“That’s not in our orders,” one of his comrades said.

  “Getting myself killed for no good reason isn’t in my orders, either,” Talsu retorted.

  In the end, a couple of platoons did sweep the mountainside. Talsu made sure he got part of that duty, thinking, If you want something done right, do it yourself. But he soon discovered even the whole regiment couldn’t have done the job right, not without working on it for a week. Near the valley floor, the mountainsides were covered with scrubby bushes. He might have walked past an Algarvian company and never known it. Farther up, tumbled rocks offered concealment almost equally good. The sweep found no one, but none of the Jelgavans—save possibly their captain, a pompous marquis—had any illusions about what that proved.

  When Talsu got back to the village, he set out his bedroll as far from the handful of buildings as he could. He noted that Smilsu was doing the same thing not far away. The two men shared a wry look, shook their heads, and went on about the business of getting ready for the night.

  Talsu woke up at every small noise, grabbing for his stick. No soldier who wanted to live to get old could afford to be a heavy sleeper. But he did not wake for the egg flying past till it slammed into the farming village. Three more followed in quick succession: not big, heavy, immensely potent ones, but the sort a crew might hurl with a light tosser a couple of men could break out and carry in and out with them on their backs.

  They knocked down three houses and set several others afire. Talsu and his company went out into the fields to keep the Algarvians from getting close enough to blaze at their comrades, who labored to rescue the men trapped in the building the egg had wrecked. Looking back, Talsu saw the house Colonel Dzirnavu had taken as his own now burning merrily. He wondered whether or not he should hope the illustrious colonel had escaped.

  Leofsig trudged east along a dirt road in northern Algarve, in the direction of the town of Gozzo. That was what his officers said, at any rate, and he was willing to take their word for it. The countryside looked much as it did back in Forthweg: ripening wheatfields, groves of almonds and olives and oranges and limes, villages full of houses built from whitewashed sun-dried brick with red tile roofs.

  But the stench of war was in his nostrils, as it had not been around Gromheort. Smoke blew in little thin wisps, like dying fog: some of the wheatfields behind him were no longer worth admiring. And dead horses and cows and unicorns lay bloating by the roadside and scattered through the fields, adding their sickly-sweet reek to the sour sharpness of the smoke. Forthwegians and Algarvians lay bloating in the fields and by the roadside, too. Leofsig did his best not to think about that.

  When he’d found himself included in King Penda’s levy, he’d been proud, eager, to serve the king and the kingdom. Ealstan, his little brother, had been sick with jealousy at being too young to go off and smash the Algarvians himself. Having seen what went into smashing a foe—and how the foe could smash back—Leofsig would have been just as well pleased to return to Gromheort and help his father cast accounts the rest of his days.

  What would please a soldier and what he got were not one and the same.

  A trooper mounted on a brown-painted unicorn came trotting back toward the column of which Leofsig was a tiny part. He pointed over his shoulder, gesturing and shouting something Leofsig couldn’t understand. The gestures were plain enough, though. Turning to the soldier on his left, Leofsig said, “Looks like the Algarvians are going to try to hold us in front of Gozzo.”

  “Aye, so it does,” answered his squadmate, whose name was Beocca. Leofsig envied him his fine, thick beard. His own still had almost hairless patches on his cheeks and under his lower lip. When Beocca scratched his chin, as he did now, the hairs rustled under his fingers. “We’ve pushed ‘em back before—otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. We can do it again.”

  Before long, officers started shouting orders. The column deployed into skirmish lines. Along with his comrades, Leofsig tramped through the fields instead of between them. The grain went down under the feet of thousands of men almost as if cut by a reaper.

  “One way or another, we’ll make the redheads go hungry,” Beocca said, stamping down the ripening grain with great relish. Leofsig, sweating in the hot sun, hadn’t the energy to stamp. He just nodded and kept marching.

  More shouts produced lanes between blocks of men. Unicorn and horse cavalry trotted forward to screen the footsoldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting. Forthwegian dragons flew overhead, some so high as to be only specks, others low enough to let Leofsig hear their shrill screeches.

  “I hope they drop plenty of eggs on Gozzo,” Beocca said.

  “I hope they keep the Algarvians from dropping eggs on us,” Leofsig added. After a moment, Beocca grunted agreement.

  As the Forthwegians drew nearer to Gozzo, Leofsig kept cocking his head and looking up into the sky every so often. Even so, he was cautiously skirting a hedgerow when the Algarvian dragons came racing out of the east to challenge those of his kingdom.

  The first he knew of the battle overhead was when a dragon fell out of the sky and smashed to earth a hundred yards or so in front of him. The great beast writhed in its death agony, throwing now its silvered belly, now its back—painted Forthwegian blue and white—uppermost. Its flier lay motionless, a small, crumpled heap, a few feet away. Flame spurted from the dragon’s jaw, cremating the man who had taken it into action.

  Leofsig looked up again: looked up and gasped in horror. He had seen very few Algarvian dragons till now. That had led him to believe the enemy had very few, or very few they could commit against the Forthwegians, at any rate. Since they were also fighting Jelgava and Valmiera and Sibiu, that made sense to him.

  It might have made sense, but it proved untrue. Suddenly, two or three times the Forthwegians’ numbers beset them. Dragons tumbled to earth, burned or even clawed by their foes. Most were marked in blue and white, not Algarvian green, red, and white. Other dragons, their fliers killed by an enemy’s stick, either flew off at random or, mad with battle, struck out at friends and foes alike.

  In what seemed the twinkling of an eye, the Forthwegian dragon-swarm was shattered. The remnant not sent spinning to their doom or flying wild without a man to guide them fled back toward Forthweg. They might fight another day. Against overwhelming odds, they would not fight above this field. Inside half an hour, Algarve, not Forthweg, ruled the skies.

  Beocca made a rumbling noise, deep in his throat. “Now we’re in for it,” he said. Leofsig could only nod. The same thought, in the same words, had gone through his mind, too.

  Most of the dragons that had driven off the Forthwegian swarm had flown without eggs, making them faster and more maneuverable in the air. Now still more flew in from the direction of Gozzo. Some of their fliers released their eggs from on high, as was the usual Forthwegian practice—the usual practice everywhere, so far as Leofsig knew.

  But the enemy, with Algarvian panache, had also found a new way. Some of the Algarvian fliers made their dragons stoop on the Forthwegian forces below like a falcon stooping on a mouse. They loosed the eggs the dragons carried at what seemed hardly more than treetop height, then pulled out of their dives and flew away, no doubt laughing at their foes’ discomfiture.

  One of them, off to Leofsig’s right, misjudged his dive and smashed into the ground. The egg he carried erupted, searing flier and dragon both in its burst of flame. “Serves you right!” Leofsig shouted, though the flier was far beyond hearing. But the Algarvian’s swooping comrades kept on, placing their eggs far more precisely than did those who did not dive; they tore terrible holes in the Forthwegians’ ranks.

  “Forward!” an officer shouted. Leofsig heard him through stunned and battered ears. “We must go forward, for the honor of King Penda and of Forthweg!”

  Forward Leofsig stumbled. Around him, men raised a cheer. After a moment, he joined it. Turning to Beocca, he said, “Once we close with the Algarvians, we’ll crush them.”

  “Aye, belike,” Beocca answered, “if there are any of us left to do the closing.”

  As if to underscore that, more eggs started falling among the advancing Forthwegians. Not all of them—not even most of them—came from the dragons overhead. The army had come into range of the egg-tossers outside Gozzo. Dragons carried larger eggs than the tossers flung, but could not carry nearly so many; Leofsig, head down and hunched forward as if walking into a windstorm, trudged past a broken-backed unicorn, one side of its body all over burns, that dragged itself along on its forelegs and screamed like a woman.

  Forthwegian egg-tossers answered the rain of fire as best they could. But they’d had trouble keeping up with the rest of the army: horse-drawn wheeled tossers clogged roads and moved slowly going crosscountry, while the retreating Algarvians had sabotaged ley lines as they fell back. Forthwegian mages had reenergized some, but far from all. And, to make matters worse, the diving dragons paid special attention to the egg-tossers that were on the field.

  Up ahead, Forthwegian cavalry was skirmishing with Algarvian troopers on horses and unicorns. Leofsig cheered when a Forthwegian officer’s white unicorn gored an enemy horseman out of the saddle. He squatted down behind a bush and blazed at the Algarvian cavalry. The range was long, and he could not be sure his was the beam that did the job, but he thought he knocked a couple of redheads out of the saddle.

  And then, when he blazed, no beam shot from the business end of the stick. He looked around for a supply cart, spied none, and then looked around for a casualty. On this field, casualties were all too easy to find. Leofsig scurried over to a Forthwegian who would never need his stick again. He snatched up the stick and dashed back to cover. An Algarvian beam drew a brown line in the grass ahead of him, but did not sear his flesh.

  As more Forthwegian footsoldiers came forward to add their numbers to those of the cavalry, the Algarvian horsemen and unicorn riders began to fall back. Leofsig grunted in somber satisfaction as he advanced toward a large grove of orange trees. This skirmish, though bigger than most, fit the pattern of the fights that had followed Forthweg’s invasion of Algarve. The Algarvians might have won the battle in the air, but they kept on yielding ground even so.

  Under the shiny, dark green leaves of the orange trees, something stirred. Leofsig was too far away to blaze at the motion, too far away even to identify what caused it till a great force of behemoths came lumbering out of the grove. Their armor glittered in the sun. Each great beast bore several riders. Some behemoths had sticks larger and heavier and stronger than a man could carry strapped on to their backs. Others carried egg-tossers instead.

  Forthweg used behemoths to help break into positions infantry could not take unaided, parceling the animals out along the whole broad fighting line. Leofsig had never seen so many all gathered together before. He did not like the look of them. He liked that look even less when they lowered their heads, pointing their great horns toward the Forthwegian force, and lumbered forward. They moved slowly at first, but soon built up speed.

  They smashed through the Forthwegian cavalry as if it hadn’t been there, trampling down horses and unicorns. As they charged, the crews of soldiers on their backs blazed and flung eggs, spreading havoc far and wide. The behemoths were hard to bring down. Their armor warded them against most blazes, and, while they -were moving, the men on their backs—who, Leofsig saw, were also armored—were next to impossible to pick off.

  The cavalry, or as much of it as could, fled before them, as the Forthwegian dragons had fled before those of Algarve. The Algarvian dragons now redoubled their attacks against the Forthwegians on the ground as the behemoths broke in among them. Leofsig blazed at the warriors aboard the closest one—blazed and missed. An egg burst close by him, knocking him off his feet and scraping his face against the dirt.

  He scrambled up again. Algarvian footsoldiers were advancing now, rushing toward the great hole the behemoths had torn in the Forthwegian line. He saw an officer close by—not a man he knew, but an officer. “What do we do, sir?”

  “What do we do?” the captain echoed. He looked and sounded stunned, bewildered. “We fall back—what else can we do? They’ve beaten us here, the bastards. We have to be able to try to fight them again, though how we’re supposed to fight this—” Shaking his head, he stumbled off toward the west, toward Forthweg. Numbly, Leofsig followed.

  Without false modesty, Marshal Rathar knew he was the second most powerful personage in Unkerlant. None of the dukes and barons and counts could come close to matching the authority of the man who headed King Swemmel’s armies. None of the courtiers at Cottbus was his equal, either, and none of them had made the king believe Rathar a traitor, though many had tried.

  Aye, below Swemmel he was supreme. Envy filled men’s eyes as he marched through the fortresslike palace on the high ground at the heart of the capital. The green sash stretching diagonally across his rock-gray tunic proclaimed his rank to any who did not recognize his hard, stern features. Women the world called beautiful called those features handsome. He could have had many of them, including some whose courtier husbands sought to bring him down. Had he been able to judge with certainty which of them wanted him for himself, as opposed to for his rank, he might have enjoyed himself more.

  Or he might not have. Enjoyment, as most men understood it, he did not find particularly enjoyable. And he knew a secret no one else did, though some of his own chief underlings and some of King Swemmel’s other ministers might have suspected. He could have told the secret without danger. But he knew no one would believe him, and so kept silent. Silence suited his nature anyhow.

  Before he went in to confer with his sovereign, he unbuckled his sword and set it in a rack in the anteroom outside the audience chamber. King Swemmel’s guards then searched him, as thoroughly and intimately as if he’d been taken captive. Had he been a woman, matrons would have done the same.

  He felt no humiliation. The guards were doing their duty. He would have been angry—and King Swemmel angrier—had they let him go through unchallenged. “Pass on, sir,” one of them said at length.

  Rathar spent another moment adjusting his tunic, then strode into the audience chamber. In the presence of the king of Unkerlant, his stern reserve crumbled. “Your Majesty!” he cried. “I rejoice to be allowed to come into your presence!” He cast himself down on his hands and knees, knocking his forehead against the strip of green carpet that led to the throne on which King Swemmel sat.

  Any chair on which Swemmel sat was by definition a throne, since it contained the king’s fundament. This one, while gilded, was far less spectacular than the bejeweled magnificence of the one of the Grand Hall of Kings (Rathar reckoned that one insufferably gaudy, another secret he held close).

  “Rise, Marshal,” Swemmel said. His voice was rather high and thin. Rathar got to his feet and honored the king yet again, this time with a low bow. Swemmel was in his late forties, a few years younger than his marshal. For an Unkerlanter’s, his features were long and lean and angular; his hairline, which retreated toward the crown of his head, accentuated that impression.

  What hair he had left was dark—these days, probably dyed to stay so. But for that, he looked more like an Algarvian than a typical Unkerlanter. The first kings in Unkerlant, down in what was now the Duchy of Grelz, had been of Algarvic blood. Algarvic bandits, most likely, the marshal thought. But those dynasties were long extinct, often at one another’s hands. And Swemmel was an Unkerlanter through and through—he just didn’t look like one.

  Rathar shook his head, clearing away irrelevancies. He couldn’t afford them, not dealing with his sovereign. “How may I serve you, your Majesty?” he asked.

  Swemmel folded his arms across his chest. His robe was gorgeous with cloth-of-gold. Pearls and emeralds and rubies caught the light and winked at Rathar one after another as the king moved. “You know we have concluded a truce with Arpad of Gyongyos,” Swemmel said. The we was purely royal—the king had done it on his own.

  “Aye, your Majesty, I know that,” Rathar said. Swemmel had fought a savage little war with the Gongs over territory that, in the marshal’s view, wasn’t worth having in the first place. He’d fought it with great determination, as if the rocks and ice in the far west, land only a mountain ape could love, were stuffed to bursting with rich farms and quicksilver mines. And then, after all the lives and treasure spent, he’d thrown over the war with no gains to speak of. Swemmel was a law unto himself.

  He said, “We have found another employment for our soldiers, one that suits us better.”

  “And that is, your Majesty?” Rathar asked cautiously. It might have been anything from starting another war to helping with the harvest to gathering seashells by the shore. With Swemmel, there was no way to tell beforehand.

  “Gyongyos is far from the only realm that wronged us during our recent difficulties,” Swemmel said, adding with a scowl, “Had the nursemaids been efficient, Kyot would have known from birth we were the one destined for greatness. His destiny would have been the headsman’s axe either way, but he would have spared the kingdom much turmoil had he recognized it sooner.”

  “Aye, your Majesty,” Rathar said. He had no way of knowing whether Swemmel or Kyot was the elder of the twins born to their mother. He’d joined the one army rather than the other because Swemmel’s impressers passed through his village before Kyot’s could get to it. He’d been an officer within months, and a colonel by the time the Twinkings War ended.

  What would he be now, had Kyot dragged him into the fight instead? Dead, most likely, in one unpleasant way or another.

  Again, he cleared might-have-beens from his mind. Dealing with what was gave him trouble aplenty. “Is it now your will, your Majesty, to turn our might against Zuwayza? The provocations along the border they have offered”—he knew perfectly well that Unkerlant had offered them, but saying so was not done—“give us every reason for punishing them, and—”