“Thanks.” Sabrino recognized the handwriting at once. To Orosio, he said, “From my wife.”
“Ah.” Orosio stepped back a couple of paces to give him privacy to read it.
Opening the envelope with gloved hands was a clumsy business, but Sabrino managed. Inside were two pages closely written in Gismonda’s clear, precise script. As was her way, she came straight to the point. I have good reason to believe that your mistress has taken up with another man, she told him. Fronesia has been seen too much with an infantry officer—some say a major, others a colonel—to leave any doubt that he has seen too much of her. That being so, I suggest you let him pay for her flat and her extravagances.
“And so I shall,” Sabrino muttered.
“What’s that, sir?” Oraste asked.
“Cut off my mistress’ support,” Sabrino answered. “My wife tells me some colonel of footsoldiers, or whatever he may be, is getting the benefits from her these days. If he’s getting the benefits, by the powers above, he can bloody well pay the freight, too.”
“I should say so.” But Orosio’s rather heavy features clouded. “As long as you’re sure your wife’s telling the truth, that is.”
Sabrino nodded. “Oh, aye, without a doubt. Gismonda has never given me any trouble about Fronesia. I should hope she wouldn’t. My dear fellow, do you know a proper Algarvian noble who hasn’t got a mistress or two?—aside from the handful who have boys on the side instead, I mean.”
“Well …” Captain Orosio hesitated, then said, “There’s me.”
Sabrino slapped him on the back. “And we know what your problem is: you’ve been here fighting a war and serving your kingdom. You get back to civilization, you’ll need to carry a constable’s club to beat the women back.”
“Maybe.” Orosio kicked at the frozen dirt like a youth just beginning to think about girls. “It’d be nice.”
Sabrino slapped him on the back again. “It’ll happen,” he said, wondering if it would. Orosio was a nobleman, all right, or he’d have had an even harder time making officer’s rank than he had, but you needed to squint hard at his pedigree to be sure of it. He’d have risen further and faster otherwise, for he was a first-rate soldier. There were times when Sabrino was glad Orosio hadn’t been in position to hope for a wing of his own to command; he was too useful and able a subordinate to want to lose.
“Well, maybe,” Orosio said again. He knew what held him back. He could hardly help knowing. After another kick at the dirt, he went on, “The way our losses are these days, we’re getting more out-and-out commoners as officers than we probably ever did in all our history till now.”
“It could be,” Sabrino agreed. “The Six Years’ War was hard on our noble families, too. Put it together with this one, and …” He sighed. “When the war is over, the king will have to grant a lot of patents of nobility, just to keep the ranks from getting too thin.”
“I suppose so.” Orosio’s laugh sent fog spurting from his mouth. “And then the families who were noble before the war will spend the next five hundred years looking down their noses at the new ones.”
“That’s the truth.” Sabrino laughed, too. But, as happened so often these days, the laughter didn’t want to stick. “Better that than having some other king tell us who our nobles will be and who they won’t be.”
In centuries gone by, Valmiera and Jelgava and Forthweg and even Yanina had meddled in Algarvian affairs, backing now this local prince, now that one, as puppet or cat’s-paw. Once upon a time, Sibiu had ruled a broad stretch of the coastline of southern Algarve. Those bad days, those days when a man was embarrassed to admit he was an Algarvian, were gone. Algarve had taken its right place in the sun, a kingdom among kingdoms, a great kingdom among great kingdoms.
But Algarve didn’t hold Sibiu anymore. And, not far away, eggs burst, a quick, hard drumbeat of noise. Sabrino’s head swung in that direction as he gauged the sound and what it might mean. So did Orosio’s. “Unkerlanters,” Orosio said.
“Aye.” Sabrino hated to nod. “They didn’t even let the mud slow them down this autumn. Now that the ground’s hard again, I don’t know how we’re going to hold them out of Herborn.”
“Neither do I,” Orosio said. “But we’d cursed well better, because we’ll have a demon of a time hanging on to the rest of Grelz if we lose it”
“Oh, it’s not quite so bad as that, I wouldn’t say—not good, mind you, but not so bad as that,” Sabrino said. Orosio looked glum and cold and disbelieving and said not a word. Sabrino had been hoping for an argument. Silence, skeptical silence, gave him nothing to push against.
A crystallomancer hurried over to his tent and stuck his head inside. Not seeing him, the fellow drew back in confusion. “Here I am,” Sabrino called, and waved. “What’s gone wrong now?” He assumed something had, or the fellow wouldn’t have been looking for him.
With a salute, the crystallomancer said, “Sir, the wing is ordered to attack the Unkerlanter ground forces now pushing their way into map square Green-Three.”
“Green-Three? Powers below eat me if I remember where that is,” Sabrino said. “Tell the dragon handlers to load eggs onto the beasts. Orosio, call out the dragonfliers, and I’ll go find out what in blazes we’re supposed to be doing.”
While the crystallomancer and Orosio shouted, Sabrino went back to his tent and unfolded the situation map. For a moment, he didn’t see any square labeled Green-Three, and he wondered whether the crystallomancer had got the order straight. Then he noticed that the vertical column of squares labeled Green lay east of Herborn, not west where he’d been looking. He cursed under his breath. No, the capital of the Kingdom of Grelz wasn’t going to hold. If the Unkerlanters were already beyond Herborn, the fight had to be to keep a corridor open so the troops in the city could pull out.
No help for it, he thought. If we lose Herborn and those men, we’ll be worse off than if we just lose Herborn.
He hurried out of the tent again, shouting orders of his own. “Come on, you whoresons!” he yelled to the men of his wing. “Time to make some Unkerlanters sorry they were ever born.”
Even now, after so many bitter battles, his dragonfliers gave him a cheer. Somehow, that rocked him. He had trouble believing they had anything to cheer about, or that he’d done anything to deserve those shouts. Waving a mittened hand, he scrambled up onto his dragon and took his place at the base of its neck. The dragon’s screech rang high and shrill in his ears. It was younger and smaller than the beast he’d taken into all the fights before it got blazed out of the sky—younger and smaller and, if such a thing was possible, stupider, too.
He whacked it with the goad. It screeched again, this time in fury, and sprang into the air as if hoping to shake him off. He grinned. An angry dragon was a dragon that would fly hard. He activated his crystal and spoke to his squadron leaders: “Green-Three, boys, just like the crystallomancer said. North and east of Herborn.”
Would the words slide by without the officers’ fully noticing what he’d just said? He hoped so. But no such luck. “North and east?” Captain Orosio exclaimed. “Colonel, that doesn’t sound good at all, not even a little bit.”
“I wish I could tell you you were wrong, but I’m afraid you’re right,” Sabrino said. “Nothing we can do about it, though, except hit Swemmel’s bastards as hard as we can and help our own boys down on the ground.”
Orosio didn’t answer that. As far as Sabrino could see, it had no answer. They flew on over the ruined landscape of the Kingdom—not the Duchy (not yet, thought Sabrino)—of Grelz. Two and a half years before, the Unkerlanters had fought hard to hold back the Algarvians. Little of what those battles wrecked was rebuilt, and now Sabrino’s countrymen were doing everything they could to keep the Unkerlanters from retaking this stretch of land. If anything hereabouts was left standing by the time these battles were through, Sabrino would have been amazed.
Then he stopped worrying about the local landscape. There down below, just emerging f
rom forest onto open ground, was the head of an Unkerlanter column—surely the force against which his wing had been sent. A few Algarvian behemoths out on the frozen fields started tossing eggs at Swemmel’s soldiers, but they wouldn’t be able to stall the Unkerlanters for long, not without help they wouldn’t.
“Come on!” Sabrino shouted into his crystal. He pointed for good measure. “There they are. Now we make’em sorry they aren’t somewhere else.”
Like most of its kind, his new dragon was happy enough to stoop on the enemy, as if it imagined itself a madly outsized kestrel. Getting it to pull up, he knew, would be another problem. It wanted to sink its claws into a behemoth and fly off with the great beast, armor and crew and all: it had not the wit to see such was far beyond even its great strength.
Sabrino loosed the eggs slung beneath the dragon and hit it with the goad. It screeched angrily, but did finally decide to rise rather than flying into the ground. More eggs burst behind Sabrino as the rest of his dragonfliers also loosed their loads of death on the Unkerlanters. He looked back over his shoulder and nodded in solid professional satisfaction. Battered and undermanned though it was, his wing still did a solid professional job. They’d well and truly smashed in the head of this column. Swemmel’s men wouldn’t be coming forward here, not for a while.
But then more Unkerlanters emerged from the woods north and east of the column the dragonfliers had just attacked. And, as his dragon gained height, Sabrino saw still more men and beasts, some in rock-gray, some in white winter smocks over rock-gray, moving up from the south toward those soldiers coming out of the forest.
Sabrino didn’t know whether to groan or to curse. He did both at once, with great feeling. “Powers below eat them!” he shouted to the uncaring sky. “They’ve got Herborn trapped in one of their stinking kettles!”
“Herborn surrounded.” Fernao sounded out the Kuusaman words with care as he fought his way through the news sheet from Yliharma. “Large force of Algarvians trapped inside Unkerlanter lines. Demand for surrender refused.”
“I’ve heard Lagoans who sounded worse,” Ilmarinen said. Coming from him, any praise was high praise.
Fernao dipped his head. “Thank you,” he said in Kuusaman. He went on in classical Kaunian, in which he remained more fluent: “Reading the news sheets, I learn many military terms. But they are not much use to me in speaking of ordinary things.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Ilmarinen looked around the refectory till he spotted the serving girl for whom he’d conceived an as yet unrequited passion. Waving to get her attention, he called, “Hey, Linna! If I surround you, will you surrender?”
“You are not asleep, Master Ilmarinen. You are awake,” Linna answered. “You are not talking in your dreams, however much you wish you were.”
“I see,” Fernao said. “Aye, I followed that well enough.”
“I was afraid you would,” Ilmarinen said glumly. “That wench must spend an hour every morning stropping her tongue to make it sharper.” He took a sip of tea, then asked, “Let me see that news sheet, will you?” Fernao passed it to him; Ilmarinen was bound to make smoother, faster going of it than he could. And, sure enough, the Kuusaman master mage soon grunted. “Here’s a sweet little story: a Sibian woman who was pregnant by an Algarvian fed her husband rat poison when he came home and found out what she’d been up to.”
“Sweet, aye.” Fernao had a pretty good idea why Ilmarinen had picked that particular story. He had no intention of admitting as much, since that would also have meant admitting Ilmarinen had a point.
When Fernao said no more, Ilmarinen grunted again and went on, “Aye, poor Commander, ah, Cornelu won’t be riding leviathans for King Burebistu any more, and his not-soloving wife will end up a head shorter. Bad business all the way around.”
“Cornelu?” Fernao exclaimed—the name got his notice. “Oh, that poor bugger!”
“You knew him?” Now Ilmarinen sounded surprised.
“Not well, but aye, I knew him,” Fernao answered. “He was the leviathan-rider who pulled King Penda of Forthweg and me out of Mizpah, down in the land of the Ice People, when it was on the point of falling to the Yaninans.”
“Ah.” Ilmarinen nodded. “I suspect that, if we knew more of these webs of casual acquaintance, we could do more with the law of contagion than we’ve managed up till now. If I had to guess, I’d say that would be for the generation of mages after you.”
“It could be.” Fernao eyed Ilmarinen with admiration no less genuine for being reluctant. No one could ever say Ilmarinen thought small. In a couple of sentences, he’d proposed a program of research that might well keep a whole generation of mages busy.
Before Fernao could say anything else, Pekka strode into the refectory and spoke in ringing tones: “My fellow mages, we are leaving for the blockhouse in a quarter of an hour. You will be ready.” The Kuusaman verb had a form that expressed absolute certainty; Pekka used it then.
And Fernao was ready in a quarter of an hour—done with his breakfast and decked in furs a man of the Ice People wouldn’t have disdained. As he dressed, he wondered whether Ilmarinen, who’d lingered in the dining hall, could possibly get to the front door of the hostel within the appointed time. But he found Ilmarinen there before him. The master mage gave a superior smirk, as if to say he knew he’d put one over on Fernao.
Everyone was there: all the theoretical sorcerers who would conduct the next experiment that sprang from the unity at the heart of the Two Laws, the secondary sorcerers who would project their spell to the animals, the sorcerers who would keep the animals from freezing till the spell went forth, and the contingent of mages who would do their best to protect the theoretical sorcerers against any onslaught from Algarve.
Pekka didn’t look pleased to find everyone ready on time. She looked as if that were nothing less than her due. Maybe that was what leading meant. “And off we go,” she said. “The weather is very fine today.”
She came from Kajaani, of course, on the southern coast of Kuusamo. That meant her standards differed from Fernao’s. As far as he was concerned, it was bloody cold outside. But several of the other Kuusamans nodded, so he supposed he was the odd man out here.
Odd man out or not, he was glad to snuggle under more furs in a sleigh. He was also glad to snuggle under them beside Pekka. Snuggle down beside her was all he did. Without a word, without a gesture, she’d made it plain that anything else would cost them the friendship they’d built up since he came to Kuusamo. He didn’t think that was because she wasn’t interested in him. On the contrary—he thought she was, and sternly wouldn’t let herself be.
In an abstract way, he admired that … which made it no less frustrating. Still, he didn’t suppose he wanted to put her husband Leino in a situation like the one from which poor, luckless Cornelu hadn’t escaped. No, he didn’t want that at all. All I want is to go to bed with her. If only things were so simple. But he knew too well they weren’t.
Pekka said, “In spite of everything, we do make progress. We shall be sending the energies farther from the site of the sorcery than we have ever tried before.” She paused before adding, “Almost far enough to be useful in the field.”
“Almost,” Fernao said. But his comment was rather gloomier than hers: “Almost is one of the saddest words in the language—in any language. It speaks of hopes with nothing to show for them.”
“We are already releasing nearly as much energy with our sorcery as the Algarvians are with their murderous magecraft,” Pekka said. “And our magic is far cleaner than theirs.”
“I know,” Fernao replied—the last thing he wanted to do was affront her. “But they still have more control over theirs than we do with ours. We do not yet know how to project the energies from our spell across the Strait of Valmiera, for instance, and we know too well that Mezentio’s mages can.”
As usual, speaking classical Kaunian gave the conversation a certain air of detachment—some, but not enough here. Pekka’s shiver had noth
ing to do with the icy air through which the sleigh glided. “Aye, we do know that too well,” she agreed with a grimace. “Were it not so, we would still have Siuntio on our side, and not a day goes by in which I do not miss him.”
“I know,” Fernao said again. He might have dragged Siuntio out of the blockhouse when it started to collapse and burn during the Algarvian sorcerous attack. He’d dragged Pekka out instead. She still didn’t realize he’d been closer to Siuntio than to her. No matter how much he wanted to bed her, he would never tell her that.
Ptarmigan fluttered away from the sleigh, wings whistling as they took flight. “They are in their full winter plumage now,” Pekka said. “The rabbits and the ferrets will be white, too.”
“So they will, here,” Fernao said. “Up by Setubal—and on the Derlavaian mainland farther north, too—many of them will stay brown the whole winter long. I wonder how they know to go white here, where it snows more, but not to where the winters are milder.”
“Savants have puzzled over that for a long time,” Pekka said. “They have never yet found an answer that satisfies me.”
“Nor me,” Fernao agreed. “It almost tempts me to think some inborn sorcerous power is hidden inside animals. But if it is there, no mage has ever been able to detect it, and that makes me not believe in any such thing.”
“You are a modern rational man, and I feel the same way you do,” Pekka said. “No wonder, though, that our superstitious ancestors thought beasts had the same potential for using magic as people did.”
“No wonder at all,” Fernao said.
Before he or Pekka could say anything more, the driver reined in and spoke two words of Kuusaman: “We’re here.”
Fernao got down from the sleigh and extended a mittened hand to Pekka. She set her own mittened hand in his as she alighted. That was the contact of ordinary politeness, and she did not shy away from it. Even through two thick layers of felted wool, her touch warmed him.
Braziers warmed the blockhouse—not nearly so well, as far as Fernao was concerned. Filling it with mages did a better job: did, in fact, too good a job. People shed cloaks and jackets. Fernao started sweating after taking off his coat. He joined the grumbling about how warm it was. But then Pekka’s voice crisply cut through that grumbling: “Let us begin, shall we? Crystallomancer, please be so kind as to check with the mages handling the animals. Is everything ready?”
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