Valmieran. “Aye,” they said. One of them drew his thumb across his throat.
Raunu grunted. “Like they did against Yliharma this past winter, eh?” He nodded. “Sounds likely, powers below eat Mezentio and all his people. Wonder if they aimed to have another go at Kuusamo or hit Setubal in Lagoas.”
“They would know. I don’t,” Skarnu answered. His gaze met Raunu’s for a moment. They’d done more and better than they could have guessed by wrecking this ley-line caravan. Skarnu remembered the one he’d seen with Merkela not long before the attack on Yliharma, the one with shutters over all the windows. Had it been hauling doomed Kaunians down to the edge of the Strait of Valmiera?
“Help us,” one of the men from the caravan said. “Feed us.”
“Hide us,” the other one added.
Before Skarnu could answer, a man and a woman came out of the woods hand in hand. Seeing their countrymen, they pointed back toward the caravan. “Algarvian soldiers!” the woman exclaimed.
“Hide us!” the Kaunian man in the meadow said again.
But, before Skarnu could answer, all the Kaunians from Forthweg began running. They couldn’t stand the idea of being anywhere near King Mezentio’s soldiers. “Stop!” Skarnu and Raunu called after them, but they wouldn’t stop. And, when three more blonds burst out of the woods, they pelted past Skarnu and Raunu, too.
They’d all managed to get out of sight when half a dozen redheaded men in kilts stepped out onto the meadow. They came up to the two Valmierans. “You seeing escaping criminals?” one of them asked.
Skarnu looked at Raunu. Raunu looked at Skarnu. They both looked back at the Algarvian with the stolid, uncaring gaze of peasants. “Didn’t see nobody,” Skarnu answered. Raunu nodded agreement.
The Algarvian muttered something in his own language that sounded like a curse. As the Kaunians from Forthweg had done, he and his comrades ran on.
“They’ll catch a lot of them,” Raunu said out of the corner of his mouth.
“I suppose so. But they won’t do it right away, and it won’t be easy,” Skarnu answered. “And anyone who speaks even a little of the old language will find out what the Algarvians have been doing to our cousins in Forthweg. If we don’t see a lot more people in this part of the kingdom starting to fight the redheads now, we never will.” Raunu thought that over, nodded, and headed back toward the fields. He had more weeding to do.
Four
Every so often, Garivald looked at the little enamelwork plaque-striped red, green, white-set into the butt of his stick. He wondered what had happened to the Algarvian invader who’d once carried it. Nothing good, he hoped.
Not that many Algarvians patrolled the forests through which Munderic’s band of irregulars prowled. Mezentio’s men kept the roads and ley lines leading west open as best they could, and rarely batded the Unkerlanters who hadn’t given up despite being far behind the line. When the redheads wanted to make life difficult for the irregulars, they sent in their pet soldiers from the toy Kingdom of Grelz.
“How can we blaze them?” Garivald asked not long after Munderic and his comrades rescued them from the redheads. “They might be our brothers.”
“Some of them
“I don’t follow that,” Garivald said.
Munderic spat. “The Algarvians don’t conscript soldiers into the army that sticks its belly in the air for that pimp of a puppet king named Raniero. They don’t dare send out impressers, because most of the men they’d drag in hate Raniero worse than they hate us. Every bugger in that army volunteered to come after us. Now are you ready to blaze ‘em all?”
“Aye,” Garivald answered, adding. “I hadn’t known that-about the Grelzer soldiers, I mean.”
“All sorts of things you don’t know, aren’t there?” Munderic rumbled.
“I find more every day,” Garivald admitted. He’d known just how to live in Zossen. He’d been doing farm work since he was big enough to toddle around after chickens and chivvy them back to his parents’ house. He’d known the people in the village as long as he or they’d been alive, depending on who was older. A tiny world, but one in which he was completely at home. Now he’d been uprooted, thrown into something new, and each day brought fresh surprises.
“It’ll give you more to sing about,” Munderic said, which was also true.
“Where do we go next?” Garivald asked.
“We’ve been gathering supplies from the villages north of the forest,” the leader of the band of holdouts answered, “so we’ll go south for a while. Next one on the list is a little place called Gartz. The redheads don’t even bother putting a garrison there-they just go through now and again.”
“All right. That sounds easy enough,” Garivald said. Several villages around their forest stronghold kept the irregulars in food and tunics and other things they needed. They avoided a couple of others, whose firstmen favored the Algarvians and the puppet King Raniero of Grelz. Munderic kept threatening to wipe those off the face of the earth, but he and his followers hadn’t done it yet.
The irregulars left the cover of the pines and oaks and birches not long after sunset. The band numbered perhaps fifty all together, of whom half a dozen or so were women. That was one more thing Garivald hadn’t known- hadn’t imagined-before Munderic and his comrades rescued him from Mezentio’s men.
One of the women fell into stride beside him. Her name was Obilot. “I wish we were raiding tonight, not just bringing back sheep and rye and oats,” she said. The Algarvians had smashed her village on their way west; she thought she was the only one from it left alive. Now she wanted to go out and raid every night. So did all the women in the band. They hated the Algarvians worse than their male counterparts did.
“We’ve got to eat, too,” Garivald said. Like a lot of people who’d gone hungry, he wanted to make sure he didn’t have to.
“You’re soft,” Obilot said. She sounded soft herself; her voice was high and thin. The top of her head barely came up to Garivald’s chin. She looked more delicate and girlish than Annore. But a scar seamed her left arm from elbow to wrist. She bore the mark with pride-she’d cut the throat of the Algarvian who’d given it to her.
A hideous screech drifted down from high overhead. Garivald looked up, but couldn’t spy the dragon. He wondered if eggs would start dropping on the irregulars. But somebody said, “They’re flying west.” He relaxed. If the beasts were on their way to the big fight, they wouldn’t worry about a band of raiders deep inside territory Algarve was already supposed to have conquered.
Garivald sniffed. “I smell smoke,” he said. “That will be the village we’re going to, won’t it?”
“Aye,” Munderic answered. “You’d better pay attention to your nose. At night, it’ll let you know you’re coming up on people before your eyes will.”
“I’ve noticed,” Garivald answered. He’d usually taken stinks for granted back in Zossen; when he was among them all the time, he hardly noticed them. Only when he’d been out working in fields upwind from the village had he had its odors of smoke and manure and seldom-washed humanity forced upon his consciousness.
Beside him, Obilot spoke suddenly: “That’s too much smoke for a little place like Gartz. And the dogs should be barking, but they aren’t.”
Munderic grunted. “You’re right, curse it.” His call was soft but urgent: “Spread out. Go slow. We’re liable to be walking into something.”
Obilot caught Garivald in the flank with an elbow. “Get off the path. We’ll go through the fields. And be ready to turn around and run like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail if the redheads have an ambush laid on.”
Heart pounding in his chest, Garivald obeyed her. Most of the irregulars were bypassed soldiers; they knew what to do at times like these. The ones who hadn’t been in King Swemmel’s army had more practice fighting the Algarvians than Garivald did. Before joining this band, the worst fights he’d known were a couple of drunken brawls with fellow villagers. This was different. He might die here, and he knew it.
Peering ahead through the darkness, Garivald saw jagged outlines instead of the smooth, pale surfaces of
