so all the other people are sure they know what’s going on in here.”
“Aye.” Pekka nodded. They sat close together, not touching at all, not even looking at each other, for a couple of minutes. What happened next seemed likelier to have sprung from a three-hundred-year-old Valmieran comedy of manners than real life. Fernao slipped his arm around Pekka at exactly the same moment she leaned toward him. An instant after that, they weren’t sitting on the bed any more. They were lying on it, clinging to each other as if they were lodestone and iron.
When at last their lips separated, Fernao whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.” He trailed kisses across her cheek and down the side of her neck.
She shivered a little and sighed when he nibbled the lobe of her ear. She wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at anything; her eyes were shut tight. In a tiny voice, she said, “Please tell me you didn’t have this in mind when you asked me to come up here with you.”
“By the powers above, I didn’t!” Fernao exclaimed, more truthfully than not. “It just-happened.”
“It just-happened,” Pekka echoed. Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded once more and reached for him. If anything, her kiss was even more desperate than his.
She shivered again when he unbuttoned her tunic, and once more when his mouth descended on her left breast. He teased her nipple with lips and tongue. She pressed his head to her. Then, panting and laughing, she reached under his kilt.
When all her clothes lay scattered on the floor, Fernao wondered how he could ever have thought her scrawny. She was what she was-a Kuusaman woman, made as Kuusamans were. And… Not much later, he stopped thinking at all, but leaned on one elbow above her for a moment while he guided himself in. She let out a low, breathy moan and clasped him with arms and legs. She still kept her eyes shut tight.
He had to fight not to explode in the first instant. Once he managed that, once he found a rhythm that suited them both, he thought for a while that he could go on forever. But Pekka’s mounting excitement spurred him toward the end, too. She called out a name and gave a short, sharp cry of joy. Her nails scored his back. He gasped and shuddered and spent himself. Only afterwards did he notice the name she’d called wasn’t his.
He stroked her cheek. With a little luck, she hadn’t realized she’d cried her husband’s name, there in the moment when all thought fled. But she had. She jerked away from his gentle hand and burst into tears. “Leave me alone!” she said. “What have I done?”
The answer to that was only too obvious. Fernao didn’t point it out to her. He dressed quickly and hurried out of the chamber. Even though it was his, he fled it like an adulterer diving out a bedroom window when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He was halfway down the hall before he wondered what sort of rumorsthat would start.
Patrol. Somebody had to do it. Sidroc understood as much. The Unkerlanters had written the book on infiltration, written it and revised it several times. If you didn’t go prowling forth and find out what they were up to and hold them at arm’s length, you’d wake up one fine morning with them bellowing, “Urra!” from front, rear, and both flanks all at the same time.
But if you did go prowling forth, they were liable to kill you for your trouble. Patrols didn’t always come back. Sometimes they just vanished as if they’d never been. Sidroc was painfully aware of that. He tried to tiptoe through the woods of the eastern Duchy of Grelz. Somebody had to go out on patrol, aye. He wished he weren’t one of the somebodies.
He also wished he and his comrades from Plegmund’s Brigade didn’t have to rely on the guide who walked through the woods with them. Some Grelzer peasants hatedKingSwemmel and his inspectors and impressers worse than the Algarvians did. Others pretended to hate Swemmel so as to lure the redheads-and the Forthwegians who fought alongside them-to destruction. Finding out you’d trusted the wrong sort of guide was too apt to be the last discovery you ever made.
SergeantWerferthspoke in Algarvian: “Where did you see these Unker-lanter soldiers?” Then he repeated the question in Forthwegian, which was at least related to the language spoken hereabouts.
“I see… by village,” the guide said in bad Algarvian, and pointed west and a little north. “Two companies, maybeso three.” He showed the numbers on his fingers to leave no room for error.
“Maybeso,” Ceorl jeered. “Maybeso you’re leading us into an ambush, eh?”
With a shrug, the guide answered, “You kill me then.”
“Let him alone, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “He’s supposed to be on our side, remember?”
“He’s supposed to be, aye,” Sidroc said. “Butis he?” Ceorl looked at him in surprise; they seldom agreed about anything. Sidroc went on, “I don’t want him leading us down the primrose path, either, you know.”
He’d spoken Forthwegian. Sure enough, the local could follow bits of the language, for he said, “No primroses.” Then he said several other things in his own dialect of Unkerlanter. Sidroc got only fragments of that, but none of it sounded complimentary toKingSwemmel . He kicked at the muddy pine needles underfoot. The guide would sound the same way no matter how he really felt about the King of Unkerlant.
“He knows this country better than we do,” Werferth said. “It’s his neck if the Unkerlanters catch him after he’s helped us.”
If he’s the straight goods, Sidroc thought. If he’s not… If the guide wasn’t the straight goods, they could indeed avenge themselves upon him. That wasn’t likely to do them much good, though.
Off in the distance, a wolf howled. Sidroc hoped it was a wolf, anyhow. So did the Algarvian lieutenant heading up the patrol. He said, “Do they really let those cursed things run loose in this part of the world?”
“Aye,” the guide answered.
Sidroc wasn’t altogether sure why anyone let the Algarvian lieutenant run loose in this part of the world. Sidroc hadn’t seen his twentieth birthday yet, but he felt ten years older than the redhead. Even so, the Algarvian gave the orders, as if to proclaim that his folk were the conquerors, with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade only along for the ride.
If they ‘re the conquerors, how come they‘ve spent most of the past year retreating? Sidroc wondered. And what happens if they spend most of the next year retreating, too? He didn’t want to dwell on that. One of the reasons he’d signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade was that the Algarvians had looked like world-beaters back in Forthweg. If the world was theirs, what better way to grab a chunk of it than fighting at their side?
He still couldn’t imagine the world belonging to the Unkerlanters. They were too dowdy for that to seem possible.
Another wolf howled, this one in the direction where the guide said the Unkerlanters were based. “I don’t like that,”SergeantWerferth muttered.
“Why not?” The Algarvian lieutenant sounded curious. A bright child might have sounded the same way. We don’t need a bright child leading our patrol, Sidroc thought. We need a nasty old veteran who knows what he’s doing and how to go about it. But the young Algarvian was what they had.
Patiently, Werferth said, “Because it sounds like signal and answer, sir. If it is signal and answer, we’re liable to be walking into something we’d be better off missing.”
“Ah,” the lieutenant said, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. He swept off his hat and bowed to Werferth, so maybe it hadn’t. Sidroc sighed. If the lieutenant lived, he’d learn in a hurry. Fighting against the Unkerlanters, you had to. But if he didn’t live, he was liable to drag the whole patrol down in ruin with him.
Very close by, a jay jeered. The guide froze. So did all the men from Plegmund’s Brigade. That raucous cry made an even better signal than a wolfs howl. The Algarvian lieutenant took another couple of steps before realizing something might be wrong. He looked around wildly, his stick at the ready.
But then Sidroc spotted the bird, pinkish brown with a black tail, fluttering from one pine to another. As it flew, it screeched again. He breathed easier. “It’s a real jay,” he said.
“Nice to know something’s real,” Werferth said. Nobody argued with him.
The Algarvian lieutenant laughed and said, “If any Unkerlanters heard it, they probably started shivering, thinking it was us.” Sidroc nodded. The lieutenant was likely to be right. Swemmel’s men alarmed Sidroc, but he’d seen that Mezentio’s men alarmed the Unkerlanters, too. That was fortunate, as far as he was concerned. Every so often, it kept the enemy from pressing an attack as hard as he might have.
“Forward,” the young lieutenant said. Sidroc had heard the word too many times-mostly shouted, and emphasized by shrilling whistles-for it to spur him on as it had when he’d first joined Plegmund’s Brigade. What was it but an invitation to get himself killed? Even the redhead seemed to realize as much, for he spoke quietly, as if to say the patrol needed to go on but shouldn’t make a fuss about it.
