Waddo also shifted position. He almost fell while he was doing so. Had he gone down into the muck, Garivald would have been tempted to hold him there till he stopped struggling. If Waddo drowned, Zossen would stay as it had always been. To Garivald’s disappointment, the firstman caught himself. “We’ll see what we see, that’s all,” Waddo said. “Nothing’s sure yet.” He might have been firstman, but remained a peasant under the petty rank.

  “Aye, nothing’s ever sure,” Garivald agreed. So would everyone else in the village. So would everyone else through vast stretches of Unkerlant.

  “Well, then,” Waddo said, as if everything were all settled.

  He said it so convincingly, Garivald believed for a moment everything was all settled and started to go on his way. The firstman wasn’t firstman for nothing. But then Garivald turned back. “This is the third time I’ve asked you, and you haven’t told me yet: how would we make a crystal work here without a power point or a ley line anywhere close by?”

  Waddo looked unhappy. Garivald thought that was because he had no answer, because the whole scheme lived in his head and nowhere else. But he discovered he was wrong, for Waddo said, “Power points and ley lines aren’t the only ways to get sorcerous energy, you know. There is another source it would be more efficient to use here in Zossen.”

  “Oh, aye, I’ll bet it would,” Garivald said with a laugh. “Well, when you line people up to sacrifice ‘em to make your precious crystal, you can start with my mother-in-law.” He laughed again. All things considered, he got on pretty well with Annore’s mother, her chief virtue being that she stayed out of his hair.

  Then he watched Waddo’s expression change. His own expression changed, too, to one of horror. He’d thought he was joking. He’d been sure he was joking. Just how badly did the firstman want a crystal here? What would he do—what would King Swemmel’s inspectors, and maybe King Swemmel’s soldiers, too, help him do—to get a crystal here?

  “Powers above,” Garivald whispered, thinking he ought to drown Waddo in the mud right this instant.

  Waddo’s arms fluttered under the cloak, as if he was making brushing-away motions. “No, no, no,” he said. “No, no, no. We would never sacrifice anyone from Zossen to power the crystal. That would upset people”—which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along—“and be inefficient. But there are plenty of criminals in the kingdom, especially in the cities, where people haven’t got any morals at all. Who’d miss them if they had their throats cut? And they’d be doing something useful, wouldn’t they? That’s efficiency.”

  “Aye … so it is,” Garivald said grudgingly. He didn’t mind the idea of unpleasant strangers getting their throats slit—no doubt they had it coming. He did wish it would be for a better cause than bringing a cursed crystal to the village.

  Waddo said, “Now do you see why I didn’t want to come right out and talk about sacrifices and such? Everybody in the village would want to get rid of everybody else, or else be sure everybody else wanted to get rid of him. Things won’t settle down till folks see it’s only bad eggs from far away who get what they deserve.”

  “I suppose so,” Garivald said. He knew whom people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He was standing here talking with the fellow people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He almost said as much, to see the look on Waddo’s face. But the firstman would remember a crack like that. If something chanced to go wrong with the crystal—Garivald didn’t know how he could arrange that, but figured it was worth a try—he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him first. Come to that, he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him at all.

  Tealdo approved of Captain Galafrone, the late Captain Larbino’s replacement as company commander. Galafrone was a thick-shouldered veteran of the Six Years’ War, his hair, mustaches, and side whiskers more gray than auburn. He was also a rarity in the Algarvian army—in those of Valmiera or Jelgava, he would have been an impossibility—an officer risen from the ranks.

  “This one’s for revenge, boys,” he said as Tealdo and his comrades stood in the forwardmost trenches and waited for the trumpets to signal them into action. “The cursed Kaunians stole our land when I was a lad your age, near enough. Now we get to pay the stinking whoremasters back. It’s that simple.”

  He couldn’t have timed things better had he been a first-rank mage. No sooner had he finished speaking than eggs started falling on the Valmieran positions in front of Tealdo’s company. Egg-tossers behind the line flung some of them. More fell from beneath the bellies of the swarms of dragons Tealdo could make out against the lightening sky.

  Here and there along the line, Valmieran egg-tossers tried to answer, but the dragons, or so Tealdo had heard, were concentrating on them. In that duel, the Algarvians had the better of it.

  Trumpets rang out. The notes were harsh and blaring, not the smooth tones of the royal hymn. “Follow me!” Captain Galafrone shouted. He was the first one out of the trench. If he’d done the same thing during the battles of the Six Years’ War, Tealdo wondered why he remained among the living.

  “Follow me!” Sergeant Panfilo echoed. “For King Mezentio!”

  “Mezentio!” Tealdo cried, and awkwardly climbed the sandbag steps so he could expose his precious body to the Valmierans’ beams and eggs. He wished he’d stayed on occupation duty in Sibiu instead of getting shipped back to southeastern Algarve to join in the assault against Valmiera. The powers that be back in Trapani had decided otherwise, though, and here he was.

  “If Mezentio wants to lick the Valmierans so much, let him come fight them!” Trasone shouted. But he, like Tealdo, dashed toward the trenches the blond robbers had dug on Algarvian soil.

  One or two men went down as beams smote them, but only one or two. The egg-tossers and dragons had done their work well. Behemoths advanced with the Algarvian infantry, to bring more egg-tossers and heavy sticks to the edge of the fighting. Other behemoths hauled supplies and bridging gear forward.

  Tealdo sprang down into the forwardmost Valmieran trench. A couple of blond men in trousers threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. “No fight!” one of them said in bad Algarvian.

  “Send the captives back!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not far down the line. “Don’t waste time going through their pockets, just send ‘em on back. We’ve got plenty of plunder waiting ahead of us, lads—we won’t go without. But the faster we move now, the sooner we kick the Kaunians out of our kingdom. Forward!”

  Rather reluctantly, Tealdo didn’t take the time to rob the Valmierans. No doubt Galafrone was right, in a strictly military sense. Still, Tealdo resented the certainty that the trousered Kaunians’ money and trinkets would end up in the hands of behind-the-lines types who’d done nothing to earn them.

  But with Galafrone already running on, Tealdo didn’t see how he could do anything less. His comrades followed the veteran captain, too. The Valmierans fought back, but not so hard as he’d expected. The pelting they’d taken from egg-tossers and dragons seemed to have left a lot of them stunned. Others threw down their sticks the moment they first spied Algarvian soldiers.

  “Our stinking nobles led us into a losing war,” a blond man said bitterly as he went off into captivity. His Algarvian was already pretty good. He’d get the chance to improve it further in a camp.

  Then Tealdo dove behind a pile of rubble as some Valmierans in a little stone keep showed themselves far from ready to quit. Their beams scorched the tender spring grass. Tealdo tried to sneak one of his own beams through their blazing slits. By the way they went on fighting, he knew he wasn’t having much luck.

  Galafrone and his crystallomancer sprawled in back of similarly makeshift shelter a few yards away. The company commander looked at a map, then yelled something—Tealdo couldn’t make out what—to the man with the crystal. The fellow spoke urgently into his sorcerous apparatus; again, Tealdo caught tone without words.

  Hardly more than a minute later, a couple of dragons with eggs under their bellies dove on the Valmieran strongpoint. Watching, Tealdo wondered if their fliers intended to take them straight into it. But they released the eggs at little more than treetop height, from which they had no chance of missing. The ground shook under Tealdo as the eggs burst. The Valmierans in that small stone fortress suddenly stopped blazing.

  Galafrone jumped to his feet. “Come on, let’s get moving!” he shouted. “Those bastards won’t bother us any more.”

  He was right about that. Tealdo trotted past the ruins of the stone keep. The sharp stink of new-burst eggs still lingered; it always put him in mind of thunderstorms. Other odors lingered with it: burnt meat and the iron smell of blood.

  Out ahead of the advancing footsoldiers, he spied a large band of behemoths. Like the dragons, they and their crews were busy smashing up the places from which the Valmierans fought hardest. By the time Tealdo and his comrades got to those places, they rarely needed to do more than mop up.

  By the time that first day ended, Tealdo was more worn than he’d ever been in his life. He and his comrades had also come farther than he’d imagined they could. And, somehow, the field kitchens had kept up with them. The stew a cook with a dragon tattoo on his forearm ladled into his tin bowl wasn’t anything over which a gourmet back in Trapani would have gone into ecstasies, but it was a lot better than anything he and his pals could have come up with by themselves.

  Galafrone ate like a wolf. He looked dazed, and not from the hard marching and fighting he’d done. “I can’t believe how fast we’ve moved,” he said with his mouth full. He’d said that before, too. “We never advanced so fast in the Six Years’ War, not even in the last push toward Priekule. Powers above, we’ve already taken back half of what the blondies stole from us up till now.”

  Around a yawn, Trasone said, “They don’t seem so hot to fight now that we’re pounding on them instead of them pounding on us.”

  Tealdo nodded. “I thought the same thing. One of them said he blamed their nobles for the war.”

  “I hope they all think that way,” Galafrone exclaimed. “They fought like mad bastards the last time, you bet your arse they did. If their hearts aren’t in it now, all the better for us.”

  The discussion around the fire would have gone on longer had the warriors not been so tired. Tealdo rolled himself into his blanket and slept like a dead man. He felt like a dead man when Sergeant Panfilo shook him awake before sunrise the next morning, too. Panfilo looked disgustingly fit and well rested. “Come on,” he said. “You’re not much, but if you’re what we’ve got to hit the Valmierans another lick, you’ll have to do.”

  “If I’m not much, why don’t you leave me here and go on without me?” But Tealdo was already climbing to his feet. He smelled bread baking in the field kitchen’s oven. He thought he smelled victory in the air, too.

  And then, after washing down the bread with a few gulps of rough red wine, he tramped east again. Again, the behemoths had already done a lot of his work for him. Again, Algarvian dragons dove on the soldiers of Kaunian blood who kept on fighting after the behemoths had passed. A few eggs usually proved plenty to silence them. Hardly any Valmieran dragons attacked Mezentio’s men. And, again, most Valmierans seemed not to have their hearts in the fight. They surrendered far more readily than the Sibians had.

  “We took the Sibs by surprise, but they fought hard while they could,” Tealdo said to Trasone after they sent another group of captives toward the rear. “These whoresons were supposed to be ready and waiting for us.”

  “Are you complaining?” his friend asked.

  “Now that you mention it, no,” Tealdo answered. Both soldiers laughed. They strode down the road leading east.

  Tealdo did his best to stay close to Captain Galafrone and the crystallomancer. That wasn’t easy; the veteran kept setting a blistering pace Tealdo had trouble matching. But he wanted to be among the first to learn if anything interesting happened: in that, he was a typical Algarvian. And, toward midafternoon, his curiosity and persistence paid off. The crystallomancer listened to his sorcerous apparatus, then spoke to Galafrone.

  After hearing him out, Galafrone whooped. “What’s up, sir?” Tealdo asked. Maybe the captain would tell him, maybe he wouldn’t. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Galafrone wasn’t just willing to talk. Had Tealdo not asked, the captain would have grabbed him and shouted the news: “The marquisate of Rivaroli has risen in revolt behind the Valmieran lines! Let’s see those cursed Kaunians move men or supplies through there now!”

  “Powers above,” Tealdo said. Then he whooped, too. “That’s what Valmiera gets for taking a marquisate full of good Algarvians away from us after the Six Years’ War.”

  “That’s just what Valmiera gets,” Galafrone agreed. “And we’re the fellows to give it to King Gainibu and his worthless nobles in their gilded trousers.” Tealdo suspected Galafrone was imperfectly enamored of his own kingdom’s nobility. Galafrone couldn’t say that, so he took out his anger on the nobles next door.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. Tealdo said, “Talking with the blondies we’ve nabbed who speak a little Algarvian, a lot of them don’t want to fight for their nobles, either.”

  Galafrone nodded and turned to the crystallomancer. “Send that on to Colonel Ombruno, and to the army headquarters, too. They’ll probably have heard it already, but send it on the off chance they haven’t. Maybe it’ll help us find a way to make more Kaunians quit without fighting.”

  “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.

  Twelve

  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.”