Despite the dismay stabbing through her at that, and despite his not having bathed for days, Vanai threw her arms around him and kissed him. Then she said, “There’s hot water on the stove. I can pour some in a basin. If you want to clean up while I get you something to eat. ..”
“Aye,” Ealstan said, and yawned again. He pulled off his tunic, his shoes and socks, and his drawers, and stood there in the kitchen careless of his nakedness. Vanai just smiled and hurried to get the hot water. A few years before, she would have been shocked. What her grandfather would have said… Idon’t care what my grandfather would have said, she thought firmly. This is my husband.
She gave him bread and oil and cheese and olives and onions: all sorts of food that would keep. She wished they had a rest crate for meat and other perishables. They could have afforded one, but they’d never got around to buying it. Now they had to do without. Ealstan sat down, still naked. He wolfed down everything in sight and looked around for more.
“When did you eat last?” Vanai demanded.
“Yesterday?” he said vaguely. “Aye, yesterday, I think. It’s been busy out there.” He shook his head; a few drops of water sprayed out from his hair and his beard. “We’re doing what we have to do-so far, anyway. How’s the baby?”
“She’s fine,” Vanai said, which drew a grin from Ealstan. She got up and filled his mug with wine once more. A moment later, it was empty again. Vanai went on, “She really is starting to smile.”
“That’s good. That’s very good,” Ealstan said. “Here’s hoping we’re able to give her something to smile about.” As if to underscore his words, more eggs burst. He grimaced. “Powers below eat the Algarvians. They don’t care if they knock Eoforwic flat, as long as they get rid of us.”
“Will the Unkerlanters help us?” Vanai asked.
“Who knows what the Unkerlanters will do?” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they’ll do? This isour kingdom, curse it. It doesn’t belong to Swemmel any more than it belongs to Mezentio.”
“Which is all very well,” Vanai said, “but will Swemmel pay any attention if you tell him that?”
“I doubt it.” Ealstan spoke with a bitter cynicism Vanai had heard from other Forthwegians talking about their kingdom’s unhappy history. “When have our neighbors ever paid any attention to us?”
Vanai got up, walked around the table, stood beside Ealstan, and set her hands on his bare shoulders. “I’ll pay attention to you, if you wouldn’t sooner fall asleep.”
He laughed as he looked up at her, but hesitated even so. “Will you be all right if we do?”
“I think so,” she answered. “It should be long enough-and I’ve missed you, too, you know.” She kissed him. That might have been a cue in a farce: Saxburh started to cry. Instead of getting angry, Ealstan laughed again. Vanai hurried off to tend the baby. Saxburh turned out to be both wet and hungry. She also turned out to be wide awake and full of smiles.
“Maybe I will just fall asleep,” Ealstan said after a while.
“Whatever you like.” Vanai knew she would be up a couple of times in the night. Saxburh hadn’t quite got the idea of sleeping through it yet. In a way, having the baby in the flat was an advantage; it left her so tired, the din of fighting outside seldom disturbed her rest.
After a couple of hours, Saxburh went back to sleep again. Vanai set her in the cradle. Ealstan, to her surprise, was still awake. “I must be important to you,” she said as she got undressed.
“You think you’re joking,” he said.
“No.” Vanai shook her head. “I don’t. I know what being tired means, too.”
Ealstan soon proved he wasn’ttoo tired. Vanai straddled him, carefully lowering herself onto him. It hurt. She wasn’t surprised that it did, not after a baby had gone through there. It hurt almost as much as her first time had. She did her best not to let Ealstan see that. She took no pleasure from it. No, that wasn’t true. She took no sensual pleasure, but she did enjoy pleasing Ealstan. He moved slowly and carefully, doing his best not to hurt her, even when he groaned and clutched her backside and spent himself.
She leaned down and kissed him. “Go to sleep now, sweetheart. Nothing’s going to happen till the morning.” Saxburh would, inevitably, wake up between now and then, but Ealstan couldn’t do anything about that.
When the baby did wake up, Ealstan didn’t even hear her cries; he kept on breathing deeply, not quite snoring, in the bed beside Vanai. His breathing didn’t change when she slid out of bed. She shook her head in bemusement. Back in the days when he’d gone to work and she’d had to stay in the flat for fear of being seized as a Kaunian, he’d often risen without waking her. Now the shoe was on the other foot.
Occasional flashes of light came through the shutters as Vanai changed Saxburh’s wet linen and put the baby to her breast: bursts of sorcerous energy, along with the fires those bursts could start. Those flashes meant men shrieking and buildings crashing to ruin, but they looked and sounded like nothing so much as a thunderstorm without the drumming rain.
Saxburh nursed. She burped. She went back to sleep without much fuss. Vanai laid her in the cradle, then lay down beside Ealstan. All sorts of questions filled her mind. Would this uprising do Forthweg any good? If it did, would Ealstan come through safe? The second mattered more to her than the first. If anything happened to Ealstan, she didn’t care what happened to Forthweg.
And then she fell asleep herself. No matter how worried about Ealstan she was, she couldn’t hold her eyes open another moment.
When she woke, it was beginning to get light outside. She found herself alone in bed. She hurried out to the kitchen. Ealstan had left a note behind. /hope I see you again soon, he’d written in classical Kaunian. Whatever happens, I shall love you as long as I live. She stared at that. Tears filled her eyes.
Saxburh chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. Vanai scooped her out of the cradle and sat down to give her her breakfast. As the baby began to nurse, they were both crying.
Ealstan wondered whether he’d been wise to go home during the lull in the fighting. He loved Vanai, and wanted to see her as much as he could. His new little daughter entranced him. But seeing them, while it reminded him of why he was fighting, also reminded him of how much he had to lose. He didn’t need that reminder, not if he was going to lay his life on the line against the redheads.
Leofsig did it, he thought. That brought his fury up to the proper pitch. If it hadn’t been for the Algarvians, his cousin Sidroc never would have quarreled either with him or with his brother. Ealstan hoped Sidroc was dead these days. If he wasn’t, he was still fighting in Plegmund’s Brigade on the Algarvian side. Recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade remained on some walls, though the Forthwegian rebels who held most of Eoforwic had whitewashed the greater number of them.
Ealstan picked his way through rubble up to the barricade of brickwork and boulders and benches behind which the rebels sheltered. A fellow named Beortwulf, who’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army and served as a captain here, nodded to him. “Pretty quiet right now. The redheads have been busy further west.” He pointed across the Twegen before continuing, “To them, we’re an afterthought. They’re really sweating about Swemmel’s men.”
“Afterthought, eh?” Ealstan bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “Let’s seem ‘em try moving men through Eoforwic and call us an afterthought.”
“Something to that,” Beortwulf agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below can eat Algarve and Unkerlant both.”
“Aye.” Ealstan nodded. “It’d make things a lot easier for Forthweg, that’s certain.”
Before Beortwulf could answer, a runner called Ealstan’s name. When he admitted to being in the neighborhood, the fellow said, “Come on with me. The big boss wants to have a chat with you.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Ealstan said. “Suppose I don’t feel like talking to him?” But he followed the man deeper into Eoforwic, to find out what Pybba had in mind. Whatever it
was, the Algarvians wouldn’t like it.
Pybba still worked out of the pottery, and ran the rebellion from there as he’d run the underground before seizing the chance to strike at Mezentio’s men. The Algarvians still hadn’t figured out who their chief tormentor was. Had they done so, eggs would surely have smashed Pybba’s establishment to potsherds.
“What now?” Ealstan asked when he came into Pybba’s sanctum. “Do you want me to cast accounts for you?”
“I’d ask you to if I didn’t have something better for you to do,” the pottery magnate replied with a laugh. He turned to the two Forthwegians already in the room with him and said, “Here’s the clever lad who figured out how to make us look like Algarvians when we need to.”
Both the other Forthwegians were in their mid-to late thirties: old men, Ealstan thought uncharitably. Then he took a second look at them and realized either one could tear him to pieces without breaking a sweat. He prudently kept his unkind thought to himself. Pybba’s pals were looking him over, too. One of them said, “I suppose he’ll have to come along, then. He looks like he might be able to cut it.”
“He’s already got himself an Algarvian stick,” the other noted, approval in his voice.
Ealstan refused to let himself be baited. He also refused to show undue curiosity, no matter what he felt. He just nodded to Pybba and said, “Tell me what you need me to do.”
Pybba nodded, too. So did the other two, unnamed, Forthwegians. The one who’d spoken first said, “Kid sounds like he’s got his head on straight. He may do.”
“He’s got gall,” Pybba said, high praise from him. He turned back to Ealstan. “The redheads are still hanging on to the royal palace and the ley-line caravan depot and one ley-line route through Eoforwic. That lets ‘em ship some men west, and it lets ‘em give us a hard time. If their military governor all of a sudden came down with a slight case of loss of life…”
“Ah.” Ealstan nodded again, doing his best to stay dispassionate. “You’ll have the right kind of Algarvian uniforms to let us get away with a masquerade?”
“Kid’s no dummy, sure enough,” one of the-assassins?-said to his comrade. The fellow suddenly switched to unaccented Algarvian: “You understand me, kid? Can you talk like this, too?”
“I understand,” Ealstan answered in the same language. “If I talk much, I give us away. I do not talk well.”
“Could be worse,” the other Forthwegian said. “All right, you’ll be junior to us. We’ll do the talking. At least you’ll know what’s going on. How long does your fancy spell hold?”
“Six or eight hours,” Ealstan said.
That seemed to please both of the men in the office with Pybba and him, and the pottery magnate as well. “Plenty of time,” Pybba said. “You can get into your new clothes just before sunup and sneak into Algarvian territory, do what you want to do, and then lie up somewhere till you can get back to our lines.”
“Why lie up?” Ealstan asked. “Why not hustle back to our lines?”
“Ha! You don’t think of everything after all,” one of the rough men said. “We hustle back looking like redheads, our fornicating pals’ll fornicating blaze us before we can tell ‘em who we are.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ealstan said. “I can turn us back as easy as I can make us look like Algarvians.” Everyone else beamed; maybe he hadn’t mentioned that part of the sorcery to Pybba before.
Before sunrise the next morning, Ealstan put on an Algarvian sergeant’s uniform, while his comrades-he still didn’t know their names-donned the clothes of a captain and a major. Ealstan had to fiddle with his cantrip a little to shift it from first person to third so it would work on the other two men. He cast it twice in quick succession, and the other two men took on the appearance of the enemy. Then he used the original version on himself. A grunt from one of the others told him it had worked; he couldn’t sense it on himself, any more than Vanai could tell that she looked like a Forthwegian after casting her own disguising spell.
“Good thing we saw you do that,” a Forthwegian fighter said, “or we’d kill you on the spot.” One of his pals nodded.
Ealstan was content to follow the older men’s lead as they sneaked out of the Forthwegian positions and toward the corridor through Eoforwic the Algarvians still held. As soon as they were on a street where redheads might see them, the two Forthwegians in officers’ clothing became Algarvians themselves, with what seemed a deeper magic than the one with which Ealstan had disguised them. It wasn’t just that they spoke the language. They imitated the strut and swagger that distinguished Mezentio’s men, imitated those things so well that it did not seem an imitation, but rather something real.
Ealstan had to work hard to imitate them. His own swagger seemed painfully artificial to him, but none of the real Algarvians pointed his way and shouted, “Impostor!” After a bit, he noticed that a lot of underofficers and troopers-not all of them, but a good many-were less flamboyant than their officers. Once he’d seen that, he stopped worrying so much about having to overact.
What amazed him as he pressed on toward the royal palace was how ordinary the Algarvians acted among themselves. He’d seen them up to now only as occupiers, harassing his fellow Forthwegians and doing worse than harassing the Kaunians of Forthweg. Now, though, even more than when he’d sneaked into the Kaunian quarter looking for Vanai, he might have been an Algarvian among Algarvians, which gave him a whole different perspective.
Among themselves, they were just people, going on about their business and laughing and joking as he might have done with his friends. No one is ever the villain in his own story, Ealstan reminded himself. It was a far cry from what he usually thought of the Algarvians, and far from the most comfortable notion he’d ever had.
If he hurried after the other two, he didn’t have to think. Redheaded guards in short tunics and kilts ringed the palace from which King Penda had once ruled Forthweg. The palace had suffered worse indignities than Algarvian guards, too. The Forthwegians had made a stand there when Unkerlant stabbed Ealstan’s kingdom in the back, and the Unkerlanters in their turn had tried and failed to keep the Algarvians from capturing it. Many of the towers famous throughout the kingdom had fallen in one fight or another. But the Algarvian banner still flew from a tall flagstaff in front of the palace, and an Algarvian military governor still ruled Forthweg for King Mezentio from inside it.
One after another, the guards stiffened to attention as Ealstan’s comrades and he went past them. No one barked a challenge. If they looked like Algarvians, they were assumed to be Algarvians. Ealstan had to fight down the urge to snicker. That might have given the game away.
“We have a situation report for the governor from the west,” said the Forthwegian who looked like an Algarvian major. He kept saying that, again and again; it was plenty to get him and his companion who was dressed like a captain and Ealstan with them whisked through the palace and toward the governor, their target. The speed with which it got them whisked through the palace again told Ealstan what the redheads truly reckoned important. The Forthwegian uprising in Eoforwic was a nuisance to Algarve; the endless grinding war against Unkerlant really mattered.
Ealstan had expected to see some of the magnificent trappings of the Forthwegian monarchy on display in the palace. He didn’t. Before long, he realized he’d been naive. What the Unkerlanters hadn’t stolen, the Algarvians surely had.
He was halfway through the throne room, in fact, before he recognized it for what it was. The throne remained, but only as a chair; all the gold leaf had been stripped off. He hadn’t even time to feel outrage. Before it could start to grow, he was pressing on toward the governor’s office, which had been the king’s.
Although the governor-a fat man with a duke’s silver dragon perched on the left breast of his uniform tunic-was talking with some other, lesser, official, he sent the man away at once, declaring, “The front comes first.” Ealstan understood him very clearly. When the other redhead went out, Ea
lstan shut the door behind him. The governor went on, “What is the latest, gentlemen? Will we be able to keep Swemmel’s men from crossing the Twegen and aiding these stinking Forthwegians?”
The two men dressed as officers led him toward a map. He paid no attention whatever to Ealstan. Why should a governor notice a sergeant? Ealstan unslung his stick. He had all the time in the world to blaze the Algarvian duke in the back of the head. The man crumpled without a sound.
“Good work,” the Forthwegian dressed as a major said. “Let’s get out of here.” Out they went, locking the door behind them. “His Grace is preparing a response for us,” the counterfeit major told the fellow who’d been conferring with the governor. “He’ll need a little while.” The genuine redhead nodded.
Ealstan and his comrades were out of the palace and in the back room of an abandoned house two blocks away when the hue and cry began. By then, he’d already turned the other two men who looked like Algarvians back into Forthwegians, and they’d pulled ordinary Forthwegian tunics from their packs and put them on. He gave himself his proper appearance, too. Leaving their sticks behind was a nuisance, but couldn’t be helped.
They went out onto the street once more without the slightest trace of fear. Ealstan felt like cutting capers. Mezentio’s men were looking for three of their own kind. They paid no attention to lowly unarmed Forthwegians, just as the governor had paid no attention to a lowly sergeant. Ealstan grinned and clapped his hands together once, liking the comparison very much.
For once, even Marquis Balastro’s bravado failed him when Hajjaj called on him at the Algarvian ministry in Bishah. The Zuwayzi foreign minister took that as a bad sign. Doing his best to conceal his worry, he said, “You are gracious for agreeing to see me on such short notice, your Excellency.”
“You are gracious for wanting to see me at all, your Excellency,” Balastro returned. “I am glad you do not find Algarve a sinking ship, to be abandoned as soon as possible.”
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