"Aye, Sergeant," Sidroc said dutifully. There were times when a common soldier could sa.s.s a sergeant, but this didn't feel like one of them.

And, however reluctant he was to admit it even to himself, he knew Werferth was right. The brigands in these parts were sneaky demons. They liked skulking through the woods best, but they'd come out and waylay soldiers in open country, too. Most marches were nothing but long, tedious bores. Terror punctuated the ones that weren't, with no telling when it might break out.

A couple of Unkerlanters--Grelzers, Sidroc supposed they were in this part of the kingdom--stood weeding in a field off to the side of the road. They straightened up and started for a moment at the troopers of Plegmund's Brigade. "Wh.o.r.esons," Sidroc muttered. "As soon as we've gone by, they'll find some way to let the bandits know."

"Maybe not," Werferth said, and Sidroc looked at him in surprise: the milk of human kindness had long since curdled in the sergeant. After a couple of strides, Werferth went on, "Maybe they're bandits themselves. In that case, they don't have to let anybody know."

"Oh." Sidroc trudged along for a couple of paces while he chewed on that. "Aye. How do we do anything about it? If we can't tell the brigands from the peasants who might be on our side, that makes things tougher."

Werferth's shrug had no Algarvian-style extravagance or mirth in it; all it said was that he either didn't know, didn't care, or both. "The way it looks to me is," he said, "we treat aem all like enemies. If we're wrong some of the time, so what? If we treat aem like our pals and they stab us in the back, then we've got real trouble."

Again, Sidroc kept marching while he thought. "Makes sense," he said at last. "They won't ever love us, most of'em. They're foreigners, after all."

Werferth laughed. "As far as they're concerned, we're the foreigners. But aye, that's about the size of it. If we keep aem afraid of us, they'll do what they're told, and that's about all anybody can hope for."

Birds chirped and trilled. Some of the songs were different from the ones Sidroc had heard up in Forthweg. He knew that much, though he would have been hard pressed to say anything more. Except for the most obvious ones like crows, he didn't know which birds went with which calls. Off in the distance, a dog barked, and then another. That meant something to him, though it wouldn't have before he came down to Grelz. "Sounds like a village up ahead," he remarked.

"Aye." Werferth nodded. "There's supposed to be one somewhere past that stand of trees there." His eyes narrowed. "I wonder if the brigands have a surprise waiting for us in those trees. Sort of thing they'd try."

"Do you want to go in there and try to flush them out?" Sidroc asked. A few weeks before, he would have sounded eager. Now he hoped Werferth would tell him no.

And Werferth did shake his head. "No way to guess how many of those b.u.g.g.e.rs might be hiding in there. No, what we'll do is, we'll swing wide through the fields--we won't stay on the road and give them a clean, easy blaze at us. There are ways to ask for trouble, you know what I mean?"

Before Sidroc could answer, a dark cloud covered the sun. More came drifting up from out of the west. "Looks like rain," he said. That sparked another thought in him: "I wonder what kind of mushrooms a good soaking rain'd bring out down here."

"If you don't know what they are, don't eat aem," Werferth advised. "You watch--some cursed lackwit's going to try something he's never seen before, and it'll kill him. Silly b.u.g.g.e.r'll get what he deserves, too, you ask me."

Up in Forthweg, people died every year from eating mushrooms they shouldn't have. Sidroc's att.i.tude was much like Werferth's: if they were stupid enough to do that, they had it coming to them. But in Forthweg, everybody was supposed to know what was good and what wasn't. How could you do that here? Sidroc figured he might take a chance or two. If the Unkerlanters couldn't kill him with sticks, odds were they couldn't kill him with mushrooms, either.

Big, fat raindrops started falling about the time the troopers from Plegmund's Brigade went off the road and into the fields. Sidroc pulled his hooded rain cape out of his pack and threw it on. The ground under his feet rapidly turned to mud. He didn't like squelching through it. But the raindrops also meant beams wouldn't carry so far, which would make any attack from the woods harder to bring off. Give a little, get a little, he thought.

No Unkerlanter hordes screaming "Urra!" burst from the trees. No devious Unkerlanter a.s.sa.s.sins skulked after Sidroc and his comrades, either. He couldn't prove a single irregular had been lurking in the forest. All the same, he was just as well pleased Werferth gave it a wide berth.

When he came back to the road--which had turned into mud even stickier than that in the fields--he could see the Unkerlanter village ahead. "Is that a friendly village?" he asked. Some few places in Grelz were conspicuously loyal to King Raniero. Even the Algarvians were supposed to leave them alone, though Algarvians, as far as Sidroc could tell, did pretty much as they pleased.

But Werferth shook his head. "No, we can plunder there to our hearts' content. They're fair game."

The villagers must have known they were fair game, too. Through the rain, Sidroc watched them fleeing at the first sight of the men from Plegmund's Brigade. "They don't trust us." He barked laughter. "I wonder why."

"We ought to see if we can catch a couple and find out why," Werferth said. But then he shrugged and shook his head. "Not much chance, is there? They've got too good a start on us."

Not everyone had fled, as the troopers discovered when they strode into the village. A handful of old men and women came out to greet them. One geezer, tottering along on a stick, even turned out to speak some Forthwegian. "I was in your kingdom on garrison duty twenty years before the start of the Six Years' War," he quavered.

"Bully for you, old-timer," Werferth said. "Where's the rest of the people who live here? Why'd they hightail it?"

He had to repeat himself; the old Unkerlanter was deaf as could be. At last, the fellow answered, "Well, you know how it is. People aren't friendly nowadays."

Looking at the wrinkled, toothless grannies who'd come out with their menfolk, Sidroc didn't much feel like being friendly to them. What went through his mind was, If I ever get that desperate, I think I'd sooner blaze myself Maybe Werferth's mind was traveling along the same ley line, for all he said us, "Give us food and spirits and we won't give you a hard time."

After the fellow who'd been in Forthweg translated that into Unkerlanter or Grelzer or whatever they spoke hereabouts, the old men and women hurried to obey. Black bread and pease porridge and smoked pork weren't very exciting, but they filled the belly. Instead of spirits, Sidroc drank ale. Like any proper Forthwegian, he would sooner have had wine, but the next vineyard he saw in this part of the world would be the first.

"King Raniero good, eh?" he asked the wizened old lady who fetched him his mug of ale. Good wasn't much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent.

But the old woman looked at him with beady eyes--one of them clouded by a cataract--and said something in her own language that, coupled with her outspread hands, had to mean she didn't understand him. Sidroc didn't believe her for a minute. She just didn't want to answer, which meant the answer she would have given was no.

Anger surged in Sidroc. He didn't have to take anything from these cursed Unkerlanters. If they'd been on his side, most of the people in this village wouldn't have lit out as soon as they found the men from Plegmund's Brigade were coming. "We ought to have some fun here," he said, a nasty sort of antic.i.p.ation in his voice.

One of his squadmates, the ruffian named Ceorl, spoke up: "Can't have as much fun as we might. Everything's too stinking wet to burn the way it should."

"We can always slap these b.u.g.g.e.rs around," Sidroc said. "Pity none of the younger women hung around. We'd have better sport then." n.o.body was inclined to say no to a man who carried a stick. Sidroc had watched Algarvian soldiers making free with Kaunian women--and with some Forthwegians, too--back in Gromheort. Now that he carried his own stick, he enjoyed imitating the redheads.

As he spoke, he eyed the old woman who'd brought him ale. She couldn't hide the fear on her face. Even if she wouldn't admit it, she understood some of what he and his pals were saying. As far as he was concerned, that was reason enough to slap her around ... in a little while. Till then, she could b.l.o.o.d.y well keep on serving him. He thrust the mug at her and growled, "More."

She understood that, all right. She hurried off to fill up the mug again. Sidroc poured the ale down his throat. No, it wasn't nearly as good as wine. But it would do. It put fire in his belly, and fire in his head, too.

He started yet another mug of ale, fully intending to start raising a ruckus when he finished that. He was just draining it, though, when a horseman came splashing up the villages main, and only, street. The fellow called out in unmistakable Forthwegian: "Ho, men of Plegmund's Brigade!"

Sergeant Werferth was the senior underofficer. He pulled his hood down low over his eyes, stepped out into the rain, and said, "We're here, all right. What's toward?"

"We're all ordered back to the encampment outside Herborn," the courier answered.

"Now there's a fine piece of b.l.o.o.d.y foolishness," Werferth said. "How are we supposed to hold down this stinking countryside if we sit in that cursed encampment with a thumb up our a.r.s.e?" Werferth liked fighting, all right.

But the courier gave a blunt, two-word reply: "We're not."

That brought not only Werferth but Sidroc and Ceorl and almost all the other troopers from Plegmund's Brigade out into the rain. "Then what in blazes will we be doing?" Sidroc demanded. Several other men threw out almost identical questions.

"We'll be getting on a ley-line caravan and heading south and west," the courier said. "If the lousy Grelzers want to go out and chase their own brigands, fine. If they don't, the powers below can eat aem up, for all we care from now on. They're sending us off to fight the real Unkerlanter armies, not these odds and sods who sneak through the woods."

"Ahh," Werferth said, a grunt of satisfaction that might almost have come from a man who'd just had a woman. "It won't get any better than that." He turned to his troopers. "The Algarvians have decided we're real soldiers after all."

"My a.r.s.e," Ceorl muttered to Sidroc. "The Algarvians have lost so many men of their own, they're throwing us into the fire to see if we can put it out."

Sidroc shrugged. "Anybody wants to kill me, he won't have an easy time of it," he said. Werferth nodded and slapped him on the back. Rainwater sprayed off his cape.

Captain Grada.s.so bowed to Krasta. "An you be fain to closet yourself with Colonel Lurcanio, milady, I am to tell you he hath gone forth into Priekule, but his return is expected ere eventide."

Krasta giggled. "You talk so funny!" she exclaimed. "It's not quite cla.s.sical Kaunian anymore, but it's not really Valmieran, either. It's a mishmash, that's what it is."

Lurcanio's new aide shrugged. "Bit by bit, I come to apprehend somewhat of the modern speech. Though my locutions be yet archaic, I find also that I make shift for to be understood. An my apprehension gaineth apace, ere o'er-much time elapseth I shall make of myself a fair scholar of Valmieran."

"Don't hold your breath," Krasta advised him, an idiom which, perhaps fortunately, he didn't catch. Her expression sharpened. "What's Lurcanio doing in Priekule?"

Captain Grada.s.so shrugged again. "Whatsoever it be, I am not privy to't."

"Privy to it?" That set Krasta giggling once more. Her mirth puzzled Grada.s.so. She didn't feel like explaining, and took herself off. When she looked back over her shoulder, Grada.s.so was staring after her, scratching his head. "Privy to it!" she repeated, and dissolved into still more giggles. "Oh, dear!"

The Algarvians who helped Lurcanio administer Priekule all eyed Krasta curiously as she threaded her way back past their desks. They often saw her angry, sometimes conspiratorial, but hardly ever amused. Some of them, the bolder ones, smiled and winked at her as she went by.

She ignored them. They were small fry, not even worthy of her contempt unless they let their hands get bolder than their faces. And her giggles soon subsided. When she thought of the privy, she thought of disposing of the pieces into which she'd torn the broadsheet her brother had written.

Skarnu's alive, she thought, and shook her head in slow wonder. She still didn't know who'd sent her the broadsheet or where it had come from, but she couldn't have been wrong about her brother's script.

As she went upstairs to her bedchamber, something new occurred to her. Some while before, Lurcanio had asked her about some provincial town or other. She frowned, trying to remember the name. It wouldn't come. She kicked at a stair. But her Algarvian lover--her Algarvian keeper--had seemed to think this town, whatever its name was, had something to do with Skarnu.

She couldn't ask Lurcanio about it, not if he was out. How inconsiderate of him, she thought. Then she realized she couldn't ask him about it even after he got back. He had a cursedly suspicious mind and a cursedly retentive memory. He would still know the name of that miserable little town, and he was all too likely to figure out why she'd started asking questions about it. No, she would have to stay silent.

"Curse him!" she snarled, an imprecation aimed mostly at Lurcanio but also at her brother. For Krasta, staying silent was an act far more unnatural than any Lurcanio enjoyed in the bedchamber. Probably even more unnatural than anything Valnu enjoys in the bedchamber, Krasta thought. That was enough to set her giggling again. She never had found out what all Valnu enjoyed in the bedchamber. One of these days, she told herself. Aye, one of these days when Lurcanio infuriates me again. That shouldnat be too long.

She'd just reached the upper floor when Malya started howling. Krasta set her teeth. Bauska's b.a.s.t.a.r.d brat wasn't quite so annoying these days as she had been right after she was born, when she'd screeched all the time. She didn't look so ugly, either; when she smiled, even Krasta found herself smiling back. But that didn't mean she wasn't a nuisance.

And now Krasta smiled, too, though she couldn't see the baby. "Bauska! Bauska, what are you doing? Come here at once," she called, as if she couldn't hear Malya crying, either. Her servant might had had the little squalling pest, but Krasta was cursed if she would let that inconvenience her. "Bauska!"

"I'll be with you in a moment, milady." Bauska sounded as if she were forcing the words out through clenched teeth. Krasta's smile got wider. Sure enough, she'd hit a nerve.

"Hurry up," she said. No, she wouldn't make things easy for her maidservant. And here came Bauska, her tunic sleeves rolled up, her expression put upon. But when Krasta got a look at--and a whiff of--Bauska's hands, her smile evaporated. "Powers above, go wash off that filth!"

"You did tell me to hurry, milady," Bauska answered. "I always try to give satisfaction in every way."

By the look in her eye, she thought she'd won the round. But Krasta wasn't easily bested. "If you hadn't given Captain Mosco every satisfaction, your hands wouldn't stink now," she snapped.

Bauska looked as if she were on the point of saying something more, something that likely would have landed her in real trouble with her mistress. And then, very visibly, she bit it back. After a deep breath, she asked, "How may I serve you, milady?"

Krasta hadn't even thought about that. She'd called her maidservant to be annoying, not because she wanted anything in particular. She had to cast about for something Bauska might do. At last, she came up with something familiar: "Go down and tell the stablemen and the driver to get my carriage ready. I intend to do some shopping today."

"Aye, milady," Bauska said. "Have I your gracious leave to wash my hands first?"

"I already told you to do that," Krasta said with the air of one conferring a large, undeserved boon. Bauska departed. Not until she was gone did Krasta wonder if she'd been sarcastic. The marchioness shook her head. Bauska wouldn't dare: she was convinced of it.

She hadn't really planned to go into Priekule, but the thought of a day spent on the Avenue of Equestrians, the princ.i.p.al street of shops and fine eateries, was too tempting to resist. Downstairs she went, and stood around fuming till the driver brought the carriage out of the stable. When she decided to do something, she always wanted to do it on the instant.

But even going into town didn't make her so happy as it would have in the days before the war. Though she was sleeping with an Algarvian colonel, she didn't like seeing kilted Algarvian soldiers on the streets, gaping like so many farmers at the sights of the big city or cuddling yellow-haired Valmieran women. The Algarvians had even presumed to put up street signs in their language to direct the soldiers to the princ.i.p.al sights. It was as if they thought Priekule would be theirs forever--and so, by all indications they did.

Krasta also scowled every time she saw a Valmieran, whether man or woman, in a kilt. In a way, that struck her as even worse than going to bed with the redheads: it abandoned the very essence of Kaunianity. She hadn't worried about such things till she recognized her brother's handwriting on that broadsheet. If Skarnu worried about them, she supposed she should, too.

But, set against the display windows of the Avenue of Equestrians, Kaunianity didn't seem so important. "Let me off here," she told her driver.

"Aye, milady." He reined in. After he handed Krasta down from the carriage, he climbed back into his seat and took a flask from his pocket. Krasta hardly noticed. She'd already begun exploring.

Not only did she examine the display windows, she also poked her nose into every eatery on the Avenue of Equestrians. Captain Grada.s.so had said Lurcanio was here somewhere. If he wasn't with his countrymen but with some little blond tart, Krasta would make sure he remembered it for a long time to come.

If he was with some little blond tart, he was more likely to be in a hostel bedchamber than in an eatery: Krasta recognized as much. But she couldn't check bedchambers, while eateries were easy. And Lurcanio liked fancy dining. He might want to impress a new Valmieran girl--or fatten her up--before he took her to bed.

"Why, h.e.l.lo, you sweet thing!" That wasn't Lurcanio--it was Viscount Valnu, who sat not far from the door of the fourth or fifth eatery into which Krasta peered. He sprang to his feet so he could bow. "Come on down and take lunch with me."

"All right," Krasta said. And if she and Valnu happened to end up in a hostel bedchamber--well, it wouldn't be anything that hadn't almost happened before. Swinging her hips, she walked downstairs and sat beside him. "What are you eating there?"

"Boiled pork and sour cabbage," he answered, and then eyed her. "Why? What would you like me to be eating?"

"You are a shameless man," she said. She eyed him, too, but just then a waiter came up and asked what she wanted. She ordered the same thing Valnu was having, and ale to go with it.

"You're looking lovely today," Valnu said with another carnivorous smile.

"I'm sure you say that to all the girls," Krasta told him, which only made him grin and nod in delight. She didn't want him to take anything for granted, and so, with a spark of malice, she added, "And to at least half the boys, as well."

"What if I do?" Valnu answered with an expressive shrug. "Variety is the life of spice--isn't that what they say?" He gave her a limp-wristed wave and some malice of his own: "I wouldn't say it to your precious Lurcanio, I'll tell you that."

Where Krasta had been intent on cuckolding her Algarvian lover, now she found herself defending him: "He knows what he's doing, as a matter of fact."

"What if he does?" Valnu shrugged again, almost as an Algarvian might have done. And he was wearing a kilt--Krasta had noticed when he rose to greet her. Pointing to her, he went on, "But do you know what you're doing?"

"Of course I do." Doubt was not among the things that troubled Krasta. Again, she might have said more without the waiter's interruption, but he distracted her by setting the ale on the table.

"Aye, you always know." Valnu's smile, instead of being hard as it had been a moment before, seemed strange and sweet, almost sad. "You're always so sure--but how much good does that do you, with the avalanche thundering down on all of us?"

"Now what are you talking about?" Krasta asked impatiently. "Avalanches! There aren't any mountains around Priekule."

Viscount Valnu sighed. "No, not literally. But you know what's happening to us." Seeing Krasta's blank look, he amplified that: "To our people, I mean. I know you know about that." He studied her.

She didn't think to wonder how he knew. "It's pretty bad," she agreed. "But it's worse over in the west--and won't it get better if the miserable war ever ends?"

"That depends on how the war ends," Valnu replied, a distinction too subtle to mean much to Krasta. The waiter set her plate of pork and cabbage in front of her. "Put it on my bill," Valnu said as she dug in.

"You don't need to do that," Krasta said. "I outrank you, after all."

"n.o.bility obliges," Valnu said lightly. He regained his leer. "And how obliging do you feel like being?"

"Are you an Algarvian officer, to think you can buy me with a lunch?" Krasta retorted. They flirted through the meal, but she didn't go to a hostel with him. Mentioning Algarvian officers made her think of Lurcanio again, and she found she simply did not have the nerve to be deliberately unfaithful to him. Someone will have to sweep me off my feet, she thought, and wondered how she could arrange that.

Thirteen.

Skarnu enjoyed going into Pavilosta with Merkela. In his days in Priekule, he'd scorned such little market towns like any city sophisticate. Had he stayed in Priekule, he was sure he would have gone right on scorning them. After some weeks on a farm out in the countryside, though, Pavilosta's few bright lights--taverns, shops, gossip in the market square--seemed to shine all the brighter.

To Merkela, Pavilosta was the big city, or as much of it as she'd ever known. "Look--the ironmonger's has some new tools in the front window," she said. She was familiar enough with what he usually displayed to recognize the additions at once.

Since Skarnu wasn't, he just nodded to show he'd heard. A couple of doors past the ironmonger's was a cordwainer's, but no new boots stood in his window. Nothing at all stood in his window, in fact. But three words had been whitewashed across it, with savage strokes of the brush: NIGHT AND FOG.

"Oh, a pox," Skarnu said softly.

"Aye, curse the Algarvians for taking him off and--" Merkela paused. She glanced over to Skarnu. "It's worse than that, isn't it?"