“I’ll try the spell again,” Vanai said. “Then I’ll throw the book away.”
“Keep it,” Ealstan said. “Read it. Enjoy it. Just don’t use it.”
Grimly, Vanai set about the spell once more, with the reversal Ealstan had suggested. She wanted to correct the Forthwegian text where she knew it had gone awry, but she didn’t. And when she called out the word of command, Ealstan went back to looking like himself.
“Did it work?” he asked-he couldn’t tell.
“Aye.” Vanai heard the relief in her own voice. “You won’t have to go through what I go through for looking like this.”
“I like the way you look,” Ealstan said. “And I wouldn’t mind looking like a Kaunian, except that I can do a better job of keeping you safe if I don’t.”
That was no doubt true. Vanai hated it, but couldn’t argue it. She slammed the cover of
Splashing through muck toward yet more trees ahead, Sergeant Istvan said, “I never thought the stars looked down on such a forest.” The big Gyongyosian plucked on his curly, tawny beard; as far as he could tell, the forest in which he was fighting went on forever.
Corporal Kun said, “Sooner or later, it has to stop. When it does, there’s the rest of Unkerlant ahead.” Kun’s beard grew in lank clumps; he was lean and would have been clever-looking even without spectacles. He’d been a mage’s apprentice before going into the Gyongyosian army, and seldom let anyone forget it.
“I know,” Istvan answered morosely. “I wonder if any of us’ll be left alive to see it.” He had no great desire to see the rest of Unkerlant. As far as he was concerned, the Unkerlanters were welcome to their kingdom. He wanted nothing to do with it. The mountains that were the borderland between Gyongyos and Unkerlant had been bad. This endless forest, in its own way, was worse. He wouldn’t have bet that whatever lay beyond it made for much of an improvement. But he did want to live to find out.
More men with tawny yellow hair and beards who wore leggings like Ist-van’s waved his squad and him forward. “All safe enough,” one of them said. “We’ve cleared the Unkerlanters out of the stretch ahead.”
Istvan didn’t laugh at his countrymen, but keeping quiet wasn’t easy. Brash Kun did speak up: “Nobody knows whether those goat-eaters are cleared out till after they blaze half a dozen men in the back. Some of them will be lurking there, you mark my words.”
“You have no faith,” said one of the warriors beckoning the squad onward.
“We have plenty of faith,” Istvan said before Kun could answer. “We have faith there will be some Unkerlanters all our patrols haven’t swept up. There always are.” He didn’t waste any more time with the guides, but tramped east past them, ever deeper into the woods.
Behind their spectacles, Kun’s eyes were puzzled. “You don’t usually stick up for me like that, Sergeant,” he said.
“I’ll take you over those know-it-alls any day,” Istvan answered. “They haven’t done any real fighting, or they wouldn’t talk like a pack of idiots. Besides, you’re mine. If anybody rakes you over the coals, it’s me. Let them tend to their own. That’s fair. That’s right.”
A few minutes later, off to one side, someone let out a shriek. “He’s been blazed!” someone else shouted. Gyongyosian troopers scurried this way and that, trying to flush out the Unkerlanter sniper. They had no luck.
“No, none of King Swemmel’s men in these parts,” Istvan said. “No chance of that at all.”
“Goat shit,” Kun said. They both laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Snipers and holdouts took a constant toll on the Gyongyosians trying to force their way through the vast pine forests of western Unkerlant. Endless ferns and tree trunks to hide behind; endless branches on which to perch; endless foliage with which to conceal. . no, rooting out the enemy was next to impossible. Kun looked now this way, now that. He knew, as the guides had not, that where there was one sniper, there were likely to be more.
Somewhere up ahead, eggs were bursting. Istvan wondered who was tossing them at whom. With the breeze blowing from out of the east, bringing the sound toward his ears, he had trouble being sure. He hoped those eggs were landing on the Unkerlanters’ heads.
“Come on! Come on!” That was Captain Tivadar’s voice. Istvan relaxed a little; if he’d found his company commander, he’d brought the squad somewhere close to where it was supposed to be. Tivadar caught sight of him and waved. “The party’s up ahead.”
“Aye.” Istvan turned to his men. “Come on, you lugs. Back into the line we go.”
“Not enough time pulled back, and we didn’t pull back far enough, either,” Szonyi said. Istvan remembered when he’d been new to the game. He wasn’t any more. He picked the same thing to complain about as Istvan would have, or, for that matter, as a fellow who’d been in the army since before Istvan was born would have.
“They can’t very well give us a proper leave, not when it’s a week’s march back to the nearest ley line that could take us anywhere worth going,” Istvan told him. Istvan had been a sergeant long enough by now to know how to squelch grumblers, too.
“Then they cursed well ought to bring some whores forward,” Szonyi said. Since Istvan thought that was a good idea, too, he didn’t argue any more.
Captain Tivadar fell into step beside him. “Swemmel’s boys are up to something,” he said. “Nobody knows what yet, but they haven’t been standing and fighting the past couple of days the way they would before.”
“Maybe they finally know they’ve been licked.” Istvan threw up a hand. Tivadar sputtered raucous laughter all the same. Istvan went on, “No, I didn’t mean it. They’re tough, no doubt about it.”
“And they’ve got more lines in these woods than a thief has on his back after he takes his forty lashes,” Tivadar added. “No, if they don’t fight now, it’s because they’re plotting something nasty for later.”
“Aye, you’re likely right, sir,” Istvan agreed with a sigh.
More eggs burst, closer now. Istvan looked around for the nearest hole in which he could hide, something he did as automatically as he breathed, and because he wanted to keep breathing. That also made him take more notice of the forest through which he was marching. Tivadar noticed him noticing; the captain didn’t miss much. “You see what I mean?”
“Aye,” Istvan said again, nodding. “If they’d fought the way they usually do, the woods here would be beaten flat. Instead, most of the trees are still standing.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” the company commander agreed. “When they’ve always done one thing and they all of a sudden change to another, anybody with any sense starts wondering why.”
An egg burst close enough to send branches crashing down only a few strides away. “They haven’t quite given up yet,” Istvan remarked dryly.
Tivadar chuckled. “No, it doesn’t seem that way, does it? But it’s not the same kind of fight as it has been, and I don’t trust it.”
The breeze from out of the east blew smoke into Istvan’s face. He coughed a couple of times. A moment later, he smelled something else: the sickly-sweet reek of corruption. Sure enough, a few paces farther on he strode past a bloated corpse in a rock-gray tunic. He jerked a thumb toward it. “Good to see we got one of those sons of goats, anyhow.”
“Oh, we’ve hurt them,” Tivadar said. “But what they’ve done to us.. ”
“The whole cursed country is too big and too far from everything to make it easy to fight over,” Istvan said. “We can’t get at it, and the Unkerlanters can’t get very many men into it, either. But as long as they can keep us from getting into country that really is worth something, they’re ahead of the game.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Captain Tivadar agreed. The breeze out of the east picked up, and tried to lift his service cap off his head. He tugged it down over his curly hair. “Sooner or later, we will break out. Then, by the stars, we’ll make them pay. Till then …” He grimaced. “Till then, the debt just keeps getting bigger.”
Cries echoed through the forest as Istvan’s squad neared the front. He had trouble sorting out Gyongyosians and Unkerlanters. No matter which kingdom wounded men came from, their moans and screams sounded very much alike. Telling how far away the racket came from wasn’t easy, either. Istvan kept expecting attackers to burst out of the bushes at any moment, only to realize a heartbeat later that the noises he’d heard came from a long way off.
“They’ve stopped tossing eggs,” Tivadar said. He frowned and plucked a hair from his beard. “I wonder why. They’ve got more egg-tossers than we do: they don’t have to manhandle them over the mountains to get them here.”
