Pekka nodded. “That’s how people have always done it, sure enough. You’ve found something different?” She cocked her head to one side and looked at her husband with approval, glad she wasn’t the only one in the family straying off the beaten track.

  “That’s what we’ve done, all right.” Leino also nodded, enthusiastically. “It turns out that, if you make a sort of sandwich of steel and then a special porcelain and then steel again, you get armor that’s a lot stronger than what we’re using now without weighing any more.”

  “You don’t mean a sandwich with three separate layers, do you?” Pekka asked with a small frown. “I can’t think of any kind of porcelain so special that it wouldn’t be easy to break in large, thin sheets.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I think that’s why nobody’s taken this approach before,” Leino said. “The trick is sorcerously fusing the porcelain to the steel on either side of it, and doing it so we don’t wreck the temper of the steel in the process.” He grinned at her. “We’ve wrecked a lot of other tempers in the process, I’ll tell you that. But now I think we’re getting the hang of it.”

  “That will be good,” Pekka said. “It will be especially good if we get drawn into the madness on the mainland of Derlavai.”

  “Aye, though I hope we don’t,” Leino said. “But you’re right again—not much place for behemoths in the island-hopping kind of war we’re fighting against Gyongyos.”

  “Oh!” Pekka muttered something worse than Oh! under her breath. “There goes the caravan. Now we’ll have to wait a quarter of an hour for the next one.”

  “At least we’ll be out of the rain,” Leino said. Every caravan stop in Kajaani—so far as Pekka knew, every stop in Kuusamo—was roofed against rain and sleet and snow. The stops wouldn’t have been worth having if they weren’t.

  A news-sheet vendor was taking advantage of the shelter when Pekka and Leino came in to get out of the wet. He waved a sheet at them, saying, “Want to read about the ultimatum Swemmel of Unkerlant has handed Zuwayza?”

  “Something unfortunate should happen to Swemmel of Unkerlant,” Leino said. That didn’t keep him from handing the vendor a couple of square copper coins and taking a sheet. He sat down on a bench, Pekka beside him.

  They read together. Pekka’s eyebrows rose. “Swemmel doesn’t ask for much, does he?” she said.

  “Let’s see.” Leino ran his hand down the page. “All the border fortifications, all the power points halfway from the border to Bishah, the right to base a fleet at the harbor of Samawa—and to have the Zuwayzin pay for it. No, not much: not much he deserves, I mean.”

  “And all that on pain of war if Zuwayza refuses,” Pekka said sadly. “If he were an ordinary man instead of a king, he’d be up before a panel of judges on extortion charges.”

  Leino had read a little more than she had. “Looks like another war, sure enough. Here, see a crystal report from Bishah quotes their foreign minister as saying that yielding to an unjust demand is worse than making one. If that doesn’t sound like the Zuwayzin intend to fight, I don’t know what does.”

  “I wish them well,” Pekka said.

  “So do I,” her husband answered. “The only thing I’m sorry about is that, if they’d given in, Swemmel might have gone back to war with Gyongyos. As is, the Gongs are only fighting us, and that makes them tougher.”

  “If a few islands out in the Bothnian Ocean were in different places, if a few ley lines ran in different directions, we’d have no quarrel with Gyongyos,” Pekka said.

  “Gyongyos would probably have a quarrel with us, though,” Leino answered. “The Gongs enjoy fighting, seems like.”

  “I wonder what they say about us,” Pekka said in musing tones. Whatever it was, it did not appear in the Kajaani Crier or any other Kuusaman news sheet.

  A caravan hummed up to the stop. The conductor opened the door. A couple of people in hats and capes got off. Pekka preceded Leino up the steps and into the car. They both plopped eight-copper silver bits in the fare box. Nodding, the conductor waved them back to the seats, as if it were only through his generosity that they had so many from which to choose.

  As the caravan began to move, Pekka said, “My grandmother said that, when she was a little girl, her grandmother told her how frightened she was when she was a little girl, the first time she got up on the step to go into a ley-line caravan. There it was, floating on nothing, and she couldn’t see why it didn’t fall down or tip over.”

  “Can’t expect a child to understand the way complex sorceries work,” Leino answered. “For that matter, back in those days ley lines were a new thing in the world, and nobody understood them very well—though people thought they did.”

  “People always think they know more than they do,” Pekka said. “It’s one of the things that make them people.”

  They got off at the road that led up to their house. No butterflies flitted now. No birds sang. Rain fell. Rain dripped from trees. Wet branches slapped them in the face as they slogged uphill to pick up Uto from Pekka’s sister.

  When Elimaki came to the door, she looked harried. Uto, on the other hand, seemed the picture of innocence. Pekka did not need grounding in theoretical sorcery to know appearances could deceive.

  “What did you do?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” he answered sweetly, as he always did.

  Pekka glanced to her sister. Elimaki said. “He went climbing in the pantry. He knocked over a five-pound canister of flour, and then tried to tell me he hadn’t. He might have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn’t left a footprint right in the middle of the pile of flour on the pantry floor.”

  Leino started to laugh. So did Pekka, in spite of herself. She and her husband weren’t the only ones in the family straying off the beaten track, either. Ruffling Uto’s hair, she said, “You’ll go a long way, son—if we decide to let you live.”

  Colonel Dzirnavu was not a happy man. So far as Talsu could tell, Dzirnavu was never a happy man. Like a lot of common people, the Jelgavan count took out his unhappiness on everyone around him. Since he was an officer and a noble, the soldiers in his regiment couldn’t tell him to jump off a cliff, as they surely would have if he’d been a commoner like themselves.

  “Vartu!” he shouted one morning—he shouted the way singers went through the scales, to warm up his voice. “Confound it, Vartu, where have you gone and hidden yourself? Get your whipworthy arse into my tent this instant!”

  “Confound it, Vartu!” Talsu echoed as Dzirnavu’s servant came by on the dead run. Vartu gave him a dirty look before ducking under the tent-flap and facing his principal’s wrath.

  “How may I serve you, my lord?” he asked, his words clearly audible through the canvas.

  “How may you serve me?” Dzirnavu bellowed. “How may you serve me? You may get me that rascally cook, that’s how, and serve me his guts for tripe at my luncheon today. Will you look at this? Will you look at this, Vartu? The ham-fisted thumbfingered son of a whore had the gall to serve me a plate of runny scrambled eggs. How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

  Talsu looked down at his own tin plate, which contained the usual breakfast scoop of mush and the equally usual length of cheap, stale sausage. He glanced over to his friend Smilsu, who was sitting on a rock close by. In a low voice, he asked, “How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

  “With a spoon?” Smilsu suggested. His breakfast ration was no more prepossessing than Talsu’s.

  “I’ve got one of those, sure enough.” Talsu held it up. “Now if I only had some eggs, I’d be in business.”

  Smilsu sadly shook his head. “If you’re going to grouse and grumble about every least little thing, my boy, you’ll never get to be a colonel like our illustrious regimental commander.” He set a finger by the side of his nose. “Of course, if you don’t grouse and grumble, you’ll never get to be a colonel, either. You haven’t got the bloodlines for it.”

  “Bloodlines are fine, if you’re a horse.” Talsu let his eyes slide toward Count Dzirnavu’s tent. “Or even some particular part of a horse.” Smilsu, who was in the middle of swallowing a mouthful of mush, almost choked to death on it. Talsu went on, “For picking soldiers, though …” Now he shook his head. “If we had real soldiers leading us, we’d be down in Tricarico this time, instead of still slogging our way through these cursed hills.” He snapped his fingers. “I bet that’s why the stinking Algarvians haven’t really counterattacked.”

  He’d got a jump ahead of Smilsu. “What’s why?” his friend asked. “What are you talking about?”

  Talsu dropped his voice to hardly more than a whisper, so only Smilsu would hear: “If the redheads hit us hard, they’d be bound to kill off a lot of officers. Sooner or later, we’d run out of nobles to take their places. Then we’d have to start using men who knew what they were doing instead. We’d be sure to lick Algarve after that, so they’re just playing it safe and smart.”

  “I’d be sure you were right, if only I thought the Algarvians had that much upstairs.” Without doing anything more than sitting a little straighter, Smilsu managed to convey the Algarvians’ swaggering pomposity. As he slumped back down, he went on, “And you’d better not say anything like that around anybody you’re not sure of, either, or you’ll be sorry for a long time.”

  Vartu came out of Dzirnavu’s tent just then. Talsu and Smilsu both fell silent. Talsu liked the colonel’s servant, and trusted him fairly far, but not far enough to speak treason in front of him.

  Mumbling under his breath, Vartu stalked past the two soldiers. A moment later, Talsu heard him yelling at a cook. The cook yelled back. Smilsu’s snicker was amused and sympathetic at the same time. “Poor

  Vartu,” he said. “He gets it from both sides at once.”

  “So do all of us,” Talsu answered, “from our officers and from the Algarvians.”

  “Someone put vinegar in your beer this morning, that’s plain,” Smilsu said. “Why don’t you go over there and scream at the cooks, too?”

  “Because they’d stick a carving knife in me or hit me over the head with a pot,” Talsu said. “I can’t get away with things like that. I’m not a count, or even servant to a count.”

  “Aye, you’re a no-account, all right,” Smilsu said, whereupon Talsu felt like hitting him over the head with a pot.

  After their less than magnificent breakfast, the Jelgavan soldiers cautiously advanced. Exhortations from King Donalitu to move faster kept coming forward. Colonel Dzirnavu would read them out whenever they did, and would blame the men for not living up to their sovereign’s requests. Then he and his superiors would order another tiptoeing step ahead, and would seem surprised when King Donalitu found it necessary to exhort the troops again.

  The Algarvians did their best to make life unpleasant for their foes, too. The country through which Talsu and his comrades moved was made for defense. One stubborn soldier with a stick who found a good hiding place could hold up a company. There were plenty of good hiding places to find, and plenty of stubborn Algarvians to fill them. Each redhead had to be flanked out and flushed from cover, which made what would have been a slow business slower.

  And the Algarvians had taken to burying eggs in the ground, and attaching to them trips lines that would rupture their shells. A soldier who didn’t watch where he put his feet was liable to go up in a great gout of sorcerous fire. That slowed the Jelgavans, too, till dowsers could find the eggs and mark paths past them.

  Most of the redheads who lived in the mountain country had fled to lower ground farther west. A few people, though, were obstinate, as Jelgavan mountain folk also had a name for being. Talsu captured an old Algarvian with a bald head, a big white mustache, and knobby knees and hairy calves sticking out from under the hem of his kilt. “Come on, gramps,” he said, and gestured with his stick. “I’m going to take you back to our encampment so they can ask you some questions.”

  “A dog should flitter you,” the old man growled in accented Jelgavan.

  He added a couple of other choice oaths in Talsu’s language, then fell back on Algarvian. Talsu didn’t know any Algarvian, but he didn’t think the captive was paying him compliments. All he did was gesture with the stick again. Cursing still, the old man got moving.

  Back at the camp, a bored-looking lieutenant who spoke Algarvian started questioning Talsu’s captive. The old man kept right on cursing, or so Talsu thought. The lieutenant stopped looking bored and started looking harassed. Talsu hid a smile. He didn’t mind seeing an officer sweat, even if it was because of an Algarvian.

  He was about to head off toward the front line again when a trooper from a different company brought in another cursing captive. Talsu stopped and stared. Everyone who heard those curses stopped and stared. The other soldier’s captive (you lucky bastard, Talsu thought) was a good-looking—a very good-looking—woman of about twenty-five. Coppery hair flowed halfway down her back. Her knees were not knobby, nor her calves hairy. Talsu examined them carefully to make sure of those facts.

  Her curses even drew from his tent Colonel Dzirnavu, who had been in there alone except, perhaps, for a bottle of what his servant called restorative. By the lurch in his stride, he was quite thoroughly restored. His eyes needed a moment before they lit on the captive. “Well, well,” he said when they finally did. “What have we here?”

  “That’s what they call a woman,” a soldier near Talsu muttered. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?” Talsu coughed to keep from laughing out loud.

  Dzirnavu advanced on her at a ponderous waddle. He looked her up and down, plainly imagining everything the tunic and kilt concealed. She looked him up and down, too. Her face also showed what she was thinking. Talsu would not have wanted anyone, let alone a good-looking woman, thinking such things about him.

  “Where did you find her?” Dzirnavu asked the soldier who had brought her back to camp. “Spying on us, unless I miss my guess.”

  “Lord, she was going into a little cottage up ahead.” The trooper pointed. “My thought is, she was trying to take away a few last things before she fled for good.”

  The Algarvian woman pointed at Dzirnavu. “Where did you find him?” she asked the soldier who had captured her. Her Jelgavan was accented but fluent. “I would say under a flat rock, but where would you find a flat rock big enough to hide him?”

  Like most Jelgavans, Dzirnavu was quite fair. That let Talsu watch the flush mount from his beefy neck to his hairline. “She is a spy,” he snapped. “She must be a spy. Take her to my tent.” A murky light kindled in his bloodshot gray eyes. “I shall attend to her interrogation personally.”

  Talsu could think of only one thing that might mean. He knew a moment’s pity for the Algarvian woman, even if he wouldn’t have minded having her himself. Dzirnavu’s “interrogation,” though, was liable to crush her to death—and he wouldn’t learn anything while he was doing it.

  After a while, the soldier who’d captured the woman came out of the tent. His face bore a curious mixture of excitement and disgust. “He had me cover her while he tied her to the bed,” he reported, and then, “He made her lie on her belly.”

  Along with his comrades, Talsu sadly shook his head. “Waste of a woman, especially one so pretty,” he said. “If that’s what he’s got in mind, he could do it with a boy instead.”

  “Officers have all the fun,” the other soldier said, “and they get to pick what kind of fun they have.”

  Since Talsu couldn’t argue with that, he started back toward the front line. He hadn’t gone far before the Algarvian woman screamed. It sounded more like outrage than anguish. Whatever it was, it was none of his business. He kept walking.

  When he returned to the encampment at suppertime, no one had been into or out of the regimental commander’s tent since he’d left. “You should have heard what he called me when I asked him if he needed anything an hour ago,” Vartu said.

  “Is the redhead still screaming in there?” Talsu asked. Dzirnavu’s servant shook his head. Talsu sighed. Maybe she’d seen screaming did her no good. Maybe, too, she was in no shape to scream any more. From what he knew of Dzirnavu, he found that more likely. He stood in line for supper. If Dzirnavu was skipping a meal for the sake of his pleasure, it wouldn’t hurt him a bit. No sound at all came from the tent. Eventually, Talsu rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

  Dzirnavu’s tent was still quiet when Talsu woke up the next morning. When Vartu cautiously asked whether the count wanted breakfast, no one answered. Even more cautiously, the servant stuck his head in through the flap. He recoiled, clapping a hand to his mouth. He choked out one word: “Blood!”

  Talsu dashed toward the tent. So did everyone else who’d heard Vartu. There lay the naked and unlovely Count Dzirnavu, half on the bed, half off, his throat cut from ear to ear. Blood soaked the sheets and the ground below. There was no sign of the Algarvian woman, no sign she’d ever been there but for the length of rope tied to each bedpost.

  “An assassin!” Vartu gasped. “She was an assassin!”

  No one argued with him, not out loud, but expressions were eloquent. Talsu’s guess was that Dzirnavu had fallen asleep because of his exertions, the woman had managed to work a hand free, and then had found a tool to take her revenge. He did wonder how she’d managed to escape afterwards. Maybe she’d been able to sneak past the sentries. Or maybe, in exchange for silence, she’d given out some of what Dzirnavu had taken by force. Any which way, she was gone.

  Smilsu had the last word. He saved it till he and Talsu were heading up to the front: “Powers above, the Algarvians wouldn’t want to murder Dzirnavu. They must have hoped he’d live forever. Now we’re liable to get a regimental commander who knows what he’s doing.” Talsu considered that, then solemnly nodded.

  Garivald’s worn leather boots squelched through mud. The fall rains in southern Unkerlant turned everything into a swamp. Spring, when a winter’s worth of snow melted, was even worse—though the peasant did not think of it that way. The weather did what it did every year. For Garivald, it was simply part of life.