“You aren’t listening—and why am I not surprised?” Saffa said. “It’s the only thing you really want from me. You wouldn’t care about anything else I did, as long as I gave you that. And because you’re like that, it’s the one thing you’ll never, ever get from me.”

  She turned away from him and headed for the stairs, putting a little something extra in her walk to give him a hint about what he might be missing. “How about next week?” Bembo called after her. “Suppose I ask you again next week?”

  Saffa climbed the stairs. Bembo automatically tried to look up her kilt, but she kept her arms close to her sides to hold it down. She went into the station and closed the door. Then she opened it, looked out at him, smiled sweetly, and said, “No.” Still smiling, she closed the door again.

  “Bitch,” Bembo muttered. “Miserable bitch.” He trudged toward the stairway himself. What I really need, he thought, is a Kaunian hussy like the ones in the romances I’ve been reading. They don’t tell a man no. All they ever do is beg for more. They can’t get enough of a strong Algarvian man.

  He scowled. All the Kaunians in Tricarico had gone into camps. He’d helped put them there, and he hadn’t even had the chance to have any fun while he was doing it. Life wasn’t fair, no doubt about it. Those Kaunian sluts were probably giving the camp guards all they wanted and then some, in exchange for whatever tiny favors they could get out of them.

  When Bembo came into the station, Sergeant Pesaro laughed at him. He’d have bet the sergeant would. “She flamed you down like a dragon attacking from out of the sun, didn’t she?” Pesaro said.

  “Ahh, she’s not as fancy as she thinks she is,” Bembo growled. “Tell me one thing she’s got that any other broad doesn’t.”

  “You by the short hairs,” Pesaro said, which was crude but unfortunately accurate. The sergeant went on, “Well, my boy, you can do your mooning over her on patrol today.”

  “I thought I could get caught up on my paperwork!” Bembo exclaimed in dismay. “If I don’t get caught up on my paperwork cursed soon, Captain Sasso’s going to have me for supper.”

  “Not as much fun as Saffa having you for supper, that’s certain,” Pesaro said, “but it can’t be helped. I’ve got a couple of men down with the galloping pukes, and somebody’s got to go out there and make certain none of our wonderful law-abiding citizens decides to walk off with the Kaunian Column in his belt pouch.”

  “Have a heart, Sergeant.” Bembo gave Pesaro the famous wounded look.

  It didn’t work this time. “You’re going out,” the sergeant said implacably. “You’re my first replacement in, though, so you do get to pick whether you want to head over to the west side or to Riversedge.”

  Bembo was almost indignant and glum enough to choose to patrol the thieves’ nest down by the waterfront—almost, but not quite. “I’ll take the west side,” he said, and Pesaro nodded, unsurprised. Pointing to the city map on the wall behind the sergeant, Bembo asked, “Exactly which route am I stuck with?”

  “You’ll get stuck with Riversedge if you don’t quit your griping,” Pesaro said. He turned his swivel chair, which squeaked under him. “You get number seven.” He pointed. “Plenty of fancy houses, and you shouldn’t have too much to do unless you flush out a sneak thief.”

  “Could be worse,” Bembo admitted. “Could be better, but could be worse, too.” From him, that was no small concession. “Better than Riversedge, anyhow.” And that, as he knew fair well, was no small understatement.

  Pesaro wrote Bembo’s name on a scrap of paper and pinned it to patrol route number seven. “Get moving,” the sergeant told him. “That part of town, they want to know they’ve got a constable on the job all the time. If they don’t, they get on the crystal and start breathing fire at us.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” Bembo said. In a way, he was glad to escape the station. If he sat at a desk and did paperwork, he’d keep watching Saffa and she’d keep sneering at him. But the paperwork really did need doing. If he didn’t get caught up soon, Captain Sasso would have some pointed and pungent things to say to him. Curse it, I was going to get it done—well, most of it, anyhow, he thought. No help for that now.

  His breath smoked when he went outside. Snow gleamed on the peaks of the Bradano Mountains to the east, but rarely got down to Tricarico. Before the war, rich people had gone up into the mountains for the privilege of playing in the snow. Now that Algarve ruled on both sides of the mountains, they could go up again. Folk from farther south would wonder why they bothered, though. As a matter of fact, Bembo wondered why they bothered. He’d seen just enough of snow to know he didn’t want to see more.

  Muttering at his unfortunate fate, he trudged west. A team of gardeners with long-handled shears trimmed the branches of the trees surrounding a home that probably cost as much as he would make in twenty years. He sighed. He lived in a flat even less prepossessing than Saffa’s.

  He started to walk by the tree trimmers, then stopped and took a second look at them. He whistled, a low note of surprise, and stepped off the sidewalk and on to the expanse of close-cropped grass that fronted the mansion. Swinging his club as he advanced on the gardeners, he did his best to put on a brave show.

  They didn’t need long to notice him; he wanted to be noticed. The boss of the crew came toward him. “Something wrong, Constable?” he asked. His shears, when you got down to it, made a more formidable weapon than Bembo’s bludgeon.

  “Wrong? I don’t know about that, pal,” Bembo answered. “But some of those people you’ve got working for you”—he pointed to the ones he meant—“they’re women, aren’t they? I’ve got pretty fair eyes, I do, and I know a woman when I see one. I know I’ve never seen one trimming trees till now, too.”

  “Well, maybe you haven’t,” the gardener allowed. “Half my workers have gone into the army. The work doesn’t go away, even if the men do. And so—” He turned to the women he’d hired. “Dalinda, Alcina, Procla—knock off for a bit and come say good day to the constable here.”

  “Good day, Constable,” they chorused, smiling at him.

  “Good day, fair ladies,” he answered, sweeping off his hat and bowing to each of them in turn. Dalinda wasn’t particularly fair, and was brawnier than most of the men still working for the master gardener. Procla wasn’t anything special, either. Alcina, now, Alcina was worth bowing to. Seeing her sweaty from pruning branches made Bembo wish he’d got her sweaty in a different way. Smiling back at all of them, but at her in particular, he asked, “And how do you like men’s work?”

  “Fine,” they said, all together again, so much in unison that Bembo wondered if the gardener had hired them from a singing group that had fallen on hard times.

  “Isn’t that something?” the constable said, and gave the head gardener a poke in the ribs with his elbow. “Tell me, pal—does your wife know how you’ve managed to keep your crew going?”

  “Now, Constable,” the fellow answered with a nudge and a wink of his own, “do I look that foolish?”

  “Not a bit of it, friend, not a bit of it,” Bembo said, chuckling. “But, of course, the municipal business licensing bureau does know you’ve changed the conditions under which you’re operating?”

  Had the master gardener said aye, Bembo would have given up and gone on with his patrol. But the man only frowned a little and said, “I hadn’t imagined that would be necessary.”

  Bembo clicked his tongue between his teeth and looked doleful. “Oh, that’s too bad. That’s really too bad. Those boys are sticklers, aye, they are. Why, if they were to find out what you were up to, if I were to tell them …” He looked up at the sky, as if he’d forgotten what he was saying.

  “Perhaps we can come to an understanding,” the master gardener said, hardly even sounding resigned. He knew how the game was played, and he’d given Bembo an opening. Taking the constable aside, he asked, “Would ten suit you?”

  They haggled for a while before meeting at fifteen. Bembo said, “By the powers above, I’ll settle for ten if that one wench—Alcina—feels like being friendly.”

  “I didn’t hire her out of a brothel, so I’ll have to ask her,” the gardener said. “If she turns you down, I’ll pay you the extra silver and you can buy what you want.”

  “That’s fair,” Bembo agreed.

  The gardener went back to Alcina and spoke to her in a low voice. She looked back toward Bembo. “Him?” she said. “Ha!” She tossed her head in fine contempt.

  “That costs you another five,” Bernbo growled at the gardener, his ears burning. The other man knew better than to argue with him. He paid out the silver without another word. Bembo took it and stalked off, pleased and angry at the same time. He’d made a profit, but if he’d been a little luckier, he could have had fun, too.

  At last, as much by accident as any other way (or so it seemed to him), the Lagoans had given Cornelu an assignment he actually wanted to have. Looming out of the mist ahead of him and Eforiel was Tirgoviste harbor.

  He thanked the powers above for the mist. Without it, he would have had a much harder time approaching his home island. The Algarvians patrolled much more alertly than the Sibian navy had—which was one huge reason why King Mezentio’s men ruled in Sibiu these days.

  Turning back to the Lagoans Eforiel carried, he asked, “All good?” He would never be truly fluent in their language, but he was beginning to be able to make himself understood.

  “Aye,” the three of them said, one after another. They slipped off the lines to which they’d clung while the leviathan brought them across the sea. Cornelu wondered if the toys under Eforiel’s belly were of the same sort the riders going into Valmiera had used or something altogether different. He hadn’t asked. It was none of his business.

  “Here. Wait,” he said as the Lagoan raiders got ready to swim off. Treading water, they looked back at him. From inside his rubber suit, he pulled out a thin tube of oiled leather, tightly sealed at both ends. He spoke Lagoan phrases he’d carefully memorized: “Envelope in here. Please put in post box. For my wife.”

  He had not fled Sibiu with any such envelopes—printed in advance to show the proper postage fee had been paid—in his possession. Neither had any of his fellow exiles from the island kingdom. But Lagoas had hobbyists who collected such things. He’d been able to buy what he wanted from a shop that catered to them, and hadn’t paid above twice what he would have at his own post office.

  One of the Lagoans took the waterproof tube. “Aye, Commander, we’ll take care of it,” he said in Algarvian. That was a two-edge sword; it would let him be understood by most Sibians, but might make him seem an occupier rather than someone fighting the occupiers.

  Cornelu shrugged as he said, “I thank you.” Few Lagoans really spoke his language. Most thought Algarvian was close enough, and most of the time, up till the war, they’d been right. Now, though, a man who used o-endings instead of u-endings and trilled his “r”s instead of gargling them showed he did not come from the unlucky islands King Burebistu had ruled.

  With a last wave, the Lagoans swam toward the shore, pushing their canister full of trouble ahead of them. They vanished into the mist almost at once. Cornelu had everything he could do not to slip away from his leviathan and swim after them. To come so close to Tirgoviste and not be allowed to go ashore was cruel, cruel. And yet, if he disobeyed his orders and left Eforiel behind, how could he strike more blows against Algarve? If all he wanted was to stay home, he could have surrendered after King Mezentio’s men seized Sibiu. He had not. He would not.

  “Costache,” he murmured. And, somewhere up there in Tirgoviste town, he had a son or daughter he’d never seen. That was hard, too.

  Eforiel let out a questioning grunt. Leviathans were smarter than animals had any business being, and Eforiel and he had been together almost as long as he and Costache. She knew something was wrong, even if she couldn’t quite fathom what.

  Cornelu sighed and stroked her smooth, pliant skin. It wasn’t the lover’s caress he wanted to give his wife, but had satisfactions of its own. “I cannot abandon you, either, can I?” he said. Eforiel grunted again. She wanted to tell him something, but he was not clever enough to know what.

  His orders were to make for Setubal once more as soon as he had dropped off the raiders or saboteurs or whatever they were. Obeying those orders exactly as he’d got them proved impossible. He was a warrior disciplined enough to keep from abandoning the fight and trying to sneak home to his wife. But not all the discipline in the world could have kept him from lingering for a while outside the harbor in the hope of at least getting a long, bittersweet look at the land he loved.

  He knew the mist might lay on the sea all day; it often did, in wintertime. If it did today, he promised himself he would guide Eforiel southeast again when evening came. Till then, he would wait. The Lagoans could not complain about when he returned. As he reluctantly admitted to himself, they were seamen, too; they understood the sea was not always a neat, tidy, precise place.

  He looked west, in the direction of distant Unkerlant. King Swemmel’s commodores probably timed their leviathan-riders with water clocks, and docked their pay for every minute they were late coming into port. That was what they called efficiency. Cornelu called it madness, but the Unkerlanters cared no more for his opinion than he did for Swemmel’s.

  Eforiel lunged off to one side after a pilchard or a squid, almost jerking Cornelu out of his harness. He laughed; while he was thinking about Unkerlant, an unprofitable pleasure if ever there was one, the leviathan was worrying about keeping her belly full. “You have better sense than I,” he said, and patted her again. She wriggled under his hand, as if to answer, Well, of course.

  Little by little, the mist did lift. Cornelu peered into Tirgoviste harbor. The warships there were Algarvian now, save for a few captured Sibian vessels. Cornelu cursed in a low voice to see the sailing ships that had brought the Algarvian army to Tirgoviste still in port, their masts and yards as bare of canvas as trees were of leaves in this season of the year.

  Tirgoviste rose steeply from the harbor. Cornelu tried to make out the house he shared with Costache. He knew where it would be, but it was just too far away for him to let himself pretend he could spy it. In his mind’s eye, though, he saw it plain, and Costache in front of it holding their—son? daughter? The mental picture blurred and grew indistinct, like a watercolor left out in drizzle.

  Fog and clouds still lingered on the slopes of Tirgoviste’s central mountains. Not for the first time, Cornelu hoped remnants of the Sibian army still carried on the fight against the Algarvians. Someone had to be carrying on the fight, else the Lagoans would not have sent their men to lend a hand.

  A couple of little ley-line patrol boats moved around inside the sheltered waters of the harbor. Cornelu didn’t think anything much about that till the boats, both flying Algarve’s banner of green, white, and red, emerged from the harbor and sped toward him and Eforiel at a clip the leviathan could not come close to matching. Then he cursed again, in good earnest this time: while he’d been eyeing Tirgoviste, King Mezentio’s men on the island had spotted him, too.

  Maybe they thought he was one of their leviathan-riders, coming in with news. He dared not take the chance. Besides, even if they did, he could not continue that masquerade for long, not in a rubber suit still stamped over the breast with Sibiu’s five crowns. He urged Eforiel down into a dive.

  He had played games with patrol boats before, during exercises against his own countrymen and during the war against the Algarvians. In exercises and in action, he’d always managed to evade them. That left him confident he could do it yet again. He was annoyed at himself for letting the Algarvians spy him, but he wasn’t anything more than annoyed.

  Eventually, Eforiel gave the wriggle that meant she needed to surface. Cornelu let her swim back up toward the air. He’d guided her as closely parallel to the shoreline as he could. Surface sailors had little imagination. They would assume he’d fled straight out to sea, terrified at the sight of them. Odds were they wouldn’t even notice Eforiel when she spouted. If they did, one more underwater run and he’d shake free of them. That was how things worked.

  Or so he thought, till Eforiel did come up to breathe. Then, to his horror, he discovered that the patrol boats had ridden down a ley line very close to the path the leviathan had taken. They’d overran her by a little, but they plainly had a good notion of how far and how fast she was likely to travel under the sea.

  When she spouted, sailors at the sterns of the patrol boats cried out. They were close enough to let Cornelu hear those shouts, thin over the water. He forced Eforiel into another dive as fast as he could. He knew she hadn’t fully refreshed her lungs, but he also knew the Algarvian boats were going to start flinging eggs any minute. He refused to give them a target they could not miss.

  Fling eggs they did. He heard them splash into the sea. The Algarvian mages had come up with something new, too, for they did not burst as soon as they hit the water, but sank for a while before suddenly releasing their energy far below the surface.

  The deep bursts terrified Eforiel, who swam faster and harder than ever, and barely under Cornelu’s control. He knew she would have to surface sooner because of it, but he couldn’t do anything about it. No—he could and did hope that, when she surfaced this time, she would have evaded the patrol boats.

  And so she had. Oh, one of them was fairly close, but out of egg-tosser range. It did not turn and move toward her when she spouted. Maybe the boat couldn’t. Maybe she’d come up for air in a stretch of ocean well away from any ley lines. Ships that pulled their energy from the world grid were swifter and surer than those that did not, but they could travel only where the grid let them. Where it did not… Cornelu thumbed his nose at the patrol boat. “Here, my dear, we are safe,” he told Eforiel. “Rest as you will.”

  He never saw the dragon that dropped the egg toward Eforiel. He never saw the egg, either, though its splash drenched him. It sank below the surface of the sea, as the ones the patrol boats tossed had done, and then it burst.