The one advantage of the cold was that the slit trenches did not stink quite so badly—or maybe it simply numbed Leofsig’s prominent nose. That dim shape ahead had to be Gutauskas. Leofsig yawned again, wishing he were back on his hard cot under his thin blanket: a strange wish, when most of the time he would have given anything to get away from the barracks.

  Someone—a Forthwegian—came back from the latrine, tugging at his tunic. He grunted at Leofsig as they passed each other in the darkness.

  Several men straddled slit trenches. All, by their silhouettes, were Kaunians. A couple exchanged soft comments in their own language: “They’re here.” “Aye. The last of them.”

  Gutauskas set a hand on Leofsig’s arm. “Come. Come quickly. Come quietly. Ask no questions, not now. Soon enough, you will know.”

  Naturally, questions flooded into Leofsig’s head. When he started to ask the first one, Gutauskas’s hand closed tight enough to hurt. Leofsig’s mouth stayed closed, too. Gutauskas jerked his chin toward the small knot of Kaunians ahead. Leofsig followed him over to them without another word.

  As he came up, one of the Kaunians spoke in quiet Forthwegian: “An advantage to digging trenches is that there is digging, and then there is digging.”

  A light shone in Leofsig’s dark, sleepy mind, bright as if an egg had burst in front of his face. Gutauskas said, “Come. It will be noisome. We could not keep everyone from using this trench. But will you set filth on your feet against the chance for freedom?”

  “By the powers above, no!” Leofsig said in the best classical Kaunian he could muster.

  “Hmm. As well we do take him, Gutauskas,” said the Kaunian who’d spoken a moment before. “Some of them, in truth, can be decent.” By them, Leofsig realized, he meant Forthwegians. He himself was the only non-Kaunian here.

  Gutauskas said, “We can all be caught if we stand around here much longer.”

  By way of answer, the other Kaunian scrambled down into the stinking trench. He yanked at the side—and pulled up a tiny square door covered with dirt and muck. “Go, my friends. Crawl as fast as you may. Crawl on one another’s heels. Never stop. There is an opening at the other end. Go to it.”

  One by one, the six or eight men slid down into the trench and into the mouth of the tunnel. Gutauskas gave Leofsig a tiny shove. “Go before me,” he murmured. Leofsig got into the slit trench as quietly as he could. The muck at the bottom tried to suck the sandals off his feet. He scrambled through the doorway. It was barely wide enough for his broad Forthwegian shoulders.

  Outside, it had been dark. In the tunnel—shored up here and there with boards that caught Leofsig in the head when he raised up too far, but mostly dirt, like a grave—it was black beyond black. The air felt dead. He crawled on, crawled for his life. A tiny thump came from behind him as the last Kaunian let the door fall. With luck, it would be filthy enough to keep the Algarvians from noticing it for a while.

  Leofsig crawled. Sometimes he touched the feet of the man in front of him. Sometimes Gutauskas bumped his. How far had he come? How far to go? He had no idea. He kept crawling. He aimed to keep crawling till he came out, even if that were in Gyongyos or Lagoas. Blackness and dirt and shoving one knee past the other.

  Fresh air, live air, ahead. He smelled it, as a hound would. The tunnel rose a little under his shins. A Kaunian pulled him out. The night looked like a hazy day to his light-starved eyes. Gutauskas came up behind him, and then the last man. “Now,” Gutauskas said in quiet but businesslike tones, “we all piss.”

  “Why?” Leofsig asked—at last, a question he could put.

  One of the other Kaunians answered, mirth in his voice: “To put running water between us and the Algarvians’ searching sorceries.”

  Hot piss splashed out of them, there near the mouth of the tunnel, hidden from the captives’ camp by a grove of olive trees. Leofsig laughed, silently but with great joy, as he shook himself. He was filthy and stinking and liable to be recaptured or blazed on sight, but not one bit of that mattered, not now. Now—for the moment—he was free.

  Bembo strolled along the streets of Tricarico, swinging his club and doing his best to make people notice him. Like most Algarvian towns, Tricarico was, among other things, a center of display. Even the most outrageously swaggering constable got less notice than he craved.

  Still, Bembo would rather have been swaggering along the street than marching and countermarching in the park. He didn’t care for the weight of the dummy stick on his shoulder, and he especially didn’t care for the way that monster of a sergeant screamed at him and at everybody else in the makeshift militia. If any screaming went on, he wanted to give it, not to be on the receiving end.

  He glanced nervously toward the east. The real army, or such part of it as Algarve could spare on this part of the frontier, was still holding the Jelgavans in the foothills of the Bradano Mountains. Bembo couldn’t quite figure out how the army was holding them there. The news sheets made it sound like strong sorcery, but no sorcery was that strong. He just hoped the regulars could keep doing it. If they couldn’t, he would have to try. He relished that notion not at all.

  A couple of people started yelling at each other down a side street. At first, Bembo was inclined to keep on walking. People shouting at one another was nothing out of the ordinary in any Algarvian city. But then he thought that, since he’d had a quiet shift, he ought to find out what was going on there. He could bring the story back to the stationhouse, which would keep Sergeant Pesaro from calling him a lazy son of a whore.

  He turned the corner. A crowd had already started to gather around the quarreling pair. “What’s going on here?” Bembo said loudly. Several people in the crowd looked his way, saw what he was, and discovered urgent business elsewhere. He chuckled. He’d expected nothing different.

  One of the people who’d been doing the yelling was a redheaded woman heading hard toward middle age. Her clothes and her wary eyes didn’t say whore, not quite, but they did say slattern. Facing her was a rather younger man who wore tunic and kilt and spiky waxed mustaches of unimpeachably Algarvian style. But those mustaches and his hair were pale gold, not red or auburn or chestnut.

  Uh-oh, Bembo thought. Aloud, he repeated, “What’s going on here?”

  “This stinking Kaunian was trying to rob me,” the slatternly woman shouted. “I bet he’s a Jelgavan spy. He looks like a spy to me.”

  A couple of men behind Bembo growled. The constable’s head started to ache, as if he’d poured down too much red wine. The man standing there looking affronted and innocent was undoubtedly of Kaunian blood, as Jelgavans were. That might mean anything, or nothing. His ancestors could have been living in Tricarico for centuries before there were any Algarvians within a couple of hundred miles. But even if they had been, that didn’t prove anything, either. Some folk of Kaunian blood were perfectly loyal to King Mezentio. Some still dreamt of the days of the ancient Kaunian Empire.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?” Bembo demanded of the blond man. His voice was rough with suspicion, partly because he was a constable, and so was suspicious on general principles, and partly because he’d been reading a lot of the torrid historical romances that had been coming out lately, and so was more suspicious of Kaunians than he had been.

  “Why would I try to rob her?” the man asked. “Does she look like she’s got anything worth having?” He spoke Algarvian with the accent of someone who’d grown up in the northeastern part of the kingdom—the same accent as Bembo’s. But a spy would be smooth, the constable thought.

  The blond man looked the woman up and down, then rolled his eyes, as any Algarvian who found a woman unattractive and wanted her to know it would have done. She screeched at him. Bembo looked her up and down. She didn’t have anything he particularly wanted, though he probably wouldn’t have said no if she offered it free of charge.

  Wearily, Bembo hauled out his notebook. “Give me your names,” he growled. “Don’t get cute with ‘em, either. We’ll have a mage checking.

  We don’t like people who lie to the constabulary.” The woman called herself Gabrina. The man said his name was Balozio.

  “A likely story,” Gabrina sneered. “Probably started out as Balozhu.” She twisted it from an Algarvian-sounding name to one that sprang from Jelgava or Valmiera.

  “Your father never knew what your name was,” Balozio told her: an insult as Algarvian as the day was long.

  Gabrina screeched again. Balozio shouted at her. “Shut up!” Bembo yelled, hating them both. He pointed to the woman. “What did he try to rob you of? How did he do it?”

  “My belt pouch,” she answered, sticking out the hip on which she wore it. She remained unalluring to Bembo.

  “Why, you lying slut!” Balozio shouted. She bit her thumb at the blond man. Turning to Bembo, he went on, “All I was trying to do was pat her on the bum.”

  For a moment, Bembo accepted that. He’d felt up a good many women strolling along the street. But then he stopped thinking like a man and started thinking like a constable. “Now just you wait,” he said. “A minute ago, you were telling me this broad didn’t have anything you wanted.”

  “Don’t you call me a broad, you tun of lard!” Gabrina yelled at him.

  Bembo brandished his club. “For that, you can come along to the station, too. We’ll sort it out there.”

  Balozio and Gabrina both looked appalled. If one ran one way and one the other, Bembo didn’t know what he’d do. Calling on people to help was about as likely to get them to help the fugitives as to help him: he knew his countrymen and how they felt about constables only too well. If they’d felt differently, Algarve wouldn’t have needed so many constables.

  But then the man and woman didn’t run. Bembo smacked the club into the palm of his left hand. “Come on,” he growled. They came. They came sullenly, but they came.

  Before one of them could decide to make a break, Bembo spotted another constable and waved him over. “What’s going on?” asked the newcomer, a burly fellow named Oraste.

  “Curse me if I know,” Bembo told him. “He says he was just letting his hand get happy, you know what I mean? She says he tried to steal her pouch.”

  Oraste eyed Gabrina. He rocked his hips forward and back; he must have liked what he saw. Gabrina noticed, too, and let her tongue slide along the edge of her lower lip. When Oraste inspected Balozio, he might have been looking at a pile of dog turds on the street. “I’ve never seen a blondie yet who wouldn’t steal whenever he got the chance,” he declared.

  Balozio turned pale. Since he was already very fair, he ended up looking downright ghostly. “Now see here,” he said. “I’m an honest man. I’ve always been an honest man, and I’ve always been a loyal man.” He was trying to bluster, and not doing a good job of it—he sounded more frightened than arrogant. After a moment, he added, “I can’t help the way I look. It’s how I was born.”

  Gabrina contrived to brush against Oraste. “I still say he looks like a Jelgavan spy,” she murmured in tones that shouldn’t have been heard outside a bedchamber.

  Balozio was too upset to notice the byplay. He snarled, “I say you look like a case of the clap on the hoof.”

  “Shut up, Kaunian,” Oraste said in a deadly voice. He might have modeled himself after an Algarvian warrior chief in one of those popular historical romances; Bembo thought he read them, too.

  Oraste looked about to lay into Balozio with his club. “Have a care,” Bembo muttered behind his hand. “He might be a rich Kaunian.” It didn’t seem likely, not from the blond man’s clothes, but stranger things had happened. Oraste scowled, but desisted.

  When they went upstairs and into the station, Sergeant Pesaro set down the plum tart he’d been eating; a couple of flaky crumbs clung to the tuft of hair under his lower lip. “What’s all this?” he rumbled.

  Everyone started speaking … shouting … screaming at once, with increasingly frantic gesticulations to accompany the increasingly loud talk. Quite suddenly, Balozio ended up on the floor. Bembo didn’t see how it happened; he’d been nose to nose with Gabrina, exchanging uncompliments.

  Like most Algarvians, Pesaro was adept at following several different threads at once. “Enough,” he said after watching and listening to the show for a while. “Bembo, you take this lug”—he pointed at Balozio -“down to the recording section. If he’s tried stealing before, we’ll drop him in a cell and charge him. If he hasn’t, I guess he can go. Oraste, you handle the wench. Same deal: you find out she tries getting customers in trouble, we jug her. Otherwise, kick her tail back out on the street.”

  Bembo thought Gabrina would start screeching at Pesaro for implying she had customers. But she was shrewder than that: she sent another smile of invitation toward Oraste, who looked as if he’d like handling her just fine. Bembo got the idea her records wouldn’t be searched so closely as, in a little while, her person would.

  Resignedly, Bembo turned to Balozio, who had a bruise on his cheek the constable didn’t remember. “Come on, pal, let’s find out about you,” Bembo said.

  Balozio seemed to know his way to the recording station, which Bembo found interesting in a man who’d loudly proclaimed his honesty. The constable leered at Saffa. The sketch artist bit the thumb at him, as Gabrina had at Balozio, but then she winked. Was she teasing him to encourage him, or to drive him mad? Probably to drive him mad.

  A bored-looking clerk took Balozio’s name and his thumbprint. He mumbled a charm. One of the many file drawers in back of him came open. He nodded to Bembo. “There’s a thumbprint in there similar to his, all right.” Still bored, he went back and got the file with the thumbprint in it. When he opened it, Bembo recognized one of Saffa’s sketches. “Let’s see,” the clerk said, flipping sheets. “Fine for cheating a courtesan of her fee, petty theft, petty theft again, charged with stealing a pouch, but that wasn’t proved.”

  “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.