in the bed with him. Plenty of Unkerlanter soldiers were avenging themselves, indulging themselves, with rape or other, less brutal, arrangements. He understood that. A lot of revenge was owed. A lot would be taken. But, as marshal, he found rape beneath his dignity, and he hadn’t seen a redheaded woman he really wanted, either.

Mangani-that was the name of the town. It lay not too far west of the Scamandro River, which was what the Algarvians called this reach of the Skamandros. The Scamandro flowed into the South Raffali. On the marshy ground between the South Raffali and the North Raffali lay Trapani. Mezentio’s men had pushed almost as far as Cottbus. Now King Swemmel’s soldiers were getting close to the Algarvian capital.

And we aren‘t the only ones, Rathar thought discontentedly as he got out of the warm, soft bed and went downstairs. General Vatran was already down there, eating porridge and drinking tea as he peered at a map through spectacles that magnified his eyes.

“Be careful,” Rathar said. “King Mezentio is watching.”

“Huh?” Vatran’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “What are you talking about, sir?”

Rathar pointed to the far wall of the dining room, where a reproduction of a portrait of Mezentio hung at a distinctly cockeyed angle. Vatran eyed the image of the King of Algarve, then spat at it. His spittle fell short and splatted on the floor. Rathar laughed, saying, “May we get the chance to try that in person soon.”

“That would be good,” Vatran agreed. “But it won’t be quite so soon as we’d like, curse it. The redheads have a pretty solid line set up on the east bank of the Scamandro. They’re good with river lines, the buggers.”

“They’ve had plenty of practice making them,” Rathar said, “but we’ve smashed every one they’ve made. We’ll smash this one, too. . eventually.”

“Eventually is right,” Vatran said. “Maybe it’s just as well they did slow us down for a while. We could use a little time to let our supplies catch up with our soldiers.”

Marshal Rathar grunted. He knew how true that was. No other army could have come so far so fast as the Unkerlanters had, for no other army was so good at living off the countryside. But, while Unkerlanters could find more food than other forces and so needed to bring less with them, they couldn’t find eggs growing on trees or in fields. They had indeed run short. Had the redheads had more themselves, they could have put in a nasty counterattack. But, while they remained brave and highly professional, they were far more desperately short of everything-men, behemoths, dragons, eggs, cinnabar-than their foes. And every mile King Swemmel’s men advanced was a mile from which the Algarvians could no longer draw any of those essentials.

But King Swemmel’s men weren’t the only ones advancing in Algarve these days. Worry in his voice, Rathar asked, “How far west have the islanders come?”

“Just about all of the Marquisate of Rivaroli is in their hands, sir,” Vatran answered. “That’s what the crystallomancers say. The really bastardly part of it is, the fornicating Algarvians aren’t putting up much of a fight against them.”

“Of course they aren’t. Whatever they have left, they’re throwing it at us.” Rathar understood why. The redheads knew to the copper how much Unkerlant owed them. They were doing everything they could to keep Unkerlant from paying.

“But if they fight us like madmen and if they don’t hardly fight Kuusamo and Lagoas at all. .” Vatran sounded worried, too. “If the islanders take Trapani and we don’t, King Swemmel will boil both of us alive.”

Rathar would have argued about that, if only he could. Since he couldn’t, he went back to the kitchen and got a bowl of porridge and some tea for himself, too. He brought them out to the dining room and ate while he, like Vatran, studied the map. His army had no bridgeheads over the Scamandro. A couple of crossings had been beaten back. The redheads had learned, too. They knew how disastrous Unkerlanter bridgeheads could be.

Finishing his breakfast, he walked out onto the sidewalk and looked northeast toward Trapani. Mangani bustled with Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them were marching east, toward the front. Their sergeants kept them moving in the profane way of sergeants all over Derlavai. Others, though, just milled about. Some were walking wounded who’d needed healing and weren’t quite ready to return to the fighting line yet. Some were probably evading orders to move east. And some were queued up in front of a building with a chunk bitten out of its fancy facade: a soldiers’ brothel. Rathar didn’t know how the quartermasters had recruited the redheaded women in the brothel. Even the Marshal of Unkerlant was entitled to squeamishness about a few things.

A soldier came past Rathar carrying something or other. “What have you got there?” Rathar asked him.

The youngster stiffened to attention when he saw who’d spoken to him. He held up his prize. “It’s a lamp, sir, one of those sorcerous lamps the redheads use.

Unkerlanters used them, too, in towns and cities. By his accent, though, this soldier, like so many of his countrymen, came from a peasant village. Gently, Rathar asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Well, lord Marshal, sir, I’m going to see if I can’t take it on home with me,” the young man answered. “The light it’s got inside of it is an awful lot finer nor a torch nor a candle nor even an oil lantern.”

Rathar sighed. A sorcerous lamp wouldn’t work without a power point or a ley line close by. Those were dense in Algarve, much less so in Unkerlant. He started to tell the soldier as much, but then checked himself. What were the odds the fellow would live to go back to his village? What were the odds the lamp would stay unbroken even if he did? Slim and slimmer, no doubt about it. Rather reached out and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck to you, son.”

“Thank you, lord Marshal!” Beaming, the soldier went on his way.

What will the world look like after this cursed war finally ends? Rathar wondered. How can Unkerlant take its proper place among the kingdoms of the world if so many of our people are so ignorant? We’re like a dragon, all strength and claws and fire and not a bit of brain.

Shaking his head, Rathar watched a column of Algarvian captives trudging gloomily off into the west. Some were too young to make good soldiers, others too old. The Algarvians had all the brains in the world. And if you don’t believe it, just ask them, Rathar thought, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a wry smile. Brains weren’t enough all by themselves, either. Mezentio’s men hadn’t had quite the brawn they needed to do everything they wanted-for which the marshal gave the powers above fervent thanks.

Almost no Algarvian civilians showed themselves. How many huddled in their houses and how many had fled, Rathar didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, the town held next to no unwounded men between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five. As for women … If he were an Algarvian woman, he wouldn’t have wanted Unkerlanter soldiers to know he was around, either.

He went back into the house he was using as a headquarters. In the few minutes he was outside, someone had taken down the picture of King Mezentio and put up one of King Swemmel. Rathar found his own sovereign’s cold stare no more pleasant to work under than that of the King of Algarve.

A crystallomancer came up to him and said, “Sir, the redheads have taken out a couple of important bridges with those steerable eggs of theirs.”

“Those things are a stinking nuisance.” Rathar felt like kicking someone whenever he thought of them. For most of the past year, Mezentio had been bellowing that Algarve’s superior sorcery would yet win the war. Most of the time, those claims seemed nothing more than so much wind and air. Things like steer-able eggs, though, made the marshal wonder what else Mezentio’s mages might come up with, and how dangerous it would prove. For now, he stuck to the business at hand: “All we can do is all we can do. We need to concentrate heavy sticks around bridges, and our dragons need to keep the Algarvians away from them.”

“Aye, sir. Will you draft an order to that effect?” the crystallomancer asked.

“Pass it on orally for now. I’ll assign it to some bright young officer as soon as I get the chance,” Rathar replied. “There are other things going on right now, you know.” The crystallomancer saluted and hurried away.

Winter nights came early in southern Algarve, as they did in the south of Unkerlant. It was cold here, too, though southern Unkerlant got colder. Rathar felt a certain gloomy pride in that. Unkerlant’s appalling fall and winter weather had played no small part in helping to hold the redheads out of Cottbus.

The marshal had just gone up to bed-again, without a redheaded girl to keep him company-when the eastern horizon lit up. The glare was so bright, he wondered for a moment if the sun hadn’t hurried round behind the world to rise again much sooner than it should have. He’d seen the night sky brightened by bursting eggs more times than he could count. This wasn’t like that. That was a flicker, a ripple, of light along a whole great stretch of the horizon. Here, all the light came from one place, and it really did seem almost bright enough for a sunrise.

It lasted about five minutes. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it winked out. A sharp bellow of noise, as of an egg bursting not far away, rattled the window. Darkness and relative quiet returned.

For a moment. Someone dashed up the stairs and pounded on Rathar’s door. “Lord Marshal, it’s Brigadier Magneric, up by the Scamandro,” a crystallomancer said.

“I’ll come,” Rathar answered, and did. When he sat down before the crystal, he asked the brigadier, “What in blazes was that just now?”

“In blazes is right, sir.” Magneric, a solid officer, sounded like a man shaken to the core. “That was … a stick, I guess you’d call it. An Algarvian stick. But it was to the heaviest stick a floating fortress carries as the floating fortress’ stick would be to a footsoldier’s. A superstick, you might say. It blazed down, it blazed through, every fornicating thing it could reach. Men, behemoths, fieldworks-it went through them like a sword through a pat of lard. It was a sword, a sword of light. How can you fight something like that, lord Marshal?”

“I don’t know. There’s bound to be a way.” Rathar sounded more confident than he felt. Then he said, “It stopped, you know.”

“So it did, sir. Something must’ve gone wrong with it. But when will it start up again, and how bad will it be then?”

“I don’t know.” Rathar didn’t relish admitting that, but he wouldn’t lie to Brigadier Magneric. “Powers below eat the redheads. I hope they ate a good many of them just now.” What I really hope is that we can beat them before they get all their fancy new magecraft working the way it’s supposed to. What if they’d started trying to do something like this two years sooner? He shivered. Then a new thought occurred to him, a really horrible one. If we ever fight another war after this, will anyone at all be left alive by the time it’s done? He had his doubts.

Marchioness Krasta got out of her pyjamas and stood naked in front of the mirror, examining herself. She shook her head in dismay. She’d always prided herself on her figure, and the way men responded to it told her she had every reason to do so (although she likely would have prided herself on it any which way, simply because it was hers). But now. .

“I’m built like a tuber,” she muttered. “Just like a fornicating tuber.” She laughed, though it wasn’t exactly funny. If not for fornicating, she wouldn’t have been built this way.

Inside her belly, the baby kicked. She could see her skin stretch. Every so often, a hard, round protuberance would surface, as it were. That had to be the baby’s head. She thought she’d identified knees and elbows, too.

Looking at herself in the reflecting glass, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. It had to have happened in the night, while she was sleeping-not that sleep came easy these days, not with the baby pressing half her insides down onto the saw blade of her spine.

“My navel!” she exclaimed in dismay. She’d always been vain about it. It was small and round and neat, as if someone with good taste and very nice fingers had poked one into the middle of her belly. No-it had been small and round and neat. Now. . Now it stuck out, as if it were the stem of the tuber she seemed to be turning into.

She poked it with her own finger. While she held it, it went back to the way it had been, or something close to that. But when she let go, it popped right back out again. She tried several times, always with the same result.

“Bauska!” she shouted. “Where in blazes are you, Bauska?”

The maidservant came into the bedchamber at a run. “What is it, milady?” The question had started while she was still out in the hallway. When she saw Krasta, she let out a startled squeak: “Milady!”

Krasta took her own nudity in stride. Bauska was only a servant, after all. How could one be embarrassed in front of one’s social inferiors? “Took you long enough to get here,” Krasta grumbled, not bothering to put an arm in front of her breasts or her bush.

“What… do you need of me, milady?” Bauska asked carefully.

“Your belly button.” Krasta tried without any luck to poke hers back in again and make it stay. “Once you had your little bastard, did it go back to the way it was supposed to be?”

“Oh,” Bauska said. “Aye, milady, it did. And yours will, too, once you have yours. And now, if you will excuse me. .” She strode out of the bedchamber.

By the time Krasta realized she’d got the glove, she was already dressed. She muttered something sulfurous under her breath. Bauska probably thought she wouldn’t notice, or that she would forget if she did. The first had been a good bet, but one the servant hadn’t won. The second was a miscalculation; Krasta had a long memory for slights.

She didn’t indulge it on the instant; it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t see Bauska again some time soon. Going down to breakfast seemed more urgent. Now that she wasn’t throwing up any more, she ate like a hog. Not all the weight she’d put on was directly connected to the baby.

Skarnu and Merkela were already sitting at the table. “Good morning,” Krasta’s brother said.

“Good morning,” she replied, and sat down herself, well away from the two of them. That didn’t keep Merkela from sending her a look as hot and burning as a beam from a heavy stick. Krasta glared back. Cow, she thought. Sow. Bitch. Hen. Amazing how many names from the farm fit the farm girl.

But she didn’t say that. Merkela didn’t just argue. Merkela was liable to come around the table and thump her. Nasty peasant slut.

Breakfast proceeded in poisonous silence. That was how breakfast usually proceeded when Krasta and her brother and his wench sat down together at table. The alternative was a screaming row, and those came along every so often, too.

The silence ended when Skarnu and Merkela rose after finishing ahead of Krasta. Merkela said, “I don’t care if that is Valnu’s baby. You were still an Algarvian’s whore, and everybody knows it.”

“Even the way you talk stinks of manure,” Krasta retorted, imitating the country woman’s accent. “And well it might-it’s a wonder your eyes aren’t brown.”

Merkela started for her. Skarnu grabbed his fiancee. “Enough, the two of you!” he said. “Too much, in fact.” Both women looked daggers at him. He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes I think the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant have it easier than I do-they don’t get blazed at from two directions at once.” He managed to get Merkela out of the dining room before she and Krasta lobbed any more eggs at each other.

My mansion, Krasta thought furiously. What’s the world coming to, when I can’t even live at peace in my own mansion? Peace anywhere around Krasta was contingent on people doing exactly as she said, but that never occurred to her.

She went into Priekule. If she couldn’t get peace and quiet at home, she would go out and buy something. That always made her feel better. When the carriage stopped on the Boulevard of Horsemen to let her out, she was as cheerful as anyone built like a tuber and resenting it could be.

Some of the shops along the boulevard had new goods in them, imports from Lagoas and Kuusamo. Krasta window-shopped avidly. Just seeing something new after the dreary sameness of the occupation was a tonic. But a good many places remained closed; on a couple of doors, the scrawl of night and fog hadn’t yet been painted over. Those shopkeepers would never come back from whatever the Algarvians had done with them.

She was looking at new jackets and feeling very large indeed when someone said, “Wasting money again, are you, sweetheart?”

There stood Viscount Valnu, his mocking grin wider than ever. Krasta drew herself up-which, with her bulging belly, made her back ache. “I’m not wasting money-I’m spending it,” she said with dignity. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m sure there must be.” Still grinning, Valnu came up, leaned forward over that belly, and kissed her on the cheek.

She was, to her surprise, thoroughly glad to get even that little throwaway kiss. It was the first sign of affection she’d had from anyone for quite a while.

Tears stung her eyes. She shook her head, angry and embarrassed at showing such emotion. It’s because you’re pregnant, she thought; this wasn’t the first time she’d puddled up for no particular reason.

Polite as a cat, Valnu affected not to see. His voice still light and cheery, he said, “And what have you been doing lately besides wasting-excuse me, besides spending-money?” Also like a cat, he had claws.

“Not much.” Krasta set a hand on her belly as a partial explanation for that. But it was only a partial explanation, as she knew. She didn’t try-it never would have occurred to her to try-to hide her bitterness: “I don’t get invited out much anymore.”

“Ah.” Valnu nodded. “I am sorry about that, my sweet. I truly am. I’ve done my best to get people to be reasonable, but it doesn’t seem to be a very reasonable time right now.”

Those tears came back. To Krasta’s dismay, one of them ran down her face. “It certainly isn’t,” she said. “Just because you didn’t pretend the Algarvians had never come to Priekule, everyone who was so tiresomely virtuous during the occupation-or can pretend he was-gets up on his high horse and acts like you did all sorts of dreadful things.” A woman with her hair just starting to grow back after a shaving walked down the other side of the street. Krasta did her best to convince herself she hadn’t seen her.

“I said as much to your brother and his lady friend not so long ago,” Valnu said.

“When was this?” Krasta asked sharply; he hadn’t been by the mansion for some time. “Where was this?”

“At some boring party or other,” he answered. “It was, in fact, one of the most boring parties I’ve ever had the bad luck to attend.”

It was, in fact, one more party to which Krasta hadn’t been invited. “It’s not fair!” she wailed, and really did burst into tears.

Valnu put his arm around her. “There, there, my dear,” he said, and kissed her again, this time without a trace of the smiling malice that was usually as inseparable from him as his skin. “Come on-I’ll buy you some ale or some brandy or whatever you like, and you’ll feel better.”

Sniffling, trying to keep from blubbering, Krasta doubted she would ever feel better. But she let Valnu lead her to a tavern a few doors down. She didn’t know anyone in there, for which she was duly grateful. She hadn’t had much taste for spirits since she started carrying her child, any more than she’d had a taste for tea. But she’d been able to drink more tea lately. And, sure enough, a brandy not only felt good going down but also put up a thin glass wall between her and some of her misery.

“Thank you,” she told Valnu, and her voice held none of the whine that so often filled it. If he’d shown any interest in taking her to bed just then, she would have given herself to him without the slightest hesitation, just from gratitude for his treating her like a human being. But he didn’t. She looked down at her swollen front. Resentment returned. Who would want to go to bed with somebody built like a tuber?

“You don’t look happy enough yet,” Valnu said, and waved at the barmaid for another brandy for Krasta and another mug of ale for himself.

“I shouldn’t,” Krasta said, but she did. The glass wall got thicker. That felt good. She tried on a smile. It fit her face surprisingly well.

And then, when she was happier than she’d been in longer than she could remember without some thought, Valnu threw a rock through that glass wall and effortlessly smashed it: “Your brother threatened to send me an invitation to his wedding, and he finally went and made good on the threat.”

“Wedding?” Krasta sat bolt upright, even if it did hurt her back. Skarnu had said he would marry the peasant wench who’d borne him a son, but it hadn’t seemed real to Krasta. Now she couldn’t avoid it. “When? Where?” she asked angrily. “He hasn’t said a word to me about it.”

“At the mansion,” Valnu answered, and named the date.

“That’s when, or just about when, the baby will come,” she said in dudgeon very high indeed.

Valnu shrugged. “Even if it weren’t, would you go?”

“Maybe to annoy them,” Krasta said, but then she shook her head. “To see that nasty weed grafted on to my family tree? No. I wouldn’t do it.”

“Well, then,” Valnu said.

Logically, that made perfect sense. Logic, though, had nothing to do with anything here. Krasta burst into tears all over again.

A straining team of unicorns hauled a dead dragon down the street in front of the block of flats where Talsu and his family were staying these days. The dragon was painted in Algarve’s all too familiar green, red, and white. Looking down at the great dead beast slowly sliding by, Talsu remarked, “First time we’ve seen those cursed colors in Skrunda for a while.”

“May it be the last,” Traku said from the next window over. “I’m just glad it came down in the middle of the market square and didn’t smash any more buildings when it hit.” His father hawked, but in the end didn’t spit down on the dragon.

The Jelgavans in the street showed less restraint. Small boys-and some men and women-ran out from the sidewalk to kick the dragon and pound on it with their fists. Some of them did spit, not so much on the dragon as on Algarve itself.

As the dragon went past, Talsu started to laugh. “Will you look at that?” he said, pointing. “Will you just look at that?” Behind the team of muscular unicorns dragging the dragon came a single donkey dragging the dead Algarvian dragonflier. People rushed forward to abuse his corpse, too. It already looked much the worse for wear.

Talsu’s father said something incendiary about Algarvians in general and the dragonflier in particular. From the kitchen, Talsu’s mother spoke in reproving tones: “That’s no way to talk, dear.”

“I’m sorry, Laitsina,” Traku said at once. He turned to Talsu and went on more quietly: “I’m sorry it didn’t happen to all the fornicating buggers, not just this one. They bloody well deserve it.”

He wasn’t quite quiet enough. “Traku!” Laitsina said.

“Aye. Aye. Aye.” Talsu’s father made a sour face and turned away from the window. “I may as well get back to work. Doesn’t seem like I’m going to be allowed to do anything else around here.”

“I heard that, too,” Laitsina said indignantly. “If you can’t say something without making the air around you smell like a latrine, you really should find a better way to express yourself.”

“Express myself!” Traku’s eyebrows pretty plainly said what he thought of his wife’s opinion, but he didn’t go against it, not out loud he didn’t.

Instead, he sat down in front of a pair of trousers he’d been working on. All the pieces were cut out. He’d set thread along all the seams and done some small part of the sewing by hand. Now he muttered a charm taking advantage of the law of similarity. The thread he’d set out writhed as if it had suddenly come to life, becoming similar to the identical thread he’d already sewn by hand. In the wink of an eye, all the stitching on the trousers was done.

Traku held them up and inspected them. Talsu nodded approval. “That’s very nice work, Father.”

“Not bad, not bad.” Traku looked pleased with himself. He was never sorry to hear himself praised.

And then, perhaps rashly, Talsu asked, “Wasn’t the spell you used the one you got from that Algarvian officer? It’s a lot easier on handwork than the ones we had before.”

“As a matter of fact, it was.” Traku paused, another expressive expression on his face. “All right, curse it. The redheads are smart bastards. I never said they weren’t. It doesn’t mean they’re any less bastards, though.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Talsu agreed.

Traku went on with his methodical, painstaking examination of the trousers. At last, he grudgingly nodded his satisfaction. “I suppose those will do.” Having supposed, he tossed the trousers at Talsu. “They go to Krogzmu the olive-oil dealer, on the south side of town. He paid twenty down, and he still owes us twenty more. Don’t let him keep the goods before you get the silver-in coins of King Donalitu, mind you.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, or even day before yesterday.” Talsu neatly folded the trousers his father had thrown at him. “You don’t have to treat me like I was three years old.”

“No, eh?” Traku chuckled. “Since when?”

Talsu didn’t dignify that with an answer. After he’d done such a nice job of folding them, he stuck the trousers under his arm, careless of the wrinkles he might cause-though they were wool, which didn’t wrinkle easily. He strode- almost stormed-out of the flat. His father chuckled again just before he shut- almost slammed-the door. Had that chuckle come a beat sooner, he would have slammed it. As things were, he went downstairs and out onto the street with his nose in the air.

He went away from the dead dragon and dragonflier, not after them. He wouldn’t have minded taking a kick at the Algarvian’s corpse, but he was set on getting the trousers to Krogzmu, getting the money, and getting back to the flat as fast as he could. I’ll show him I know what I’m doing, he thought. That something like that might have been what Traku had in mind never occurred to him, which was probably just as well.

Good intentions got sidetracked, as good intentions have a way of doing. A column of Kuusamans was tramping west through Skrunda. Till they passed, Talsu, like everybody else, had to wait. People took waiting no better than they usually did. Someone behind him in the crowd complained, “We might as well still be occupied by the Algarvians.”

“Nonsense,” somebody else said. Talsu thought he would tell the first speaker what a fool he was, but he didn’t. Instead, he went on, “The Algarvians never wasted our time with this nonsense.”

“That’s right,” a woman said, nothing but indignation in her voice. “My cat is getting hungrier every minute, and here I am, stuck in the road because of all these foreigners going by.”

Talsu rolled his eyes. Powers above! he thought. We don’t deserve to be our own masters any more. We really don’t.

Behemoths lumbered along the street. Their armor seemed different from any that Talsu had seen on Algarvian behemoths or on the few the Jelgavans had put in the field, but he couldn’t put his finger on the difference. The little, swarthy soldiers on the behemoths reminded him more of the redheads than of his own folk. They grinned and joked as they went forward; that was obvious though he knew not a word of Kuusaman. They were men with their peckers up.

They felt like winners, which went a long way toward making them into winners. The Jelgavan army had always gone into a fight looking over its shoulder, wondering what might happen to it, not what it could do to the foe.

At last, the rear of the column went by-footsoldiers stepping carefully to avoid whatever the behemoths had left behind. The Jelgavans on both sides of the road who’d had to wait surged forward and made their own traffic jam. With a judicious elbow or two, Talsu got through it fairly fast. He wished he could have elbowed the woman with the hungry cat, but no such luck.

The Kuusamans heading west to fight the redheads weren’t the only ones in town. A short, slant-eyed fellow who looked to have drunk too much wine lurched down the street with his arm around the waist of a giggling girl who wore a barmaid’s low-cut tunic and tight trousers. A few months before, had she been giving the Algarvians her favors? Talsu wouldn’t have bet more than a copper against it.

In a way, we are still occupied, he thought. Oh, the Kuusamans-and the Lagoans farther south-didn’t treat the people of Jelgava the way the Algarvians had. But if they wanted something-as that drunken trooper had wanted what the barmaid had to give-they were probably going to get it. Talsu sighed. He didn’t know what to do about that, except to hope Jelgava somehow could become strong enough to make foreigners take her seriously.

And how long will I have to wait for that? he wondered. Can we ever do it while King Donalitu sits on the throne? He had his doubts.

A new broadsheet he passed only made those doubts worse, CONCERNING TRAITORS, its big print declared, and it went on to define traitors as anyone who’d had anything at all to do with the Algarvians throughout the four years of occupation. By what it said, practically everyone in the kingdom was subject to arrest if his name happened to come to the notice of Donalitu’s constabulary.

He’ll have to leave a few people free, Talsu thought. Otherwise, who would build the dungeons he’d need to hold the whole fornicating kingdom? He laughed, but on second thought it wasn’t very funny. Captives could probably build as well as free men, if enough guards stood over them with sticks.

“Ah, good,” Krogzmu said when Talsu showed up with the trousers. “Let me just try them on. . ” He disappeared. When he came back, he was beaming. Not only did he pay Talsu the silver he owed without being asked, he gave him a clay jar of olive oil to take home, adding, “This is some of what I squeeze for my own family. This is not what I sell.”

Talsu’s mouth watered. “Thank you very much. I know it’ll be good.” His own father did good tailoring for everyone, but better than good for his own household.

“Good?” He might have insulted Krogzmu. “Is that all you can say? Good! You wait here.” The oil dealer disappeared back into his house. He returned a moment later with a chunk of bread and snatched the jar of oil out of Talsu’s hands. Yanking out the stopper, he poured some oil on the bread, then thrust it at Talsu. “There! Taste that, and then you tell me if it’s just good.”

“You don’t need to ask me twice.” Talsu took a big bite. It was either that or get olive oil smeared all over his face. The next sound he made was wordless but appreciative. The oil was everything he could have hoped it would be and then some: sharp and fruity at the same time. It made him think of men on tall ladders in the autumn plucking olives from green-gray-leafed branches to fall on tarpaulins waiting below.

“What do you say to that?” Krogzmu demanded.

“What do I say? I say I wish you’d given me more,” Talsu told him. Krogzmu beamed. That apparently satisfied him. To Talsu’s disappointment, the praise didn’t get him a second jar of that marvelous oil.

He headed home. Again, he had to wait in the middle of town. This time, though, the procession wasn’t Kuusaman soldiers heading west to fight King Mezentio’s men. It was hard-faced Jelgavans in the uniform of King Donalitu’s elite constabulary leading along a motley collection of captives. The captives weren’t Algarvians; they were every bit as blond as the constables, as blond as Talsu was himself.

A chill ran through him. Maybe Donalitu and his henchmen wouldn’t have any trouble finding enough dungeons after all.

Ealstan had imagined a great many ways he might return to Gromheort. He might have come after the war ended, bringing Vanai and Saxburh to meet his mother and father and sister. He might have come back to make sure Elfryth and Hestan and Conberge were all right, and then returned to Eoforwic to bring his wife and little daughter to them. He might even have come as part of a triumphant Forthwegian army, driving the Algarvians before him.

Coming to Gromheort as part of a triumphant Unkerlanter army that cared little, if at all, for anything Forthwegian had never once crossed his mind. Nor had he thought the Algarvians would do anything but pull out of Gromheort once they faced overwhelming force. That they might pull back into his home town and stand siege there. . No, he hadn’t thought of that, not in his wildest nightmares.

But that was just what the redheads had done, and they’d thrown back several Unkerlanter efforts to break into Gromheort. By now, Mezentio’s men trapped inside the city couldn’t retreat into Algarve even if they’d wanted to. The Unkerlanter ring around Gromheort was twenty miles thick, maybe thirty. The Algarvians had only two choices: they could fight till they ran out of everything, or they could yield.

Unkerlanter officers under flag of truce had already gone into Gromheort twice, demanding a surrender. The Algarvians had sent them away both times, and so Ealstan sprawled in a field somewhere between Oyngestun and Gromheort, peering toward his home town.

Gromheort’s wall had been more a formality than a defense for several generations. He knew that perfectly well. But seeing so many chunks of the wall bitten away by bursting eggs still hurt. What hurt worse was being unable to tell his comrades why it hurt. For one thing, they had trouble understanding him, and he them. Forthwegian and Unkerlanter were related languages, but they were a long way from identical. And, for another, they wouldn’t have cared anyhow. Gromheort was nothing to them but one more foreign town they had to take.

Whistles shrilled. Officers along the line shouted, “Forward!” That word wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent. Even if it had been, Ealstan would have been quick to figure out what it meant.

He didn’t want to advance. He wanted to go back to Eoforwic, to Vanai and Saxburh. But one Unkerlanter word he had learned was the one for efficiency. In their own brutal way, Swemmel’s men did their best to practice what they preached. Hard-faced fellows with sticks in their hands waited not far behind the line. Any soldier who tried to retreat without orders got blazed on the spot. Soldiers who went forward had at least a chance of coming through alive. The argument was crude, but it was also logical.

“Up!” a sergeant screamed. Sergeants didn’t get whistles, but soldiers had to do as they said anyhow. Ealstan got up and trotted forward with the rest of the men in rock-gray.

Rock-gray dragons swooped low overhead, eggs slung under their bellies. The eggs burst in front of and inside Gromheort. Ealstan didn’t know what to think about that. It made him more likely to live and his kinsfolk more likely to die. He wanted to give up thinking altogether.

“Behemoths!” That shout came in Unkerlanter. The word was nothing like its Forthwegian equivalent, which had been borrowed from Algarvian. Ealstan had had to learn it in a hurry. It meant either Help is coming or We’re in trouble, depending on who owned the behemoths being shouted about.

These behemoths had Algarvians aboard them. They were sallying from Gromheort, doing their best to hold the Unkerlanters away from the town. Officers or no officers, sergeants or no sergeants, Ealstan threw himself down on the muddy ground. He’d seen behemoths in the desperate fighting in and around Eoforwic, and had a hearty respect for what they could do. Most of the Unkerlanters close by him dove for cover, too. Anyone who’d had more than the tiniest taste of war knew better than to stay on his feet when enemy behemoths were in the neighborhood.

Somewhere not far away, a crystallomancer shouted into his glassy sphere. Before long, egg-tossers started aiming at the Algarvian beasts. They did less than Ealstan would have liked; only a direct hit, which took luck, would put paid to the immense beasts in their chain-mail coats. But a barrage of bursting eggs did keep Algarvian footsoldiers from going forward with the behemoths, and that left the animals and their crews more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise.

Ealstan swung his stick towards one of the redheads atop a behemoth a couple of hundred yards away. He had to aim carefully; behemoth crewmen wore armor, too. Why not? They relied on the animals to take them where they needed to go, and didn’t get down on the ground themselves unless something went wrong.

“There,” Ealstan muttered, and let his finger slide into the stick’s blazing hole. The beam leaped forth. The Algarvian started to clutch at his face, but crumpled with the motion half complete. He never knew what hit him, Ealstan thought. Instead of celebrating, he crawled toward a new hiding place. If one of Mezentio’s men had seen his beam, staying where he was might get him killed.

More men fell from the Algarvian behemoths. The Unkerlanter footsoldiers, like Ealstan, had learned to pick off crewmen whenever they got the chance. Had Algarvian footsoldiers gone forward with the beasts, they could have kept Swemmel’s soldiers too busy to let them snipe at the behemoth crews. But eggs bursting all around had held back the unarmored footsoldiers.

Sullenly, the Algarvian behemoths drew back toward Gromheort. Ealstan waited for the order to pursue. It didn’t come. The Unkerlanters around him seemed content to stay where they were, even if they could have gained some ground by showing initiative. There were also times when the efficiency Swemmel’s men talked so much about proved only talk.

Night fell. That didn’t keep the Unkerlanters from pounding Gromheort with eggs or the Algarvians in the town from answering back as best they could. Ealstan filled his mess tin with boiled barley and chunks of meat from a pot bubbling over a fire well shielded from sight by banks of dirt-Algarvian snipers sometimes sneaked out after dark to pick off whomever they could spot, and they were good at what they did. Poking one of the chunks with his spoon, Ealstan asked the cook, “What is this?”

“Unicorn tonight,” the fellow answered. “Not too bad.”

“Not, not too,” Ealstan more or less agreed. Unicorn, horse, behemoth-he’d eaten all sorts of things he never would have touched before the war. Behemoth was very tough and very gamy. But when the choice lay between eating it and going hungry. . Hard times had long since taught him that lesson.

He sat with his squadmates, going through the stew and talking. He couldn’t always understand them, nor they him, but they and he kept repeating themselves and changing a word here, a word there, till they got it. They didn’t hold his being Forthwegian against him. A couple of them still seemed to think he was just an Unkerlanter from a district where the dialect was very strange. They’d already seen he knew enough on the battlefield not to be a danger to them.

As for his method of joining King Swemmel’s army, most of them had stories not a whole lot different. “Oh, aye,” said a fellow named Curvenal, who, by his pimpled but almost beardless face, couldn’t have been much above sixteen. “The impressers came into my village. They said I could go fight the Algarvians or I could get blazed. With that for a choice. . The Algarvians might not blaze me, so here I am.”

“Me, I’m from the far southwest,” another soldier said. “I’d never even heard of Algarvians till the fornicating war started. All I want to do is go home.”

Ealstan could have had something to say about Unkerlant’s jumping on Forthweg’s back after the Algarvians stormed into his kingdom. He could have, but he didn’t. What point to it? None of these men had been in Swemmel’s army then; Curvenal would have been about eleven years old. And most of his new comrades were peasants. He might be ignorant of their language, but they were ignorant of much more. How could one not have heard of Algarvians? Not have met any? — that, certainly; the far southwest of Unkerlant was far indeed. But not to know they existed? That astonished Ealstan. He’d never met any Gyongyosians, but he would have had no trouble finding Gyongyos on a map.

Under cover of darkness, more Unkerlanter soldiers came forward. As soon as it got light, dragons painted rock-gray started harrying Gromheort once more. Listening to the thud of bursting eggs, Ealstan wondered again how his family was faring. He hoped they were well. That was all he could do.

Behemoths lumbered toward the city wall. “Forward!” officers shouted. Forward Ealstan went, along with his squadmates, along with the fresh troops. The Algarvians fought like canny veterans. Some of the new Unkerlanter soldiers were very raw indeed, too raw to know to take cover when the enemy started blazing at them. They might as well have been grain before the reaper.

But they also took a toll on the redheads. Though it was a smaller toll, the Algarvians could afford less in the way of losses. And, seeing smoke rising all around Gromheort, Ealstan realized Swemmel’s soldiers were coming at the city from every side. If they broke in anywhere, they would be ahead of the game.

No such luck. The Algarvians in Gromheort were trapped, but they hadn’t given up-and they hadn’t run out of food or supplies. They threw back this attack as they’d thrown back the others. They had courage and to spare-or maybe they didn’t dare let themselves fall into Unkerlanter hands.

“Won’t be anything left of that place before long,” Curvenal said.

“I used to live there,” Ealstan said in Forthwegian, and then had to struggle to get meaning across in Unkerlanter, which formed past tenses differently.

“Is your family still there?” Curvenal asked.

Ealstan nodded. “I think so. I hope so.”

The young Unkerlanter slapped him on the back. “That’s hard. That’s cursed hard. The redheads never got to my village, so I’m one of the lucky ones. But I know how many people have lost kin. I hope your folks come through all right.”

Sympathy from one of Swemmel’s men came as a surprise. “Thanks,” Ealstan said roughly. “So do I.” In ironic counterpoint, more eggs burst on Gromheort. He hoped his mother and father and sister were down in cellars where no harm could come to them. He also hoped they had enough to eat. The Algarvians would probably do their best to keep everything in the besieged town for themselves.

If any Forthwegians got food, he suspected his own family would. His father had both money and connections, and the Algarvians took bribes. Ealstan had seen that for himself, both in Gromheort and in Eoforwic. But even the redheads wouldn’t give civilians food if they had none to spare.

All I can do is try to break into the city when we’ve worn Mezentio’s men down enough to have a decent chance of doing it, Ealstan thought. If I desert and try to sneak in on my own, the Unkerlanters will blaze me if they catch me and the Algarvians will if the Unkerlanters don’t. And I couldn‘t do anything useful even if I did get in.

Every bit of that made perfect logical sense, the sort of sense that should have calmed a bookkeeper’s spirit. Somehow or other, it did nothing whatever to ease Ealstan’s mind.

Hajjaj was glad Bishah’s rainy season, never very long, was drawing to a close. That meant his roof wouldn’t leak much longer-till next rainy season. Zuwayzi roofers were among the most inept workmen in the whole kingdom. They could get away with it, too, because they were so seldom tested.

“Frauds, the lot of them,” he grumbled to his senior wife just after the latest set of bunglers packed up their tools and went down from the hills to Bishah.

“They certainly are,” Kolthoum agreed. They’d been together for half a century now. It had been an arranged marriage, not a love match; leaders among Zuwayzi clans wed for reasons far removed from romance. But they’d grown very fond of each other. Hajjaj wondered if he’d ever spoken the word love to her. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t imagine what he would do without her.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re just a pack of clumsy children playing with toys-and not playing very well,” he went on.

“Odds are, we won’t find out what sort of work they’ve done till the fall,” Kolthoum said. “By then, they can expect we’ll either have forgotten all the promises they’ve made or lost their bill or both.”

“They can expect it, but they’ll be disappointed,” Hajjaj said. “They don’t know how well you keep track of such things.” His senior wife graciously inclined her head at the compliment. She’d never been a great beauty, and she’d got fat as the years went by, but she moved like a queen. From roofers, Hajjaj went on to other complications: “Speaking of toys. .”

He needed no more than that for Kolthoum to understand exactly what he had in mind. “What’s the latest trouble with Tassi?” she asked. “And why won’t Iskakis dry up and blow away?”

“Because King Tsavellas of Yanina chose exactly the right moment to change sides and suck up to Unkerlant and we didn’t,” Hajjaj answered. “That means Swemmel’s happier about the Yaninans than he is about us. And besides, Ansovald likes sticking pins in me to see if I’ll jump. Barbarian.” The last word was necessarily in Algarvian; Zuwayzi didn’t have a satisfactory equivalent.

“Why doesn’t Iskakis leave it alone, though?” Kolthoum asked fretfully. “It’s not as if he wants her for herself. If she were a pretty boy instead of a pretty girl, he might. As things are?” She shook her head.

“Pride,” Hajjaj said. “He has plenty of that; Yaninans are prickly folk. A Zuwayzi noble would want to get back a wife who’d run off, too.”

“Aye, so he would, and something horrible would happen to her if he did, too,” Kolthoum said. “Plenty of feuds have started that way. Tassi doesn’t deserve to have anything like that happen to her. She can’t help it if her husband would sooner have had a boy.”

“I wish Marquis Balastro had taken her back to Algarve with him when he had to flee Zuwayza,” Hajjaj said. “But he’d quarreled with her by then; that was what prompted her to come to me.”

His senior wife gave him a sidelong glance. “You can’t tell me you’ve been sorry, and you know it.”

Since Hajjaj knew perfectly well that he couldn’t, he didn’t try. What he did say was, “The latest is, Ansovald had the gall to tell me Yanina might declare war on Zuwayza if I don’t hand Tassi over.”

“Yanina might,” Kolthoum said. Hajjaj nodded. “But we don’t border Yanina,” she went on. Hajjaj nodded again. She asked, “Did he say Unkerlant might declare war on us on account of this?” Hajjaj shook his head. “Well, then,” she told him, “we’ve got nothing to worry about. Enjoy yourself with her, and think of Iskakis every time you do.”

“I wonder if she enjoys herself with me. I have my doubts,” Hajjaj said, a thought he never would have aired to anyone in the world but Kolthoum.

“You’ve given her the pleasure of not having to live with Iskakis anymore,” his senior wife replied. “The least she can do is give you some pleasure in exchange.”

Kolthoum’s brisk practicality made a sensible answer. It did not, however, fill Hajjaj with delight. He had pride of his own, a man’s pride. He wanted to think he pleased the pretty young woman who also pleased him. What he wanted to think and what was true were liable to be two different things, though.

“I take it you told Ansovald the Yaninans were welcome to invade us whenever they chose?” Kolthoum said.

“Actually, no. I’m afraid I lost my temper this time,” Hajjaj said. Kolthoum waved for him to go on. With mingled pride and shame, he did: “I offered Iskakis a camel he could use as he planned on using Tassi.”

“Did you!” His senior wife’s eyebrows rose. After a moment’s calculation- one almost too short for Hajjaj to notice, but not quite-she said, “Well, good for you. Unkerlant won’t go to war against us because Iskakis doesn’t get his wife back. King Swemmel’s a madman, but he’s a shrewd sort of madman.”

“Most of the time,” Hajjaj said.

“Most of the time,” Kolthoum agreed.

“Iskakis is making himself troublesome, though,” Hajjaj said. “I keep wondering if he’ll hire some bravos to do me an injury.”

Now Kolthoum’s eyebrows flew upwards. “A Yaninan hire Zuwayzi bravos to do you an injury? I should hope not, by the powers above! I should hope no one in this kingdom would take his silver for such a thing. Zuwayza wouldn’t be a kingdom if not for you.”

That was, on the whole, true. Nevertheless, Hajjaj answered, “Men don’t turn into bravos unless they love silver first and everything else afterwards. And young men don’t remember-and probably don’t care-how we got to be a kingdom again. It would be just another job as far as they’re concerned, one that paid better than most.”

“Disgraceful,” Kolthoum said. “A hundred years ago, our ancestors never would have thought of such treason against their own kind.”

Hajjaj shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re wrong, my dear. I could say, ask Tewfik: he would remember. But he’s not so old as that, and I don’t need to ask him, because I already know. Unkerlant got hold of Zuwayza and held us as long as she did by playing our princes off against one another. These things have happened, and they can happen again.”

“Well, they had better not, not to you, or whoever plays such games will answer to me.” Kolthoum sounded as if she meant every word of that. From some Zuwayzi women, it would have been an idle threat. From Kolthoum. . Hajjaj would not have wanted his senior wife angry at him. Kolthoum arose from the nest of cushions she’d made for herself and flounced away in considerable annoyance.

Why aren’t I more upset at the idea? Hajjaj wondered. Maybe because Iskakis is such a blunderer, any assassins he hires would likely make a hash of the job. Anyone who would let a woman as. entertaining as Tassi leave him can’t be very bright. Of course, Iskakis looked for entertainments of that sort elsewhere. The more fool he, Hajjaj thought.

Joints creaking, he got to his feet and went into the library. Surrounded by books in Zuwayzi, in Algarvian, in classical Kaunian, he didn’t have to think about man’s inhumanity to man. . unless he pulled out a history in any of those languages. He didn’t. A volume of love poetry from the days of the Kaunian Empire better suited his mood.

Motion in the doorway made him look up. There stood Tassi. Since becoming part of his household, she’d insisted on adopting Zuwayzi dress: which is to say, sandals and jewelry and, outdoors, a hat. To Hajjaj’s eyes, she always looked much more naked than a woman of his own people. Maybe that was because he was used to the idea that people of her pale color were supposed to wear clothes. Or maybe her nipples and her bush stood out more than they did with dark-skinned Zuwayzin.

“Do I disturb you?” she asked in Algarvian, the only language they had in common.

Aye, he thought, but that wasn’t how she meant the question. “No, of course not,” he said, and closed the book of poems.

“Good.” She came into the library and sat down on the carpeted floor beside him. “Do I hear rightly? Iskakis is being difficult again? Difficult still?”

That didn’t take long, Hajjaj thought. Kolthoum didn’t spread his business around the household, either. Servants going down the hall must have heard bits and pieces, and all the powers above put together couldn’t keep servants from gossiping. “As a matter of fact, he is,” Hajjaj replied. He wouldn’t lie to her, not on matters touching her as well as him.

“Why not just”-she snapped her fingers-”send him away, tell King Tsavellas to pick a new minister? Then he will be gone, and so will the trouble.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

Tassi snapped her fingers again. “King Shazli can. And he will do as you say.”

That did hold some truth. Hajjaj had hesitated to ask Shazli to declare Iskakis unwelcome in Zuwayza. He was a purist, and did not feel personal problems had any place in the affairs of his kingdom. If, however, Iskakis had killing him in mind, the Yaninan minister was the one mixing personal affairs and diplomacy. “I may ask him,” Hajjaj said at last.

“Good. That is settled, then.” Tassi took such logical leaps as easily, as naturally, as she breathed. “And I will stay here.”

“Does that please you, staying here?” Hajjaj asked.

She looked at him sidelong. “I hope it pleases you, my staying here.”

Aye, Tassi looked very naked indeed. He didn’t think she let her legs fall open by accident just then, giving him a glimpse of the sweet slit between them. She used her naked flesh as a tool, a weapon, in ways that never would have occurred to a Zuwayzi woman who took nudity for granted.

Age gave Hajjaj a certain advantage, or at least a certain perspective, on such things. “You didn’t answer what I asked,” he remarked.

Tassi’s lower lip pooched like an indignant child’s, though that pouting lip was the only childlike part of her. Her lisping, throaty accent made even ordinary things she said sound provocative. When she asked, “Shall I show you I am pleased?”. . Hajjaj didn’t answer. Tassi got up and shut the door to the library.

Some time later, she said, “There. Are you pleased? Am I pleased?”

Hajjaj could scarcely deny he was pleased. He wanted to roll over and go to sleep. He wasn’t so sure about Tassi, not in that same sense. “I hope you are,” he said.

“Oh, aye.” She dipped her head, as she often did instead of nodding. Her eyes sparkled. “And do you see? I do not ask for precious stones. They would be nice, but I do not ask for them. All I ask for is to stay here. You can do that for me. It is easy for you, in fact.”

With a laugh, Hajjaj patted her round, smooth backside. On the surface, she spoke nothing but the truth. Below the surface. . He’d never before heard anyone ask for jewels by not asking for them. She might even get some. And if she didn’t, how could she complain?