hesitation. By everything people in Forthweg--Forthwegians and Kaunians alike--said, that made her a slut, almost as much a slut as the Kaunian girl who’d tried to get Leofsig to go to bed with her for money.
“But it wasn’t
And calling Daukantis’ daughter a slut wasn’t easy, either, not when the Algarvians had left her with the choice between whoring and starving. From the height of his seventeen years, Ealstan saw that the older he got, the less the world looked like the things everybody said.
He hoped the redheads hadn’t swept up the oil merchant’s daughter (he couldn’t remember her name, though Leofsig had mentioned it) when they gathered laborers in Gromheort. Something was strange there, though he couldn’t see what. But had the Algarvians only been after laborers, they would have chosen differently and let the Kaunians they did choose bring along more than they had.
He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about that. His features softened as his thoughts returned to what he and Vanai had done. He spent most of the walk back to Gromheort trying to fix in his memory every kiss, every murmured endearment, every caress, every caress, every incredible sensation. Remembering wasn’t as good as lying down with her again, but it was all he could do now.
Gromheort’s gray stone wall loomed higher and higher as he neared the city. Behind the wall, the sky was gray, too, gray as lead. It looked as if it would rain again soon. Autumn was shaping up as wet and nasty, which meant winter probably would be, too. He wondered if it would snow. That didn’t happen every year, not this far north.
Someone standing by the wall waved. Ealstan squinted. Aye, that was Sidroc. Ealstan waved, too, and tried to bring his mind back from Vanai to mushrooms. Sidroc came toward him. He pointed to the basket Ealstan was carrying. “Ha!” he said. “That’s the one you brought home last year, not yours. Didn’t run into the little Kaunian bitch this time, eh? Too bad for you. You might have had a good time.”
The only thing that let Ealstan get through was having been sure Sidroc would make some such crack. “No, I didn’t see her,” he answered, hoping he sounded casual. “Even if I had, we’d have just traded some mushrooms.” That would have been true the year before. It wasn’t any more.
Sidroc gestured derisively. “She’s got to be sweet for you, Ealstan,” he said. “Powers above, if I’d found her out there in the woods, I’d have got her trousers down faster than you could say King Offa.”
“In your dreams,” Ealstan said.
“Aye.” Sidroc grabbed his own crotch. “In my wet dreams.” Ealstan managed to laugh at that, which seemed to convince Sidroc nothing unusual had happened out in the oak grove. Sidroc chaffed him as they went into Gromheort, but not too hard. They both chaffed the Algarvian constable at the gate when the fellow looked disgusted at the baskets of mushrooms they showed him.
“More for us,” Ealstan said to Sidroc. The constable must have spoken some Forthwegian, for he made as if to retch. Ealstan and his cousin both laughed. Ealstan kept laughing all the way through the city, all the way back to his house. If Sidroc wanted to think he was laughing at the Algarvian, he didn’t mind a bit.
Rain beat into Colonel Sabrino s face as he led his wing east from the front toward the miserable excuse for a dragon farm at which they were based. His dragon didn’t like the rain, not even a little. It flew heavily, laboring much more than it would have had the weather been good.
Sabrino didn’t like the rain, either. He had a demon of a time keeping track of the dragonfliers under his command, and had to rely on his squadron leaders more than he wanted. He couldn’t see far enough to do anything else. Nor could he see far enough to spy Unkerlanter dragons and thanked the powers above the enemy couldn’t see very far, either.
He had a demon of a time finding the dragon farm, too. Flying low to glimpse the ground through the curtain of rain, he almost flew his dragon into the side of a hill. The beast screeched protests when he made it pull up. It would have liked hitting the hillside even less but was too stupid to know that.
He might not have found the dragon farm at all had he not flown over the victory camp that had gone up just north of it. Seeing the Kaunians huddled in dripping misery behind their palisade made him wonder what they thought of the name some clever clerk nad come up with. He doubted the Algarvian guards on the palisade were any too happy, either. In this weather, their sticks wouldn’t carry very far before raindrops attenuated their beams.
But that was their worry, not his. His worries shrank, because spotting the victory camp told him where he was. He swung his dragon into a sharp turn. The beast screamed at him, not wanting to obey. He whacked it with his goad, and shouted into the crystal he carried as he did so. The dragons he could see through the rain were conforming to his
