Fewer young Forthwegian louts were on the streets and cluttering the taverns of Oyngestun than would have been true a few weeks earlier, though: the army had summoned them to fight the Algarvians. King Penda had also taken a fair number of men of Kaunian blood from

  Oyngestun into his service. As long as they dwelt in his realm and had blood in their veins, he didn’t care what sort of blood it was.

  Brivibas’s house was in the middle of the Kaunian section, on the west side of the village. Not all Kaunians in Oyngestun dwelt there, and a few Forthwegians lived among them, but for the most part each of the two peoples followed its own path through the world.

  Here and there, the two folk did mix. When Vanai saw a tall, lean man with a dark beard or a fair-haired woman who was built like a brick, she pitied their Kaunian ancestors. In a village like Oyngestun, such mingling was rare. It was not common in Gromheort, either. In worldly—Brivibas called it decadent—Eoforwic, though, from what Vanai had heard, it was in some circles taken for granted.

  “My grandfather,” she said suddenly as they went inside, “you could be a scholar at the King’s University, did you so choose. Why have you been content to stay here in Oyngestun all your days?”

  Brivibas stopped so abruptly, she almost ran into him. “Why?” he said, perhaps as much to himself as to Vanai. After a considerable pause for thought, he went on, “Here, at least, I know the Forthwegians who dis-; like me because I have light hair. In the capital, I would ever be taken by surprise. Some surprises are delightful. Some, like that one, I would sooner do without.”

  At first, Vanai thought that was the most foolish answer she’d ever heard. The longer she thought about it, though, the more sense it made.

  All things considered, Istvan could have liked the island of Obuda. The weather was mild, or at least he thought so: having grown up in the domain of the Hetman of Zalaber in central Gyongyos, his standards of comparison were not stringent. The soil was rich—again, by his standards. He did not mind military discipline; his father had clouted him harder than his sergeant did. The Obudans were friendly, the women often delightfully so. They said they preferred Arpad, the Ekrekek of Gyongyos, to the Seven Princes of Kuusamo as their overlord.

  When Istvan remarked on that in the barracks one morning, Sergeant Jokai laughed at him. “They’re whores, is what they are,” Jokai said. “Two years ago, before we bounced the Kuusamans off this rock, you’d better believe the natives were telling them how wonderful they were, too.”

  “It could be, I suppose,” Istvan said.

  “Could be, nothing—it is.” Jokai spoke with great assurance. “And if those slant-eyed whoresons throw us off of here again, the Obudans’ll tell ‘em what great heroes they are. And if any of our boys didn’t get away, they’ll tell the Kuusamans where they’re hiding.”

  Arguing with a sergeant wasn’t smart, not unless you were fond of latrine detail. Istvan wasn’t. He poured down his morning beer—that was brought from home, for the stuff the natives brewed wasn’t fit to drink; it was, in his view, barely fit for removing varnish—and went outside.

  The barracks lay just outside of Sorong, the biggest town on the island, which didn’t boast more than three, plus a couple of smaller villages. Sorong was halfway up a hill the Obudans called Mount Sorong. That made Istvan want to laugh. If the natives ever saw a real mountain, like the ones that towered above his own home village, they’d take that name and throw it into the sea: the stubby little hill didn’t come close to deserving it.

  But, since it was the highest ground on Obuda, though, Istvan could see a long way from where he stood. Down below were small patches of timber and long stretches of wheat and barley fields and vegetable gardens. Out past them, the surf rolled up the beach, then slid back down again.

  Istvan had never seen the ocean before he went into the army. Its immensity fascinated him. He could spy a couple of other islands, blue and misty in the distance. Otherwise, the water went on forever: or as far as his eye could reach, which amounted to the same thing. He was used to looking up if he wanted to see the sky, not straight out.

  When he did look up, he spied a couple of dragons circling overhead, so high that, even with their enormous wingspans, they seemed only dots, midges seen at arm’s length. They floated as high as any of the peaks serrating the skyline back home. Up there, the air got cold and thin. The fliers swaddled themselves in furs and leather, the way hunters did when they went after snow leopards or marauding mountain apes.

  His reveries were rudely interrupted when Sergeant Jokai came out behind him. Sergeants were unlikely to know any other way to interrupt a reverie. “Time on your hands, eh?” Jokai said. “That’s a shame. That’s a crying shame. Why don’t you go police the dragon pens? The scouts won’t be back for a while, that’s plain.”

  “Have a heart, Sergeant,” Istvan pleaded.

  He might as well have asked for the moon. “Go draw your leathers and go get to work,” Jokai said implacably. He hated idleness in any form. Poor Istvan hadn’t yet perfected the art of looking busy even when he wasn’t.

  Cursing under his breath, he went over to the dragon pens—at the prescribed brisk march, because Jokai was watching—and pulled on elbow-length leather gauntlets and leather shin protectors that fit over the tops of his shoes. He grabbed a rake and a broom and a pail.

  Turul, the head dragonkeeper, chuckled as Istvan donned the protective gear. “And how did you win the prize?” he asked.

  “I was breathing,” Istvan answered bitterly.

  Turul chuckled again. “Don’t do too much of that while you’re working, or you’ll be sorry afterwards.”

  “I’m already sorry,” Istvan said. All that did was make the dragon-keeper laugh louder than ever. Istvan himself was something less than amused. Mucking out after horses or unicorns was nasty, smelly work. Mucking out after dragons was nasty, smelly, dangerous work.

  He shoveled dung and raked foul straw, doing his best not to let any of the fetid stuff— and it was far more fetid than what horses and unicorns produced—touch bare skin. The brimstone and quicksilver dragons ate along with their meat made their wastes not just odorous but corrosive. They also made their wastes toxic, for those who dealt with them over years. Mad as a dragonkeeper was a common expression, but not one Istvan had the nerve to use around Turul.

  Istvan cursed when a couple of drops of dragon piss splashed up and caught him on the arm above the gauntlet. The stuff burned like acid. It was acid. He snatched up some clean straw from a corner of the pen and scrubbed it off. It left behind a nasty red welt.

  A copper-skinned Obudan boy watched him, wide-eyed. Dragons fascinated the locals. Even wild ones were rare all through the long reach of islands between Kuusamo and the western mainland of Derlavai. None of the islanders had ever imagined taming them. That a man could ride one high into the heavens left the locals astonished and awed.

  No matter how astonished and awed they were, Istvan didn’t feel like being watched right now. He grabbed a ball of dragon dung with his gauntleted hand and made as if to throw it at the Obudan boy. The boy fled, shrieking with laughter.

  Istvan laughed a little himself, some of his good humor restored. He brought the tools back to Turul and dumped the contents of the pails in a special slit trench that had been dug even farther away from the streams than the Gyongyosian soldiers’ latrines. Then, with a sigh of relief, he stripped off the gauntlets and the shin protectors and hung those up, too.

  He hadn’t even started to walk away when he saw one of the scout dragons spiralling down toward a pen he had just cleaned. He shook his fist at the great beast. “If you shit in there again, you can clean it up yourself,” he called. Turul thought that was pretty funny. Istvan didn’t. He meant it from the bottom of his heart.

  Down came the dragon, with a great fluttering of wings as it landed. The blast of wind from them almost knocked Istvan off his feet. The flier sprang off the beast’s neck, secured its chain to the iron post in the center of the pen, and started to dash away. “Who set fire to your breeks?” Turul asked.

  “We’re going to have company,” the flier answered, and pointed west. He said no more, but hurried away to give his superiors a detailed account of what kind of company and how soon.

  Only one kind of company mattered, though: the Kuusamans. Several ley lines converged on Obuda. That was why Gyongyos and Kuusamo kept fighting over the island. The natives’ sorcerers hadn’t discovered ley lines. They sailed by wind and paddle; several fishing boats bobbed in the ocean off the island.

  “If we weren’t fighting the Unkerlanters, too, we’d kick Kuusamo hard enough to make the Seven Princes leave us alone,” Istvan said hotly.

  Turul shrugged. “If all seven of the Princes ever walked in the same line, they might do the same to us. Nobody’s giving this war everything he had—and a good thing, too, says I.”

  Being young and from the back country, Istvan said, “Not bloody likely!”

  “I’ll bet the recruiters smiled when they got their hands on you.” Turul smiled, too, but not altogether pleasantly.

  Drums started thudding an alarm. Istvan forgot about the cynical dragonkeeper and ran to snatch up his stick and to assemble so an officer could send him to a battle station. He almost collided with several of his squadmates, who were also doing their best to seem seasoned soldiers. None of them had yet seen combat. Istvan was half eager, half terrified.

  The Obudans had seen combat, even if they hadn’t taken part in it. They had their own strong opinion on the subject, and showed it by fleeing the town of Sorong. Some ran up toward the top of Mt. Sorong, others just headed off into the woods. A few carried sacks of coarse native cloth stuffed with their belongings; most didn’t bother, and took off with nothing but the robes on their backs.

  “Have no fear, fierce warriors of Ekrekek Arpad!” Major Kisfaludy cried. Every tawny strand of his beard seemed to quiver from great emotion. “We have a surprise in store for the Kuusamans, if those little slant-eyed demons ever dare set foot on the soil of this island.” His grin was both fierce and conspiratorial. “They can have no notion of how many dragons we’ve flown into Obuda since we took it back from them.”

  In his mind’s eye, Istvan saw dragons dropping eggs around and then on Kuusaman ships that presumed to approach Obuda. He saw some of those ships burning and others fleeing east down the ley lines as fast as they could go. He joined the rest of the squad, the rest of the whole unit, in a rousing cheer.

  “And now, down toward the beach,” Major Kisfaludy said. “If any Kuusamans are lucky enough to land on Obuda, we shall drive them back into the sea.”

  Along with his comrades, Istvan cheered again. Wings thundered, off in the distance, as dragons hurled themselves and their fliers into the air. Istvan laughed to think of the dreadful surprise the enemy would get when flame and raw energy consumed them. If they were rash enough to set themselves against the will of Arpad the ekrekek, they deserved nothing better, not as far as he was concerned.

  He trotted down a path through the woods toward the beach. At the edge of the trees, sheltered among logs and rocks, stood egg-tossers and their crews, also ready to rain fire down on any Kuusamans who reached land. Istvan waved to the crews, then filed into a trench.

  After that, he had nothing to do but wait. He watched the dragons wing their way east against targets they could see, but which the bulge of the earth hid from his eyes. And then he watched in some surprise as dragons came out of the east toward those that had flown from Obuda. He scratched his head. Was a flight returning already?

  Sergeant Jokai cursed horribly. At last, the curses cooled to coherence:

  “The slant-eyes have gone and loaded a ship full of dragons. Life just got uglier, aye, it did.”

  Sure enough, while some of the Gyongyosian dragons arrowed down toward whatever Kuusaman ships lay below Istvan’s horizon, others wheeled in a dance of death with the enemy’s fliers. When a couple of the great beasts flew back toward Obuda, neither Istvan nor anyone else on the ground knew whether or not to blaze at them.

  One was plainly laboring, doing more gliding than stroking with its left wing. It crashed down on to the sand not twenty feet in front of Istvan, which let him see how badly that wing was burned. The bloodied flier, a Gyongyosian, staggered toward the trench. “We drove ‘em back!” he called, and fell on his face.

  A couple of soldiers ran out and scooped him up. Sergeant Jokai cursed again. “We drove ‘em back this time,” he said, “on account of we had a surprise to match their surprise, and because we spotted ‘em early. But flying dragons off a ship! The Kuusaman bastards have gone and complicated the war, curse ‘em to powerless.” Istvan was suddenly just as well pleased not to have received his initiation into combat, at least from the receiving end.

  Pekka looked out at the students filing into the auditorium. It was hardly the biggest hall at Kajaani City College, but that did not dismay her. Theoretical sorcery, unlike the more practical applications of the art, was not a ley line to fame or riches. Without theoretical sorcery, though, no one would ever have realized ley lines existed, let alone figured out how to use them.

  She set her hands on the lectern, took a deep breath, and began: before anything else, ritual. “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

  Softly, her students repeated the unadorned but proud phrases. A couple of the students were of Kaunian blood, from Valmiera or Jelgava; another handful were Lagoans. Their inches and beaky features and yellow and auburn hair set them apart from the Kuusaman majority (though some who served the Seven Princes, especially from the eastern part of the realm, might almost have been Lagoans by looks). Regardless of their homelands, they joined in the ritual. If they refused, they did not attend Pekka’s lectures.

  “Mankind has used the energies manifested and released at power points since long before the beginning of recorded history,” she began. Her students scribbled notes. Watching them amused her. Most of them took down everything she said, even when it was something they already knew. For those who advanced in the discipline, that would end. Theoretical sorcery was, after all, about the essential, not the accidental in which it was surrounded.

  “Only improvements in both the theoretical underpinnings of sorcery and in sorcerous instrumentation have enabled us to advance beyond what was known in the days of the Kaunian Empire,” Pekka went on. She held up an amulet of amber and lodestone, such as a mage might use at sea. “Please note that these phenomena have gone hand in hand. Improved instruments of magecraft had yielded new data, which, in turn, have forced improvements in theory, making it correspond more closely to observed reality. And new theory has also led to new instruments to exploit and expand upon it.”

  She turned and wrote on a large sheet of slate behind her the law of similarity—similar causes produce similar effects—and the law of contagion—objects once in contact continue to influence each other at a distance. Like her body, her script was small and precise and elegant.

  One of the students in the front row muttered discontentedly to her benchmate: “What does she think we are, morons? They knew that much back in the Kaunian Empire.”

  Pekka nodded. “Yes, they did know the two laws back in the days of the Empire. Our own ancestors”—like her, the student was of Kuusaman blood—“knew them before the Kaunians crossed the Strait of Valmiera and came to our island. The ancestors of the Gyongyosians discovered them independently. Some of the savages in the distant jungles of equatorial Siaulia and on the island of the Great North Sea know them, too. Even the shaggy Ice People know them, though they may have learned them from us or from the folk of Derlavai.”

  The student looked as if she wished she’d never opened her mouth. In her place, Pekka would have wished the same thing. But wishes had no place in theoretical sorcery. Pekka resumed:

  “What we have here is qualitative, not quantitative. The laws of similarity and contagion state that these effects occur, but not how they occur or to what degree they occur. That is what we shall be contemplating during the rest of the term.”

  She covered the sheet of slate with symbols and numbers a couple of times before the lecture ended, pausing to use an old wool rag to wipe it clean before cluttering it once more. When she dismissed the students, one of them came up to her, bowed, and asked, “Mistress Pekka, could you not have cleansed the slate by magecraft instead of bothering with that rag?”

  “A mage with a stronger practical bent than mine would have had an easier time of it, but yes, I could have done that.” Pekka hid most of her amusement; she got this sort of question about every other term. She could see the followup gleaming in the young man’s eyes, and forestalled it: “I use the rag instead of magic because using the rag is easier than any magic I could make. One thing a mage must learn is, that he can do something does not necessarily mean he should do it.”

  He stared at her, his eyes as wide as a Kuusaman’s could be, nothing but incomprehension on his face. “What’s the point of magic, if not doing things?” he asked.

  “Knowing what things to do?” Pekka suggested gently. No, the student did not understand; she could see as much. Perhaps he would begin to by the end of the term. Perhaps not, too. He was very young. And, being a man, he was likelier to think of limits as things to be overcome than to be respected.

  He went off shaking his head. Pekka permitted herself a small smile. She dealt with a couple of other questions of smaller import, though ones more immediately urgent to the students asking them: matters of text and examinations. And then, as a new group of chattering young men and women began coming into the auditorium for the lecture on crystallography that followed hers, Pekka neatly tucked her notes into a small leather valise and left the hall.