“Every now and then, my dear, you do succeed in surprising me,” Valnu said. “This makes twice in one night.”
“Really?” Krasta laughed; sure enough, the spiked brandy was mounting straight to her head. “Lurcanio said the same thing, though I think I only surprised him once.”
“Well, he is bound to be harder to surprise than I am,” Valnu said. “Practically everything surprises me, including my being here at this doleful gathering. It’s like the bloodied ghost of what one of these affairs should be.”
Krasta thought about that. She wasn’t used to figures of speech-those that hadn’t ossified into cliches, at any rate-but she had no trouble figuring out what this one meant. “Hard times,” she agreed, nodding. “But what can we do? The Algarvians are stronger than we are. The Algarvians, as far as I can see, are stronger than everybody else is.”
“So they want you to think,” Valnu said. “So they want everybody to think. It’s part of their magic: thinking them stronger than everybody else helps make them stronger than everybody else. But there are some faces I’ve seen before in these crows that aren’t here tonight.”
“So?” Krasta said vaguely. Sure enough, the brandy was making her thoughts spin. Before long, she might be looking for a chair just like her sovereign.
Valnu bowed himself almost double. “I’m so relieved to discover you don’t know everything there is to know after all. Where, I ask you, are the Algarvian officers who were here but are no more? Why, gone to Unkerlant, of course. King Swemmel, you see, isn’t yet convinced the Algarvians are stronger than everybody else.”
“Captain Mosco!” Krasta exclaimed. He wasn’t here because he’d had to go there. That seemed sensible enough. She wished Valnu wouldn’t try to make something important and meaningful out of it. She wasn’t up to dealing with complications right now.
“Who is Captain Mosco?” Valnu asked. Krasta stared owlishly at him; how could he not know?
“Captain Mosco was my aide, a very good fellow,” Colonel Lurcanio said in his precise, almost unaccented Valmieran. “He has gone to fight in the west; powers above grant that he stay safe.”
“I didn’t notice you come up,” Krasta told Lurcanio. She hadn’t noticed a good many things since drinking the laced brandy. One of the things she hadn’t noticed was how many things she hadn’t noticed.
Lurcanio said, “Seeing a friend is all very well, milady, but I did want to remind you that you came here with me and will also be going home with me.”
Valnu shrieked laughter and patted Lurcanio on the arm. “Why, my dear Colonel, I do believe you’re jealous.”
Lurcanio’s answering laugh was smug, the laugh of a man certain he had nothing to fear. Krasta’s laugh was wild and dangerous-and so drunken that Lurcanio didn’t let it worry him in the least. If Valnu’s laugh was relieved, neither Krasta nor Lurcanio noticed.
“Did you have a good time?” Lurcanio asked as they went home through the dark, quiet streets of Priekule later that evening.
“The poor king,” Krasta answered. She would have a dreadful headache in the morning. King Gainibu, though, would surely have a worse one. Krasta slumped over against Lurcanio and fell asleep.
How long would the good weather last? On the austral continent, people started asking that not long after the summer solstice. Before long, the birds would start flying north. Fernao wished he could fly north, too, but the war against Yanina and Algarve pinned him to the land of the Ice People.
“Just think,” he said to Affonso. “If everything had gone as we’d hoped it would-the way everybody back in Setubal said it would-we could be enjoying the fleshpots of Heshbon right now.”
The second-rank mage raised a gingery eyebrow. “I thought you told me Heshbon was a miserable hole in the ground.”
“Oh, it is,” Fernao assured him. “It is. But what, I pray you, do you think you’re sitting in now?”
Affbnso laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Lagoan attacks and Algarvian counterattacks had chewed up a good deal of the coastal country in the land of the Ice People. Fernao and Affonso had both taken refuge in the crater a bursting egg from some earlier fight had left in the ground. At the bottom of it were a little grass, a little water, and much more muddy ice.
“Next to a literal hole in the ground,” Fernao said in meditative tones, “a metaphorical hole in the ground doesn’t look so bad any more. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”
Affonso shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it. How could I? You outrank me. But I will say that, if we’d taken Heshbon, it probably would have got wrecked in the fighting.”
“That depends,” Fernao said. “If we’d taken it from the Yaninans, they would have handed it over and been glad to do it. With the Algarvians, though, you’re right. Those whoresons would have fought us block by block-not that Heshbon has a whole lot of blocks-and there wouldn’t have been one brick left on top of another by the time the battle was through.”
Now Affonso nodded, though gloomily. “Who would have thought a pack of swaggering fops could make such good soldiers?”
“They did in the Six Years’ War, too,” Fernao said. “They
“I understood you,” his colleague said. “Whenever they slaughter another batch of Kaunians, the whole world seems to tremble, for those who can feel it. And they’ve got the Unkerlanters imitating them, too. I think I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”
“War was a filthy business before,” Fernao said. “It’s filthier now, and we’ve got Mezentio’s men to blame for it.” Many of his worst nightmares centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked. He kept dreaming he would be asked to judge which was worst, and to sample them all till he made a choice. He had some camel baked in clay in his pack, and thought it the most dreadful thing in the world … save only hunger.
Whatever Affonso might have said about war or about camel meat or about anything else, he didn’t, for a lookout shouted one of the words the Lagoans in the austral continent least wanted to hear: “Dragons!”
Fernao looked to the west. The number of dragons winging toward the Lagoan encampment made him curse. “The whoresons have flown more of the beasts across the Narrow Sea,” he said in dismay. He looked at the hole in which he squatted, wishing it were deeper, wishing it had a good strong roof, wishing most of all that the Algarvians would turn around and fly back toward Heshbon.
As usual, he got none of his wishes. Several Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons flew above the Lagoan army. With a whistling thunder of wings-and with their usual hoarse, angry shrieks-more rose from the dragon farm near the camp to challenge the beasts painted in red, green, and white.
Watching, Affonso said, “Makes you feel helpless, doesn’t it?”
“What, because I can’t do anything about the dragons?” Fernao asked, and Affonso nodded. Fernao considered, then shrugged. “Less than I thought it would, as a matter of fact. There are too many things in this campaign I can’t do anything about to get upset over any one in particular. I’ll just watch the sport and hope I don’t get killed.” He leaned back and did just that.
“Algarvians are trying something new, looks like,” Affonso said.
“Aye,” Fernao answered absently. The lead dragons flying out of the west engaged the Lagoan and Kuusaman defenders with the usual ferocity Mezentio’s men brought to the attack. Dragons wheeled and whirled and twisted and snapped and flamed all over the sky above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Lagoans’ heavy sticks on the ground found targets, they blazed at the Algarvian dragons. When one of those beasts tumbled toward the earth, Fernao couldn’t tell whether a stick or a dragon on his side had laid it low.
But Mezentio’s men had more dragons than they’d been able to bring to the fight before. Some of them kept the Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons busy. The rest started dropping eggs on the Lagoan army. Only a few dragons from his side broke free to attack the ones carrying eggs.
Once the eggs started falling, Fernao stopped watching the action overhead. He did what everyone else on the ground was doing: he buried his face in the dirt and tried to mold himself to the side of the hole in which he lay. Affonso jumped into one nearby. Such precautions had kept them alive and no worse than scratched till now. That they should do so one more time didn’t strike Fernao as unreasonable.
Then a line of eggs, probably all dropped by the same dragon, walked straight toward the crater in which he
