huddled. Each burst was louder than the one before; each made the ground shake worse. When one hit quite close to that crater, Fernao screamed. He couldn’t help himself. He was still screaming when the next egg burst. The world around him went blinding white, then black.
And when he woke, he screamed again. Every inch of him cried out in agony. The worst of it was concentrated in a couple of places: his right leg, his left arm.
“Take it easy, friend,” somebody told him-far and away the most useless advice he’d ever heard. He would have said so, but he needed all his breath for screaming. His mouth tasted of mud and, increasingly, of blood.
He hadn’t thought he could shriek louder than he was shrieking, but discovered he was wrong when they went about setting his leg and bandaging some of his other wounds. “No!” he howled, but they wouldn’t listen. He choked out two coherent sentences: “Let me die! Kill me!”
They wouldn’t listen to that, either. They talked above him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it,” one of them said, “not with the kind of healing we can give him in the field.”
“He’s a first-rank mage,” another one answered. “The kingdom can’t afford to lose him.” They didn’t ask Fernao’s opinion. He’d given it, and they’d ignored it.
“How are we supposed to get him back to Lagoas, though?” the first voice said. “A dragon can’t fly that far, not without somewhere to rest on the way.”
“We’ve got ships down south of Sibiu,” the second voice replied. “They were going to fly more dragons here. I wish they’d done it sooner, but we can send him that way, and then east from there.”
“I wouldn’t bet on him to last long enough to get slung under a dragon,” the first voice said. Fernao devoutly hoped he wouldn’t last that long.
But the second voice said, “Get a mage and slow him down. It’s the only chance he’s got.” They both went away after that.
The next voice Fernao heard was Affonso’s. “I’ll do what I can,” he was saying to somebody off to the side. “Just fool luck he isn’t doing the same for me. The burst picked him up and flung him into a rock…. Fernao! Can you hear me?”
“Aye,” Fernao answered. The next scream quivered in his throat, as eager to be loose as a racing unicorn.
“I’m going to slow you down,” Affonso said. “I have to hope the spell will last long enough to get you to a ship where the dragon can rest. They’ll have a mage there to renew it, so just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away….” Fernao wished it would sweep him into oblivion. After what seemed far too long, it did.
But when he woke, he was in just as much torment as he had been before Affonso began the spell. For a moment, he forgot the magic altogether, lost as he was in his own pain. Then he realized that, added to all his other torments, he was swaying suspended in space. Instead of Affonso, he saw a dragon’s scaly belly above him. When he turned his head-actually, when it flopped to one side-he got a view of iron-gray ocean far below.
He never knew how long the dragon kept flying. Long enough for him to wish several times he were dead-he knew that. Thanks to, or rather on account of, Affonso’s spell, no time seemed to have passed for him between the magic and his awakening. He hadn’t healed a bit in the interim.
At last, after what seemed like a little longer than forever, the dragon glided down to a ship sliding along a ley line. As dragons had a way of doing, it landed clumsily. The pallet on which he’d been lashed thudded down onto the deck. The jolt made him shriek and faint. Unfortunately-or so he thought of it-he woke up again.
When he did, a man he’d never seen before was staring down at him. “I’ll soon have you out again,” the stranger promised. “I hope my spell will hold long enough to get you back to Lagoas. They’ll put you together again. Powers above willing, you’ll be good as new again in a while.”
Fernao couldn’t imagine being as good as new again. He had trouble even imagining being conscious and out of pain. “Hurts,” he groaned.
“Oh, I bet it does,” the ship’s mage said. “Now, just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away. . ”
Again, oblivion descended on Fernao. Again, it swept over him so abruptly, he had no idea it was there. Again, he woke to agony-but agony of a different sort, for now he found himself on a soft bed with a cast on his leg, another on his arm, and a bandage round his battered ribs. When he whimpered, a nurse said, “Here. Drink this.”
Drink it he did, hoping it was poison. It wasn’t; it tasted overwhelmingly of poppy seeds. It was so concentrated, he wondered if he could keep it down. Somehow, he did. After a while, the pain receded.
“Where am I?” he asked. He didn’t particularly care about the answer, either, but asking about anything but the pain that had crushed him seemed a delightful novelty.
“Setubal,” the nurse told him.
“Ah,” Fernao said. “With any luck at all, I’ll never leave again.” Then the poppy juice made him sleep, a natural sleep different from the time-frozen comas the emergency sorcery had brought on. Little by little, his body began to repair itself.
King Swemmel’s long, pale face stared out of the crystal, straight at Marshal Rathar. Everywhere in the broad kingdom of Unkerlant-everywhere the Algarvians hadn’t overrun, at any rate-peasants and soldiers and townsfolk who could get to a crystal were listening to the king.
“Durrwangen has fallen,” Swemmel said without preamble. “Unkerlant is in danger. We tell you that some of the soldiers who were posted there ran away instead of doing all they could against the invaders who want to enslave us. They have been punished as they deserve for their cowardice, and shall never have the chance to betray the kingdom again.”
General Vatran, who shared an abandoned peasant hut with Rathar, grimaced. “He executed more men than he needed to,” Vatran said. “A lot more men than he needed to.”
Rathar agreed with him, but waved him to silence all the same. He counted himself lucky not to be among the executed, and counted Vatran even luckier. And he wanted to hear what Swemmel had to say.
“Not one step back!” the king shouted, his tiny image clenching a tiny fist. “Not one step back, we say again. We shall never yield another inch of our sacred soil to the Algarvian savages. If they advance, they shall advance only over the bodies of our warriors, warriors who will never again turn their backs to the barbarous foe. Attack, we say! Attack and triumph!”
King Swemmel’s image vanished from the crystal, which flashed and went dark. With another grimace, Vatran said, “I wish it were as easy as he makes it sound.”
“So does the whole kingdom,” Rathar answered. “But he’s right about one thing: if we don’t fight the Algarvians, we won’t drive them away. We haven’t got much room for retreat, not anymore.”
“I don’t care what Swemmel says,” Vatran declared, a reckless statement from any Unkerlanter. “I don’t see how we’re going to stop the redheads this side of Sulingen. Do you, lord Marshal?” He made Rathar’s title half a challenge, half a reproach.
They were alone in the hut. Otherwise, without a doubt, Vatran would have kept his mouth shut. And otherwise, without a doubt, Rathar would not have answered, “No.” Even saying it where only Vatran could hear was a risk; the general might become a marshal if he could persuade Swemmel that the word had passed Rathar’s lips. Of course, Rathar would call him a liar, but still….
But Vatran said, “Well, you’re honest, at any rate.” He tore a chunk off the very stale loaf of black bread they’d found in the hut and passed it to Rathar. Rathar chewed and swallowed and thanked the powers above for a good set of teeth. His canteen was full of spirits. He swigged, then offered Vatran a drink. Maybe the general thought it was water. He took a big swallow. His eyes went wide. He coughed a couple of times, but held the spirits down.
“Fooled you,” Rathar said with a chuckle. But his amusement soon faded. “Now if we could only fool the redheads.”
“If we don’t-” Vatran shook his head. Not even to Rathar’s ear alone, not even with a good slug of spirits in him, would he saw what was in his mind.
Rathar didn’t have much trouble figuring out what that was. He said it, even if Vatran wouldn’t: “If we don’t,
