Through the Darkness

shouting instructions to the new men. Would the raw recruits understand? They’d better, Leudast thought, if they want to have the chance to get any more lessons. Soldiers said you’d last a while if you lived through your first fight. If you didn’t, you surely wouldn’t.

Up he came, running heavily toward a boulder a hundred feet ahead. He dove behind it as if one step ahead of the inspectors, lay panting for a moment, then peered¹ around the chunk of granite. The enemy was blazing from an apple orchard that, like the fields around the abandoned village, had seen better years. Leudast spotted a man in there who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He brought his stick to his shoulder and thrust his forefinger into the beaming hole. The foeman toppled. Leudast let out a growl of triumph.

Two more rushes brought him into the grove. As he crouched behind a tree trunk, he made sure the knife on his belt was loose in its sheath. He knew from bitter experience that Algarvians didn’t go backwards without leaving a lot of dead, theirs and those of their enemies, as monuments to where they’d been.

“Urra!” he yelled as he ran forward again. “Swemmel! Urra!” His countrymen echoed him. He waited for the answering cries of “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” to give him some idea of how many redheads he faced.

Those cries didn’t come. Instead, the enemy soldiers yelled a name he hardly knew-”Tsavellas!”-and other things in a language he’d never heard before. In brief glimpses, he saw that their uniforms were a darker tan than those of the Algarvians, and they wore tight leggings, not kilts.

Realization smote. “They’re Yaninans!” he called to his men. From everything he’d heard, the Algarvians’ allies didn’t have the stomach for the fight that Mezentio’s men brought to it. Maybe that was so, maybe it wasn’t. It might be worth finding out. “Yaninans!” he yelled as loud as he could, and then a couple of phrases of Algarvian he’d learned: “Surrender! Hands high!”

For a moment, the enemy’s shouts and blazing went on as they had before. Then silence fell. And then, from behind trees and bushes and rocks, skinny little men with big black mustaches began emerging. When the first ones weren’t blazed down out of hand, more and more came forth. Leudast told off troopers of his own to take charge of them and get them to the rear.

One of those troopers looked at him in something approaching awe. “Powers above, Sergeant, we’ve just bagged twice as many men as we’ve got.”

“I know.” Leudast was astonished, too. “It’s not so easy against the Algarvians, is it? Go on, get ‘em out of here.” He raised his voice and addressed the rest of his men: “They’ve given us a chance. We’re going into that hole fast and hard, like it belongs to some easy wench. Now come on!”

“Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters, the new men loudest among them: they thought it would be this easy all the time. Leudast didn’t try to tell them anything different. Pretty soon, they’d run into Algarvians and find out for themselves. Meanwhile, they-and he-would go forward as fast and as far as they could. Maybe, if they got lucky enough, they’d cut off the spearhead after all.

Among the books Ealstan had brought home to help keep Vanai amused in the flat she dared not leave was an old atlas. It was, in fact, a very old atlas, dating back to the days before the Six Years’ War. As far as that atlas was concerned, Forthweg didn’t exist; the east belonged to a swollen Algarve, while the west was an Unkerlanter grand duchy centered on Eoforwic here.

Vanai’s chuckle had a bitter edge. Algarve was a great deal more swollen these days than it had been when the atlas was printed. And the news sheets kept announcing new Algarvian victories every day. Down in the south of Unkerlant, their spearheads reached toward the Narrow Sea.

She looked back from the atlas to the news sheet. In fierce fighting, she read, the town of Andlau fell to Algarve and her allies. An enemy counterblow against the flank of the attacking column was turned back with heavy loss.

Andlau, she saw, was well beyond Durrwangen, three quarters of the way from where the fighting had begun in spring to Sulingen. Sure enough, Mezentio’s men seemed to be moving as fast as they had the summer before.

“But they can’t,” Vanai said out loud, defiantly using her Kaunian birth-speech. “They can’t. What will be left of the world if they do?”

What would be left of the world for her if the Algarvians won their war was nothing. But they kept right on rolling forward all the same. The news sheet went on, in the boasting Algarvian style even though it was written in Forthwegian, Algarvian dragons hammered Sulingen on the Wolter, dropping eggs by the thousand and leaving the city, an ungainly sprawl stretched along the northern bank of the river, burning in many places. Casualties are certain to be very heavy, but King Swemmel continues his useless, senseless resistance.

“Good for him,” Vanai muttered. Forthwegians despised their Unkerlanter cousins, not least for being stronger and more numerous than they were. Living in Forthweg, Vanai had picked up a good deal of that attitude. And her grandfather despised the Unkerlanters for being even more barbarous-which is to say, less under Kaunian influence-than the Forthwegians. She’d picked up a good deal of that attitude, too.

But now, if the Unkerlanters were giving King Mezentio’s men a run for their money, Vanai would cheer them on. She wished she could do more. If she left the flat, though, she was all too likely to end up sacrificed to fuel the Algarvian mages’ assault on Unkerlant. And so she stayed hidden, and thought kinder thoughts about King Swemmel than she’d ever imagined she would.

From the atlas and the news sheet, her eyes went to the little book called You Too Can Be a Mage. She wondered why she hadn’t pitched it into the garbage. She’d worked magic with it, all right: magic that had almost got her in more trouble than she’d known before. If you were already a mage, the spells in You Too Can Be a Mage might be useful.. but if you were already a mage, you wouldn’t need them, because you’d already know better.

She complained about that to Ealstan when he came home that evening. He laughed, which made her angry. Then he held up a placating hand. “I’m sorry,” he told her, though he didn’t sound very sorry. “It reminds me of something my father would say sometimes: ‘Any child can do it-as long as he has twenty years of practice.’ “

Vanai worked through that, then smiled in spite of herself. “It does sound like your father, or what you’ve said about him,” she answered. Then her smile faded. “I wish we’d hear from him again.”

“So do I,” Ealstan said, his own face tight with worry. “With Leofsig gone, he must be going mad. My whole family must be, come to that.”

She reached across the small supper table to set her hand on his. “I wish you’d been able to do something about your cousin.”

“So do I,” he growled. “But his regiment or whatever they call it had left the camp outside Eoforwic just before I got the news. And even if it hadn’t…” He grimaced. “What could I have done? Sidroc’s worth more to the Algarvians than I’ll ever be, so they’d surely back him, curse them. Powers below eat them and leave them in darkness forever.”

“Aye,” Vanai whispered fervently. But the Algarvians had to be immune to curses. So many had been aimed their way since the Derlavaian War started, but none seemed to bite.

“I think this may be what growing up means,” Ealstan said, “finding out there are things you can’t do anything about, and neither can anybody else.”

In one way, Vanai was a year older than he. In another, she was far older than that. The second way didn’t always show itself, but this was one of those times. “Kaunians in Forthweg suck that up with their mothers’ milk,” she said. “They have ever since the Kaunian Empire fell.”

“Maybe so,” Ealstan said. “But it’s not bred in you, any more than it’s bred in us. You learn it one at a time, too.”

Vanai remembered Major Spinello. “Aye, that’s so,” she said softly, hoping the redhead who’d taken his pleasure with her to keep her grandfather from working himself to death had met a horrible end in Unkerlant. Then she burst out with what she couldn’t hold in any more: “What will we do if Algarve wins the war?”

Ealstan got up, went over to the pantry, and came back with a jug of wine. After pouring, he answered, “I heard-Ethelhelm says-Zuwayza is letting Kaunians land on her shores.”

“Zuwayza?” Vanai’s voice was a dismayed squeak. “They’re-” She caught herself. She’d been about to say the Zuwayzin were nothing but bare black barbarians. Her grandfather would surely have said just that. She tried something else: “They’re allied with Mezentio, so how long can that last?”