Darkness Descending

left!”

As the dragons stooped on their horrified, bewildered foes, Algarvian foot-soldiers and behemoths and cavalry erupted from their lines and joined in the assault. Their exultant shouts reached high into the sky; the disaster that smote the Unkerlanters had not hurt them in the least. They tore through the gutted enemy positions and swarmed westward.

When Sabrino flew over the victory camp, bringing the dragons back to their farm in triumph at the end of the day, he saw what he knew he would see: a camp full of corpses.

Seven

Cornelu pulled his socks up above his knees. He wished they were thicker wool, so they might keep his legs warmer. The wind that blew into the hills above Tirgoviste came from the southwest, off the Narrow Sea and die land of the Ice People, and carried the chill of the austral continent with it. Snow wouldn’t have surprised him.

He stared down from the hills toward the harbor town. With three Algarvian officers quartered in her house--my house, too, curse them, Cornelu thought--Costache would assuredly be snug and warm, and so would Brindza. The Sibian naval officer consigned the Algarvians to the powers below all the same.

“Come on, you lazy bugger,” shouted the boss of the woodcutting gang for which he’d been working the past few weeks. “Swing your axe or I’ll throw you out on your cursed arse.”

“Aye,” Cornelu said, and then again, wearily, “Aye.” The weariness was more of the spirit than of the body, though the work made a man sleep every night like one of the logs made from trees he cut down. But Cornelu had lived his whole life in polite company, and was used to politely phrased orders. He found few of those here.

He returned his attention to the pine he’d been attacking. When he swung the axe, he imagined it bit into the Algarvian’s neck rather than the dark, scaly bark of the tree, and that blood spurted in place of dribbles of fragrant, resinous sap. The gang boss, a wide-shouldered bruiser named Giurgiu, grunted in something approaching satisfaction and went off to shout at another woodsman who wasn’t working so hard as he might have.

To give Giurgiu his due, he did almost as much work as any two of the men in the gang. He handled an axe as if it were light as a schoolmaster’s switch and did far more than his share on a two-man saw. His hands bore calluses half an inch thick, and looked and felt hard as rocks.

Cornelu’s hands had bled the first several days after he’d joined the woodcutters. He’d never used them so roughly before. Rubbing them with turpentine made him want to shriek, but it had also helped him gain calluses that gave him some protection. By now, swinging the axe was just work, not torment.

Chips flew as he struck the tree again and again. “Come on, you whore!” he panted. Having been reviled, he in turn reviled something that could not argue back. He let out a snort. Maybe this work wasn’t so much different from the Sibian navy after all.

He heard a crackling deep inside the tree, a crackling and a groan. He struck harder than ever, looking up toward the crown of the pine as he did so. The tree stood straight for another couple of strokes. Then it began to lean.

“She falls!” he shouted. Woodcutters near him scattered. He hadn’t known to let out a warning cry when he first joined the gang. The second tree he felled had almost driven Giurgiu into the ground like a sledge hitting a spike. He’d had trouble blaming the boss for cursing him then.

With a louder crackling, the pine went over. Cornelu stood on the balls of his feet, ready to leap out of the way if it looked like falling on him. He’d almost driven himself into the ground two or three times. Here, though, he put the trunk right where he wanted, a skill he’d acquired without quite knowing how. The pine thudded down into yellowing grass near the edge of the wood.

Giurgiu came over and examined it. He nodded. “I’ve seen worse jobs,” he rumbled at last--from him, high praise. “Now we turn it into stovewood. They’re going to get chilly down in the city before too long, and they have to cook even when they aren’t chilly. As long as the hills still have woods on them, the likes of us won’t go hungry.”

“Aye,” Cornelu said. He wondered how much longer the hills would have woods on them. In earlier times, forests had covered far more land than they did now. Before the days of iron ships that coursed the ley lines, great trees were essential for the timbers and masts of the merchantmen that had made Sibiu rich and the galleons that had made her strong. Great stretches of forest had been royal preserves then. Things were different nowadays. Cornelu doubted they were better--with the Algarvians occupying the kingdom, they couldn’t very well be.

Giurgiu brought over a big two-man saw. “Come on,” he said. “Act lively. We’ll cut the trunk into wheels, and then you can split the wheels into wedges. Don’t stand there gawping, curse it--it’s not like you’ve got a lot of time to waste.”

“Aye,” Cornelu repeated. But for his foul mouth, Giurgiu did think like a naval officer. Cornelu grasped the handle of the saw and lowered it to the tree trunk.