'Maybe.' Orosio kicked at the frozen dirt like a youth just beginning to think about girls. 'It'd be nice.'
Sabrino slapped him on the back again. 'It'll happen,' he said, wondering if it would. Orosio was a nobleman, all right, or he'd have had an even harder time making officer's rank than he had, but you needed to squint hard at his pedigree to be sure of it. He'd have risen further and faster otherwise, for he was a first-rate soldier. There were times when Sabrino was glad Orosio hadn't been in position to hope for a wing of his own to command; he was too useful and able a subordinate to want to lose.
'Well, maybe,' Orosio said again. He knew what held him back. He could hardly help knowing. After another kick at the dirt, he went on, 'The way our losses are these days, we're getting more out-and-out commoners as officers than we probably ever did in all our history till now.'
'It could be,' Sabrino agreed. 'The Six Years' War was hard on our noble families, too. Put it together with this one, and…' He sighed. 'When the war is over, the king will have to grant a lot of patents of nobility, just to keep the ranks from getting too thin.'
'I suppose so.' Orosio's laugh sent fog spurting from his mouth. 'And then the families who were noble before the war will spend the next five hundred years looking down their noses at the new ones.'
'That's the truth.' Sabrino laughed, too. But, as happened so often these days, the laughter didn't want to stick. 'Better that than having some other king tell us who our nobles will be and who they won't be.'
In centuries gone by, Valmiera and Jelgava and Forthweg and even Yanina had meddled in Algarvian affairs, backing now this local prince, now that one, as puppet or cat's-paw. Once upon a time, Sibiu had ruled a broad stretch of the coastline of southern Algarve. Those bad days, those days when a man was embarrassed to admit he was an Algarvian, were gone. Algarve had taken its right place in the sun, a kingdom among kingdoms, a great kingdom among great kingdoms.
But Algarve didn't hold Sibiu anymore. And, not far away, eggs burst, a quick, hard drumbeat of noise. Sabrino's head swung in that direction as he gauged the sound and what it might mean. So did Orosio's. 'Unkerlanters,' Orosio said.
'Aye.' Sabrino hated to nod. 'They didn't even let the mud slow them down this autumn. Now that the ground's hard again, I don't know how we're going to hold them out of Herborn.'
'Neither do I,' Orosio said. 'But we'd cursed well better, because we'll have a demon of a time hanging on to the rest of Grelz if we lose it.'
'Oh, it's not quite so bad as that, I wouldn't say- not good, mind you, but not so bad as that,' Sabrino said. Orosio looked glum and cold and disbelieving and said not a word. Sabrino had been hoping for an argument. Silence, skeptical silence, gave him nothing to push against.
A crystallomancer hurried over to his tent and stuck his head inside. Not seeing him, the fellow drew back in confusion. 'Here I am,' Sabrino called, and waved. 'What's gone wrong now?' He assumed something had, or the fellow wouldn't have been looking for him.
With a salute, the crystallomancer said, 'Sir, the wing is ordered to attack the Unkerlanter ground forces now pushing their way into map square Green-Three.'
'Green-Three? Powers below eat me if I remember where that is,' Sabrino said. 'Tell the dragon handlers to load eggs onto the beasts. Orosio, call out the dragonfliers, and I'll go find out what in blazes we're supposed to be doing.'
While the crystallomancer and Orosio shouted, Sabrino went back to his tent and unfolded the situation map. For a moment, he didn't see any square labeled Green-Three, and he wondered whether the crystallomancer had got the order straight. Then he noticed that the vertical column of squares labeled Green lay east of Herborn, not west where he'd been looking. He cursed under his breath. No, the capital of the Kingdom of Grelz wasn't going to hold. If the Unkerlanters were already beyond Herborn, the fight had to be to keep a corridor open so the troops in the city could pull out.
No help for it, he thought. If we lose Herborn and those men, we'll be worse off than if we just lose Herborn.
He hurried out of the tent again, shouting orders of his own. 'Come on, you whoresons!' he yelled to the men of his wing. 'Time to make some Unkerlanters sorry they were ever born.'
Even now, after so many bitter battles, his dragonfliers gave him a cheer. Somehow, that rocked him. He had trouble believing they had anything to cheer about, or that he'd done anything to deserve those shouts. Waving a mittened hand, he scrambled up onto his dragon and took his place at the base of its neck. The dragon's screech rang high and shrill in his ears. It was younger and smaller than the beast he'd taken into all the fights before it got blazed out of the sky- younger and smaller and, if such a thing was possible, stupider, too.
He whacked it with the goad. It screeched again, this time in fury, and sprang into the air as if hoping to shake him off. He grinned. An angry dragon was a dragon that would fly hard. He activated his crystal and spoke to his squadron leaders: 'Green-Three, boys, just like the crystallomancer said. North and east of Herborn.'
Would the words slide by without the officers' fully noticing what he'd just said? He hoped so. But no such luck. 'North and east?' Captain Orosio exclaimed. 'Colonel, that doesn't sound good at all, not even a little bit.'
'I wish I could tell you you were wrong, but I'm afraid you're right,' Sabrino said. 'Nothing we can do about it, though, except hit Swemmel's bastards as hard as we can and help our own boys down on the ground.'
Orosio didn't answer that. As far as Sabrino could see, it had no answer. They flew on over the ruined landscape of the Kingdom- not the Duchy (not yet, thought Sabrino) -of Grelz. Two and a half years before, the Unkerlanters had fought hard to hold back the Algarvians. Little of what those battles wrecked was rebuilt, and now Sabrino's countrymen were doing everything they could to keep the Unkerlanters from retaking this stretch of land. If anything hereabouts was left standing by the time these battles were through, Sabrino would have been amazed.
Then he stopped worrying about the local landscape. There down below, just emerging from forest onto open ground, was the head of an Unkerlanter column- surely the force against which his wing had been sent. A few Algarvian behemoths out on the frozen fields started tossing eggs at Swemmel's soldiers, but they wouldn't be able to stall the Unkerlanters for long, not without help they wouldn't.
'Come on!' Sabrino shouted into his crystal. He pointed for good measure. 'There they are. Now we make 'em sorry they aren't somewhere else.'
Like most of its kind, his new dragon was happy enough to stoop on the enemy, as if it imagined itself a madly outsized kestrel. Getting it to pull up, he knew, would be another problem. It wanted to sink its claws into a behemoth and fly off with the great beast, armor and crew and all: it had not the wit to see such was far beyond even its great strength.
Sabrino loosed the eggs slung beneath the dragon and hit it with the goad. It screeched angrily, but did finally decide to rise rather than flying into the ground. More eggs burst behind Sabrino as the rest of his dragonfliers also loosed their loads of death on the Unkerlanters. He looked back over his shoulder and nodded in solid professional satisfaction. Battered and undermanned though it was, his wing still did a solid professional job. They'd well and truly smashed in the head of this column. Swemmel's men wouldn't be coming forward here, not for a while.
But then more Unkerlanters emerged from the woods north and east of the column the dragonfliers had just attacked. And, as his dragon gained height, Sabrino saw still more men and beasts, some in rock-gray, some in white winter smocks over rock-gray, moving up from the south toward those soldiers coming out of the forest.
Sabrino didn't know whether to groan or to curse. He did both at once, with great feeling. 'Powers below eat them!' he shouted to the uncaring sky. 'They've got Herborn trapped in one of their stinking kettles!'
'Herborn surrounded.' Fernao sounded out the Kuusaman words with care as he fought his way through the news sheet from Yliharma. 'Large force of Algarvians trapped inside Unkerlanter lines. Demand for surrender refused.'
'I've heard Lagoans who sounded worse,' Ilmarinen said. Coming from him, any praise was high praise.
Fernao dipped his head. 'Thank you,' he said in Kuusaman. He went on in classical Kaunian, in which he remained more fluent: 'Reading the news sheets, I learn many military terms. But they are not much use to me in speaking of ordinary things.'
'Oh, I don't know.' Ilmarinen looked around the refectory till he spotted the serving girl for whom he'd
