Before answering, Rathar reviewed in his mind the man he was likeliest to use. “Not so many ley lines leading up toward Zuwayza as we would like, your Majesty,” he said. “Not many through the desert leading toward Bishah, either. If we hadn’t already established supply caches up there, we’d be a good while preparing. As things are … We can move in three weeks, I would say.” In practice, it would take rather longer, as such things had a way of doing, but he was sure he would be able to keep King Swemmel from actually ordering the assault till everything was ready.

  But, as he’d thought only a few minutes before, you never could tell with Swemmel. The king screwed up his face till he looked like an infant about to throw a tantrum. “We cannot wait that long!” he shouted. “We will not wait that long! We have been waiting for twenty years!”

  Rathar spoke in what he thought to be the voice of reason: “If you have been waiting so long, your Majesty, would you not be wise in waiting just a little longer, to make sure everything goes forward as it should?”

  “If you show yourself a disobedient servant, Marshal, we shall find another to wield the righteous sword of Unkerlant,” Swemmel said in a deadly voice. “It is our will that our army redeem the land the Zuwayzin stole from us beginning no later than ten days hence.”

  If someone else suddenly became Marshal of Unkerlant, he would make a worse hash of the war against Zuwayza, and of any later wars, than Rathar would himself. Rathar knew the men likeliest to replace him if he fell, and knew without false modesty that he was abler than any of them. Not only that, but he had his hands on the reins and knew exactly how to guide the horse. Anyone else would need a while to figure out how to do whatever needed doing.

  All that went through Rathar’s mind before he worried about his own extinction. He was not sure his wife would miss him; they spent little time together these days. His oldest son was a junior officer. His fall would injure the lad’s career—or Swemmel might decide to destroy the whole family, to make sure no trouble arose later.

  Steadily, even stolidly, Rathar asked, “Would you throw away twenty years of waiting, your Majesty, because you cannot bear to wait twenty days?”

  Swemmel’s chin was hardly the more prepossessing Rathar had ever seen. Nonetheless, the king stuck it out. “We shall not wait even an instant longer. Will you or will you not launch the assault in ten days’ time, Marshal?”

  “If we strike too soon, without all our regiments in their proper places, the Zuwayzin will be far better able to resist,” Rathar said.

  King Swemmel’s eyes bored into his. Rathar dropped his own eyes, staring down at the green carpet on which he stood. Nevertheless, he felt the king’s gaze like a physical weight, a heavy, heavy weight. Swemmel said, “We would not have so much patience with many men, Marshal. Do you obey us?”

  “Your Majesty, I obey you,” Rathar said. Obeying Swemmel would cost lives. Odds were, it would cost lives by the thousands. Unkerlant had lives to spend. Zuwayza did not. It was as simple as that. And with Rathar in command, the king’s willfulness would not cost so many lives as it would under some other commander. So he told himself, at any rate, salving his conscience as best he could.

  When he looked up at Swemmel again, the king was relaxed, or as relaxed as his tightly wound spirit ever let him be. “Go, then,” he said. “Go and ready the army, to hurl it against the Zuwayzin at our command. We shall publish to the world the indignities Shazli and his burnt-skinned, naked minions have committed against our kingdom. No one will lift a finger to aid them.”

  “I should think not,” Rathar said. With the rest of the world embroiled in war, who would even grieve over one small, distant kingdom?

  “Go, then,” Swemmel repeated. “You have shown yourself to be a good leader of men, Marshal, and the armies you commanded did all we expected and all we had hoped in taking back Forthweg. Otherwise, your insolence here would not go unpunished. Next time, regardless of circumstances, it shall not go unpunished. Do you understand?”

  “I am your servant, your Majesty,” Rathar said, bowing low. “You have commanded; I shall obey. All I wanted was to be certain you fully grasped the choice you are making.”

  “Every man, woman, and child in Unkerlant is our servant,” King Swemmel said indifferently. “A marshal’s blade makes you no different from the rest. And we make our own choices for our own reasons. We need no one to confuse our mind, especially when we did not seek your views on this matter. Do you understand that?”

  “Aye, your Majesty.” Rathar’s face showed nothing of what he thought. So far as he could, his face showed nothing at all. Around King Swemmel, that was safest.

  “Then get out!” Swemmel shouted.

  Rathar prostrated himself again. When he rose to retreat from the king’s chamber, he did so without turning around, lest his back offend his sovereign. In the antechamber, he buckled on his ceremonial sword once more. A guard matter-of-factly got between him and the doorway through which he’d come, to make sure he could not attack the king. Sometimes the idea was tempting, though Rathar did not let his face show that, either.

  He went off to do his best to get the army ready to invade Zuwayza at King Swemmel’s impossible deadline. His aides exclaimed in dismay. Normally as calm a man as any ever born, Rathar screamed at them. After his audience with Swemmel, that made him feel a little better, but not much.

  Tealdo liked being stationed in the Duchy of Bari just fine, even if, as a man from the north, he found oncoming autumn in this part of Algarve on the chilly side. The folk of the Duchy remained thrilled to be united with their countrymen, from whom old Duke Alardo had done his best to sunder them. And a gratifying number of girls in the Duchy remained thrilled to unite with Algarvian soldiers.

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Tealdo’s friend Trasone said when he remarked on that. “It’s their patriotic duty, isn’t it?”

  “If I ever told a wench it was her patriotic duty to lay me, she’d figure it was her patriotic duty to smack me in the head,” Tealdo said, which made Trasone laugh. Tealdo went on, “The other thing I like about being here is that I’m not blazing away at the Valmierans or the Jelgavans—and they’re not blazing away at me.”

  Trasone laughed again, a big bass rumble that suited his burly frame. “Well, I won’t argue with that. Powers above, I can’t argue with that. But sooner or later we’ll have to do some blazing, and when we do it’s liable to be worse than facing either one of the stinking Kaunian kingdoms.”

  “Sooner or later will take care of itself,” Tealdo said. “For now, nobody’s blazing at me, and that’s just fine.”

  He strode out of the barracks, which were made of pine timber so new, they still smelled strongly of resinous sap. Off in the distance, waves from the Narrow Sea slapped against the stone breakwater that shielded the harbor of Imola from winter storms. Endless streams of birds flew past overhead, all of them going north. Already they were fleeing the brief summer of the land of the Ice People. Soon, very soon, they would be fleeing the Duchy of Bari, too, bound for warmer climes. Some would stop in northern Algarve and Jelgava; some would cross the Garelian Ocean and winter in tropic Siaulia, which hardly knew the meaning of the word.

  Above the twittering flocks, dragons whirled in lazy—no, in lazy-looking—circles. Tealdo looked south, toward the sea and toward Sibiu. More dragons circled over the sea. Tealdo resented the dragonfliers less than he had when he was marching into the Duchy. They kept the Sibs from dropping eggs on his head. He heartily approved of that. They also kept the enemy’s dragons from peering down on him and his comrades. He approved of that, too.

  A trumpeter on the parade ground in front of the barracks blew a sprightly flourish: the call to assembly. Tealdo dashed for his place. Behind him, men poured from the barracks as if from a bawdy house the constables were raiding. He took his assigned place in the ranks of the regiment ahead of almost everyone else. That gave him half a minute to brush a few specks of dust from his kilt, to slide his boots along his socks, and to adjust his broad-brimmed hat to the proper jaunty angle before Sergeant Panfilo started prowling.

  Prowl Panfilo did. He favored Tealdo with a glare sergeants surely had to practice in front of a reflecting glass. Tealdo looked back imperturbably. Panfilo reached out and slapped away some dust he’d missed—or perhaps slapped at nothing at all, to keep Tealdo from thinking he had the world by the tail. Sergeants did things like that.

  “King Mezentio doesn’t want slobs in his army,” Panfilo growled.

  “Told you so himself, did he?” Tealdo asked innocently.

  But Panfilo got the last word: “That he did, in his regulations, and I’ll thank you to remember it.” He stalked off to make some other common soldier’s life less joyous than it had been.

  Colonel Ombruno swaggered out to the front of the regiment. “Well, my pirates, my cutthroats, my old-fashioned robbers and burglars,” he called with a grin, “how wags your world today?”

  “We are well, sir,” Tealdo shouted along with the rest of the men.

  “Diddling enough of the pretty girls around these parts?” Ombruno asked.

  “Aye!” the men shouted, Tealdo again loud among them. He knew Ombruno chased—and caught—the Barian women as frequently as he had farther north in Algarve.

  “That’s good; that’s good.” The regimental commander rocked back on his heels, then forward once more. “No diddling for now, though, except that we’re going to figure out how to diddle our enemies. Go load your packs, grab your sticks, and report back here in ten minutes. Dismissed!”

  This time, Tealdo groaned. He knew what they would be doing for the rest of the day: the same thing they’d been doing most of the days since they’d established themselves by Imola. Unless it involved a pretty girl, he soon got sick of doing the same thing over and over. He realized that, when the time for fighting came, all this practice was liable to help keep him alive. That didn’t, that couldn’t, make him enjoy it while it was going on.

  His pack sat at the foot of his cot, in precisely the prescribed place. His stick leaned against the wall at the left side of the bed, at precisely the prescribed angle. Panfilo hadn’t been able to find a thing to complain about in the way he handled his gear, If Panfilo couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there.

  Tealdo slung the pack over his shoulder, grunting at its weight. When he picked up the stick, his finger accidentally slid into the blazing hole. It didn’t matter here, not directly: in training, well away from any fighting front, none of the weapons carried a sorcerous charge. But it was not a good habit to acquire.

  He wasn’t one of the first men back out to the parade ground. But he wasn’t one of the last men out, either, the men at whom his superiors screamed. He enjoyed people screaming at him no more than he enjoyed endless practice. Practice he couldn’t escape. He could keep people from screaming at him, could and did.

  “Form by companies!” Colonel Ombruno shouted: a useless order, since the regiment always formed by companies. “Form by companies, and report to your designated practice locations.”

  The company commanders shepherded the men off to their own areas. Soon, when a new practice field combined all those areas, they would work together. In the meanwhile …

  In the meanwhile, the company commanders got to puff out their chests and strut, like so many pigeons trying to impress mates. Captain Larbino’s strut and his shouted orders did not impress Tealdo: he was no dimwitted female pigeon. But he had to obey, which a female pigeon did not.

  Larbino led his company to a cramped underground chamber that had two stairways leading down into it, one broad, the other narrow. The men entered the chamber by the broad stairway. Only a few lanterns, stinking offish oil, cast a dim, flickering glow there. “Powers above, it’s like falling back through a thousand years of time,” Tealdo muttered.

  “Take your places!” Larbino’s loud voice dinned in the small, crowded chamber. “Five minutes till the exercise begins! Take your places! No mercy on any man who’s out of place when the whistle blows.”

  The soldiers were already taking their places. They had been doing this for three weeks. They knew, or were convinced they knew, at least as much about their part of the operation as did Larbino. They formed a single serpentine line that led to the bottom of the narrow stairway and kinked at each earthen wall. Seen from above, it would have looked like a long string of gut twisted to fit into the abdominal cavity.

  Shrill and deafeningly loud, the brass whistle screeched. “I love running in full kit,” Trasone said through the blast, and then, in a lower voice, “In a pig’s arse I do.” Tealdo chuckled. He felt the same way.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Larbino was screaming. “They’ll be blazing at you when you do this for real! Don’t stand around playing with yourselves.”

  “I’d rather be playing with myself than doing this,” Tealdo said. He didn’t think anyone heard him. The line was uncoiling rapidly as soldier after soldier dashed up the narrow stairs. They’d had dreadful tangles the first few times they tried it. They’d got better with practice. Tealdo declined to admit that, even to himself.

  His feet thudded on the timbers of the narrow stairway. Up he went. Anyone who tripped here was a cork in the bottle for everyone behind him. Panfilo had a more expressive term for it: as far as he was concerned, anyone who tripped on the narrow stairway was a dead man.

  Tealdo emerged into daylight. Before long, they’d be running the exercise at night, which would make it even more delightful. He dashed to a broad plank that spanned a deep trench and raced across it. Two men from his company had fallen into the trench. One managed to escape without being hurt. The other broke his leg.

  Cloth flags on stakes marked the narrow way he and his comrades had to take. He rushed along that narrow way till it suddenly widened out. Where it did, buildings—or rather, false fronts—defined streets through which they had to run. Soldiers with uncharged sticks “fought” from those false fronts, trying to impede the company’s progress. Umpires with green ribbons tied to their tunic sleeves signaled theoretical casualties.

  Tealdo “blazed” back at the defenders. One after another, the umpires ruled them deceased. But Tealdo’s comrades were taken out of action, too. He rather hoped he would be, as had happened during a couple of practice runs. Then he could lie down and grab a breather, and no sergeant would be able to complain.

  But, at the umpires’ whim, he was allowed to survive. Panting, he raced left, right, and then left again before coming to the gateway for whose capture his company was responsible. More soldiers tried to keep the company from seizing the gate. The umpires ruled those soldiers failed and fell.

  The egg one of Captain Larbino’s soldiers set against the gateway was only a wooden simulacrum. An umpire’s whistle blew, signaling a blast of energy. A couple of defenders, miraculously revived from their “deaths”, opened the gate to let the “survivors” of the company inside.

  More narrow ways lay beyond, some as twisted as the paths in a maze. Still more soldiers tried to keep Tealdo and his comrades from passing those ways to the end. Again, they failed. More whistles shrilled. Tealdo raised a weary cheer. He and enough of the other soldiers had reached the end of the practice area to have succeeded were this actual battle.

  “King Mezentio and all of Algarve will have reason to be proud of you when you fight this well with your lives truly in the pans of the scale,” Larbino declared. “I know you will. You need no lessons in courage, only in how best to use that courage. Those lessons will go on. Tomorrow, we will take the practice course in the dark.”

  Weary groans replaced the weary cheers. Tealdo turned and saw Trasone not far away. “Marching into Bari was a lot more fun,” he said. “All this running around looks too much like work to me.”

  “It’ll look even more like work when the bastards on the other side start blazing back for real,” Trasone answered.

  “Don’t remind me,” Tealdo said with a grimace. “Don’t remind me.”

  Leofsig felt like a beast of burden, or perhaps an animal in a cage. He was not a Forthwegian soldier any more, the Forthwegian army having been crushed between those of Algarve and Unkerlant. Not a foot of Forthwegian soil remained under the control of men loyal to King Penda. From east and west, the enemies’ forces had joined hands east of Eoforwic; joined hands over Forthweg’s fallen corpse.

  And so Leofsig languished with thousands of his comrades in a captives’ camp somewhere between Gromheort and Eoforwic, not far from where his regiment, or what was left of it, had finally surrendered to the Algarvians. He scowled when he thought of the dapper Algarvian officer who’d inspected the dirty, worn, beaten Forthwegian soldiers still hale enough to line up for the surrender ceremony.

  “You fought well. You fought bravely,” the Algarvian officer had said, trilling the slow sounds of Forthwegian as if they belonged to his native tongue. Then he’d hopped into the air, kicking up his heels in an extravagant gesture of contempt. “And for all the good it did you, for all the good it did your kingdom, you might as well not have fought at all. Think on that. You will have a long time to think on that.” He’d turned his back and strutted away.

  Time Leofsig did indeed have. Inside these wooden fences, inside these towers manned by Algarvians who would sooner blaze a captive coming near than listen to him, time was very nearly the only thing he did have. He had the tunic and boots in which he’d surrendered, and he had a hard cot in a flimsy barracks.

  He also had work. If the captives wanted wood for cooking and wood for heating—not so great a need in Forthweg as farther south in Derlavai, but not to be ignored as winter drew nearer, either—they had to cut it and haul it back. Work gangs under Algarvian guard went out every day. If they wanted latrines to keep the camp from being swamped by filth and disease, they had to dig them. The place stank anyway, putting Leofsig in mind of a barnyard once more.

  If they wanted food, they had to depend on the Algarvians. Their captives doled out flour as if it were silver, salt pork as if it were gold. Like most Forthwegians, Leofsig was on the blocky side. The block that was he had been narrowing ever since he’d surrendered.