Those beams also revealed where some of the Algarvians were. Merkela was the first to blaze at them. A redhead fell with a groan. “Take cover!” Skarnu shouted to his followers, and was proud that his yell came out a split second before Raunu’s.
Then Raunu yelled something else: “Reinforcements, come in from the left!” For a moment, that made no sense to Skarnu, who knew too well that he had no reinforcements. Then he realized the redheads didn’t know he had none.
Fighting by night was a terrifying, deadly dangerous business. Every time anyone blazed, he gave away his position. That meant blazing and then rolling away at once, before an enemy looking for your beam could send one of his own at you. Skarnu had done it at the front against Algarve, back in the days--how distant they seemed now!--when Valmiera could hold a front against Algarve.
He wished he knew about how many Algarvians he was facing now. Not a company, or anything of the sort, or they would have rolled over his little band of raiders without a second thought. His comrades and he had probably been unlucky enough to stumble across a patrol with about as many in it as they had. But the Algarvians, curse them, would be carrying a crystal. They’d have more men here all too soon.
“We’ve got to break away!” he shouted. But he couldn’t slide off into the woods by himself, not without Merkela and Raunu. Keeping low, keeping to what cover he could, he scuttled toward where he thought they were, softly calling, “King Gainibu!”
After a moment, Merkela answered, “Column of Victory.” Then, in no small anger, she added, “You idiot--I almost blazed you.”
“Well, it’s not if you’re the only one trying to,” he answered. “We’d better find Raunu and slide away. We won’t get to Negyu’s tonight, or any time soon.”
“No.” Merkela’s whisper held both ice and fire. “And how did they come upon us just when we were getting so close? Who let them know we were going to visit the traitor?”
That hadn’t occurred to Skarnu. On the battlefield, he’d worried about incompetence and cowardice, not betrayal. But Merkela was right. This was--or could be--a different sort of war.
“King Gainibu!” From the darkness came Raunu’s voice.
This time, Skarnu answered, “Column of Victory.” He went on, “We won’t have a victory this time, though. We’d better disappear--if the redheads let us.”
“No arguments from me,” Raunu said. Had he argued, Skarnu would have thought hard about staying and fighting. But Raunu only let out a glum sigh. “Cursed bad luck we ran into that patrol.”
“Bad luck--or treason?” Merkela asked, as she had with Skarnu. Raunu grunted, almost as if he’d been blazed. Like Skarnu, he’d thought of war as a business where the sides were easy to tell apart. Skarnu realized he’d have to do some new thinking.
After the dreadful weather and hard fighting he’d gone through in Unkerlant, Colonel Sabrino found the mild air and bright sunshine above Trapani a great relief. An even greater relief was knowing that Algarve’s enemies were all hundreds of miles away from the kingdom’s borders, pushed back by the might of King Mezentio’s soldiers--and by the might of his mages, though Sabrino did not like thinking about that so well.
He waved to the dragonfliers of his wing, who’d flown back to Trapani with him, then pointed down toward the dragon farm on the outskirts of the capital. In good weather, with no enemies close by, he didn’t bother using the crystal he carried. Hand signals were plenty good, as they had been back in his great-grandfather’s days when men first began to master the art of flying dragons.
Down spiraled the wing. One after another, the dragons settled to earth. Ground crewmen ran up to chain the fierce and stupid beasts to their mooring stakes. That would keep them from fighting one another for food (foolish, for they all got plenty) or for no reason at all (even more foolish, but then they were dragons).
Sabrino undid his harness and dismounted. His dragon was too busy screaming at the ground crewmen to pay him any attention. Ground felt good under his feet. Being home felt good, too, even if only for a little while. The sunlight, the color of the sky, the green of the new grass that was beginning to sprout--all seemed right to him at a level far below thought. So did the smell of the air, even if one part of the smell was the rank reek of dragonshit.
Captain Domiziano came up to Sabrino. Saluting, the squadron commander said, “Good to get away from the front for a little while, and I’d be the last to deny it. Still and all, I wish we were going back soon. Powers above know the footsoldiers need the help of every dragon they can get in the sky above ‘em.”
“We have different orders,” Sabrino said, and said no more about that: he liked those orders no better than Domiziano did. Instead, he went on, “Almost two and a half years since we flew our dragons out of here to fight the Forthwegians. I stood in the square below the palace balcony listening to the king declare war, then hurried down here fast
