A wild shout came from sentries posted east of the camp: “Here they come!”

  “Come on, you whoresons!” Leudast yelled. “If we don’t fight the redheads, they’ll kill all of us.” Even if his comrades did fight the Algarvians, King Mezentio’s men were liable to kill them all. He chose not to dwell on that.

  Now, instead of reaching for his stick, he grabbed his shovel off his belt and dug frantically. He had no time to make a proper hole from which to fight, but a little scrape with the dirt he’d dug thrown up in front of it was better than nothing. He lay flat in the scrape, rested his stick on the dirt parapet, and waited for the Algarvians to get close enough to blaze.

  And then Colonel Roflanz, the regimental commander, shouted, “The attack must go on as ordered. Forward against the foe, men! King Swemmel and efficiency!”

  “No!” Leudast and Magnulf yelled it together. Both of them had seen enough combat to know Roflanz was asking to get himself slaughtered, and everyone who followed him, too. The men in their squad, or the two or three of them close enough to hear their corporal, held their places. But far more men followed Roflanz. He was their leader. How could they go wrong if they followed him?

  They found out. It did not take long. Algarvians on behemoths blazed them with heavy sticks at ranges from which they could not reply. Other behemoths bore light egg-tossers. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung Unkerlanter soldiers aside, broken and bleeding. And the behemoths themselves, armored against footsoldiers’ weapons, lumbered forward and trampled down King Swemmel’s men. The Algarvians swarmed into the holes torn in their ranks.

  Leudast almost started blazing at the first men he saw running back toward him. With the new-risen sun shining in his face, they were hardly more than silhouettes. His finger was already halfway into the blazing hole when he realized the men wore long tunics, not short tunics and kilts.

  “Fall back!” one of them shouted, stumbling past his position. “If you don’t fall back, everything’s lost. Powers above, if you do fall back, everything’s lost, too.” Away he went, at least as fast as the captain who had incontinently fled when Algarvian dragons started dropping eggs on the encampment.

  Magnulf said, “If the redheads make us fall back, I’ll do it. But I’m cursed if I’ll run away just because some coward tells me to.”

  “Aye, by the powers above,” Leudast said. There—there ahead of him were men in kilts. He blazed at them. They went down. Maybe he’d hit one or two, maybe they were battlewise like him, and knew enough to make themselves smaller targets. Either way, he whooped. “We can stop the whoresons!”

  But the Algarvians, when they met steady resistance, did not try to overrun and overwhelm it, as any Unkerlanter force would have done. Instead, they flowed around it, and soon were blazing at Leudast and the other steady Unkerlanters from the flank as well as the front.

  “We have to give way!” Magnulf shouted then. “If we don’t, they’ll get behind us in a minute, and then we’re dead.” When he retreated, Leudast went with him. Leudast didn’t want to move back, but he didn’t want to die, either. As far as he was concerned, for the moment survival and efficiency were one and the same.

  Count Sabrino whooped with glee. He whacked his dragon with the goad. The great, stupid beast screamed fury at him. But then it dove on the Unkerlanter column on the road outside of Eoforwic. The Unkerlanters started to scatter, but it was already too late. Sabrino’s was not the only dragon falling out of the sky. His whole wing of dragonfliers plunged toward them.

  When he saw five or six Unkerlanters tightly bunched, Sabrino whacked the dragon again, in a different way. Flame burst from its jaws. He heard the soldiers shriek as he flew by just above their heads. He didn’t whoop then. Savoring the enemy’s anguish might have been all very well for the Algarvian chieftains who’d toppled the Kaunian Empire, but listening to footsoldiers burn brought combat to a level too personal for his taste.

  And then, off to the north, he spied a different sort of target, the sort of target of which dragonfliers usually but dreamt. For this campaign, the mages had given him a crystal attuned to his squadron and flight leaders. He spoke into it now: “Look, lads! Another Unkerlanter dragon farm. Shall we go pay them a visit?”

  “Aye!” That was Captain Domiziano, sounding as fierce as any Algarvian chieftain from the ancient days. “If Swemmel’s men will give us presents, they can’t be surprised when we take them.”

  The whole wing swung toward the dragon farm. Sabrino laughed under his breath. The Unkerlanters had intended to take Algarve by surprise. They’d moved strong forces very close to the front. But King Mezentio had had plans of his own, and now the Unkerlanters found themselves on the receiving end of the surprise they’d intended to give.

  They weren’t responding well, either, any more than Forthweg or Valmiera or Jelgava had when Mezentio’s men struck them. There ahead, coming up fast, was a dragon farm whose dragons, on this second day of the attack, remained chained to the ground.

  With a great roar, Sabrino’s dragon put on a burst of speed. Dragons had no sense of chivalry or fair play whatever. When they saw foes helpless in the ground, all that filled their tiny minds was killing them. Sabrino’s problem was not to urge his mount on, but to keep the dragon from flaming too soon and from landing to rend the Unkerlanter beast with its talons as well as burning them from above.

  Unkerlanter fliers and keepers ran this way and that, trying to get a few dragons in the air either to oppose the Algarvians or simply to flee. They had little luck; Sabrino’s wing flamed them with almost as much gusto as his dragons gave to destroying their winged, scaly counterparts.

  By the time the wing had made several passes above the dragon farm, it was as dreadful a shambles as Sabrino had ever seen. By then, his dragon could produce only little wheezes of flame. It still wanted to go back and do some more killing. Sabrino had to beat it savagely with the goad to get it to fly away from the Unkerlanter dragon farm. As long as it could see enemy dragons on the ground, it was ready to attack.

  But, fortunately, it was, like any dragon, too stupid to own much in the way of a memory. After Sabrino had finally persuaded—and there was a splendid euphemism—it to leave the dragon farm, it flew on toward the east without a backwards glance. Sabrino, on the other hand, did look back, not for one more glimpse of the battered foe but to find out how the men and beasts of his wing had come through. He spied not a single hole in the formation. Pride filled him. The great force King Mezentio had built for revenge was performing exactly as its creator had intended.

  Once Sabrino had made sure of that, he looked down to see how the fight on the ground was going. Pride filled him again. Here was the same pattern he’d seen in Valmiera. Wherever the Unkerlanters tried to make a stand, the Algarvians either used behemoths to pound them into submission with eggs and heavy sticks or went around them to strike from the side and rear as well as the front. And the Unkerlanters would have to retreat or surrender or die where they stood.

  Some—quite a few, in fact—chose to do just that. No one had ever said the Unkerlanters were cowards: no one who’d fought them in the Six Years’ War, certainly. But many Valmierans had been brave, too, and it hadn’t helped them any. King Mezentio and his generals had out-thought them before they outfought them. The same drama looked to be unfolding on the plains of eastern Forthweg.

  Every once in a while, the Unkerlanters would hole up in a village or a natural strongpoint too tough to be easily taken. Then, again as in Valmiera and Jelgava, the dragons would come in, dropping eggs on the enemy, softening him up so the men on the ground could finish him off.

  When Sabrino’s wing came spiraling down to land at a hastily set up farm in what had been, up till that morning, Unkerlanter-occupied Forthweg, the keepers shouted, “How’s it going? How are we doing, up ahead there?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” Sabrino said as he slid off his dragon once it was securely chained to a stake. “By the powers above, I really don’t see how anything could look finer. If we keep going like this, we’ll get to Cottbus almost as fast as we got to Priekule.”

  The keepers cheered. One of them took a chunk of meat, rolled it in a bucket full of ground cinnabar and brimstone, and tossed it to the dragon. A snap, and the meat was gone. The dragon ate greedily. It had worked hard today. It would work hard again tomorrow. As long as it got enough food and close to enough rest, it would be able to do what was required of it.

  “Eat, sleep, and fight,” Sabrino said. “Not such a bad life, eh?”

  One of the keepers looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about screwing?”

  “A reward for good service,” Sabrino answered easily. “That’d pull ’em into the army, wouldn’t it? ‘Serve your kingdom bravely and we’ll put you out to stud.’ Aye, they’d be storming to join up once they heard that.” He laughed. So did the keepers. Why not laugh? The enemy fled before them.

  Captain Domiziano came up. “What’s so funny, sir?” he asked. Sabrino told him. He laughed, too. “Can I quit and join up again?”

  “Up till now, my dear fellow, I haven’t noticed you having any problems finding a lady—or, in a pinch, merely a woman—who was interested, or at least willing, when you were,” Sabrino said.

  “Well, that’s true enough,” Domiziano said complacently. “The hunting was better when we were on the eastern front, though. Those Valmieran and Jelgavan wenches acted almost the way the ones in the historical romances do. Most of the Kaunian women here won’t give us the time of day, and half the Forthwegians are built like bricks.

  “It won’t get any better,” Sabrino said. “When we break into Unkerlant, they’ll be even dumpier than the Forthwegians.”

  “My lord count!” Domiziano said in piteous tones. “Did you have to make me think in such doleful terms?”

  “What’s so doleful about breaking into Unkerlant?” Captain Orosio asked. He’d come up too late to hear how the conversation started.

  Domiziano needed only two words to fill him in: “Homely women.”

  “Ah.” Orosio nodded. He looked west. “You had better get used to it, my dear comrade. Not even the powers above, I shouldn’t think, can keep us from smashing the Unkerlanters once for all. You can watch them crumble as we hit them.”

  “They’re trying hard to fight back,” Sabrino said, giving credit where he thought it due. “They may even be fighting back harder than the Kaunian kingdoms did in the east. The Jelgavans just quit once we got the jump on them; they had no use for their own officers. The Valmierans did a little better, but they still haven’t figured out what hit them.”

  “Do you think the Unkerlanters have, sir?” Orosio asked, his eyes wide.

  Sabrino considered the day’s action, the column flamed on the road and the dragon farm caught with its animals still chained to the ground. A slow smile stole across his face. “Now that you mention it, no,” he said.

  Orosio and Domiziano both laughed and clapped their hands. Domiziano said, “We’ll be in Cottbus, burning King Swemmel’s palace down around his crazy ears, before harvest time.”

  “Aye.” Captain Orosio nodded again. “He’s going to have a lesson in what efficiency really means.” He paraded around very stiffly, as if he were afraid to make any movement not prescribed for him by some higher authority.

  “You look like you’ve got a poker up your arse,” Sabrino said.

  “Feels that way, too.” Orosio relaxed into a more natural posture. “But go ahead and tell me it’s not how Unkerlanters are.”

  “I can’t do that,” Sabrino admitted. “Can’t even come close. “They’re the sort of people who wait for permission to come through on a crystal before they blow their noses.”

  “And they haven’t got enough crystals to go around, either,” Domiziano added.

  “Makes things easier for us,” Orosio said. “I’m in favor of whatever makes things easier for us.”

  “What I’d be in favor of right now is some wine and some food,”

  Sabrino said. “Our dragons are stuffing themselves”—he glanced back to where the keepers tossed more gobbets of meat to the great beasts—“and I want to do the same.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but brimstone and cinnabar give me heartburn,” Domiziano said with a grin.

  “What would the back of my hand give you?” the wing commander asked, but he also grinned. Aye, grins were easy to come by in an army moving forward. Sabrino looked toward the west again. Faces would be long in the Unkerlanter encampments. He hoped they would get longer, too, in the days ahead. In a low voice, he murmured, “The tide is flowing our way.”

  “Aye, it is,” Captain Orosio said. For his part, he looked toward the tents set to one side of the dragon farm. He was grinning, too. “And it looks like supper is finally flowing our way.”

  Supper, plainly, had been foraged from the Forthwegian countryside. Sabrino gorged himself on crumbly white cheese, almost preserved with salt and garlic, olives even saltier than the almonds, and breads with wheat and barley flour dusted with sesame seeds. Had anyone back at his estate presumed to serve him such a rough red wine, he would have bitten the luckless fellow’s head off. Here in the field, he drank it without complaint. It might even have gone better with his simple fare than a more subtle vintage would have done.

  As he ate, the stars came out. The Gyongyosians made them into powers, powers that could control a man’s destiny. Foolishness, as far as Sabrino was concerned. Powers or not, though, they were beautiful. He watched them for a while, till he caught himself yawning.

  He sought his bed without the least embarrassment or the least desire for company. If young Domiziano had the energy to look for a companion and to do something with her once he found her, that was his affair. Sabrino needed sleep.

  Some time in the middle of the night, Unkerlanter dragons dropped eggs not too far from the dragon farm. Sabrino woke up, cursed the Unkerlanters in a blurry voice, and fell asleep again. The next morning, the attack went on.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Algarve

  Alardo Duke of Ban

  Alcina Gardener in Tricarico

  Balastro Marquis; Algarvian minister to Zuwayza

  Balozio Man of Kaunian blood in Tricarico

  Bembo* Constable in Tricarico

  Borso Commandant of dragon farm outside Trapani

  Cilandro Colonel of footsoldiers near Tricarico

  Corbeo Dragonflier in Sabrino’s wing

  Dalinda Gardener in Tricarico

  Domiziano Captain-squadron commander in Sabrino’s wing

  Dudone King Mezentio’s predecessor

  Elio Lieutenant in Tealdo’s regiment

  Evadne Kaunian woman in Tricarico; Falsirone’s wife

  Falsirone Kaunian hair stylist in Tricarico; Evadne’s husband

  Fiametta Courtesan in Tricarico

  Frontino Warder in Tricarico

  Gabrina Slattern in Tricarico

  Galafrone Captain replacing Larbino

  Ippalca Algarvian noblewoman

  Ivone Grand duke commanding Algarvian forces in Valmiera

  Larbino Captain in Tealdo’s regiment

  Lurcanio Count and colonel occupying Prickule

  Mainardo Mezentio’s brother, named King of Jelgava

  Martusino Thief in Tricarico

  Mezentio King of Algarve

  Mosco Captain; Colonel Lurcanio’s adjutant

  Ombruno Colonel commanding officer of Tealdo’s regiment

  Oraste Constable in Tricarico

  Orosio Senior lieutenant in Sabrino’s wing

  Panfilo Sergeant in Tealdo’s regiment

  Pesaro Constabulary sergeant in Tricarico

  Procla Gardener in Tricarico

  Sabrino* Count and colonel of dragonfliers

  Saffa Constabulary sketch artist in Tricarico

  Sasso Constabulary captain in Tricarico

  Spinello Major commanding occupiers in Oyngestun

  Tealdo* Common soldier

  Trasone Common soldier; Tealdo’s friend

  Forthweg

  Agmund Master of Algarvian, Gromheort

  Arnulf Firstman in village in eastern Forthweg

  Bede Master of classical Kaunian, Gromheort

  Beocca Leofsig’s squadmate

  Brivibas Vanai’s grandfather

  Brorda Count of Gromheort

  Burgred Laborer in Leofsig’s gang

  Ceolnoth Magecraft master at Ealstan and Sidroc’s academy

  Conberge Ealstan and Leofsig’s sister

  Cynfrid Brigadier; senior officer in captives’ camp

  Ealstan* Student in Gromheort; Leofsig’s younger brother

  Elfryth Ealstan and Leofsig, and Conberge’s mother

  Elfsig Felgilde’s father

  Felgilde Leofsig’s girlfriend

  Frithstan Professor of ancient history

  Gutauskas Kaunian war captive

  Hengist Sidroc’s father; Hestan’s brother

  Hestan Ealstan, Leofsig, and Conberge’s father—a bookkeeper

  Leofsig* Soldier in King Penda’s levy; Ealstan’s older brother

  Merwit War captive

  Odda One of Ealstan’s classmates

  Osgar Master of herblore in Gromheort

  Penda King of Forthweg

  Sidroc Ealstan’s first cousin

  Swithulf Headmaster of Ealstan and Sidroc’s academy

  Tamulis Kaunian apothecary in Oyngestun

  Vanai* Young Kaunian woman in Forthweg

  Womer Linen merchant in Gromheort

  Wulfher Ealstan’s uncle

  Gyongyos

  Arpad Ekrekek (King) of Gyongyos

  Borsos Dowser on Obuda

  Gergely Borsos’s wife

  Horthy Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza

  Istvan* Common soldier on island of Obuda

  Jokai Sergeant in Istvan’s company

  Kisfaludy Major in Istvan’s battalion

  Kun Soldier on Obuda; former mage’s apprentice

  Szonyi Soldier on Obuda

  Turul Dragonkeeper