“We hope we would, anyhow,” Werferth said. “From what I hear, the Grelzers are getting shaky.”
“Fair-weather friends.” Ceorl spat into the campfire. “Blaze a few of’em to remind the rest who they work for and they won’t give you much trouble.”
Sidroc found himself nodding. Even though Ceorl was the one who’d said it, it made good sense to him. Werferth stirred the pot again, lifted out the spoon to taste a mouthful, and nodded. “It’s done.”
The stew was cabbage and buckwheat groats and turnips and meat from a dead unicorn, all boiled together with some salt. Back in Gromheort, Sidroc wouldn’t have touched it. Here, he wolfed it down and held out his mess tin for more. His comrades were doing the same, so he didn’t get much of a second helping.
A sentry called out a challenge. The Forthwegians by the fire grabbed for their sticks. Nobody from Plegmund’s Brigade ever left his weapon out of reach, not even for a moment. Anybody who did that in this country was asking to get his throat cut. But the answer came back in Algarvian: “You are Plegmund’s Brigade, is it not so? I’ve got letters for you: soldiers’ post.”
They greeted him almost as enthusiastically as if he were a woman of easy virtue. He got whatever stew was left in the pot, and a swig of spirits from somebody’s water bottle. Once he figured out which squad from which company they were, he started passing out letters. Some of them got passed back to him, with remarks like, “He’s dead,” or, “He got wounded and taken off a couple weeks ago,” that took the edge off the excitement of seeing mail.
Sidroc leaped in the air when the Algarvian called his name. He hadn’t heard from Gromheort in a long time. The only person there who cared to write him was his father. The rest of his family were either dead or hated him, and that ran both ways.
Sure enough, the envelope the redhead handed him bore his father’s familiar handwriting. It also bore a prewar Forthwegian value imprinted in one corner, and a green handstamp that said MILITARY POST over it. People who collected envelopes might have paid a fair bit of silver for this one. Sidroc wasn’t any of those people, and so he tore it open to get at the letter inside.
My dear son, his father wrote. It was good to hear from you, and good to hear that you came through the hard fighting around Durrwangen safe. I hope this finds you well. Powers above grant it be so. I am well enough, though a toothache will send me to the dentist when it gets bad enough.
After I got your last letter, I paid a call on your dear Uncle Hestan. Sidroc grunted at that; Ealstan and Leofsig’s father wasn’t dear to him these days, nor he to Hestan. His own father went on, I told him what you had to say to me about the Kaunian wench named Vanai, and about the way his precious son Ealstan had been panting after her for years. I also told him she was an Algarvian officer’s plaything in Oyngestun.
He only shrugged and said he didn’t know anything about it. He said he hadn’t heard a word from Ealstan since the day you got hit in the head (however that happened) and the self-righteous little brat disappeared (however that happened).
I don’t believe him. But you know Hestan too well, the same as I do. He never tells his face what he is thinking. A lot of people think he is clever just because they don’t know what’s going on inside his head. And he may even be clever, but he is not as smart as he thinks he is.
“Ha! That’s the truth, by the powers above,” Sidroc said, as if his father were standing there beside him.
I am afraid I will never be able to get to the bottom of this by myself, the letter went on. Maybe I will see if the Algarvians are interested in getting to the bottom of it for me. Hestan is my own flesh and blood, but that gets hard to remember after all the names he’s called me since things went sour between you and his sons.
You are everything I have left. Stay safe. Stay warm. Be brave—I know you will. Love, your father.
“Powers below eat Uncle Hestan,” Sidroc muttered. “Powers below eat Ealstan, too. He’d always suck up to the schoolmasters, and I’d get the stripes.”
“Who’s it from, Sidroc?” Sergeant Werferth asked. “Anything juicy in it?” The soldiers who got letters from sweethearts often read out the livelier bits to amuse their comrades.
But Sidroc shook his head. “Not a thing. It’s just from my old man.”
“Well, is he getting any?” Ceorl demanded. Sidroc shook his head again and put the letter in his belt pouch. Ceorl looked to be about to say something else. Sergeant Werferth set him to gathering more wood to throw on the fire. Werferth knew Sidroc and Ceorl had no love lost between them. He did his best not to give them any chance to quarrel.
“Halt! Who goes there?” the sentry called again.
“I have the honor to be Captain Baiardo,” another Algarvian answered. “Do you have the honor to be the men of Plegmundo’s—no, Plegmund’s—Brigade?”
“Aye,” the sentry answered. “Advance and be recognized, sir.”
Sidroc turned to Sergeant Werferth. “Too bad they wouldn’t let you keep the company, Sergeant. You’ve done as well with it as any of the redhead officers they put over us.”
“Thanks.” Werferth shrugged. “What can you do? They give the orders.”
But Baiardo, when he came up to the fire, proved not to be the new company commander. Along with his rank badges, he wore that of a mage—he was an officer by courtesy, not by blood. And it took a lot of courtesy to reckon him an officer: he looked like an unmade bed. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked, peering from one Forthwegian to another.
The men of Plegmund’s Brigade wore their own kingdom’s markings of rank; Sergeant Werferth’s single chevrons couldn’t have meant anything to Baiardo. “I am, sir,” Werferth said resignedly. “What do you want?”
“I need a volunteer,” Baiardo said.
Silence fell on the Forthwegians. They had seen plenty to teach them that the war was bad enough when they did what they had to do. Doing more than they had to do only made it worse. Baiardo looked expectantly from one soldier to the next. Maybe he hadn’t seen all that much himself. Nobody could tell him no, not straight out. He was an Algarvian, and an officer—well, an officer of sorts—to boot. At last, Sergeant Werferth pointed to Sidroc and said, “He’ll do whatever you need, sir.”
“Splendid.” Baiardo clapped his hands in what looked like real delight.
Sidroc thought it anything but splendid. He glared at Baiardo and Werferth in turn. Glaring, of course, was all he could do. Whatever happened to him would be better than what he’d get for disobeying an order. With a sigh, he asked the Algarvian mage, “What do you need from me, sir?”
If Baiardo noticed his reluctance, he didn’t let it show. “Here.” He unslung his pack and handed it to Sidroc. “Carry this. Come with me.”
He’s arrogant enough to make a proper Algarvian, Sidroc thought. The pack might have been stuffed with lead. He carried it and his own pack and his stick and followed Baiardo away from the fire. The mage blithely strode southwest. After a little while, Sidroc said, “Sir, if you keep going, you’ll see the Unkerlanters closer than you ever wanted to.”
“Their lines are close?” Baiardo sounded as if that hadn’t occurred to him.
“You might say so, aye,” Sidroc answered dryly. Baiardo clapped his hands again. “Powers above, keep quiet!” Sidroc hissed. “Are you trying to get both of us killed?” As far as he was concerned, Baiardo was welcome to do himself in, but Sidroc resented being included in his suicide.
But the mage shook his head and said, “No. Set down the pack”—an order Sidroc was glad to obey. Baiardo took from the heavy pack a laurel leaf of the sort often used in Forthwegian cookery and a small, dazzlingly bright opal. He wrapped the stone in the leaf and chanted first in Algarvian, then in classical Kaunian. Sidroc stared, for the mage’s outline grew hazy, indistinct; at last, Baiardo almost disappeared. “Stay here,” he told Sidroc. “Wait for me.” Still in that wraithlike state, he started for the Unkerlanters’ line.
How long do I wait? Sidroc wondered. Ba
iardo wasn’t fully invisible. If Swemmel’s soldiers were alert, they would spot him. If they did, Sidroc was liable to have a very long wait indeed. Muttering a curse under his breath, he started digging a hole. He felt naked on the Unkerlanter plain without one. The dirt he dug up made a breastwork in front of his scrape. It wouldn’t protect him if a regiment of Unkerlanters came roaring after Baiardo, but it might keep a sniper from parting his hair with a beam.
He’d just scrambled down into the hole when a voice spoke out of thin air behind him: “We can go back now.” He whirled, and there stood Baiardo, as haggard and unkempt as ever, putting the laurel leaf and the opal back into his pack. The mage added, “I got what I came for.”
“And you almost got blazed before you could deliver it, whatever it was, you cursed fool,” Sidroc said angrily. “Don’t you have any sense at all?”
Baiardo gave that serious consideration. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “It doesn’t always help in my business.”
They trudged back toward the fire, Baiardo pleased with himself, Sidroc still a little—maybe more than a little—twitchy. The mage, he noticed, had sense enough not to carry his own pack when he didn’t have to. He left that to Sidroc.
“Welcome back,” people kept telling Fernao, in Kuusaman and in classical Kaunian. Some of them added, “How well you are moving!”
“Thank you,” Fernao said, over and over. The mages and the cooks and maids in the hostel in the Naantali district were just being polite, and he knew it. He would never move well again, not as long as he lived. Maybe he was moving a little better than he had when he went off to Setubal. Maybe. He remained imperfectly convinced.
Ilmarinen helped him put things in perspective. The master mage patted him on the back and said, “Well, after so much time off in that miserable little no-account excuse for a city, you must be glad to come back here, to a place where interesting things are happening.”
His classical Kaunian was so fast and colloquial—so much like a living language in his mouth—that at first Fernao thought he meant the Naantali district was the sleepy place and Setubal the one where things happened. When he realized Ilmarinen had said the opposite, he laughed out loud. “You always have that knack for turning things upside down,” he told the Kuusaman mage. His own Kaunian remained formal: a language he could use, but not one in which he felt at home.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ilmarinen answered. “I always speak plain sense. Is it my fault the rest of the world isn’t ready to see it most of the time?”
Pekka came into the dining room in time to hear that. “A madman’s ravings always seem sensible to him,” she remarked, not without affection.
Ilmarinen snorted and waved to a serving woman. “A mug of ale, Linna,” he called before turning back to Pekka. “You sound as if sense were sensible in magecraft. A thing has to work. It doesn’t have to be sensible.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Fernao said. “Otherwise, theoretical sorcery would be a dry well.”
“A lot of the time, it is,” Ilmarinen retorted, reveling in his heresy. “A lot of the time, what we do is figure out after the fact why an experiment that had no business working did work in spite of what we—wrongly—thought we knew.” He waved. “If that weren’t so, what would we all be doing here?”
Fernao hesitated. Ilmarinen enjoyed tossing eggs into a conversation. But being outrageous wasn’t necessarily the same as being wrong.
Pekka, now, wagged a finger under Ilmarinen’s nose, as if he were a naughty little boy. “We can also go from pure theory to practical sorcery. If that isn’t sense, what is it?”
“Luck,” Ilmarinen answered. “And speaking of luck …” Linna came up with the mug of ale. “Here it is now. Thank you, sweetheart.” He bowed to the serving girl. He hadn’t given up chasing her—or maybe he had while Fernao was away, and then started up again. You never could tell with Ilmarinen.
Linna went off without a backwards glance. Plainly, the next time Ilmarinen caught her would be the first. Whatever else Fernao couldn’t tell about the master mage, that was glaringly obvious.
Ilmarinen took a long pull at the ale. “Curse King Mezentio,” he ground out. “Curse him and all his clever mages. Now the rest of the world has to deal with the question of how in blazes to beat him without being as vile as he is.”
“King Swemmel worries about that not at all,” Fernao pointed out, which only prompted Ilmarinen to make a horrible face at him.
“We are still fighting King Mezentio, too, and we have resorted to none of his barbarism,” Pekka said primly.
Ilmarinen got down to the bottom of his mug and smacked it down on the table almost hard enough to shatter it. He said, “We’ve also got the luxury of the Strait of Valmiera between us and the worst Mezentio can do. The Unkerlanters, poor buggers, don’t. What’ll we do when we’ve got big armies in the field against Algarve?”
“A good deal of the answer to that depends on whether we succeed here, would you not agree?” Fernao said. Pekka nodded; she agreed, at any rate.
But Ilmarinen, contrary as usual, said, “Suppose we fail here. Sooner or later, we’ll still have big armies in the field against the Algarvians. Sure as Mezentio’s got a pointy nose, they’ll start killing Kaunians to try to stop us. What do we do then?”
That was a large, important question. The only time the Lagoans and Kuusamans had had a large army in the field against Algarve after Mezentio’s men unveiled their murderous magic was down in the land of the Ice People. Sure as sure, the Algarvians had tried to turn back their foes by butchering blonds. But the magic had gone wrong, there on the austral continent. It had come down on the Algarvians’ heads, not those of their foes. That wouldn’t happen on the mainland of Derlavai. Too many massacres had proved as much.
Pekka said, “We cannot match them in murder. That is the best argument I know for mastering them with magecraft.”
“Suppose we fail,” Ilmarinen repeated. “We’ll be fighting Mezentio’s men even so. What do we do when they start killing? We had better think about that, you know—I don’t mean us here alone, but also the Seven here and King Vitor and his counselors in that small town of yours, Fernao. The day is coming. We’ve all heard the name Habakkuk—no use pretending we haven’t.”
“I have heard the name, but I do not know what it means,” Fernao said.
“My husband works with Habakkuk, and I do not know what he does,” Pekka added. “I do not ask, any more than he asks me what I do.”
“You are the soul of virtue.” Ilmarinen’s voice was sour. “Well, I know, because I have no virtue save perhaps that of thinking backwards and upside down. I will spare your tender virgin ears the details, but I trust I do not shock you when I say Habakkuk isn’t intended to make Mezentio sleep easier of nights.”
“If Mezentio can sleep at all, after the things he has done, his conscience is made of cast iron,” Fernao said, “and doubtless he can, so doubtless it is.”
“All right, then.” Ilmarinen took his usual pleasure in making himself as difficult as possible. “Thanks to Habakkuk, among other things, we come to grips with Algarve on land. Mezentio’s mages kill Kaunians to throw us back. What comes next?”
“There are blocking spells,” Fernao said. “If you and Siuntio had not used them then, we probably would not be here to have this discussion.”
“Aye, they helped—some,” Ilmarinen answered. “How would you like to be a foolish young man, more balls than brains, trying to kill other foolish young men in a different uniform, with your mages helping you with a spell that leaks as much as it shields? Before very long, wouldn’t you sooner take after them than after the enemy soldiers? I would, and I wouldn’t take long to get there, either.”
“Master Ilmarinen, you have just shown why we so badly have to succeed,” Pekka said.
“No.” The master mage shook his head. “I’ve shown why we so badly need to succeed. But have to?” He shook his head again. “Life does not come wit
h a guarantee, except that it will end. What I tried to show you was that we’d better find some answers somewhere else in case we don’t find them here. But you don’t want to listen to that. And so …” He got to his feet, gave Fernao and Pekka nicely matched mocking bows, and departed.
“I am always so grateful for such encouragement,” Pekka said.
“As am I,” Fernao agreed. He made as if to rise and follow Ilmarinen. “And now, if you will excuse me, I think I shall go back to my room and slit my wrists.”
Pekka stared at him, then laughed when she realized he was joking. “Be careful with what you say,” she warned. “I took you seriously for a moment.”
“He asks interesting questions, does he not?” Fernao said. “If he were as interested in answering them as he is in asking them …” He shrugged. “If that were so, he would not be Ilmarinen.”
“No—he would come closer to being Siuntio,” Pekka said. “And Siuntio is the mage we need most right now. Every day without him proves that.” Her hands folded into fists. “Powers below eat the Algarvians. Curse their magic.”
Fernao nodded. But the question Ilmarinen had posed kept rattling around in his mind, whether he wanted it to or not. “If we fail here, how do our kingdoms beat the Algarvians without sinking into the swamp that has already taken them?”
“I do not know,” Pekka said. “If we do sink down into the swamp with the Algarvians, does it matter in the end whether we win or lose?”
“To us, aye, it matters.” Fernao held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished and to keep Pekka from arguing. “To the world, it probably does not.”
Pekka pondered that, then slowly nodded. “If Algarve beats Unkerlant, we have Mezentio’s minions eyeing us from across the Strait of Valmiera. And if Unkerlant beats Algarve, we have Swemmel’s minions eyeing us instead. But the one set would not be much different from the other, would it?”
“The Algarvians would tell you more about the differences than you would ever want to hear,” Fernao answered. “So would the Unkerlanters. My opinion is that they would not matter much.”
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