Out of the Darkness

the west-facing seat, but he’d had plenty of Algarvian officers and soldiers in the square to protect him from the folk whose overlord he was supposed to become.

“That whoreson,” the peasant said. “He deserved every bit of what he got, and more besides. And now, your Excellency, if you’ll excuse me. .” He got to his feet and pushed through the crowd to the edge of the square.

Two cows waited there for him, one plump and sleek, the other distinctly on the scrawny side. He led them back to Skarnu, as another peasant-or perhaps this same fellow? — had led them back to Simanu.

The new overlord was supposed to choose the scrawny cow, showing that he reserved the best for the people living in his domain. Skarnu did. Simanu hadn’t-he’d picked the fat one. Skarnu bent his head and let the peasant give him a light box on the ear, which meant he would attend to the concerns of those who lived under his lordship. Simanu, secure in the knowledge that the Algarvians backed him, hadn’t worried about anything else, and had dealt the peasant a buffet that knocked him sprawling. The riot started immediately thereafter.

He made the redheads hate him, too, Skarnu thought. They wanted peace and quiet in the Valmieran countryside, not trouble. But he was their tool, and they were stuck with him.. till his untimely demise. He’d blazed Simanu himself, which was not the way one noble usually acquired another’s domain.

Loud cheers rang out when Skarnu accepted the lean cow and the buffet. This was the way the ceremony was supposed to go. Skarnu had lived as a farmer long enough to begin to understand how much people who worked the land for a living appreciated it when things went as they were supposed to go.

Now he had to make a speech. He didn’t want to do that; he would sooner have had another box on the ear. But it was part of the ceremony, too, and so he couldn’t escape it. He stood up on that west-facing seat. An expectant hush fell.

“People of Pavilosta, people of Adutiskis, people of the countryside, I am proud to become your marquis,” he said. “I’ve lived among you. I know what sort of folk you are. I know how you never believed the redheads would rule here forever, and how you made their lives hard while they were here.”

He got a nice round of applause. And I know what a liar I am, he thought. Aye, plenty of the locals had opposed Mezentio’s men. But plenty hadn’t. Several women in the crowd still had their hair shorter than most because they’d been shorn after the Algarvians withdrew. A good many men had done a good deal of business with the occupiers. But he didn’t want to dwell on that part of the past.

“I fought the Algarvians, as you did,” he said. “Whatever I can do to protect you from your enemies, I will do. Now you may know that King Gainibu appointed me to this place. But I will also tell you that I will do whatever I can to protect you from the king, should he ever act unjustly. That’s a noble’s duty to his people, and I’ll do everything I can to meet it.”

More cheering, this louder and more enthusiastic. In the old days, nobles really were a shield against royal power-not least because dukes and counts and such didn’t care to give up any power of their own. Things weren’t so easy for the nobility nowadays; kings were stronger than they had been. But the pledge was worth making.

He made another pledge: “I won’t be a scourge on your womenfolk, however much I admire them. And I admire them so much, I married one of them.”

He waved to Merkela, and kept waving till she finally waved back. That got him a different sort of applause, warmer and more sympathetic. What went through his mind was, I’ll take whatever I can get. He hopped down from the high seat and gave the peasant who’d boxed his ear one goldpiece and three of silver. The amount was as traditional as everything else in the ceremony. He wondered how it had first been set, and how long ago. No one seemed to know.

People came up to clasp his hand, to congratulate him-and to start asking him for judgments on their problems and quarrels. Time after time, he said, “Let me find out more before I answer you.” That seemed to satisfy most of the would-be petitioners, but not all.

Merkela said, “You did very well.”

“Thanks,” Skarnu answered. “Now in another twenty years I’ll stand up there and make myself another speech. Till then, no thanks.”

“But isn’t that part of what being a marquis is about?” Merkela asked. “Even a son of a whore like Enkuru would do it every so often. ‘My people,’ he would call us, as if he owned us. But we liked to come into Priekule to listen to him. It gave us a break from what we did every day.”

Skarnu thought about that. Back in Priekule, nobles were common as dirt. Remembering some of the people in the capital, Skarnu knew the resemblance didn’t end there. And, with King Gainibu at the apex of the social hierarchy, one count or marquis more or less didn’t matter much.

Here in the countryside, things were different. People here won’t ever meet the king or even see him. So who’s at the top of the column, then? I am, by the powers above. I’m the one everybody’s going to be looking at.

Slowly, he nodded. “You’re right,” he told Merkela. “I’m going to have to get out there and show myself, even if I don’t much want to do it.”

“It needs doing,” she said seriously.

“All right,” Skarnu said. “But that means you’re going to have to get out and show yourself a lot, too. After all, you’re the main connection I’ve got to this part of the kingdom. You’re the one who’s lived here all her life. You’ll have to help me.”

Merkela had been smiling when she told Skarnu he’d need to face the people. The smile slipped when he suggested she needed to do it, too. The shoe pinched differently on her foot. Even if she needed a moment to gather herself, though, she nodded, too. Skarnu had expected that she would. He put his arm around her. Of one thing he was abundantly certain: she didn’t run away from anything.

Sabrino’s mother had died while he was fighting in the Six Years’ War. He’d got compassionate leave to go home and see her laid on her pyre, but he hadn’t been there during her last illness. His father had lived another fifteen years before passing away from a slow, painful wasting disease. He remembered going into the sickroom one day and realizing what he saw on the old man’s face was death.

He looked at Algarve now. What he saw on his kingdom’s face was death.

Not far west of his wing’s dragon farm, the last Algarvian army holding the Unkerlanter hordes back from Trapani was breaking up. That it was breaking up didn’t surprise him. If anything, the surprise lay in how long it had held together and how badly it had hurt Swemmel’s soldiers. His wing, with a paper strength of sixty-four dragons, had eight ready to fly right now. They’d flown and flown and flown. They’d done everything they could, despite exhaustion, despite being without cinnabar. Every Algarvian in uniform had done everything he could.

The kingdom was dying anyhow. Not enough Algarvians remained in uniform to matter.

“Maybe we ought to stand aside, surrender, let the Unkerlanters and the cursed islanders finish overrunning us,” Sabrino told Captain Orosio as they ate black bread and drank spirits in a miserable little tent that some pen- pushing idiot back in Trapani had surely recorded on a map as the headquarters of a full-strength wing. “Everything would be done then, and the kingdom wouldn’t get trampled like a naked man trying to stand up to a herd of behemoths.”

Orosio looked up from his mug. “Colonel, you’d better be careful what you say, and who you say it to,” he answered. “Even now-maybe especially now- you can’t talk about giving up. They’ll grab you for treason and blaze you.”

Sabrino’s laugh held all the bitterness in the world. “And much difference that would make, to me or to Algarve. I don’t think it’ll happen, anyhow. Mezentio was going to raise us to the powers above. Instead, he’s dropped us down to the powers below, and he won’t quit till they’ve eaten every fornicating one of us.” He took a swig. The spirits held out, if nothing else did. “Won’t be long now.”

“You can’t talk that way, sir.” Orosio sounded worried. “It really is treason.”

“Go ahead and report me, then. You’ll make yourself a hero, a hero of Algarve!” Sabrino said. “The king’ll pin the medal on you himself, and give you your very own wing. You too can command eight dragons, you poor, sorry sod. That’s half as many as a squadron is supposed to have, but who’s counting?”

“Sir, I think you’d better go to bed,” Orosio said stiffly. He would never report Sabrino, but the wing commander realized he’d pushed further than even his longtime comrade could go. With a sigh, Orosio asked, “What’s left for us now?”

“What?” Sabrino waved his hand. “Nothing.”