was almost impossibly difficult for a mistress. But the war made it easy. What were the odds that two… friends would come into Trapani wanting to see a woman at the same time? Slim, no doubt about it. A canny woman, or a grasping one, could do very well for herself.
He had no proof, only the tone of the letter. In his own prewar days, though, he’d studied the Kaunian classics, which left him uncommonly sensitive to tone. If Fronesia didn’t have more than one protector, it wasn’t solely because of love for him. He was sure, very sure, of that.
Instead of crumpling up the letter and tossing it into the mud, he took it back to his hut. He kept his head up and his stride brisk. He wouldn’t let the men see that Fronesia had written anything to upset him.
When he got inside, though, he tossed the letter on the embers of the fire. Those were plenty to make it char and crackle and flare and burn. For a moment he smelled, or imagined he smelled, scorched perfume. Then the sharp odor of burning paper overwhelmed it, and then that too was lost in the usual smoky stink of the hearth.
He sat down at a folding table-Algarvian army issue; Unkerlanter peasant huts didn’t boast such amenities- inked a pen, and began his reply. Halfway through the first paragraph, he set down the pen, shaking his head. If he wrote while angry, he would regret the letter as soon as he posted it. Fronesia didn’t need to hear from him right away. If she didn’t hear from him right away, she might worry a little. That wouldn’t be so bad.
After a bit, the field-post wagon rattled off to deliver letters and packages to some other brigade. Half noticing the noise, Spinello nodded to himself. The military postmen were good, solid fellows; even footsoldiers respected them. They carried sticks when they got near the front, and they knew what to do with them, too.
Someone knocked on the door. ColonelSpinello started. He wished one of his regimental commanders would have picked a different time to bother him. He also sniffed a couple of times before going to the door. No, he couldn’t smell the perfume from Fronesia’s letter. That was something, anyhow.
But when he opened the door, no grimy, poorly shaved Algarvian officer stood there. Jadwigai did. “Oh,” Spinello said in surprise. He managed a bow. “Come in, milady. What can I do for you?”
He intended to leave the door to the hut open, so the men in the brigade could see he was up to nothing nefarious with their mascot. Jadwigai, though, closed it after herself as she walked in. “Are you all right, Colonel?” she asked in that disconcertingly fluent Algarvian of hers.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Spinello asked in return, more surprised than ever.
“When the field post came, I saw you didn’t like the letter you got,” the Kaunian girl answered. “I was afraid it might be bad news from your family. This is a… very large war.”
If it hadn’t been a very large war, a Kaunian girl from Forthweg would never have found herself in the wilds of northern Unkerlant. But that wasn’t what Jadwigai had meant. Touched, Spinello said, “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”
“Really?” She didn’t sound as if she believed him. Maybe she’d heard other Algarvian officers making light of losses.
But, very firmly, Spinello said, “Really. My father and uncles are too old to fight. My brother and my cousins are all fine, so far as I know. So are my aunts and my sister, for that matter.”
“All right,” Jadwigai said-actually, the soldiers’ expression she used had a literal meaning a lot more pungent than that. “I’m glad. Even so, though, you can’t tell me that letter made you happy.”
“No, it didn’t,” Spinello admitted. The Kaunian girl’s face bore anI-told-you-so expression. Hoping to cure her of it, he went on, “If you really must know what the trouble is, my mistress back in Algarve is trying to squeeze more money out of me.”
“Oh.” She turned red. For a moment, he thought it was embarrassment. Then he realized it was outrage. “The nerve of her, doing something like that when you’re out here where you’re liable to get killed.”
“That did cross my mind, aye,” Spinello said. “Of course, from Fronesia’s point of view my being out here only makes me a poor long-term investment.”
Jadwigai said something inflammatory in Algarvian-she’d learned it from soldiers, sure enough. Then she said something even more inflammatory in classical Kaunian. It was the first time Spinello had heard her use her birth- speech.
He answered in classical Kaunian himself: “Letting such small things pierce one to the heart merely burdens the spirit to no purpose.”
Jadwigai looked astonished. “I didn’t think you knew my language, not when…” She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to go on. She had to know what happened at the camps the Algarvians politely termedspecial, sure enough.
Spinello grimaced. How was he supposed to respond to that? At last, after some thought, he said, “A kingdom will do what it thinks it has to do to win, to survive. Afterwards, maybe, it will look back and count the cost of what it did.”
To his surprise, and more than a little to his relief, Jadwigai nodded. “Or, if it wins, it won’t bother to count the cost at all.” That jerked a nod from Spinello. The Kaunian girl went on, “It’s the same for people, you know: you do what you have to do first, and then you count the cost later.”
He nodded again. “Any soldier who’s ever been blazed at, will say the same thing.”
“Not just soldiers.” Jadwigai stepped up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. She was, if anything, an inch or two taller than he. “You can have me if you want me, you know.”
“And you’ll count the cost later?” he asked.
Quite seriously, she nodded. “Of course. If there is a later.”
Sleeping with you would improve my chances of having a later. Spinello had had no compunctions whatever about making Vanai bribe him with her body to keep her miserable grandfather alive. He hesitated now, and wondered why. The answer wasn’t long in coming, not least because he’d seen so much more soldiering than he had when he was stationed in Oyngestun.
Gently, he kissed her. She stiffened in his arms. That had excited him with Vanai. Here, it just left him sad. He said, “I’m afraid you’re not my pet-you’re the brigade’s pet.” She stared at him, then started to cry. “Stop that!” he exclaimed, and he wasn’t acting at all. “If the soldiers think I’ve done something to you that you didn’t want, I’m a dead man.”
Too late, he realized he’d just handed her a weapon. But she didn’t seem interested in using it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”
“For what? For being a fool?” he said, and was relieved again when that made her laugh. She was still smiling when she left the hut. Later, he thought, standing there all alone. You count the cost later.
Skarnu turned to Palasta. “If we go much farther, we fall off the edge of the world,” he said.
The young mage smiled at him. She looked as if a strong breeze would blow her away. Here at the southeasternmost reach of Valmiera, there were plenty of strong breezes, most of them off the Strait of Valmiera that separated the Derlavaian mainland from the great island holding Lagoas and Kuusamo. The wind didn’t stagger her, but it did blow her long blond hair into a mare’s nest of tangles. Brushing a strand that escaped her flat knitted wool hat back from her eyes, she said, “Back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they really thought they would.”
“I suppose so, sis,” he said, which made Palasta smile again. They’d decided to travel as brother and sister; he would have had to have startedvery young to claim her as a daughter. He wished shewere his sister-he vastly preferred her to the one he really had. Palasta would never have given herself to the Algarvians, not for anything.
She said, “If we go to the top of that little hill there”-she pointed-”we might be able to see something interesting.”
“Maybe,” Skarnu said. Up to the top of the hill they went. The path was muddy; Skarnu almost slipped. Once they did get to the top, he shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand and peered south and east toward the beach where the Algarvians had murdered their Kaunian captives to assail the Kuusamans, and where something-no one on this side of the Strait of Valmiera seemed to know what-had gone wrong for the redheads. Even shading his eyes against the wan southern sun, he couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. “I wish I had a spyglass,” he muttered.
“Not safe,” Palasta said, and he could hardly disagree.
Shaggy green fields, rich and lush, stretched down toward the sea. A circle of tall, crudely shaped stones stood in one of those a few hundred yards away: a monument a thousand years older than the Kaunian Empire, maybe more. Lichen scrawled red and yellow-green patterns up the sides of the stones.
