Pulses of light began flickering in the night ahead—Algarvian sticks, their beams probing for his countrymen. No, the redheads hadn’t been completely fooled, and they hadn’t been completely silenced, either. Leudast cursed under his breath. Why don’t they start killing the poor sods they’ve rounded up? he thought. We could use the help.
He was ashamed of himself a moment later. Algarvian footsoldiers must have felt the same way when their mages first started slaughtering Kaunians back in the dark, fearful days when Cottbus looked as if it would surely fall. If they were wrong to wish for such a thing, how was he right, especially when his kingdom’s sorcerers slaughtered his own countrymen for their effects?
How am I right? It’s my neck, that’s how. Some of the enemy’s beams zipped past him, fearfully close, before the ground ahead shook and violet flames burst up from it. Some of his men whooped with glee as the sorcery struck the foe. Maybe they were naive enough not to know how their mages did what they did. Maybe—more likely—they wanted to live themselves, and didn’t care.
“Forward!” Leudast yelled. “Hit ‘em hard while they’re groggy!” The Algarvians wouldn’t stay groggy long. Three years and more of fighting them had made him all too sure of that. They didn’t have enough men or beasts to hold back the Unkerlanters or drive them as they once had, but the troopers they had left were as deadly dangerous as ever.
And the redheads still had Kaunians left to kill. Leudast had hoped the Unkerlanter bombardment would have slain a lot of the blonds without giving the Algarvians the chance to seize their life energy and turn it into sorcerous energy. No such luck. The dreadfully disruptive and destructive sorcery the Unkerlanter wizards raised now quieted much sooner than it should have, as Mezentio’s mages used, and used up, the Kaunians to counteract it.
Could be worse, Leudast thought. In the old days, we’d’ve been fighting like mad bastards to counter their conjuring, not the other way round.
A column of Unkerlanter behemoths thundered forward. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks the armored beasts bore on their backs battered down surviving Algarvian strongpoints. And once it got moving east, that column kept moving. The only thing that could reliably stop a behemoth was another behemoth. The Algarvians had been short of behemoths ever since losing so many in the enormous battles of the Durrwangen bulge, and most of the animals they did have were in the north, trying to hold the Unkerlanters there.
“Come on, men!” Leudast shouted, almost stumbling over a kilted corpse. “They can’t hold us! We’re breaking them! Their crust is tough, but once we’re past it, what have they got left? Nothing!” He blew the whistle again, exulting in the squeal.
He exulted in what he saw, too, as the sky grew light and true dawn approached. Watching Algarvians run was something Unkerlanter soldiers didn’t get to do often enough. The redheads almost always fought till they couldn’t fight any more. Not here. Hit with overwhelming force, Mezentio’s men fled for their lives. It didn’t help much; the fleeing footsoldiers fell one after another.
Leudast was in the middle of yelling, “Forward!” yet again when an Algarvian who didn’t run—some stubborn whoresons always stood their ground— blazed him in the leg. The word went from a command to an anguished howl. He fell heavily, clutching at his right thigh.
“Lieutenant’s down!” Sergeant Hagen shouted. Leudast heard the words as if from very far away. He’d heard such cries countless times before, but he’d gone through three years of war and been wounded only once—till now.
How bad was it? He made himself yank up his tunic and look. The beam had gone right through his leg, outside the thighbone. Such wounds often cauterized themselves. This one hadn’t. He was bleeding, but not too badly. He had a wound bandage. Unkerlant didn’t issue such things; he’d taken it off a dead Algarvian. Covering both sides of the wound was awkward, but he managed.
He’d just got the bandage into place when a couple of troopers hauled him upright. He screamed again; the way they manhandled him hurt as much as getting blazed had in the first place. “Sorry, sir,” one of them said. “We’ll get you back to the healers.”
“All right.” Leudast tasted blood; he must have bitten his tongue or lower lip. The men were glad to help him. Why not? It took them away from danger, too. And, he realized, in dull, pain-filled astonishment, he was getting his own second holiday from the war. But the price of the ticket was very high. He bit down on another scream, and then on another still. Before long, he wasn’t biting down on them anymore.
Pekka hadn’t needed long to realize she disliked Viana. The more she knew her, the more she disliked her, too. It wasn’t that the Lagoan sorceress was particularly annoying, or that she lacked the wit to understand the spells she’d come to the Naantali district to learn. For a little while, Pekka had trouble figuring out what it was.
For a little while, but not for long. Viana was tall and straight and high-breasted, with a narrow waist and long, elegant legs the short kilts she wore showed to best advantage. Standing beside her, Pekka felt twelve years old and half-sprouted all over again. Having stood beside Viana once, Pekka made it a point of never doing it again.
She’s a Lagoan. Lagoan women are bigger and rounder than Kuusamans. After Pekka told herself that a couple of times, she suddenly quit. It wasn’t the answer to the problem. It was the problem.
It wouldn’t have been, if Viana hadn’t cast sheep’s eyes at Fernao every chance she got—and she made sure she got plenty of them. Just watching her, just listening to her, made Pekka want to retch.
You’re jealous, Pekka thought. He’s not your man—you made a point of telling him he’s not your man—and you’re jealous. You told him to find a Lagoan girl. Here’s one practically throwing herself at his feet, and you want to kill her. You don ‘tjust want to kill her. You want to kill her slowly, an inch at a time, and take days and days to get it over with.
She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink in her room. Jealousy was the green-eyed monster, but her eyes remained brown. “No, Viana’s eyes are green,” Pekka hissed.
She stepped away from the mirror. No, she whirled away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at herself or think about the color of Viana’s eyes. Am L going out of my mind’!
In a way, it would have been easier had Fernao fallen head over heels for his countrywoman. Then Pekka would have known how things were, and she could have gone on with her own life. But, as far as she could see, Fernao was much less interested in Viana than Viana was in him. Which meant . .
“Which means trouble,” Pekka said aloud. Which meant Fernao was still interested in her. If that wasn’t trouble, she didn’t know what was.
Going to him to let him know how upset she was at Leino’s jointing the war on the Derlavaian mainland had been a mistake. She saw that now. If she revealed her most intimate feelings about her husband to another man, with whom was she being more intimate? The answer to that was depressingly obvious. The reason for it was pretty obvious, too: Leino was far away, while Fernao was here.
“I was only really intimate with him once,” Pekka said. As long as she could keep on saying that… As long as I can keep on saying that, what? she wondered. As long as I can keep saying that, I’m going to be sick-jealous ofViana whenever I see her or even think of her.
And what if I were really intimate with Fernao more than once? She didn’t see Leino’s face in her mind when she asked herself that. She saw Uto’s. Thinking about her son made Pekka raise a hand to her cheek, as if someone had slapped her in the face.
After that, Pekka couldn’t make herself stay in her chamber another instant. For that matter, she couldn’t make herself stay in the hostel any more. Instead of going into the refectory to gab with her colleagues, she fled the place as if it were full of demons. And so it was, but the demons were her own.
Outside, things felt easier somehow. The day was mild, not warm: the Naantali district got warmer in summer than her southern seacoast home town of Kajaan
i, but not a lot warmer. White clouds drifted slowly from west to east across a watery blue sky. Grass and shrubs remained green, but they would start turning yellow in only a couple of months. Before long, winter would reclaim this land and hold it for a long, long time. A lapwing flew by, peeping. Before long, it would fly north. It could flee. She was stuck here.
The lapwing’s motion made her notice other motion in the sky, far, far higher. Something up there circled lazily, right at the edge of visibility. A hawk? she wondered, and shook her head. It was bigger than a hawk, and higher than a hawk, too. A dragon.
But what was a dragon doing up there? How long had dragons circled over Naantali? She didn’t remember seeing one before. Had the Seven Princes taken to warding the hostel and the blockhouse and the land in between? It wasn’t the worst idea in the world. If they had, though, why hadn’t they told her about it? This was her project. She was supposed to know about such things.
She watched the dragon. It continued to wheel, far too high up for her to tell anything about it except what it was. Then something fell away from it. Pekka let out a gasp of horror, fearing the dragonflier had somehow fallen off. But the dragon didn’t change course, as it would have if suddenly deprived of intelligent control. It kept right on circling, as the the speck tumbled down to earth.
Pekka had a while to watch that speck fall, to watch it grow larger, to wonder what it was. She didn’t wonder long. If it wasn’t a dragonflier, it almost had to be an egg. But if it was an egg, either something had gone dreadfully wrong up there or. … Or the Algarvians have managed to sneak a dragon south from Valmiera, the way we pound their kingdom. The thought formed, blizzard-cold, in her mind.
One egg, though? The dragon had flown a long, long way. It couldn’t possibly have carried more than one. What were the odds the fellow flying it could hit anything worth hitting with a single egg? Good enough to risk a dragon and a highly trained man? Pekka couldn’t see how.
Unless … She had to keep her eye on the plummeting egg now; had she glanced away, she would have lost it. It looked as if it would fall some little distance behind the hostel—but then, at the last instant, the direction in which it fell suddenly shifted, bringing it back toward the building.
Magecraft! flashed through her mind just before the egg burst. She knew of no spell that could catch a quickly falling object like an egg and swing it back toward its target, but she didn’t know everything there was to know, either. The Algarvians had talented mages of their own. If they’d concentrated on this kind of magic, they might be as far ahead with it as her group was with its special spells.
Even as she realized that, the egg released its sorcerous energy with a great roar and a flash of light just behind the hostel. Although she’d wandered a couple of hundred yards away before she saw the dragon, the noise was terrific, a hammer-blow against the ears. Part of the hostel sagged down toward the back, like a tired old man sagging into a sofa. Smoke began to rise.
“No!” Pekka screamed, and dashed back to the battered building. As she ran, she looked up into the sky. She couldn’t spot the dragon at first. Then she did. It wasn’t circling any more. It was flying off toward the north, as if the man aboard it knew he’d done what he was supposed to do. And so, no doubt, he did.
Pekka cursed him with all her heart. She doubted the curse would bite; her own countrymen were warded against such, and the Algarvians were bound to be, too. She cursed anyhow.
People started spilling out of the hostel, some bleeding, some limping, some helping others who had trouble moving on their own. There was Ilmarinen, with blood running down his face from a cut cheek—and with the plate of smoked salmon from which he’d been eating still in his hand. He waved to her, calling, “They managed to sneak one in on us, the stinking whoresons.” Was he angry, or did he admire the Algarvians’ professional skill? Pekka couldn’t tell.
She waved back and said, “Aye.” She was glad to see Ilmarinen not badly hurt, but he wasn’t the one who’d made her come tearing back the way she had. “Where’s Fernao?” she cried.
In the midst of death and destruction, Ilmarinen laughed at her. But the laughter cut off. “He’s in there somewhere,” he answered, “one way or another.” He took the last bite of salmon off the plate and ate it.
More smoke poured from the hostel and more of it slid toward ruin. More people came staggering out, too, mages and servants and cooks all mixed together. Pekka’s heart leaped when she saw a tall, redheaded man with a ponytail—but it wasn’t Fernao, only one of the Lagoan mages who’d come here to learn the sorceries he’d helped shape.
Fernao had rescued her when the Algarvians assailed the blockhouse. Could she do anything less for him? She started into the hostel. A couple of men caught her and held her back. “Don’t go inside, Mistress Pekka,” one of them said. “The whole thing is liable to fall down.”
“I don’t care.” She kicked out at them. “Let me go!”
“No, mistress,” the man replied. “We need you safe. Plenty of other people to go in there and get out the hurt and the dead. You’re staying right here.” Between them, he and his friend were much stronger than she.
She struggled anyhow, and had to bite her tongue to keep from cursing them as savagely as she had the Algarvian dragonflier. And then, all at once, she went limp in their restraining arms. There was Fernao, staggering out through the door Ilmarinen had used. He’d lost his stick and made heavy going without it, but didn’t seem badly hurt.
“Pekka! Where’s Pekka?” he shouted in his accented but now fluent Kuusaman.
“Here I am,” Pekka called. When she said, “Let me go,” this time, the men who had hold of her did. She hurried over to Fernao. “Are you all right?” she demanded.
“Not too bad,” he answered. “How in blazes did the Algarvians manage to do this to us?” His face went thoroughly grim. “If one of the Lagoan mages I brought in turns out to be a spy, you can do whatever you please with me. I’d deserve it.”
“No,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you or any of the other Lagoans.” She explained how she knew.
“Guiding falling eggs by sorcery?” Fernao said when she was through. “I wouldn’t want to try that. But I won’t argue with you—you saw it, and I didn’t. I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“I’m glad you‘re all right,” Pekka said. They clung to each other. Now that she knew he was hale, Pekka’s wits started working again. “I’ve seen Ilmarinen. Now we have to find out if the rest of the theoretical sorcerers are safe.”
“There’s Palis.” Fernao pointed. “And who’s he dragging out? … Oh, powers above, it’s Viana.”
The Lagoan sorceress’ neck bent at an unnatural angle. She was plainly dead. Piilis let her rest on the grass and hurried in after someone else before Pekka could tell him to stop. She stared at Viana’s corpse, which looked skyward with blank eyes. In an odd way, her jealousy of the Lagoan might have saved her life. Shame filled her. She began to cry.
Fifteen
At some point in his life, Sidroc had surely heard the phrase Misery loves company. If he had, the exact meaning of that phrase had escaped him till he found himself not far from the town of Mandelsloh, in the extreme east of Unkerlant, surrounded by King Swemmel’s soldiers.
He didn’t know how many men who fought for King Mezentio were surrounded with him, but he did know the number wasn’t small. And he knew that the miserable men in the Mandelsloh pocket came from just about every kingdom that had followed Algarve into war against Unkerlant. Had he not known, the men sitting and lying around the fire with him would have done a good enough job of teaching the lesson.
Even in the chaotic, desperate fighting that marked the Algarvian response to the Unkerlanters’ latest blow here in the south, he hadn’t lost touch with Sergeant Werferth or Ceorl, though he wouldn’t have particularly missed the ruffian had something happened to him. A young, exhausted Algarvian lieutenant sprawled on the ground close by them. He’d been attach
ed to Plegmund’s Brigade, but not to Sidroc’s company of Forthwegians in Algarvian service.
A couple of Grelzers in dark green tunics by now had beards that would have let them pass for Forthwegians—except that Sidroc understood very little of what they said. One of them was roasting some meat: probably a chunk of dead unicorn, but possibly dead behemoth. Not far from them, a blond from the Phalanx of Valmieran lay snoring. A Yaninan in leggings and the funny shoes the soldiers of his kingdom wore changed the bandage on a minor wound.
Unkerlanter dragons flew by overhead. They ruled the skies these days. They didn’t bother dropping an egg on the campfire: they were after bigger targets. Before long, eggs burst half a mile or so away. Sidroc didn’t even stir. If a burst wasn’t close enough to put him in danger of his life, he didn’t intend to worry about it. Even if it was that close, he wouldn’t worry about it much. Next to what would happen if Swemmel’s soldiers got their hands on him alive, dying didn’t look so bad.
“Where do we go from here?” he said—in Algarvian, the one language all the weary, frightened, battered soldiers nearby might understand.
Sure enough, the Yaninan answered in the same tongue: “East.”
“Plenty of Unkerlanters east of us, too,” Werferth said fatalistically.
That lieutenant sat up. “But our comrades are there to the east.” He was worn and filthy, not at all the proper, dapper Algarvian officer. “We have to break through. If we don’t break through, we’re all dead.”
“And if we do break through, we are still all dead.” That was one of the Grelzers, the one who wasn’t roasting meat. “It will take a little longer, that is all.” His Algarvian was so heavily accented, Sidroc had a hard time understanding him. But, once Sidroc did make sense of the words, he had a demon of a time disagreeing with them.
The Yaninan finished fiddling with his bandage. He pointed to the Grelzers. “You not have to go east,” he said, also haltingly. “You take off tunics, you just peasants.”
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