As Conberge poured the wine, she said, “Mother and Father are glad to have you around no matter what—and so am I.”

  Being Leofsig’s brother, Ealstan could say, “I’m not so sure I am,” and wrinkle his nose. Leofsig didn’t do anything but punch him in the upper arm, not too hard. But when Sidroc presumed to guffaw, both Ealstan and Leofsig gave him such stony stares, he took himself elsewhere in a hurry.

  Leofsig drank down the rough red wine in three or four gulps. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. It was already so filthy, a little wine would do it no further harm. “That’s good,” he said. “The only trouble with it is, it makes me want to go to sleep, and I do need to bathe first.”

  “You’re wearing yourself out, working as a laborer,” Conberge said worriedly. “You know enough to be Father’s assistant. I don’t see why you wear yourself out with a pick and shovel instead.”

  “Aye, I know enough to be his assistant—and I know enough not to be, too,” Leofsig answered. “For one thing, he doesn’t really have so much work that he needs an assistant. For another, he’s good at what he does; he even casts accounts for some of the Algarvians in Gromheort these days. Remember, a lot of people quietly know I’m home. I want to make sure it stays quiet. If he takes me along to help him in front of the Algarvian governor, say, it won’t.”

  “Well, that’s so,” Conberge admitted with a sigh. “But I hate to watch you wasting away to a nub.”

  “Plenty of me left, never fear,” Leofsig said. “Remember how I was when I first got out of the camp? Then I was a nub, not now. Now all I do is stink, and I can take care of that.” He kissed his sister on the cheek and headed out again.

  Conberge sighed once more. “I wish he’d stay in more. No matter how well we’ve paid off the redheads, they will notice him if he makes them do it.”

  “That’s what he just told you,” Ealstan answered. Conberge made a face at him. He didn’t feel too happy about it himself, because he knew his sister had a point. He said, “If he stayed in all the time, he’d feel like a bear in a cage at the zoological gardens.”

  “I’d rather have him be a live bear in a cage than a bearskin rug in front of some Algarvian’s divan,” Conberge said. Ealstan stood there looking unhappy; she’d turned his own figure against him too neatly for him to do anything else.

  The metaphorical bear came back about half an hour later, clean but looking thoroughly grim. Before Ealstan or Conberge could ask him what was wrong, he told them: “The Algarvians have hanged a Kaunian in the market square in front of the baths. He was one of the fellows who escaped with me.”

  Leofsig reported to his labor gang the next morning wondering if he should be lying low instead. If the redheads had squeezed the Kaunian hard enough before they hanged him, or if the fellow had sung on his own, trying to save his own skin, the new masters of Gromheort would be able to scoop him up with the greatest of ease.

  Had the escaped and recaptured captive sung, though, the Algarvians could have surrounded his house and dragged him away in irons the night before. He took that to mean the Kaunian had kept quiet, or maybe that the redheads hadn’t known the right questions to ask.

  No kilted soldiers shouted his name and pointed sticks at him. A couple of them, the friendlier ones, nodded as he came up to report. The one who bossed his group gave forth with another of his two-words bursts of Forthwegian: “Working good!”

  “Aye,” Leofsig said. He sounded unenthusiastic. The soldier laughed a laugh that said he wasn’t slamming down cobblestones himself.

  But Leofsig, unlike a lot of his comrades, honestly did not mind the work. Before he’d gone into King Penda’s levy, he’d been a student and an apprentice bookkeeper: he’d worked with his head, not with his hands and back. In the Forthwegian army, though, he’d discovered, as some bright young men do, that work with the hands and back had satisfactions of its own. A job wasn’t right or wrong, only done or undone, and getting it from undone to done required only time and effort, not thought. He could think about other things or, if he chose to, about nothing at all.

  And, in the army and on the labor gang, he’d hardened in a way he’d never imagined. Only muscle lay between skin and bone, but more muscle than he’d dreamt of carrying. He’d been on the plump side before going into the army. His service there and in the gang would have taken care of that even without the intervening months in the captives’ camp. He doubted he’d ever be plump again.

  “All right!” the Algarvian straw boss shouted. “We go. Work hard. Plenty cobblestones.” Sure enough, he sounded perfectly happy. A lot of people got even more satisfaction from watching others do hard physical labor than from doing it themselves.

  Under his two-word bursts of what he thought was enthusiasm, the labor gang tramped down a road leading northwest till they got to the point where the cobbles stopped. They’d worked on the road leading southwest till they’d gone too far for them to march out from Gromheort, do a decent day’s work, and then march back. Laborers—a lot of them probably Kaunian laborers—from towns and villages farther on down that road would be paving it now.

  Mule-drawn wagons hauled the labor gang’s tools and the stones with which they would be paving this stretch of road. The wagons’ iron tires rattled and banged over the cobblestones already in the roadway. Leofsig’s comrade Burgred winced at the racket. “Shouldn’t have had so much wine last night,” he said. “My head wants to fall off, and I bloody well wish it would.”

  “Wagons wouldn’t make so much noise on a dirt road, sure enough,” Leofsig said, showing more sympathy than he felt—nobody’d held a stick to Burgred’s head and made him get drunk, and if this was the first hangover he’d ever had, then Leofsig was a slant-eyed Kaunian. He went on, “Of course, they’d go hub-deep in mud when it rained. The redheads don’t want that.”

  “I wish I’d go hub-deep in mud about now,” Burgred said—sure enough, he was much the worse for wear this morning.

  Passing by some meadow mushrooms, Leofsig stepped out into the field in which they grew to pick them and store them in his belt pouch. “Meadow mushrooms are better than no mushrooms at all,” he said to Burgred. He had to repeat himself, because the noise from the wagons was particularly fierce. Burgred looked as if the only mushrooms he would have wanted then were some of the lethal variety, to put him out of his misery.

  Like most Algarvians, the straw boss had a low opinion of what Forthwegians and Kaunians reckoned delicacies. “Mushrooms bad,” he said, sticking out his tongue and making a horrible face. “Mushrooms poisonous. Mushrooms disgusting.” He spat on a cobblestone.

  “Powers above,” Leofsig said softly. “Even the yellow-hairs know better than that.” Kaunians and local delicacies were both on his mind; he’d heard rather different versions from Sidroc and from his own brother about the Kaunian girl Ealstan had met in the woods while out hunting mushrooms. Sidroc had them all but betrothed, but Sidroc’s mouth generally outran his wits.

  Leofsig eyed Burgred. Mentioning Kaunians to him was a calculated jab. He responded to it, sure enough, but not in the way Leofsig had expected, saying, “Ought to hang all the stinking Kaunians, same as the redheads hanged that one bugger back in town. Serve ‘em right.”

  “They’re not that bad,” Leofsig said, which was about as far as he could go without putting himself in danger. “What did they ever do to you?”

  “They’re Kaunians,” Burgred said, which seemed to be the only answer he thought necessary. Several of the men in the labor gang were Kaunians, too, but Burgred didn’t bother trying to keep his voice down. He took it for granted that the blonds would know what he thought of them. Maybe they took it for granted, too, because, while a couple of them must have heard him, they didn’t get angry.

  No. In the captives’ camp, Leofsig had got to know Kaunians better than he had before. They got angry. They didn’t show it. Had they dared show it in Forthweg, they would soon have become a tinier minority than they already were.

  Before he could take that thought any further, they came to the end of the cobbled stretch of road. When the wagons stopped, Burgred let out a theatrical sigh of relief. The Algarvian soldier pointed dramatically toward the northeast. “Moving on!” he cried. Even in his bits of Forthwegian, he made the prospect of setting stones in the roadbed more exciting than one of Leofsig’s countrymen could do.

  Not all the stones in the wagon were proper rounded cobblestones. A lot of them came from the rubble left over from the fighting in Gromheort. Whenever Leofsig picked up one of those, he tried to see if he could figure out from what building it had come. He’d succeeded a couple of times, but only a couple. Most of them were just anonymous chunks of masonry.

  He laughed at himself. He couldn’t help thinking, even on a job as mindless as roadbuilding. He watched Burgred carry a stone from the wagon to the roadway, dig out the roadbed so his stone would lie more or less level with its neighbors, and then slam it into place. Was Burgred doing much in the way of thinking while he did that? Leofsig had his doubts. Leofsig doubted Burgred did much in the way of thinking any time.

  Leofsig was carrying a stone—another anonymous bit of rubble—of his own to what would be its place in the roadbed when the Algarvian straw boss let out a furious shout. “Who doing?” he demanded, pointing to a stone some ten or twenty feet away from the present border between paving and dirt. “Who doing?” From his point of view, he had a right to be exercised: the stone jaggedly projected half a foot above its fellows.

  No one in the labor gang said anything. No one had been close to the stone when the Algarvian noticed it. Any one of four or five different men might have set it there. Nobody’d paid any attention.

  “Must have been one of the Kaunians,” Burgred said. “Hang ‘em all.”

  “Sabotage bad,” the straw boss said. Sabotage was a fancy word, but one that tied in with his job. He shook his head. “Very bad. Killing sabotagers.”

  “Oh, aye,” Leofsig murmured. “That’s clever, isn’t it? Now whoever did it is sure to admit it.”

  “Hang a couple of Kaunians,” Burgred repeated loudly. “Nobody will miss the whoresons, and then we can get on with the fornicating road.”

  One of the blond men in the labor gang took a couple of steps toward him. “I have a wife,” he said. “I have children. I have a mother. I have a father. I know who he is, too, which is more than you can say.”

  Burgred needed a bit to get that. For a couple of heartbeats, Leofsig thought he wouldn’t, which would have been convenient. Probably because it would have been convenient, it didn’t happen. “Call me a bastard, will you?” Burgred roared, and started toward the Kaunian.

  Leofsig brought him down with a tackle as fierce and illegal as the one he’d used to level Sidroc. He’d regretted that one, because he should have let his cousin keep going. He wasn’t the least bit sorry about knocking Burgred over. Burgred wasn’t very happy about it, though. They rolled on the cobbles and then off the cobbles and on to the dirt, pummeling each other.

  “You stopping!” the Algarvian yelled at them. They didn’t stop. Had either of them stopped, the other would have gone right on doing damage. The straw boss turned to the laborers. “Stopping they!”

  The men from the work gang pulled Leofsig and Burgred apart. Leofsig had a cut lip and a bruised cheek. Burgred, he saw, had a bloody nose and a black eye. Leofsig’s ribs ached. He hoped Burgred’s did, too.

  “Kaunian-lover,” Burgred snarled.

  “Oh, shut up, you cursed fool,” Leofsig answered wearily. “When you start talking about hanging people, you can’t really be surprised if they insult you. Besides”—he spoke quietly so the Algarvian soldier wouldn’t follow—“when we quarrel, who laughs? The redheads, that’s who.”

  Had he just talked about Kaunians, he never would have got Burgred to pay him any attention. But Burgred did glance over at the straw boss. When he shrugged off the hands that restrained him, it wasn’t so he could get at either Leofsig or the Kaunian. “A pestilence take ‘em all,” he muttered.

  “No pay.” The Algarvian pointed at Leofsig. “No pay.” He pointed at Burgred. “No pay.” He pointed at the Kaunian who’d questioned Burgred’s legitimacy.

  “I don’t lose much,” the Kaunian said.

  Ignoring that, the Algarvian went on, “No treason. No sabotage.” He’d learned the Forthwegian words he needed to know, all right. He pointed back at the offending chunk of stone. “Fixing that. One more? Losing heads.” This time, he pointed to everyone in the work gang in turn. By the expressions on the laborers’ faces, none of them, Forthwegians or Kaunians, thought he was joking.

  A tall, blond Kaunian and a couple of stocky, swarthy Forthwegians broke up the offending stone. They didn’t quarrel about who did what. In the face of the straw boss’s threat, that didn’t matter. Getting the work done mattered, and they did it. Leofsig watched them with a certain sour satisfaction. Under the threat of death, they might have become brothers. Without it …? He sighed and went back to work.

  Seventeen

  WHEN HE served the Sibian Navy, Cornelu had rarely ridden Eforiel to the south, toward the land of the Ice People. Sibiu had worried—and had had reason to worry—about Algarve. Almost all the time he’d spent aboard his leviathan had been in the channel between his island kingdom and the mainland of Derlavai to the north.

  Now Lagoas had sent him and Eforiel down toward the austral continent. He wished the powers that be in Setubal had chosen to send him a couple of months earlier. Despite his rubber suit, despite the sorcery the Lagoan mages had added to the suit, he was chilly. Of course, the waters around the land of the Ice People weren’t warm even in high summer, such as it was down near the bottom of the world. Now … the sea hadn’t started freezing yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

  Cornelu’s teeth might have felt like chattering, but Eforiel thought the Lagoans had sent her (and, incidentally, her rider) to a fine restaurant. For reasons mages had never been able to fathom, fish flourished in the frigid waters of the Narrow Sea. Eforiel put on more blubber with every mile she swam. It did a better job of keeping her warm than rubber and mage-craft did for her master.

  Thanks to the Lagoans, he’d taught her a new trick. At his tapped command, she stood on her tail, thrusting the front part of her body up out of the water. That let Cornelu, who clung not far back of her blowhole, see farther than he could have from a couple of feet above the surface of the sea.

  He sighed. The Lagoans were clever, no doubt about it. They hadn’t invaded his kingdom. They had taken him in as an exile. He wished he liked them better. He wished he liked them at all.

  Whether he liked them or not, he preferred them to the Algarvians, whom he actively despised. Lagoas being the only kingdom still in the fight against Algarve, she perforce had his allegiance. He urged Eforiel up on her tail once more. Was that smoke he saw, there to the southwest?

  “Aye, it is,” he said, and urged the leviathan toward it.

  Mizpah was falling. Had the Yaninans put their full effort into the attack on the Lagoan towns at the edge of the land of the Ice People, Mizpah would have fallen long since. But King Tsavellas kept most of his men at home, to watch the border with Unkerlant. Cornelu wasn’t sure whether that made Tsavellas wise or foolish. King Swemmel was likely to go to war against Yanina. If he did, though, a few regiments wouldn’t do much to slow him down. They might have been used to better purpose on the austral continent.

  King Tsavellas had chosen otherwise, though. Because of that, the Lagoans and their nomad allies still had a grip on Mizpah, even if the Yaninans finally had fought their way into egg-tosser range, which meant the outpost would not hold much longer. But the Lagoans had the chance to salvage some of what they thought important from Mizpah before it fell.

  “A fugitive king and a mage,” Cornelu said to Eforiel. “I can see that. Both will be useful, and the Lagoans love what is useful. But I wager plenty of other people in Mizpah would sooner we were coming for them.”

  Eforiel’s jaw closed on a good-sized squid that swam right in front of her. By the way she frisked under Cornelu, she would be delighted to visit these waters again. Cornelu gently patted the leviathan. By the time she took these men back to Lagoas, Mizpah would not be worth visiting, not for anyone with Lagoas’s interests in mind. He couldn’t explain that to the leviathan, and didn’t bother trying.

  “A little spit of land east of the harbor,” Cornelu murmured. That was where the fugitives were supposed to be. He wondered if they could get there with the Yaninans investing Mizpah. He shrugged. If they weren’t there, he couldn’t very well pick them up.

  He had Eforiel rear in the water again. If that wasn’t the right spit of land, there a few hundred yards ahead, he didn’t know what would be. He didn’t see any people on it. He shrugged again. The Lagoan officers who sent him forth had thought the fugitives would be there.

  “Oh, aye,” one of them had said just before he and Eforiel left Setubal harbor. “The one of them has a name for getting out of scraps—and the mage isn’t supposed to be bad at it, either.” Cornelu remembered the fellow laughing uproariously at his own sally. Among Lagoans, it passed for wit.

  Cornelu was harder to amuse. These days, nothing less than the prospect of King Mezentio’s palace going up in flames, and all of Trapani with it, would have set him to laughing uproariously. He would have howled like a wolf for that, laughed like a loon. Even thinking about it with no likelihood of its happening was enough—more than enough -to make him smile.