Out of the Darkness

Ealstan got the drift; Forthwegian and Unkerlanter were cousins. “Twenty,” he said.

“Good.” The Unkerlanter gestured with his stick. “You come here with us.”

Ice ran through Ealstan. “What?” he said. “Why?”

“For the army,” the Unkerlanter answered. “Now come, or be sorry.”

“King Beornwulf will have an army?” Ealstan asked in surprise.

“No, no, no.” The Unkerlanter laughed. “King Swemmel’s army. Plenty of Algarvians to kill. Now come.” By the way he gestured with the stick this time, he’d use it if Ealstan balked. Numbly, Ealstan went. He didn’t even get to kiss Vanai goodbye.

Colonel Lurcanio had spent four happy, useful years in Priekule, helping to administer the occupied capital of Valmiera for King Mezentio of Algarve. He’d seen a great many other Algarvians leave Valmiera to fight in Unkerlant, a fate not worse than death but near enough equivalent to it. After the islanders landed in Jelgava, he’d seen other countrymen go north to fight there.

At last, with the Valmierans ever more restless under Algarvian control, there simply weren’t enough Algarvians left to hold down the occupied kingdom any more. And so Mezentio’s men had withdrawn from most of it, the bargain being that the Valmieran irregulars wouldn’t harass them so long as they were pulling back. Both sides had stuck to it fairly well.

And so I’ve become a real soldier again, Lurcanio thought. A tent in the rugged upland forests of northwestern Valmiera was a far cry from a mansion on the outskirts of Priekule. If he wanted his cot warmed, he could put stones by the campfire and wrap them in flannel. They were a far cry from Marchioness Krasta. Lurcanio sighed for pleasures now lost. Krasta hadn’t a brain in her head, but the rest of her body more than made up for that. Not for the first time, Lurcanio wondered if she was indeed carrying his child.

He had no time to dwell on the question. Instead of keeping Priekule running smoothly for Grand Duke Ivone, he had command of a brigade of footsoldiers these days. And they were about to strike. As soon as the Algarvians abandoned the northern coast of the Strait of Valmiera, Kuusamo and Lagoas promptly started pouring men and behemoths and dragons across the arm of the sea separating their island from the Derlavaian mainland. Algarvian dragons and leviathans did what they could to hinder that, but what they could was less than their commanders had expected--less than they’d promised, too.

“As if anyone with sense would believe our promises nowadays,” Lurcanio muttered. Too many of them had been broken. And so Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers rampaged west through southern Valmiera, a few brigades of Valmierans with them. They were heading straight for the border of the Marquisate of Rivaroli, which had been Algarvian before the Six Years’ War, Valmieran between the Six Years’ War and the Derlavaian War, and was now Algarvian once more. How long it would stay that way . . .

Is partly up to me, Lurcanio thought. He turned to his adjutant, Captain Santerno. “Are we ready?”

“As ready as we can be, sir,” Santerno answered. He was a young man, with perhaps half Lurcanio’s fifty-five years, but he wore two wound badges and what he called a frozen-meat medal that showed he’d fought in Unkerlant through the first dreadful winter of the war there. He had a scarred face and hard, watchful eyes. “Now we get to find out how good the islanders really are.”

His tone said he didn’t expect the Lagoans and Kuusamans to be very good. After what he’d seen in the west, his attitude proclaimed, nothing the islanders did was likely to impress him. And his eyes measured Lurcanio. He didn’t say, You ‘ve been sitting on your arse in Priekule, screwing blond women and living high on the hog, but what kind of warrior do you make? He didn’t say it, but he thought it very loudly.

What kind of warrior do I make? Lurcanio wondered. After four years of being a military bureaucrat, he was going to find out. “Do you think we can slice south through them, all the way to the sea?” he asked.

“We’d cursed well better, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?” Santerno replied. “Cut ‘em off, chew ‘em up. That’ll buy us the time we need here, maybe let us set things right against the Unkerlanters.” He didn’t sound convinced. A moment later, he explained why: “We’ve scraped a lot together to make this attack. We might have done better to throw it all at Swemmel’s bastards.”

“How would we stop the islanders then?” Lurcanio asked.