are brewing up something nasty out of sight.' He turned to Kun. 'Anything that feels like trouble, Corporal?'
Kun shook his head. 'Nothing I can sense, Captain. I don't know how much that's worth, though. I was only an apprentice, after all, not a mage myself.' In the squad, he put on airs about the small spells he did know. Putting on airs with the company commander didn't pay.
'All right,' Tivadar said. 'The last time they struck us with sorcery, even our best mages didn't know what they'd do till they did it, curse them.'
He was all business. Having purified Istvan, Kun, Szonyi, and the rest, he acted as if they were ritually pure, and never mentioned that dreadful night. Neither did any of them, not where anybody not of their number might hear. The shame was too great for that. Istvan thought it always would be.
Kun usually mocked whenever he saw the chance. He was a city man, and his ways often seemed strange and slick and rather repellent to Istvan, who like most Gyongyosians came from a mountain valley where the people were at feud with some neighboring valley when they weren't at feud among themselves. But Kun didn't mock now. In tones unwontedly serious, he said, 'That was an abomination. The stars will not shine on men who murder their own to power their magecraft.'
'Aye, you're right,' Lajos boomed. 'The Unkerlanters fight filthy. It's worse than eating goat's flesh, if you ask me.'
He waited for everyone to nod and agree with him. In most squads, everybody would have. Here, the agreement was slow and halfhearted. It was badly acted by men who wanted to seem normal Gyongyosians but had trouble doing so. Lajos didn't realize that. Istvan hoped the motions of the stars would grant that he never did. The young trooper grunted and shifted uncomfortably, knowing things had gone wrong and not understanding why.
Szonyi said, 'Captain, when can we take the fight to Swemmel's men again? We drove 'em through the mountains and we drove 'em through the woods. We can still do it, any time we get the orders.'
Tivadar answered, 'If the men set over me tell me to go forward, go forward I shall, unless I should die serving Gyongyos, in which case the stars will cherish my spirit forevermore. But if the men set over me tell me to wait in place, wait in place I shall. And if the men set over you, Trooper, if they tell you to wait in place, wait in place you will. And they do. I do.'
'Aye, sir.' Szonyi dipped his head in reluctant acquiescence. He was a man of his kingdom- and, like Istvan, a man of the countryside. Given his way, he would go straight at a foe, without subtlety but without hesitation, and keep going till one or the other of them couldn't stand up anymore.
'Remember, boys, you have to stay alert all the time,' Tivadar warned. 'The Unkerlanters are better in the forest than we are. We couldn't have come so far against 'em if we didn't have 'em outnumbered. They don't always need magic to have a go at us- sometimes sneakiness serves 'em just as well.'
He climbed out of the redoubt and headed off along the line to the next Gyongyosian strongpoint. Istvan wished his countrymen had enough men to cover all the line through the forest they held. They didn't, especially in winter, where staying out alone might so easily lead to freezing to death.
'The captain is a pretty good officer,' Lajos said.
'Aye, he is,' Istvan agreed, and all the other veterans in the squad chimed in, too. Lajos let out a small sigh of relief. Not everyone thought he was an idiot all the time, anyhow.
Kun said, 'If we can keep what we hold now when the war is over, we'll have won the greatest victory against Unkerlant in almost three hundred years.'
'Is that a fact?' Istvan said, and Kun nodded in a way that proclaimed it was not only a fact, it was a fact anyone this side of feeblemindedness should have known. Istvan sent his corporal a look a little less than warm. Kun returned it: not quite so openly this time, for Istvan outranked him, but unmistakably nonetheless.
Szonyi sniffed, for all the world like a hound taking a scent. 'More snow coming,' he said. 'Won't be long, either. You can taste the wind.'
Istvan had plenty of practice gauging the weather himself. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, as if he were taking bites out of the air. The chill of the wind- a wind that had suddenly picked up- the feel of the moisture it carried… He nodded. 'Aye, we're for it. Coming out of the west, from behind us.'
'Blowing right into the Unkerlanters' faces,' Szonyi said. 'Seems a shame not to hit 'em when we've got that kind of edge. We could be like mountain apes, gone before they even knew we were there.'
'Aye, I see the resemblance, all right.' Kun planted the barb with a self-satisfied smirk. Szonyi glowered at him. Istvan kept the two of them from quarreling any worse than they usually did.
Whether right about striking or not, Szonyi was right about the storm. It blew in that night, snow swirling around the trees and through their branches till Lajos, on sentry-go, complained, 'How am I supposed to see anything? King Swemmel and his whole court could be out there drinking tea, by the stars, and I wouldn't know it unless they invited me to have some.'
'If Swemmel was out there, he'd be drinking spirits.' Istvan spoke with great conviction. 'And the son of a whore wouldn't invite anybody to share.' But he could see no farther than Lajos. If the Unkerlanters were gathering in the forest not far away, he might not know it till too late. He might not, but Kun would. He shook the onetime mage's apprentice out of his bedroll.
'What do you want?' Kun asked irritably, yawning in his face.
'You've got that little magic that tells when somebody's moving toward you,' Istvan answered. 'Don't you think this would be a good time to use it?'
Kun eyed the snowstorm and nodded, though he warned, 'The spell won't say whether the men it spies are friends or foes.'
'Just work it,' Istvan said impatiently. 'If they're coming toward us from out of the east, they're no friends of ours.'
'Well, you're bound to be right about that,' Kun admitted, and worked the tiny spell. A moment later, he turned back to Istvan. 'Nothing, Sergeant. Remember, the snow gives the Unkerlanters as much trouble as it gives us.'
'All right.' Istvan used a brisk nod to hide his relief. He knew he shouldn't have been so relieved; it wasn't proper for a man from a warrior race. But even a man of a warrior race might have been excused for being unwilling to wait and receive a blow from the enemy.
Kun said, 'We'll get through another day. That will do.' He sounded none too fierce himself, but Istvan didn't reprove him.
Now that Vanai dared go out onto the streets of Eoforwic once more, she wished she could find some books written in classical Kaunian. But they'd long since vanished from all the booksellers' shops, those dealing in new and secondhand volumes alike: the Algarvians forbade them. The redheads had aimed to destroy Kaunianity even before they'd started destroying Kaunians.
Vanai suspected she might have been able to get her hands on some had she known which booksellers to trust. But she didn't, and she didn't care to ask questions that might draw notice to herself. She made do with Forthwegian books.
My magecraft makes me look like a Forthwegian, she thought. Even Ealstan sees me this way almost all the time. I speak Forthwegian almost all the time. People call me Thelberge, as if I really were a Forthwegian. Am I still Vanai?
Whenever she looked in a mirror, her old familiar features looked back at her. Her sorcery didn't change the way she saw herself. In the mirror, she still had fair skin, a long face with a straight nose, and gray-blue eyes. But even in the mirror, her hair was black. Like any Kaunian with a grain of sense, she'd dyed it to make it harder for the Algarvians to penetrate her disguise.
Am I still Vanai, if the world knows me as Thelberge? If the world knows me as Thelberge for long enough, will the Vanai inside me start to die? If Algarve wins the Derlavaian War, will I have to go on being Thelberge for the rest of my life?
She didn't want to think about things like that, but how could she help it? If the Algarvians won the war, would Eoforwic stay shabby and battered, its people- even real Forthwegians- scrawny, for the rest of her life? She didn't want to think about that, either, but it looked like being true.
