Out of the Darkness

Garivald whooped. That there might be some large number of redheads with sticks between him and their kingdom was true, but hardly seemed to matter. If King Swemmel’s men had surged forward from the Twegen and Eoforwic to here in a few short weeks, another surge would surely take them onto Algarvian soil.

Garivald whooped again when he saw Unkerlanter behemoths on this side of the rivet. Footsoldiers were a lot safer when they had plenty of the big beasts along for company.

But then one of those behemoths crumpled as if it had charged headlong into a boulder. A couple of the crewmen riding it were thrown clear; its fall crushed the rest. “Heavy stick!” someone close to the beast yelled. “Blazed right through its armor!”

Maybe that was just an enemy emplacement nearby. Or maybe . . . An alarmed shout rose: “Enemy behemoths!”

Even before the first egg from the Algarvian beasts’ tossers burst, Garivald was digging himself a hole in the muddy ground. A footsoldier without a hole was like a turtle without a shell: naked, vulnerable, and ever so likely to be crushed.

Another Unkerlanter behemoth went down, this one from a well-aimed egg. The Algarvians knew what they were doing. They generally did, worse luck. Had there been more of them . . . Garivald didn’t care to think about that. Beams from ordinary, hand-held sticks announced that Algarvian footsoldiers were in the neighborhood, too.

“Crystallomancer!” Andelot bellowed. “Powers below eat you, where’s a crystallomancer?” No one answered. He cursed, loudly and foully. “The fornicating Algarvians would have a crystallomancer handy.”

Before he could embroider on that theme, Unkerlanter dragons dove on the enemy behemoths. Crystallomancer or not, someone back on the other side of the river knew what was going on. Under the cover of their aerial umbrella, the men in rock-gray moved forward again. Garivald ran past a couple of corpses in kilts, and past a redhead down and moaning. He blazed the Algarvian to make sure the fellow wouldn’t get up again, then ran on.

But Mezentio’s men hadn’t given up. A crash from behind Garivald made him whirl. There was the bridge on which he’d crossed, smashed by an egg. A moment later, another one went up. A tall column of water rose into the air. “They’re using those stinking sorcerously guided eggs again,” somebody exclaimed.

“They did this to us back by the Twegen, too, and we managed fine then,” Garivald said. But that bridgehead had been well established. This one was brand new. Could it stand against enemy counterattack? He’d find out.

Vanai hadn’t known peace, hadn’t known the absence of fear, since Algarvian footsoldiers and behemoths swept into, swept past, Oyngestun. Now Eoforwic was calm and quiet under the rule of King Beornwulf and the more obvious and emphatic rule of the Unkerlanters who propped him on his throne. She could go out without sorcerous disguise if she wanted to. Some Kaunians did. She hadn’t had the nerve to try it herself, not after having had her nose rubbed in how little so many Forthwegians loved the blonds who lived among them.

But lack of love was one thing. The desire to kill her on sight was something else again. For the first time in more than four years, she didn’t have to worry about that. Life could have been idyllic ... if the Unkerlanters hadn’t hijacked Ealstan into their army.

Fear for her husband swirled around her and choked her like nasty smoke. “It’s not fair,” she told Saxburh. The baby looked up at her out of big round eyes--eyes that, by now, were almost as dark as Ealstan’s. Saxburh smiled enormously, showing a new front tooth. Now that it had come in, she was happy. She had no other worries. Vanai wished she could say the same herself.

“Not fair,” she whispered fiercely. Saxburh laughed. Vanai didn’t.

In a way--in a couple of ways, actually--this was worse than worrying about her grandfather when Major Spinello set out to work him to death. She’d agonized over Brivibas more from a sense of family duty than out of real affection. And she’d been able to do something to keep her grandfather safe, even if letting Spinello into her bed had been a nightmare of its own.

But all the love she had in the world that she didn’t give to Saxburh was aimed at Ealstan. She knew he was going into dreadful danger; the Unkerlanters had beaten back Mezentio’s men more by throwing bodies at them than through clever strategy. And one of the bodies was his--the only body she’d ever cared about in that particular way.

If bedding an Unkerlanter officer could have brought Ealstan back to Eoforwic, she would have done it in a heartbeat, and worried about everything else afterwards. But she knew better. The Unkerlanters didn’t care what happened to one conscripted Forthwegian. And, for all their talk about efficiency, she wouldn’t have bet they could even find him once he went into the enormous man-hungry monster that was their army.