Bembo said, 'Suspicion of Kaunianity. Lock him up and see if he still looks the same tomorrow. The magic isn't even good for a day at a time, from everything I've heard.'
'Aha- one of those.' The gaoler brightened. 'How'd you catch him? Can't tell much by his hair, I'd say- white's still white.'
'I recognized his voice,' Bembo said proudly. 'I'd run into him before, when he looked like what he really is. He made himself enough of a nuisance that he stuck in my mind.'
'I am a Forthwegian,' the old man said. 'I am not a Kaunian.'
'Shut up,' the gaoler told him. 'We'll find out what you are.' He turned to a couple of his assistants, who looked to have been shooting dice before Bembo and Oraste came in with their captive. 'Strip him- don't leave him anything he can use to make more magic and make more work for us. Then throw him in a cell. Like the constable says, we'll find out what he is.'
'Aye,' one of his assistants said. They did as they were told. The old man squawked protests and tried to fight back, but he might have been a three-year-old for all the good it did him. The assistant gaolers led him away. Even though he was naked, he kept on squawking.
'Now…' The gaoler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some forms. 'The paperwork. If he really is a Kaunian, you'll get the credit. If he's not, you'll get the blame.'
'Blame? For what?' Bembo clapped a hand to his forehead in melodramatic disbelief. 'For bothering a miserable Forthwegian? Where's the blame in that?'
'There's no blame for bothering a Forthwegian,' the gaoler agreed. 'But if that old bugger turns out not to be a Kaunian, you get the blame for bothering me.' He favored the constables with a singularly unpleasant smile, the sort of smile that made them scurry out of the gaol in a hurry.
Once they'd got outside, Oraste gave Bembo the same kind of smile. 'You'd better not be wrong,' he said. Bembo wanted to scurry away from his partner, too, but he couldn't. He had to smile himself, and nod, and go on with his shift.
As soon as they came on duty the next day, they hurried to the gaol. The gaoler didn't start cursing the moment he set eyes on them, which Bembo took for a good sign. 'Well, you boys got it straight,' the gaoler said. 'He was a Kaunian.'
Oraste thumped Bembo on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Bembo heard something Oraste missed. 'Was?' he asked.
'Aye.' The gaoler looked sour. 'Sometime during the night, somebody gave him drawers and a tunic so he wouldn't freeze. He twisted 'em up and hanged himself with 'em. That killed the spell along with him. Like I say, he was a Kaunian, all right.'
'Filthy bastard,' Oraste said. 'We could have got some use out of his life energy.'
'That's right,' Bembo said. 'Killing yourself like that ought to be punishable by death.' He laughed. After a moment, Oraste and the gaoler did, too.
'I've sent the forms off to the constabulary barracks,' the gaoler said. 'You deserve the credit, like I told you yesterday. That turned out to be a nice bit of work.' Bembo beamed and preened and strutted. He hadn't much minded hearing that the longwinded old Kaunian was dead. Now that he knew he'd get the credit for capturing him, he didn't mind at all.
Back in the days when he was a peasant like any other peasant in the Unkerlanter Duchy of Grelz, Garivald had looked forward to winter. With snowdrifts covering the fields, he'd spent most of his time indoors and a lot of that time drunk. Aside from taking care of the livestock that always shared the hut with his family and him, what else was there to do but drink?
But he had no home now, only a miserable little shelter, not even worth dignifying with the name of hut, in the middle of the forest west of Herborn, the capital of Grelz. Munderic's band of irregulars still held the woods, still held away the Algarvians who'd overrun Grelz and the Grelzer puppets who served them, but irregulars had a harder time of it in winter than they did in summer.
Garivald came out of his shelter to look up through the pines and the bare-branched birches to the sullen gray sky overhead. It had snowed the day before. He thought it was done for a while, but you never could tell. He took a couple of steps. At each one, his felt boots left a clear track in the snow.
'Footprints,' he growled, vapor puffing from his mouth at the word. 'I wish there were a magic to make footprints go away.'
'Don't say things like that,' Obilot exclaimed. She was one of a handful of women in Munderic's band. The women who ran off to fight the redheads and their local cat's-paws commonly had reasons much more urgent than those of their male counterparts. Obilot went on, 'Sadoc's liable to get wind of it and try to cast a spell to be rid of them.'
'That might not be so bad,' Garivald said. 'Odds are, whatever magecraft he tried wouldn't do anything.'
'Aye, but it might go wrong so badly, it'd bring the Algarvians down on our heads,' Obilot said.
Neither of them spoke of the benefits that would follow if Sadoc's spell succeeded. Neither of them thought Sadoc's spell, if he made one, would succeed. He was the closest thing to a mage Munderic's band boasted. As far as Garivald was concerned, he wasn't close enough. He had no training whatever. He was just a peasant who'd fiddled around with a few charms.
'If only he knew when to try and when not to,' Garivald said mournfully. 'He might be good enough for little things, but he won't stay with those. He won't even take a blaze at them. If it isn't huge, he doesn't want to bother with it.'
'Who doesn't want to bother with what?' Munderic asked. The leader of the irregulars was a big, hard-faced, burly man. He looked the part he played. His temper suited him to it, too. Scowling, he went on, 'Who doesn't, curse it? We all have to do whatever we can.'
Obilot and Garivald looked at each other. Garivald owed Munderic his life. If the irregulars hadn't plucked him from Algarvian hands, Mezentio's men would have boiled him alive for making songs that mocked them. Even so, he didn't want to give Munderic this particular idea, and neither, evidently, did Obilot.
Munderic saw as much, too. His bushy eyebrows formed a dark bar over his eyes as he scowled. 'Who doesn't want to bother with what?' he repeated, an angry rumble in his voice. 'You'd better tell me what you were talking about, or you'll be sorry.'
'It wasn't anything, really.' Garivald didn't want to antagonize Munderic, either. They'd already had a couple of run-ins. To his relief, Obilot nodded agreement.
But they didn't satisfy their leader. 'Come on, out with it!' he barked. 'If we're going to make the invaders and the traitors howl, we've got to do everything we can.' His glare was so fierce, Garivald reluctantly told him what he and Obilot had been talking about. To his dismay, Munderic beamed. 'Aye, that'd be just what we need. Footprints in the snow make it hard for us to raid without giving ourselves away. I'll talk to Sadoc.'
'There's no guarantee he'll be able to do anything like that, you know,' Obilot said. This time, Garivald was the one who nodded.
'I'll talk to him,' Munderic said again. 'We'll see what he can do. If we've got a mage here, we bloody well ought to get some use out of him, don't you think?' He stamped away without waiting for an answer.
'If we had a mage, we could get some use out of him,' Garivald said after the irregulars' leader was out of earshot. 'But we've got Sadoc instead.'
'I know,' Obilot said. They exchanged wry smiles. Garivald knew a certain amount of relief. He'd quarreled with Obilot not so long before, too.
I never wanted to quarrel with anybody, he thought. I just wanted to live out my life back in Zossen with my wife and my son and my daughter. But Zossen lay a long, long way to the west- fifty miles, maybe even sixty. He didn't know if he'd ever see his family again. Obilot was no great beauty, but she wasn't homely, either. He didn't want her angry at him.
He'd been away from Annore for most of a year now. Had Obilot decided to slip under the blankets with him, he wouldn't have thrown her out. But she hadn't. She didn't slip under the blankets with anyone, and she'd knifed a man who tried too persistently to slip under the blankets with her. The other women in the band of irregulars acted
