marsh. Plenty of things with wings came forth to attack the Unkerlanters.
When morning came, Leudast woke again, this time with the feeling something was badly wrong somewhere, even though he couldn’t put his finger on what. He was an officer these days, and entitled to sniff around and try to find out (he’d done the same thing as a sergeant, and as a common soldier, too, but fewer people could squelch him now). He walked up to Captain Dagaric and asked, “What’s going on, sir? Something is, sure as sure, and I don’t think it’s anything good.”
“You think so, too, eh?” the regimental commander answered. “I hadn’t noticed anything myself, but I saw a couple of mages putting their heads together and muttering a few minutes ago.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Leudast said. “What are the fornicating Algarvians going to throw at us now?”
“Who knows?” Dagaric said with weary cynicism. “We’ll have to find out the hard way, I expect. That’s what we’re for, after all.”
“Huh,” Leudast said. “I’ve had to find out too cursed many things the hard way. Once in a while, I’d like to know ahead of time.”
He went off in search of the mages his superior had seen, and found them under an oak whose trunk was badly scarred with beams. As Dagaric had said, they were talking in low voices, and both looked worried. Leudast stood around waiting for them to notice him. He waited more ostentatiously with each passing minute. At last, one of the sorcerers said, “You want something, Lieutenant?”
“I want to know what the redheads are brewing up,” Leudast answered. “They’ve got something ready to pop, sure as blazes.” Both wizards wore captain’s rank badges, but he didn’t waste much military courtesy on them. They were only mages, after all, not
They looked at each other. One of them asked, “Have you wizardly talent?”
“Not that I know of,” Leudast said. “Just a bad feeling in the air.”
“Very bad,” the mage agreed. “Something is coming, and we don’t know what. All we can do is wait and see.”
“Can we send dragons to drop eggs on the heads of the whoresons cooking up whatever it is?” Leudast asked. “If they’re trying not to get smashed into strawberry jam, they can’t very well cast spells.”
The wizards brightened. “Do you know, Lieutenant, that isn’t the worst idea anyone has ever had,” said the one who did the talking.
“You boys are the ones to take care of it,” Leudast said, hiding a smile. “You’re the ones who deal with crystals and such.” The mages might outrank him, but he could see what needed doing. They sometimes put him in mind of bright children: they could come up with all sorts of clever schemes, but a good many of those had nothing to do with the real world.
Whistles shrilled again. Leudast trotted away from the mages without a backwards glance. If the attack was heating up again, he needed to be with his men as they pushed on toward the heart of Trapani. But, as he moved forward, he suddenly discovered that he wasn’t going forward at all: his feet were moving up and down, but each new step left him in the same place as had the one before it.
Cries of alarm said he wasn’t the only Unkerlanter soldier thus afflicted. He didn’t know how the Algarvian mages were doing this, but they plainly were. A glance told him the behemoths were similarly frozen in place. Unkerlanter soldiers started falling as hidden redheads blazed them.
They could still run away from the heart of Trapani. Some of them did. Leudast discovered he could move sideways and, more important, that he could duck. “Get down!” he called to the men closest to danger. “Get into cover! You can do it.” Some people wouldn’t have figured it out for themselves, but would manage to do it once told they could.
Scuttling behind a boulder, Leudast wondered if the entire Unkerlanter assault on Trapani, all the way around the Algarvian capital, had been frozen in its tracks. He wouldn’t have been surprised. Algarvian mages didn’t think small. They never had, not since they started killing Kaunians-and, very likely, not before then, either. Algarvians were flamboyant folk.
Eggs kept on bursting deeper inside Trapani. “They can’t stop everything!” Leudast exclaimed. He’d had the right of it while talking with his own wizards. It was up to the fellows who served the egg-tossers now. If they killed or wounded or at least distracted the sorcerers who made the spell work, the attack could resume again. If not. .
Leudast looked up. A couple of dragons painted Unkerlanter rock-gray hovered like oversized kestrels, unable to go forward no matter how powerfully they beat their great wings. Even as he watched, a beam from an Algarvian heavy stick tumbled one of them from the sky.
He waited, every now and then blazing from behind that boulder. Maybe the eggs the Unkerlanters hurtled into Trapani finally did what they were supposed to. Maybe Mezentio’s mages could hold their spell for only so long. Maybe-though he wouldn’t have bet much on it-their Unkerlanter counterparts at last beat down their wizardry. Whatever the reason, shouts of, “Urra!” rang out when Swemmel’s soldiers discovered they could go forward again.
One of the diehards showed himself at a window-only for a moment, but long enough for Leudast’s beam to cut him down. “Urra!” Leudast yelled. “King Swemmel! Revenge!” Maybe that one word said everything that needed saying.
Not a lot of mail came to the hostel in the Naantali district. As far as most of the world was concerned, that hostel didn’t exist. Pekka and the other mages who labored there might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Even relatives who knew the sorcerers were working somewhere didn’t usually know where, and relied on the post office to get letters where they needed to go.
One envelope that got to Pekka did not, at first, look as if it had come to the right place. The printed design on the corner that showed postage fees had been paid was not Kuusaman. After a bit of puzzling, she figured out the letter was from Jelgava.
Even the script challenged her. Printed Jelgavan used the same characters as Kuusaman, but the two kingdoms’ handwritings were quite different. Her name wasn’t on the envelope. A chill ran through her when she realized Leino’s was.
She turned the envelope over. There on the back, in red, was a stamp in her own language: military post- deceased, forward to next of kin.
Pekka’s lips skinned back from her teeth. That explained how she’d got the letter-explained it in more detail than she’d wanted. She opened the envelope. The letter inside was in Jelgavan, too. She had only a few words of the language, and could make out next to nothing of what it said.
She found Fernao in the refectory at suppertime. He was demolishing a plate of corned venison and red cabbage. “Do you read Jelgavan?” she asked, sitting down beside him. Pointing to his supper, she added, “That looks good.”
“It is,” he said, and then asked, “Why do you need me to read Jelgavan? I can probably make sense of it-it’s as close to Valmieran as Sibian is to Algarvian, maybe closer, and I don’t have much trouble with Valmieran.”
“Here. I got this today.” Pekka gave him the letter. “I knew you were good with languages. Can you tell me what it says?” A serving girl came up. Pekka ordered the venison and cabbage for herself, too.
“Let me see.” Fernao started to read, then looked up sharply. “This is to your husband.”
“I know.” Pekka had destroyed the envelope with that hateful rubber stamp. “It got sent to me. What does it say?” She wondered, not for the first time, if Leino had had a Jelgavan lover. She could hardly be angry at him now if he had; it would go some way toward salving her own conscience.
Even so, she started when Fernao said, “It’s from a woman.” He continued, “She’s writing about her husband.”
Was the fellow angry at Leino? Pekka didn’t care to come right out and ask that. Instead, she said, “What does she say about him?”
“Says he helped your husband when he was with the irregulars, but now he’s disappeared, and she’s afraid
