“Aye, Captain,” the crystallomancer said. As soon as the message went out, Galafrone waved his men forward again.

  By the end of the day, the company was inside the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Tealdo had no trouble telling when they crossed the border. All at once, Valmieran replaced Algarvian on every roadside sign—the retreating enemy had knocked down some of those, but not all—and in the first village through which the company passed. The people in the village remained Algarvian, even if their names were spelled Valmieran-style. Tealdo wondered what his own name would look like if he’d grown up here. Something like Tealtu, he supposed.

  Most of the villagers greeted the Algarvian soldiers with wine and cakes and cheers. The women greeted them with hugs and kisses. The women might have greeted them with more, too, as they had when Tealdo helped reclaim the Duchy of Bari for Algarve, but Galafrone shouted, “Keep in line and keep moving, curse you all! The way this campaign’s shaping up, you’ll have plenty of chances to dip your wicks before long. The harder we press the Kaunians now, the sooner it’ll be.”

  Tealdo saw a man and woman staring out through a shop window. They weren’t Algarvians, not with hair yellow as butter. A good many Valmierans had moved into the Marquisate since the Treaty of Tortus. Tealdo wondered what they were thinking as they watched the Algarvian soldiers tramp past. “Nothing good,” he muttered, “or I miss my guess.”

  “Keep moving!” Galafrone yelled again. Entering open country, his troopers spread out into a skirmish line. Maybe the Valmierans would be able to make a stand somewhere ahead. They hadn’t done it yet, though.

  12.

  Skarnu felt like a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. From everything the young captain could see, the whole Valmieran army might have been a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. He couldn’t see past his own tiny circle of the war, of course, but nothing inside it looked good.

  His men had been coming up from rest and recuperation behind the line when the Algarvian blow fell. Had they gone into the line, no doubt they—or however many of them stayed alive—would be in an Algarvian captives’ camp now. As things were, they’d been caught up in the headlong Valmieran retreat, fighting when they had to, traveling a lot by night so they could slip between the redheads’ scouts. The Algarvians didn’t always have great numbers. Wherever they were, though they had great strength. After a while, footsoldiers despaired of fighting behemoths, of having dragons plummet out of the sky to drop eggs on them.

  Sergeant Raunu came up to Skarnu with a grim look on his face. “Sir, another three must have slipped away, on account of they sure as blazes aren’t here.” Pulling a map from his breast pocket, Skarnu spoke in musing tones: “I wonder where exactly here is.” He had some idea—somewhere between their line of farthest advance and the border between Valmiera and Algarve—but couldn’t pin it down within five miles, let alone to dot on the map. All he and his men had done was stumble backwards again and again.

  “Sooner or later, we’ll find a village,” Raunu said. “Then we’ll know.” The veteran hesitated. At last, he went on, “By what I’ve heard, sir, desertion’s a lot heavier in the other companies in the regiment than it is with us.”

  “Heard from whom?” Skarnu demanded. As far as he could tell, his company might have fallen off the edge of the world to his superiors. He hadn’t had orders for a couple of days.

  “People I run into in the woods,” Raunu said with a shrug. He hesitated again. “Our men know you’ve been in there with ’em, sir. That means they aren’t so likely to take off on their own or just sit on a stump and wait for the redheads to pick ’em up.”

  “People in the woods, eh?” Skarnu said. His sergeant shrugged again and nodded. He said nothing more. Skarnu had learned to gauge when not to push Raunu. This looked to be one of those times. He asked a different question instead: “Is it really as bad as that?”

  “Aye, sir, it is,” Raunu answered stolidly. “The companies, the regiments where the noble officers haven’t pulled their weight, they’re falling to pieces, sir.” He hesitated even longer than he had in either of his earlier pauses, then added, “A lot of companies, a lot of regiments, in that boat, sir.”

  “Curse the soldiers for not defending the kingdom!” Skarnu burst out. Raunu stood mute. Skarnu thought for a while before making an addition of his own: “And curse the officers who didn’t give them a better reason to defend the kingdom.”

  “Ah,” Raunu murmured—or was it just an exhalation a little louder than usual? “Sir, you don’t mind my saying so, it’s because you’re the kind of captain who’d come out with the first thing and the second both that so many men have stuck by you.”

  “Much good it’s done them.” Skarnu’s voice was bitter. Then he sighed. “We can only do what we can do. Let’s get moving.”

  “Aye, sir,” Raunu said. “It could be worse, sir. At least we’re moving through countryside that’s pretty much empty—except for Algarvian soldiers, of course. Down in Rivaroli, we’ve got enemy soldiers and the locals hunting us.”

  “Aye.” Skarnu sighed once more. “And curse King Mezentio for stirring up rebellion against us down there. Only goes to show a generation isn’t time enough to make Algarvians change their stripes.”

  He set off through the forest, walking as softly as he could. He knew Algarvian behemoths had already got ahead of his company. He knew redheaded footsoldiers couldn’t be far behind. He kept scouts out ahead and to all sides of his main body of men. None of them reported anything untoward. He still wished he had eyes in the back of his head.

  After about an hour, a man at the van came back and reported that the woods ended and, past some untended fields and vineyards, a village lay ahead. “Any sign of soldiers in it?” Skarnu asked.

  “Redheads, you mean?” the scout asked, and Skarnu nodded. The soldier said, “No, sir, but I did see a couple of men in trousers on the street.”

  “Did you?” Skarnu made up his mind. “All right. We’ll go forward and scoop them up. People can sort things out later. Right now, I want all the bodies I can get my hands on.”

  “Aye, that’s sensible, sir,” Raunu said. Skarnu would have gone on without the sergeant’s approval, but was glad to have it.

  The company cautiously moved out of the woods and toward the village. Skarnu supposed they were advancing on it, but could you advance during a retreat? That was a fine point of warfare with which he remained unacquainted.

  Sure enough, trousered troopers did tramp along the village streets. One of them shouted when he spied the soldiers approaching in open order. In a twinkling, the men in the village took cover. “Be ready for anything,” Skarnu called to his own men. “They may be Algarvians in our clothes, trying to lure us into a trap.”

  Inside the village, the soldiers seemed to have the same fear about Skarnu’s company. They needed a good deal of wary calling back and forth before they decided they were all Valmierans. “Powers above be praised you’re here,” said a young lieutenant who came out to greet Skarnu.

  Skarnu took out his map. “Where is here?” he asked.

  “This miserable place is called Stornarella, sir,” the lieutenant answered. When Skarnu found it, he whistled softly; the Algarvians had driven him even farther east than he’d thought. The lieutenant went on, “Now we have some sort of a decent guard force for Duke Marstalu.”

  “What?” Skarnu stared. “The army commander? Here?”

  “Aye, sir.” The lieutenant nodded. “We were falling back from the first Algarvian onslaught when their dragonfliers hit our column. I don’t think they knew his Grace the Duke was part of it. We were just Valmierans on a road, and so they dropped eggs on us. They killed his Grace’s unicorn. He broke his leg when the animal fell on him; we got him to the first shelter we could.”

  “Is he still in command?” Skarnu asked.

  “As much as anyone is,” the lieutenant said wearily, which summed up the plight of the army as well as anything. “We didn’t think the redheads could do to us what they did to Forthweg last fall. We may have been wrong.”

  We may have been wrong. Such a bloodless sentence, to leave so much blood in its wake. Skarnu said, “Algarve didn’t beat us during the Six Years’ War. I expect we’ll manage to halt the redheads again.”

  “I hope we do,” the lieutenant said.

  The difference between hope and expect spoke volumes. Skarnu did his best not to read them. He turned to Raunu. “Sergeant, have the men form a perimeter around this village. We’ll want to be able to defend it and, if need be, to move out toward the east.” He would not say retreat.

  “Aye, sir,” Raunu said, and began giving orders.

  “If you will come with me, sir, I know Duke Marstalu will be glad to have your report,” the lieutenant said. Skarnu knew nothing of the sort, but accompanied the other officer into Stornarella.

  Close up, the village showed its abandonment. Only shards of glass remained in the windows. Leaves drifted against walls and fenceposts. Flowers and grass grew in rank, untended exuberance. The lieutenant led Skarnu to the biggest, fanciest house in Stornarella. Skarnu had expected nothing less. He hadn’t thought having his expectations confirmed would leave him so sad.

  When the lieutenant took Skarnu inside, Marstalu was lying on a sofa, a splint on his leg, giving a crystallomancer orders to relay: “Tell them to hold out as long as they can, curse it, and to counterattack if they see even the slightest chance. We must try to establish some kind of order at the front.” He looked up. “Ah, Marquis Skarnu! So good to see you again.” For a moment, he might have been in his drawing room at Klaipeda rather than a filthy village parlor with trash and leaves on the floor and pictures all askew on the wall.

  Then the illusion shattered. Marstalu himself almost seemed to shatter. He’d always reminded Skarnu of a kindly grandfather. Now he reminded him of a kindly grandfather whose wife of many years had just died: Marstalu was suddenly a little old man cast adrift in a world he neither understood nor desired.

  “Command me, your Grace!” Skarnu said, trying to put some spirit back into the man who commanded not merely him but the entire Valmieran army struggling to resist the assault from Algarve.

  It was no good. He could see it was no good before Marstalu spoke. “Your words prove you noble,” the duke said with a sad, sweet smile. “But what good is nobility in these times? The commoners shun it, as do most even of our so-called nobles. We are beaten, Skarnu, beaten. All that remains is to learn how badly we are beaten.”

  “Surely we can yet rally,” Skarnu said.

  “Perhaps we can rally in the south—back of the Soretto,” Marstalu said. “Defending true Valmierans may put the heart back in our soldiers. We do have to form a line here in the center. How and where we can do that, I am not so sure. In the north, I admit, things are rather better. The thick forests and rough country along the border there will leave the Algarvians with their work cut out for them.”

  “Then we ought to fall back to the Soretto in the south and use the men we save to help strengthen the center here,” Skarnu said.

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Marstalu showed temper for the first time. “But powers above, it’s not been easy. The cursed folk of Rivaroli have raised a guerrilla against our soldiers there, and the Algarvian behemoth brigades smash through everything we can move against them, throwing us into disarray far behind what should be the line.”

  “Have we no behemoths of our own, your Grace?” Skarnu asked. In the retreat, he’d seen a handful of dead Valmieran beasts, but none in action.

  “Aye, distributed along the line to support our foot,” the Duke of Klaipeda answered. “That is the way sensible men have employed them as long as they have been utilized in warfare.”

  Skarnu was about to point out that the Algarvian way seemed to work better and therefore seemed more sensible when shouts came from the street. The young lieutenant dashed outside. When he came back a moment later, smiles wreathed his face. “Your Grace,” he cried, “they have a carriage to take you to the rear.”

  “Oh, very good.” Marstalu pointed to his splinted leg, then to Skarnu. “My lord Marquis, will you be so kind as to help my aide get me to the said carriage?”

  With one of the duke’s arms draped over each of them, Skarnu and the lieutenant did haul him to the carriage and heave him aboard. The lieutenant stuck his head into the carriage, spoke briefly with Marstalu, and then turned to Skarnu. “You and your company are to continue your stalwart defense, as before.”

  “Aye,” Skarnu said in a hollow voice. The lieutenant mounted a unicorn. The carriage began to roll. Marstalu’s followers rode off with it. They left Skarnu and his men behind, to salvage what they could.

  Count Sabrino peered down at the ground from atop his dragon. Thick woods hid some of the roughness of the terrain, but could not conceal it all. For generations, generals on both sides had been convinced these uplands on the northern part of the border between Algarve and Valmiera were too rugged for any large operations. King Mezentio’s men aimed to prove those generations of generals mistaken.

  Had Sabrino swung his dragon so he could look more to the west, he would have seen the great columns of men and behemoths stretching back into Algarve. He didn’t bother; he knew they were there. His task, and that of his wing, was twofold: to keep Valmieran dragonfliers from spying on them as they deployed and to support them when they come out into the open country east of the uplands.

  He had not seen many enemy dragons. Maybe the Valmierans were using all they had in the south, against the Algarvian assault and against the rebellious men of the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Maybe they didn’t have enough to cover all their frontier with Algarve. Maybe both those things were true. Sabrino hoped they were. If they were, Valmiera would soon get a nasty surprise.

  “In fact,” Sabrino breathed, “I think the cursed Kaunians may be getting a nasty surprise just about now.” He patted the side of his dragon’s scaly neck, a gesture of affection altogether out of keeping with his usual annoyance at the beast he rode.

  Down below, the wooded uplands gradually gave way to the flatter farming country of most of western Valmiera. And now he spied emerging from the woods the heads of the columns whose tails stretched back into Algarve. Behemoths trotted across newly planted fields, marking fresh paths easily visible from the air.

  Sabrino whooped. “The blonds will know they’ve been diddled, all right!”

  The behemoth crews started tossing eggs into the first villages they reached and blazing at the buildings in them with the heavy sticks the great animals carried. Wooden houses and shops burst into flames. Smoke rose in thick clouds. Sabrino nodded approval. The Valmierans might not think Mezentio’s men able to mount a major assault through the rough country lying between the two kingdoms, but they would have garrisons hereabouts.

  And so they did. A behemoth went down, crushing some of the men who rode it. The rest perished when a Valmieran beam blazed through the metal-and-magic shell of an egg it carried. When that egg went up, it touched off the sorcerous energy stored in the others and in the heavy stick. The resulting blast of light made Sabrino close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, only a crater in the middle of the field showed where the behemoth and its crew had been.

  But most of the others, and the mounted footsoldiers accompanying them, kept right on going forward. The dragoons entered the village. Before long, they came out the other side, rejoining the behemoths that had skirted the built-up area. The men who had held their horses brought them up so they could quickly move forward again. First tiny obstacles overcome, the advance rolled ahead like the oncoming tide.

  Also like the tide, it left rubbish in its wake and pushed more along ahead of it. Not all the dots down there on the ground moved with military discipline and precision. Some were peasants and townsfolk, fleeing before King Mezentio’s soldiers as the ancient Kaunians must have fled before the fierce Algarvian invaders of another day—and as Algarvians had assuredly fled when Valmieran troops pushed into eastern Algarve.

  Sabrino was tempted to order his wing to swoop down on the Valmieran refugees, to rake them with dragonfire. A less experienced officer would have done it, and would have been raked over the coals for it afterwards. Sabrino knew the Valmierans would finally be discovering they’d worried more about one attack when another was more important. They’d be rushing all the men and behemoths and dragons they could to the north, to try to stanch the breach. He didn’t want those dragons attacking his fliers with the advantage of altitude.

  In any case, other, lower-flying, Algarvian dragons began dropping eggs on the roads and on the Valmierans clogging them. Sabrino nodded to himself. He’d been wise to resist temptation. The commanders were prepared for everything.

  The first Valmieran dragons came winging their way out of the southeast less than half an hour later. Sabrino nodded again. Some Valmieran soldier in one of those little towns had had a crystal with him, and warned his comrades before he either died or ran away. The blonds had responded pretty quickly.

  But they’d sent a boy to do a man’s job. They couldn’t have put more than a squadron of dragons in the air: more a reconnaissance force than one in any shape to fight hard. Sabrino laughed for joy as he signaled his wing to the attack. Even his dragon’s hiss seemed to have a gloating anticipation to it. He knew that was a product of his own imagination; dragons barely had the brains to know they were alive at the moment, and couldn’t possibly anticipate.

  When the Valmierans realized how many Algarvian dragons they faced, some of them flew back the way they had come. The others soon wished they had. Sabrino and his men blazed some of the enemy fliers off their dragons’ necks. Other Valmierans perished in the dragon-to-dragon fights that always broke out in spite of everything fliers could do. A couple of his own men perished, too, which made him curse.