Only a block and a half away from Ethelhelm’s elegant flat, a labor gang was clearing away the rubble of a burnt-out building. The laborers were Kaunians, some men, some women. Had their overseers been Algarvian soldiers or constables, Ealstan would have been angry but unsurprised. But the men holding the Kaunians to their tasks were Forthwegians armed with nothing more than bludgeons-and the certainty that they were doing the right thing.
Ealstan wanted to curse them. He wanted to persuade them they were wrong. He wanted to tell them they were playing into their conquerors’ hands. In the end, he did none of that. He simply walked on, free hand curled into a fist tight enough to make his nails bite into his palm, belly churning with rage he dared not show.
More wrecked, burnt-out buildings lay in the poorer parts of Eoforwic. No one had started clearing them away. Ealstan wondered how long that would take. He also wondered if it would ever happen. He didn’t intend to hold his breath.
Here and there, people went through the wreckage. Some were folk who’d lived and worked in those buildings, doing their best to salvage what they could. And some, no doubt, were nothing but scavengers. Ealstan glared at the gleaners, which did no good at all: it might have angered the people who had a right to search for what was theirs, but bothered the looters not at all.
He stopped in a baker’s shop and bought two loaves of bread. It was nasty stuff, and had got nastier since the latest riots. He’d long since grown used to wheat flour cut with barley and rye. They made loaves thicker and chewier, because they rose less readily than wheat, but they didn’t taste too strange. Ground-up peas and beans and buckwheat groats, on the other hand …
“What’s next?” he asked the baker. “Sawdust?”
“If I can’t get anything else,” the fellow answered, adding, “Listen, pal, I eat the same bread I sell. Times aren’t easy.”
“No,” Ealstan agreed. Did the baker really eat the same bread he sold his customers? Ealstan doubted it. From everything he’d seen, anyone who got a position privileged in any way took advantage of it as best he could. Ealstan chuckled mirthlessly. If that wasn’t an Algarvian way of looking at the world, he didn’t know what was.
When he got back to his own part of town, he paused and marveled that all the buildings on his block had come through intact. Oh, some new windows on the bottom couple of stories were boarded up, but a lot of windows had been boarded up for a long time; glass, these days, was expensive and hard to come by.
Feet and hooves and wheels had worn away the fresh bloodstains from the crowns of the cobbles, but the red-brown still lingered between the gray and yellow-brown stones. Someone had left a bloody handprint on the wall of the building next to Ealstan’s, too. He wondered what had happened to that fellow. Nothing good, he feared.
He paused in the lobby to get his mail from the brass bank of boxes against the wall opposite the door. The lock on his box was as stout and fancy as he could afford; he had one key, the postman the other. The rest of the boxes sported similar impressive pieces of the locksmith’s art. Few people hereabouts trusted their neighbors’ good intentions.
When Ealstan saw his father’s precise, familiar script on an envelope, he grabbed it with a mixture of excitement and alarm. He didn’t hear from home very often, and wrote back even less. But news, he’d discovered when he got the letter telling of Leofsig’s death, could be bad as easily as good.
He had to set down the ledgers so he could knock on the door. Vanai let him in. “What have you got there?” she asked, pointing to the envelope.
“It’s from home,” he answered. “That’s all I know right now.” He held up the envelope to show her he hadn’t opened it, then added, “I didn’t have the nerve to do it down in the lobby.”
Vanai bit her lip as she nodded. “Let me pour some wine.” She hurried off to the kitchen. Ealstan clenched his jaw. He’d needed numbing after other letters from home, and knew too well he might need it again.
He waited till Vanai came back with two full glasses before he tore open the envelope and took out the letter inside. He unfolded it, started to read- and let out a chuckle that was shaky with relief. “Oh!” he said. “Is that all?”
“What is it?” Vanai asked, a wineglass still in each hand.
“My sister’s married,” Ealstan answered. That seemed strange-Conberge had been a part of the household his whole life-but he’d known it was likely to happen one day. “My father says everything went very well. Powers above be praised for that! Wouldn’t it have been fine if Sidroc walked in right in the middle of the ceremony?”
“No,” Vanai said, and handed him one of the glasses. She raised the other. “Here’s to your sister. May she be happy.”
“Aye. Conberge deserves to be happy.” Ealstan drank. The wine was nowhere near so fine as the fancy vintages Ethelhelm served, but it would do. He finished reading the letter, then winced in sympathy. “My father says he and my mother are just rattling around in the house. They never expected it to empty out so soon.”
Vanai stepped up and held him for a moment. He’d had to flee Gromheort, his brother was dead-at least Conberge had left the way she should have.
And something else occurred to him: something, he realized, he should have thought of quite a while before. He slipped his arm around Vanai. “I wish I could marry you properly,” he said. “If I ever get the chance, I will, I promise.”
She looked up at him and started to cry. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. Vanai spent the rest of the night finding ways to show him he hadn’t.
Down below Sabrino, Heshbon burned. In a few spots among the ruins, Algarvian and Yaninan holdouts still struggled against the advancing Lagoan army. Most of the men who’d survived the sorcerous debacle in the land of the Ice People, though, had long since surrendered.
Being a dragonflier, Sabrino enjoyed more choices than surrender or hopeless resistance. Along with his wing, along with all the dragons on the austral continent, he’d been recalled to Derlavai. The order still left him more than a little startled. He’d expected King Mezentio to send another army across the Narrow Sea to take the place of the one his mages, in their bloodthirsty arrogance, had thrown away. But the king had chosen to cut his losses instead. That wasn’t like Mezentio. It wasn’t like him at all. Sabrino wondered what had happened in Trapani to persuade Mezentio to take such a course.
He’d find out before long. His wing was ordered to the great dragon farm outside the capital of Algarve: they’d get their next assignment there. He assumed they would also get a few days of rest and recuperation, during which he intended to learn all he could. He knew he had a lot of catching up to do; down on the austral continent, he might as well have been cut off from what went on in the wider world.
His dragon eagerly flew north over the gray-green waters of the Narrow Sea: toward the sun, toward the warmth, toward civilization-though of course the beast cared nothing for that last. Sabrino glanced back over his shoulder. No, the Lagoans and Kuusamans weren’t pursuing. They kept on pounding Heshbon with eggs. If the Algarvians wanted to leave the land of the Ice People, they would let them.
Before long, Sabrino spied a black line ahead: land crawling up over the edge of the world to mar the smooth horizon between land and sea. The swamps and forests of southern Algarve, though the homeland of his folk, were not the part of the kingdom of which he was fondest. They’d always struck him as dull and gloomy. No wonder the ancient Algarvic tribes had waged endless war against the Kaunian Empire-the Kaunians held most of the land worth living in.
Sabrino wasn’t in the habit of talking to his dragon, as leviathan-riders often did with their beasts; he knew too well that dragons neither knew nor cared about words. But he broke his own rule now, saying, “Do you know, after the land of the Ice People this doesn’t look so bad.”
In among the woods and the swamps, farmers grew turnips and parsnips and beets, and grain along with them. Little by little, the trees thinned out, the land got drier, and fields of wheat and barley supplanted the root crops. With every few miles farther north Sabrino flew, the greens of growing things got brighter.
Trapani lay still within the swampy belt, but toward its northern edge. One after another, the dragons in Sabrino’s wing spiraled down out of the sky. Handlers took charge of them, exclaiming at how thin and ill-used they were.
