And then, as matter approached a climax, Pekka made the sort of mistake that could befall any mage working through a long, complex, difficult spell: she dropped a line. Ilmarinen jumped. Piilis exclaimed in horror. Raahe and Alkio seized each other's hands as if they never expected to touch anything else again.
Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at recognizing the problem as fast as any of the Kuusamans. He also knew the same fear that gripped them: Ilmarinen's joke about bringing the sorcerous energy down on their own heads wasn't funny anymore. When things went wrong at this stage…
'Counterspells!' Ilmarinen rapped out, and began to chant with sudden harsh urgency. So did Raahe and Alkio, their two voices merging into one. So did Pekka, trying to reverse what she'd unleashed. Dismay still seemed to freeze Piilis.
Not so Fernao. For a long time, he'd had nothing to do but draft and refine counterspells. Because he wasn't fluent in Kuusaman, he'd been only an emergency backstop, a firewall. The spell he raced through now wasn't in Kuusaman, or even classical Kaunian. It was in Lagoan: his birthspeech, he'd long since decided, would be best for such magic, for he could use it faster and more accurately than any other.
And he, like the rest of the mages, was incanting for his life now. He knew as much. The sorcerous energies that would have torn a new hole in the landscape were poised now to do the same to the mages who had unleashed them. If the mages couldn't divert those energies, weaken them, spread them fast enough, they wouldn't get a second chance.
Past, present, and future seemed to stretch very thin- all too fitting for the sort of sorcery they'd been using. Fernao felt an odd rush of memories: from his youth, from his childhood, from what he would have taken oath were his father's and grandfather's childhoods as well- but all recalled or perhaps relived with as much immediacy, as much reality, as his own. And, at the same time (if time had any meaning here), he knew also memories from years he hadn't yet experienced: from himself as an old man; from one of the children he did not at this moment have, also old; and from that child's child.
He wished he could have held those memories instead of just being aware that he'd had them. All the Kuusaman mages around him were exclaiming in awe and dread as they used their counterspells, so he supposed they were going through the same thing he was. And then, at last, when he thought the chaos in the timestream would cast them adrift in duration- or perhaps cast them out of it altogether- the counterspells began to bite.
Now suddenly took on meaning again. His consciousness, which had been spread over what felt like a century or more, contracted back to a single sharp point that advanced heartbeat by heartbeat. He remembered things that had happened to him before that point, but nothing more. No, not quite nothing more: he remembered remembering other things, but he could not have said what they were.
'Well, well,' Ilmarinen said. Sweat beaded his face and soaked the armpits of his tunic. Even so, he didn't forget to use classical Kaunian: 'Wasn't that interesting, my friends?' He didn't forget his ironic tone, either.
Pekka, who had been standing while she cast the spell that went awry, slumped down onto a stool and began to weep, her face hidden in her hands. 'I could have… us all,' she said in a broken voice. Fernao didn't know the Kuusaman verb, but he would have been astonished if it didn't mean killed.
He limped over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. 'It is all right,' he said, cursing the classical tongue for not letting him sound colloquial. 'We are safe. We can try again. We shall try again.'
'Aye, no harm done,' Ilmarinen agreed. 'Any spell you live through is a spell you learn something from.'
'Learn what?' Pekka said with a laugh that sounded more like hysterics than mirth. 'Not to miss a line at the key moment of the incantation? I was already supposed to know that, Master Ilmarinen, thank you very kindly.'
Fernao said, 'No, I think there is more to learn here than that. Now we know from the inside out what our spell does, or some of what it does. If our next version is not better on account of that, I shall be surprised. The method was drastic, but the lesson is worthwhile.'
'Aye,' Ilmarinen repeated. 'The Lagoan mage has the right of it.' He glanced over at Fernao. 'Accidents will happen.' Fernao smiled and nodded, as if at a compliment. Ilmarinen glared at him, which was exactly what he wanted.
Every time a peasant sneaked into the woods and sought out the battered band of irregulars Garivald was leading these days, he almost wished the newcomer would go away. He'd heard a great many tales of woe, some of them horrible enough to move him close to tears. How could he resist bringing such people into the band? He couldn't. But what if one of them was lying?
'What do I do?' he asked Obilot. 'Let in the wrong man- or woman- and the Grelzers will know everything about us a day later.'
'If we don't get new blood, they won't care about us one way or the other,' she answered. 'If we didn't take chances, none of us would be irregulars in the first place.'
Garivald grunted. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. But he said, 'It's not on your shoulders. It's on my shoulders. And you're one of the people who helped dump it there.' He glowered at her with none of the interest, none of the liking- why lie? none of the desire- he usually felt.
Obilot met the glare with a shrug. 'Munderic got killed. Somebody had to lead us. Why not you? Thanks to your songs, people have heard your name. They want to join Garivald the Songmaker's band.'
'But I don't want to lead them!' Garivald said in a sort of whispered scream. 'I never wanted to lead anybody. All I ever wanted to do was raise a decent crop and stay drunk through the winter and- lately- make songs. That's all, curse it!'
'I wanted this and that, too,' Obilot said. 'The Algarvians made sure I wouldn't have any of that.' She'd never said just why she'd joined the irregulars, but she hated the redheads with a passion that made what her male comrades felt toward them seem mere mild distaste by comparison. 'And now you can't have the things you always wanted, either. Isn't that one more reason to want to do everything you can to make them suffer?'
'I suppose so,' he admitted. 'But it doesn't mean I want to lead. Besides, we aren't strong enough to do anything much right now.'
'We will be.' Obilot sounded more confident than Garivald felt.
He didn't have to answer. Rain had been falling steadily for a while. Now lightning flashed and thunder bellowed, drowning out anything he might have said. Nobody could do anything much in such weather: the Grelzers couldn't push into the woods, as they had when snow lay on the ground, but the band of irregulars couldn't very well sally forth by squelching through the mud.
After another peal of thunder rumbled and subsided, Obilot said, 'Would you rather be taking orders from Sadoc?'
'That's not fair,' Garivald answered, though he couldn't have said why it wasn't. As a matter of fact, he had no desire whatever to take orders from Sadoc; the idea scared him worse than going up against the Algarvians in battle. But no one had proposed the inept would-be mage to succeed Munderic. No one had proposed Garivald, either, or not exactly. People had just looked at him. They hadn't looked at anyone else, and so the job ended up his.
But the irregulars couldn't very well stay holed up in the woods forever, either. A fellow named Razalic came up to Garivald while the rain was still falling and said, 'You know, boss, we're almost out of food.'
'Aye,' Garivald agreed, not altogether happily. 'We'd better pay a call on one of those villages outside the forest- maybe on more than one of them.' Some of the peasant villages in these parts collaborated with the irregulars and gave them grain and meat. Others had firstmen who worked hand in glove with the Grelzer authorities and with their Algarvian puppet masters.
But when Garivald led a couple of dozen men out of the woods, he found the peasants from even the friendliest villages imperfectly delighted to see him. He'd expected nothing better. Early spring was the hungry time of year for everybody. Living on the end of the supplies that had brought them through the winter, the peasants had little left over to share with anyone.
'What do you want us to do?' he asked the firstman of a hamlet named Dargun. 'Dry up and blow away and leave you at the mercy of the redheads and the Grelzer dogs who sniff their arses?'
'Well, no,' the firstman answered, but he didn't sound pleased. 'Don't want the brats here to starve, either, though.'
