Then Smilsu shouted, “Over here! This way!” Talsu, just then, would have taken any way out of the trap in which the regiment found itself. The stink of his comrade’s charred flesh in his nostrils, he ran toward the little path leading up into the mountains that Smilsu had found.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. Vartu and half a dozen others sprinted toward that path. None of them, Talsu was sure, had the least idea where it led, or if it led anywhere. None of them cared, cither; he was equally sure of that. Wherever it went could not be worse than here.

  That was what he thought till another dragon painted in white and green and red swooped toward his comrades and him. On that narrow track, they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He threw his stick up to his shoulder and blazed away. He gave a sort of mental shrug even as he did so. If he was going to die, he’d die fighting. Given a chance, he would have far preferred not dying at all. Soldiers didn’t always get choices like that.

  Sometimes—not nearly often enough, especially not among Jelgavans these days—soldiers did get lucky. Talsu wasn’t the only one blazing at the dragon, but he always insisted his was the beam that caught the great beast in the eye and blazed out its tiny, hate-filled brain. Instead of turning him into another human torch, the dragon and its flier slammed into the ground not twenty feet from him, cutting off the mouth of the path. The dragon’s carcass began to burn then. The flier didn’t move; the fall of his dragon must have killed him.

  Talsu was not about to complain. He had his life back when he’d expected to lose it in the next instant. “Let’s go!” he said. He still didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care, either. He could go, and so he would.

  “Blazed down a dragon!” Smilsu cried. “They’d give us a decoration for that, if only they knew about it.”

  “Bugger the decorations,” Talsu said. He looked around. No, he had no officers, nor even any sergeants, to tell him what to do. He felt absurdly free, cut off not only from whatever was left of the rest of the regiment but also from the army and Jelgava as a whole. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get away.”

  “We’ve already gotten away,” Vartu said, which also held a great deal of truth. The ex-servant turned an eye to the sky, no doubt fearing another dragon might turn that truth into a lie.

  But the Algarvians had more to worry about than a few fleeting foot-soldiers. Their dragons rained death down on the Jelgavans still trying to push through their force plugging the pass. Talsu and his companions, out of the main tight, were quickly forgotten.

  “Do you know,” Smilsu said after they trudged east, or as close to east as they could, for a couple of miles, “I think this track is going to let us out into the foothills on the other side of the mountains.”

  “If you’re right,” Vartu said, “it sure as blazes doesn’t look like anybody in a fancy uniform knows it’s here. If the dukes and counts and what have you did know, they’d be moving men along it.”

  Smilsu nodded. “Aye. If we come out the other side, we could be heroes for letting the dukes know about it.”

  They walked on a while longer. Then Talsu said, “If I had my choice between being a hero and being out of the cursed war …” He took another couple of steps before realizing that might be exactly the choice he had. He spat. “What have the dukes and counts and what have you ever done for me? They’ve done plenty to me. They’ve done their cursed best to get me killed. Let them sweat.” He kept going. None of the others said a word to contradict him.

  Sixteen

  TEALDO AND his company tramped down a road through fields fragrant with fennel. The Jelgavans used the spice to flavor sausage. Tealdo gnawed on a hard, grayish length of the stuff he’d taken from a farmhouse a few miles back. At first, he hadn’t been sure he liked it; it gave the chopped and salted meat a slightly medicinal taste. Now that he’d grown used to it, though, it wasn’t bad.

  Here and there in the fields, Jelgavan farmers stood staring at the Algarvian soldiers advancing past them. Tealdo pointed to one of them, a thickset, stooped old man leaning on a hoe. “Wonder what’s going through his head right now. He never expected to see us on this side of the Bradanos, I’ll lay.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting laid myself,” his friend Trasone answered. That wasn’t what Tealdo had meant, but it didn’t strike him as the worst idea in the world, either. Trasone went on, “I bet the Kaunian bastard is hoping he locked up his daughters well enough so we can’t find ‘em or maybe”—he took another look at the farmer—“maybe his granddaughters.”

  Sergeant Panfilo glared at both of them. “We don’t have the time to waste for you cockproud whoresons to pull the pants off every Jelgavan slut we find. We finish this occupation, they’ll set up brothels for us, set ‘em up or more likely take over some that are already going. Till then, keep your pricks under your kilts.”

  In a low voice, Tealdo said, “Panfilo’s an old man. Doesn’t matter to him if he has to wait for his fun.” Trasone laughed and nodded. Unfortunately for Tealdo, his voice hadn’t been quite low enough. Panfilo spent the next mile and a half scorching his ears.

  By the time the sergeant was through, Tealdo thought he could smell the organs in question sizzling. The only thing that kept him from being sure was the smoke already drifting in the air. Behemoths and dragons had gone ahead of the main force of footsoldiers, following the same pattern in Jelgava as they had farther south in Valmiera. Here, once they’d forced their way through the passes and down on to the plain, they’d met little resistance.

  Four or five Jelgavans got out of the road to let the Algarvian soldiers march past them. The Jelgavans wore dirty, tattered uniforms, but none of them was carrying a weapon. “Sir, shouldn’t we round them up and send them back to a captives’ camp?” somebody asked Captain Galafrone.

  “I don’t see any point to bothering,” replied the commoner who’d risen from the ranks. “The war’s over for them. They’re heading for home, no place else but. When they get there, they’ll tell everybody who’ll listen that we’re too tough to lick. That’s what we want the Jelgavans to hear.”

  He showed a hard common sense a lot of officers with bluer blood would have been better off having. Tealdo nodded approval. These Jelgavans weren’t going to do any more fighting; they looked so tired and worn, they might have been some of the handful who’d made it back from the Algarvian side of the mountains. Indeed, why waste time and detail a man to escort them off into captivity?

  One of them shook his fist toward the east. “Blaze our noblemen!” he said in accented Algarvian. Then he dropped back into Jelgavan to tell his pals what he’d said. Their blond heads bobbed up and down.

  “Don’t worry about it, chum,” Trasone said. “We’ll take care of it for you.”

  Tealdo couldn’t tell whether the Jelgavans understood his friend or not. It mattered little, one way or the other. King Donalitu hadn’t surrendered yet, but the war was as good as over even so. Some more Jelgavans would get blazed because their king was stubborn, and a few Algarvians, too, but that also mattered little, as far as Tealdo could see. Once the mountain shell was cracked, Jelgava had proved easy meat.

  “Come on, you miserable, lazy bastards,” Galafrone called to his own men. “Keep moving. The deeper we push the knife in, the less room the blonds will have to wriggle and the more they’ll bleed.” He did his best to drive his company forward with the force of his words and will, but Tealdo noted that he didn’t sound so urgent as he had in the campaign against Valmiera. Even he thought the Algarvians were on the point of wrapping things up.

  As if to prove as much, an hour or so later a few Algarvian guards led a great many more Jelgavans west toward captivity. The Jelgavans were not glum or downhearted. Instead, they smiled and laughed and joked with the men who guarded them. To them, a captives’ camp looked good.

  “Degenerate Kaunians,” Trasone said scornfully.

  “Well, maybe,” Tealdo answered, “but maybe not, too. I don’t think it’s against the law to show you’re glad to be alive.”

  “You could be right,” Trasone said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it. “You’re more generous than I am, though, I’ll tell you that.”

  Tealdo only shrugged and kept plodding east. Jelgavans weren’t worth arguing about. But he remained convinced he had it straight. If he’d been a Jelgavan soldier—especially a Jelgavan soldier east of the mountains, who wouldn’t have expected to do much fighting till just before the fighting found him—he wouldn’t have needed to be a degenerate to be happy he’d come through in one piece.

  Toward evening that day, a couple of diehard Jelgavans blazed at Tealdo and his comrades from a brushy field. Galafrone turned his company loose, saying no more than, “You know what to do, boys. Hunt ‘em down.”

  Methodically as if they were digging a trench, the Algarvians did. The trouser-wearing foes were fine soldiers, and made them work hard. But two against a company was not betting odds, even if the two did have good cover. One of the Jelgavan soldiers indeed died hard, blazed down from the flank as he in turn kept blazing away at the Algarvians in front of him. The other threw down his stick as the Algarvians closed in on him. He stood up with his hands high, smiling and speaking good Algarvian: “All right, boys, you’ve got me now.”

  He did not go west toward a captives’ camp.

  “Can’t play that kind of game with us,” Trasone rumbled as he picked his way through the bushes and back toward the road.

  “Oh, you can play it,” Tealdo answered, “but you’re a fool if you expect to win. It’s not like football or draughts—it’s for keeps. You don’t just up and quit when it’s not going your way.”

  “Aye, by the powers above,” Trasone said. “You blaze at me and my pals, you’re going to pay.”

  “This whole kingdom is going to pay,” Tealdo said. His friend nodded, then threw back his head and laughed, plainly enjoying the idea.

  They camped by a village where the Jelgavans must have shown fight, for about half of it had burned. Eggs had smashed a good many houses, while others showed the scars of beams from the heavy sticks behemoths carried. Along with the sour stink of stale smoke, the sickly-sweet smell of death clogged Tealdo’s nostrils.

  A few Jelgavans still slunk around the village, their postures as wary and fright-filled as those of the dogs that kept them company. They weren’t worth plundering; whatever they might have had before the first waves of Algarvians went through their village, they had nothing now. A couple of them, bolder than the rest, came up to the camp and begged for food. Some of the Algarvians fed them; others sent them away with curses.

  Tealdo drew a midnight sentry turn. For one of the rare times since breaking into Jelgava, he felt like a soldier on hazardous duty. If some stubborn Kaunians like the ones the company had met that afternoon were sneaking up on him, they might give him a thin time of it. Shaken out of his blanket in the middle of the night, he should have been sleepy. He wasn’t.

  Every rustle of a mouse scurrying through the grass made him start and swing his stick in that direction, lest it prove something worse than a mouse. Every time an owl hooted, he jumped. Once, something in the wrecked Jelgavan village collapsed with a crash. Tealdo threw himself flat, as if a wing of wardragons were passing overhead.

  He got to his feet again a moment later, feeling foolish. But he knew he’d flatten out again at any other sudden, untoward noise. Better safe than sorry made a good maxim for any soldier who wanted to see the end of the war.

  A little later, a Jelgavan did approach him, but openly, hands held up so he could see they were empty. Even so, he barked out a sharp order: “Halt!” He had no reason to trust the folk of this kingdom, and every reason not to.

  The Jelgavan did stop, and said something quiet and questioning in the local language. Only then did Tealdo realize it was a woman. He still kept his stick aimed at her. You never could tell.

  She spoke again. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” he answered.

  She spread her hands—she didn’t understand him, either. Then she pointed to her mouth and rubbed her belly: she was hungry. He couldn’t have missed that if he tried. When he only stood there, she pointed elsewhere and twitched her hips, after which she rubbed her belly again. He didn’t need words for that, either: if you feed me, you can have me.

  Afterwards, he wondered whether he might have responded differently had he not spent so much time marching and so little sleeping. Maybe—when he felt the urge, he satisfied it, even if he had to pay. But maybe not, too. Laying down silver was one thing. This was something else again. And he did feel worn down to a nub.

  He took from his belt pouch a hard roll and a chunk of that fennel-flavored sausage and held them out to the woman. Nervously, she approached. Even more nervously, she took the food. Then, with the sigh of one completing an unpleasant but necessary bargain, she began to unbutton her tunic.

  Tealdo shook his head. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “Go on, get out of here. Go away and eat.” He spoke Algarvian—it was the only language he knew. To leave her in no doubt of what he meant, he made as if to push her away. She got that. She bowed very low, as if he were a duke, perhaps even a king. Then she did up her tunic again, leaned close to kiss him on the cheek, and hurried away into the night.

  He didn’t tell his relief what had happened. He didn’t tell any of his friends the next morning, either. They would have laughed at him for not taking everything he could get. He would have laughed at one of them the same way.

  Not long after sunrise, the long slog east began again. But the company hadn’t been marching long before a messenger from Colonel Ombruno, the regimental commander, rode up to Captain Galafrone. Galafrone listened, nodded, listened some more, and then threw up his hands to halt the men he led.

  “We’ve licked ‘em,” he said. “King Donalitu has fled his palace, like Penda did in Forthweg when the Unkerlanters closed in on him. I hope we catch the son of a whore; if we don’t, he’ll end up in Lagoas, sure as sure. But whatever duke or minister he left in charge has yielded up the whole kingdom to us. Let’s give a cheer for King Mezentio—aye, and for not having to fight any more, too.”

  “Mezentio!” Tealdo shouted, along with his happy comrades.

  Galafrone knew how an ordinary soldier thought, all right.

  “Fool!” King Swemmel cried in a great voice. “Idiot! Jackanapes! Bungler! Get thee gone from our presence. Thou hast fallen under our displeasure, and the sight of thee is a stench in our nostrils. Begone!” The second-person familiar was almost extinct in Unkerlanter. Lovers sometimes used it. More rarely, so did people in the grip of other towering passions, as Swemmel was now.

  Marshal Rathar got to his feet. “Your Majesty, I obey,” he said crisply, as if the king had given him leave to rise some while before, rather than summoning him not to the audience chamber but to the throne room and humiliating him by forcing him to stay on his belly before the assembled courtiers of the kingdom for that concentrated blast of hate.

  As if back at the royal military academy, Rathar did a smart about-turn and marched away from the king. Though he heard courtiers whispering behind their hands, he kept his face stolidly blank. He couldn’t make out all the whispers, but he knew what the men in tunics covered with fancy embroidery would be saying: they’d be betting when King Swemmel would order his execution, and on what form the execution would take. Those questions were on Rathar’s mind, too, but he was cursed if he would give anyone else the satisfaction of knowing it.

  Eyes followed him as he strode out of the throne room. He wondered if the guards would seize him the moment he passed through the great brazen doors. When they didn’t, he clicked his tongue between his teeth, a gesture of relief as remarkable in him as falling down in a faint would have been in some other man.

  A hallway separated the throne room from the chamber in which the nobility of Unkerlant had to store their weapons before attending King Swemmel. Rathar stopped there and pointed to the blade that symbolized his rank. “Give it to me,” he told the servitor who had no function but watching over all the gorgeous cutlery and looking gorgeous himself.

  The fellow hesitated. “Uh, my lord Marshal—” he began.

  Rathar cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. Had he had the sword in his hand then, he might have used it, too. “Give it to me,” he repeated. “I am the Marshal of Unkerlant, and the king did not demote me.” Swemmel had done everything but that. He had, in a way, done worse than that. But Rathar was technically correct. He went on, “If his Majesty wants my sword, I will yield it to him or to his designee. You, sirrah, are not that man.”

  He spread his feet and leaned forward a little, plainly ready to lay into the servant if he did not get his way. Biting his lip, the man took the marshal’s sword from the wall brackets that held it and handed it to Rathar.

  “I thank you,” Rathar said, as if he’d been obeyed without question. He slid the blade on to his belt and went off.

  He created no small consternation as he tramped through the palace on his way back to his own chamber there. People stopped and stared and pointed at him: not only cooks and serving maids and other such light-minded folk but also guardsmen and nobles not important enough to have been invited to witness his excoriation. They might not have seen it, but they knew about it. Everyone in Cottbus doubtless knew about it. Peasants down in the Duchy of Grelz would hear about it no later than day after tomorrow.

  He might have been a man who’d come down with a deadly disease but not yet perished of it. And so, in fact, he was, for the king’s disfavour killed more surely and more painfully than many a phthisic against which mages and healers might struggle with some chance of success.

  Even his own officers, once he was back among them, seemed at a loss over how to treat him. A few looked relieved that he had been allowed to return from the throne room. More looked astonished. Still more looked annoyed: now that he had been allowed to return, everyone else’s advancement would necessarily have to wait till the axe fell.