“Of course it wasn’t proved,” Balozio exclaimed. “I didn’t do it.” He spread his hands in despairing appeal. “I’m a blond, and they still couldn’t convict me. I must have been innocent, right?”

  “It’s close enough,” Bembo said to the clerk. “Thanks. We’ll pack him away for a while. Getting a Kaunian off the streets sounds good to me.”

  “I don’t even speak Kaunian!” Balozio said.

  The clerk ignored him, except to put his file back in its proper drawer. Bembo took Balozio by the arm. “Come on, pal. Come quiet, and you’ll just get packed away. If you don’t—” Head hanging miserably, Balozio went with him.

  Cornelu drank the bitter wine of exile. He ate the hard bread of the man cast from his home. The metaphor, he knew, was only a metaphor.

  The bread the Lagoans fed him was no harder than what he’d been used to eating in Sibiu. Now that Lagoas was at war with Algarve, wine had grown hard to come by, but he found nothing wrong with Lagoan ales and lagers, stouts and porters.

  However well they fed him, though, an exile he remained. The Algarvian banner, green and white and red, flew above Tirgoviste and the other cities of Sibiu. King Burebistu was a captive, seized in his own palace before he could flee. And Costache, Cornelu’s wife, was a captive, too. By now, he might well have a son or daughter. He did not know. He could not know. He did know Algarvians. They’d be sniffing around Costache like dogs around a bitch in heat.

  His hands folded into fists as he sat on his hard cot in one of the barracks halls the Lagoans had given to the forlorn few soldiers and sailors who’d got out of Sibiu: the only free Sibians left. He cursed the Algarvians who occupied his kingdom. He cursed them twice, for being there and for being clever enough to figure out a way to get there that no one in the island kingdom had foreseen.

  A Lagoan officer came into the barracks. Cornelu and his fellow exiles looked up from whatever dullnesses occupied them. Cornelu had never been enormously fond of Lagoans. As far as he was concerned, the only reason they’d ever got ahead of Sibiu in trade and war was that they had a larger kingdom.

  And now that larger kingdom remained free, while Sibiu lay captive and Algarvian soldiers—or so he feared, at any rate—accosted his wife. That gave him another reason to resent Lagoans: they did not understand what he was going through. Oh, they’d taken him in, they’d fed him, they’d housed him, they’d even promised to use his leviathan and him in the fight against Algarve they now—belatedly—joined. But they did not understand. With gloomy Sibian pride, he was sure of it.

  The officer, who wore the grayish green of the Lagoan navy, came toward Cornelu. His stride was easy, loose, confident: the stride of a man whose own king ruled his kingdom and was likely to keep on ruling it. That stride and the thoughtlessly cheerful smile on his face made Cornelu dislike him on sight.

  “Good day, Commander, and how are you?” the Lagoan asked in what he no doubt fondly imagined to be Cornelu’s language. To Cornelu, it sounded more like Algarvian, and bad Algarvian at that.

  Blithely oblivious, the fellow went on, “I am Lieutenant Ramalho. I hope you are not busy now?”

  Slowly, Cornelu got to his feet. He was glad to find himself a couple of inches taller than Ramalho. “I do not know,” he said. “There are, after all, so many important things for me to do right now.”

  Ramalho laughed a gay laugh, as if Cornelu had been jocular rather than icily sardonic. Maybe the Lagoan gave him the benefit of the doubt, which was a mistake. Maybe, too, Ramalho couldn’t tell the difference. Still chuckling, the fellow said, “If you are not too busy, will you come with me?”

  “Why? Where will we go?” Cornelu kept his words slow and simple, as if speaking to an idiot child. Even Lagoans who thought they spoke his language made heavy going of it. As for him, he despised their tongue, with its nasal vowels and sneezy consonants, with its hordes of words pillaged from Kaunian, Kuusaman, and every other language under the sun. How even people born speaking it figured out what they were going to say was beyond him.

  “Well, you’ll know more about that when we get there, won’t you?” Ramalho said, cheerful still. “Come along.” He turned away, certain Cornelu would follow—as indeed he did. He and his fellow Sibian exiles were tools in the Lagoans’ hands—useful tools, to be employed with some care, but tools nonetheless.

  He blinked against watery sunshine when he went outside. He also winced at the racket; whatever else the naval half of Setubal harbor was, it was a noisy place. Iron and steel clanged against each other. Sailors and stevedores and teamsters and mages shouted in their incomprehensible language. Every now and then, Cornelu caught a word close enough to its Sibian equivalent for him to recognize it. Those few words made him lonelier than ever; it was as if they were exiles, too.

  “Do we go to the leviathan pens?” Cornelu asked. “I should see Eforiel.” He did not want the leviathan to think he’d abandoned her. He counted her a friend—almost the only friend he had here—and did not want to worry her or make her sad.

  “Not far from them,” Ramalho answered. He pointed toward a couple of low, white-painted buildings set a little way back from the pens. “We go there.”

  “And what do we do there?” Cornelu inquired. All Ramalho did was laugh again, as if at another joke. Cornelu gritted his teeth. He wondered if he should have surrendered to the Algarvians. He’d be with Costache now—if Mezentio’s men didn’t fling him in a captives’ camp. He sighed. He’d done this. He had to live with it.

  Gulls, some with white heads, some with dark, rose in angry, skrawking clouds as he and Ramalho drew near. “Miserable beggars,” Ramalho said, his tone halfway between annoyance and affection. “If we fed them, they would love us instead of making such a fuss.”

  Cornelu shrugged. The Lagoans fed him. In their offhand way, they tried to be kind to him. He recognized as much. Even so, he could not love them. Ramalho chattered on. If he had any notion what his companion was thinking, he gave no sign of it.

  “Well, here we are,” the Lagoan lieutenant said gaily as he led Cornelu up a short wooden staircase and opened the door at the top, standing aside so Cornelu could precede him. Cornelu’s shoulders went back and then forward in a silent sigh. He wondered how, if Lagoas had men like this, Sibiu had ever come out on the short end of their naval wars in centuries past.

  When he got a look at the men who stood to greet him, he reluctantly stopped wondering. Here, by all appearances, were Lagoan naval officers who might have stepped from the pages of a Sibian romance: arrogant, aye, but with solid ability underlying the arrogance. “Commander Cornelu,” one of them said, and then went on in his own language: “You speak Lagoan?”

  Cornelu understood the question, and could answer “No” in Lagoan—one of the few polite expressions out of the handful of words and phrases he’d picked up.

  “Right.” The Lagoan officer spoke good Algarvian, and didn’t try to turn it into Sibian, as Ramalho ineptly kept doing. “We can get along in this tongue, I expect.” He waited for Cornelu to nod, then continued, “I am Commodore Ribeiro; my colleague here is Captain Ebastiao.” After handclasps, the commodore suddenly seemed to remember Ramalho was there. “Run along, Lieutenant,” he said, and Ramalho disappeared.

  Ebastiao also handled himself well in Algarvian, saying, “That’s a fine leviathan you rode here. You Sibs have always been good at getting the most out of those beasts.”

  “For this I thank you.” Cornelu stiffly inclined his head. “And this is why I have been summoned here, this matter of leviathans?” He realized he was speaking Sibian himself, and started to translate into the language the Lagoan officers had shown they knew.

  Commodore Ribeiro made a chopping gesture. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I expect Ebastiao and I can follow your jargon well enough, even if we wouldn’t care to try wrapping our tongues around it.” He poked the other Lagoan officer in the ribs with an elbow. “Eh, Ebastiao?”

  “I expect so, sir,” Ebastiao said, nodding. “And if we don’t know what the commander is talking about, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, either, eh?” He had narrow, slanted eyes; they would have been perfect Kuusaman eyes had they been dark rather than gray. The lid to one of them dipped in an unmistakable wink aimed Cornelu’s way.

  Cornelu didn’t know how to respond to that. The Sibian navy enforced almost as much distance between ranks as did those of Valmiera and Jelgava. Cornelu tried to imagine Commodore Delfinu winking at him. He shook his head. Inconceivable. He stood still, waiting to see what the Lagoans would do next. You couldn’t tell ahead of time with Lagoans. That was part of what made them dangerous.

  Ebastiao said, “What we have in mind for you, Commander, is working with our leviathan riders, teaching them some of your tricks—bringing them up to speed generally, you might say—and then commencing patrols out from our shores and as close to Sibiu as proves practicable.”

  “That’s right.” Ribeiro nodded. “We don’t relish the notion of being taken by surprise, as your kingdom was. We shall have leviathans patrolling as far forward as possible, as Ebastiao told you—we shall do our best to equip the riders with crystals, that they may expeditiously report what they see. We shall have the navy moving along the ley lines. We shall also put yachts to see, to peer in between the lines, so to speak.”

  “I doubt you will need them,” Cornelu said bitterly. “Some tricks work only once. This one worked on us.”

  “Better to have and not need than to need and not have,” Ribeiro replied. “And we shall have long-distance dowsers out along the coasts—as your kingdom should have done, if I may speak frankly without giving offense.”

  “Looking back, you are right,” Cornelu said. “But who could have thought ahead of time that even Algarvians would be mad enough to try such a stunt? Had it failed—” He scowled. It had not failed.

  “Let’s go back to your place in this,” Ebastiao said. Commodore Ribeiro looked at the broad picture. His subordinate dealt with details. In that, the Lagoan navy operated like its Sibian counterpart—no, as its Sibian counterpart had done. Ebastiao went on, “You will train our men up to your standards. You will, as circumstances permit, draft a manual of training techniques so others may use them. And you will—you most assuredly will—patrol and, again as circumstances permit, take the war to the foe in and around Sibian waters. Will that put enough on your plate to keep you hopping?”

  “Aye,” Cornelu said hastily. He was indeed a tool to the Lagoans. But, at last, they were seeing he could be a sharp one.

  Ealstan and Sidroc had a day free from school. They and some of their classmates were kicking a ball around in a park not far from Ealstan’s home, along with a few boys—some older, some younger—they’d met there. It wasn’t really a game—how could it be, with no goals, no nets, no properly marked pitch? They were just running and shouting and having as good a time as they could in occupied Gromheort.

  It had rained the night before. Mud splashed up from under Ealstan’s shoes as he sprinted toward the beat-up old ball. He and his cousin would come home filthy. His mother would shout at them. He knew that, somewhere in the back of his mind, and was vaguely sorry about it—but not enough to stop running.

  Here came Sidroc, too, so intent on the ball that he didn’t notice Ealstan. Joy burst through Ealstan like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. He lowered his shoulder and knocked his cousin sprawling. Sidroc went rolling through the muck. With a wild shout of triumph, Ealstan booted the ball toward a little grove of carob trees. The pack of boys dashed after it.

  “Curse you, Ealstan!” Sidroc shouted, spitting mud out of his mouth. He scrambled to his feet.

  “Powers below eat you!” Ealstan called back over his shoulder. “I got you fair and square.”

  Three strides later, somebody—he never saw who—got him fair and square. He was briefly airborne, like a dragon taking wing. Unlike a dragon taking wing, he didn’t stay airborne. He landed on his belly and skidded along the muddy ground for a good ten feet. His mother would yell, all right—the front of his tunic, he discovered as he got up, was nothing but brown and green. It had started out grayish blue.

  He charged after the ball, which had gone its own merry way while he was down. As he ran, he brushed mud from his tunic—and from his arms. He was as grimy as some of the ragged men who stood around watching the boys at their sport.

  Before the war, Gromheort had been a quietly prosperous town. Oh, it had some derelicts; Ealstan’s father said there was no place in the world that didn’t have some derelicts, which made sense to Ealstan. Now, though, with so many homes and shops destroyed, with so many former soldiers around whom the occupying authorities hadn’t bothered formally capturing, Gromheort seemed full of men—and some women, too—living as they could, cadging what they could, sleeping where they could.

  One of them, a scrawny fellow with an unkempt beard who wore a tunic much too small, started to wave when Ealstan ran past. Ealstan saw him only from the corner of his eye. The ragged men often begged for coins. If he happened to have any, he sometimes gave them out. When he did, he thought of Leofsig, who, in the captives’ camp, couldn’t get even that much help. Today, though, Ealstan had left his belt pouch at home; kicking a ball around was as good a way to lose a pouch as any he could think of offhand.

  Then the beggar who’d waved called his name.

  Ealstan stopped dead. Sidroc, who’d been about to hit him from the side, skidded past and nearly went down in the mud again. Ealstan didn’t even notice his cousin had almost clipped him. He trotted out of the game, staring at the man he’d taken for a derelict.

  “Leof—” he began.

  “Don’t say it,” his brother cautioned. He coughed a couple of times before continuing. “I’m not exactly here on official business, you know.”

  He hadn’t been released, then, as Ealstan had guessed. He’d escaped. The pride Ealstan felt for his brother swelled enormously. “How did you—?”

  Leofsig cut him off again. “Don’t ask stupid questions. And speaking of stupid questions—” He pointed with his chin. Sidroc was coming up.

  “Found your own level?” Ealstan’s cousin asked with a hard, sour laugh. “Beggars now? It’ll probably be Kaunians next.”

  “I should have wrung your neck years ago,” Leofsig said evenly. “Are you trying to show me it’s not too late?”

  Sidroc started to get angry. Then, far more slowly than Ealstan had, he recognized Leofsig. “I thought you were in a camp,” he blurted.

  “So did the fornicating redheads,” Leofsig said. “And don’t talk about Kaunians like that. You drip ignorance.”

  Sidroc rolled his eyes. “You sound like Ealstan.”

  “Do I?” Leofsig glanced at his younger brother. “Are you growing up? Maybe you are. Here’s hoping, anyhow.”

  “We’ve got to get you home,” Ealstan said.

  “I didn’t want to go straight there—didn’t know how risky it was.” Leofsig’s face took on a look of bleak, cold calculation: the look of the hunted. “The Algarvians haven’t been paying you any special attention?” He waited for both Ealstan and Sidroc to shake their heads before going on. “All right, we’ll try it. Ealstan, you run ahead. Let them know I’m on the way. Sidroc, you come along with me. Keep me company. It’s been a while.”

  Ealstan ran like the wind. He’d never run so hard after a ball, not in all his born days. A couple of Algarvian soldiers gave him fishy looks, but he was young enough to look like someone running for the fun of it, not someone running because he’d just done something nasty to one of their pals. One of the Algarvians shrugged, the other made a mildly disparaging gesture, and they walked on.

  He kept running. He pounded on the front door to his house. When his sister unbarred it, alarm filled her face. “Ealstan! You’re filthy!” she exclaimed. “And have you gone crazy? Mother and I thought you were a squad of redheads, come to tear the place apart or worse.”

  “They’d better not,” Ealstan panted. All at once, how hard he’d run caught up with him. He pushed past Conberge into the short front hall, closed the door behind him, and barred it again. When his sister began to give him more of a hard time about the way he looked, he said, “Shut up.” That made her start to shout; he wasn’t supposed to speak to her so. He knew how to make her stop, though: “Leofsig is on the way home. He’s coming with Sidroc. He’ll be here in about five minutes.”

  Conberge went on for another couple of words before she really heard that. Then she hugged him, regardless of how grubby he was. “Did the Algarvians let him go?” she asked. “Why didn’t they tell us if they let him go?”

  “Because they’re Algarvians,” Ealstan answered. “And because they didn’t let him go. But he’ll be here any minute, all the same.”

  His sister understood at once what he was saying. “He’ll have to hide, won’t he?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “You’d better tell Mother. She’ll know what to do.”

  “Of course she will.” Ealstan was just young enough to say that without sounding sardonic. “Is she in the kitchen?” Conberge nodded. She stayed by the door, ready to slam it shut the instant Leofsig crossed the threshold.

  When Ealstan burst into the kitchen, his mother looked up from the garlic cloves she was mincing. Her look was much more ominous than the one the Algarvian soldiers had turned on him. “What happened to you?” Elfryth demanded in tones that said he had no possible answer.

  He found one anyhow: “Leofsig’s right behind me. He’s coming with Sidroc.”