She kissed him on the cheek, then slid off him. A brief rustle was her putting on the tunic she’d shed before waking him. “Conqueror,” she whispered, and slipped out of the tiny chamber. Feeling more conquered than anything else, Rathar set his clothes to rights. Had they not been disarranged, he might have thought he’d been dreaming. A moment later, he was asleep again.
“Do you think we got rid of those cursed Forthwegians by ourselves?” Garivald asked Munderic. He didn’t think so himself, not for a minute. Those bearded demons had given Munderic’s band of irregulars everything they wanted and then some.
Munderic said, “I can’t tell you one way or the other. All I can tell you is, nobody’s seen the buggers anywhere around for the past week or so. They’re like a squall, is what they are. They blew in, they tore things up, and now they’ve blown out again.” He spat. “I’m cursed if I’m going to tell you I miss ‘em, either.”
“They were trouble,” Garivald agreed. “Now that they’re gone, what do we do?”
“Have to remind folks we’re still around,” Munderic said, and Garivald nodded. The band had spent most of its time deep in the woods since the Forthwegians outdid them at the game of ambush.
“We ought to hit a Grelzer patrol,” Garivald said. “If we can send Raniero’s pups home with a jug tied to their tails, we’ll have things to ourselves for a while here.”
“That’s so,” Munderic agreed. “The other thing we have to do is, we have to keep hitting the ley lines that run south and west. The harder the time the Algarvians have moving men forward, the better our armies will do.”
Ley lines hardly seemed real to Garivald. Zossen had been a long way away from any of them; for all practical purposes, his home village lived as it had two centuries before, when all traffic moved on wheels or on the backs of beasts or men in summer and what traffic there was in winter went by sled. Even so, he nodded and said, “Aye, makes sense to me.”
Munderic’s face was rarely cheerful. Now it went savage indeed. “And I’ll find out who sold us to the Forthwegians. When I do, he’ll die, but he’ll spend a long time wishing he was dead first.”
Garivald nodded again. “Have to get rid of traitors,” he said. He wasn’t surprised there were some, though. He knew the irregulars had spies among the Grelzers who followed King Raniero: only natural the backers of the puppet king should try to return the favor.
“Maybe Sadoc’ll be able to sniff out the son of a whore,” Munderic said.
“Sadoc couldn’t sniff out a week-dead horse if you put him ten feet downwind of it,” Garivald said. “He’s a good fighter, Munderic. I’ll never say anything about his nerve. But he’s no mage, and you’ll get hurt if you count on him to be one.”
The leader of the irregulars glared at him. “He knew the Forthwegians were coming down out of the north, not just along the path through the woods.”
“All right. Have it your way. You will anyhow.” Back in Zossen, Garivald wouldn’t have got into an argument with Waddo the firstman. He didn’t argue with Munderic here. Arguing with a man who had more power than you did you no good. Even when you were right, you were wrong. Sometimes you were especially wrong when you turned out to be especially right.
There was a song in that somewhere. Garivald felt it. He wondered if he ought to go looking for it. Ordinary peasants would laugh themselves silly. Firstmen and nobles and inspectors and impressers wouldn’t think it was so funny. He had no trouble figuring out what they’d do to someone who sang a song mocking them: about the same as the Algarvians would have done to him for singing songs about them.
Munderic and the irregulars had rescued him when he wrote songs about the redheads. They wanted him to go right on doing it. Suppose by some miracle the war were won tomorrow. Suppose he went right on singing songs about firstmen and inspectors, songs as biting as the ones he sang about the Algarvians. When King Swemmel’s men came after him then, who would rescue him? Nobody he could think of.
That made him wonder for the first time whether he’d chosen the right side. It also made him understand for the first time the men and women who followed Raniero of Grelz and not Swemmel of Unkerlant. He shook his head. Raniero was an Algarvian, propped up by the might of the Algarvians. And the redheads were even harder on the peasants of Unkerlant than Swemmel’s men.
He looked up through the branches overhead. A dragon was circling in the sky, so high that it looked like nothing so much as a worm gliding on little batwings. But Garivald knew what sort of worm it was. He also knew- though he couldn’t see-whose great worm it was: it would surely be painted in the green and red and white of Algarve.
What could the man on it see down here? Not much, Garivald hoped. He glanced around. No campfires burning, no cookfires burning: nothing to draw a dragonflier’s eye. He hoped nothing to draw a dragonflier’s eye. Maybe, after a while, the redhead up there would get sick of staring at trees and fly off.
If Garivald hadn’t been looking up at the sky, maybe Sadoc wouldn’t have looked up, either. But nothing makes one man want to crane his neck like seeing another man already doing it. Sadoc spied the dragon in short order. He shook his fist at it. “Cursed thing!” he growled.
“It’s a nuisance, all right,” Garivald agreed. “I don’t think the fellow on it knows we’re down here, though.”
Sadoc shook his fist again. “I ought to knock it right out of the sky, that’s what I ought to do.”
Garivald eyed him. “Can you?”
Almost as if he were an Algarvian, Sadoc struck a pose redolent of affronted dignity. “Do you doubt me, songster? Do you doubt my magecraft?”
“In a pig’s arse, it wouldn’t,” Sadoc snarled, drawing himself up with even more offended pride. “I can do it. I
Garivald thought of running after him to stop him. But Sadoc was bigger than he was, meaner than he was, and already angry at him. He didn’t think he could either talk the other irregular out of trying his magecraft or beat him in a fight. Instead, he hurried back to Munderic and told him what Sadoc had in mind.
To his dismay, Munderic said, “Good for him. The Algarvians have been putting us in fear with their wizardry. High time we paid ‘em back in their own coin.
“But what if something goes wrong?” Garivald said. “Then he won’t knock the dragon down, and he likely will give away where we’re hiding.”
“You worry too much,” Munderic told him. “Sadoc isn’t as bad a mage as you think.”
“No, he’s worse,” Garivald retorted. Munderic jerked his thumb in a brusque gesture of dismissal. Having just argued twice with the leader of the irregulars, Garivald supposed he understood why Munderic responded as he did. That didn’t mean he thought Munderic was right. It didn’t mean he thought Sadoc could sorcerously bring down a dragon, either.
But Munderic wouldn’t listen. And Sadoc gave every sign of going ahead with his wizardry. A crowd of irregulars gathered round him, watching his preparations. Garivald wanted nothing to do with them. He strode away from what he feared would be the scene of a disaster-and almost bowled over Obilot, who was coming up to see what Sadoc was up to.
“Don’t you want him to knock down the beast?” Obilot asked.
“If I thought he could, I would,” Garivald said. “Since I don’t..” He started to snarl something, then bit it back. “Do you think he can?”
Obilot pondered, then shook her head. “No. He’s not much of a mage, is he?”
“Oh, good!” Garivald exclaimed. “Here’s another question for you: If he tries to bring down the dragon and doesn’t manage it, do you want to be anywhere close by?”
Obilot considered that, too, but then she shrugged. “Probably won’t matter much. If he botches the job, this whole stretch of forest will catch it.”
That bit of common sense made Garivald stop and think. He had to nod. “All right. Shall we see what happens?”
Sadoc had started a fire from the embers of one of the morning’s cook-fires. He was throwing powders of one sort or another onto it, and incanting furiously while he did. Each new powder made the flames flare a different color-yellow, green, red, blue-and send up a new, noxious cloud of smoke. If the Algarvian dragonflier hadn’t
