He knew he was exaggerating- or rather, that he would have to be very lucky indeed to bring off everything he had in mind. The Algarvians would have a lot to say about what he did and what he ended up unable to do. Getting his sovereign to understand that was one of the hardest jobs he had. So far, he'd managed. Had he failed, Unkerlant would have a new marshal these days. Rathar didn't particularly fear for himself. He did doubt the kingdom had a better officer to lead her armies.
Swemmel said, "At last, we have them on the run. By the powers above, we shall punish them as they deserve. When King Mezentio is in our hands, we'll boil him alive, as we served Kyot." Kyot, his identical twin, had fought him for the throne and lost. Had he won, he would have boiled Swemmel- and, probably, Rathar with him, though he might have contented himself with taking the soldier's head.
As far as Rathar was concerned, his king was putting the unicorn's tail in front of its horn. The marshal said, "This war is still a long way from won, your Majesty."
But Swemmel had the bit between his teeth and trampled on: "And before we do, we'll give Mezentio's cousin Raniero, the misnamed King of Grelz, an end to make Mezentio glad he's just being boiled. Aye, we will." Gloating anticipation filled his voice.
Rathar did his best to draw the king back from dreams of revenge to what was real. "We have to beat the redheads first, you know. As I said, I want to keep biting chunks out of their forces in Unkerlant. We bit out a big chunk when we took Sulingen back, but they can still hurt us if we get careless. I aim to pin them against one river barrier after another, make them fight at a disadvantage or else have to make a whole series of difficult retreats…"
Swemmel wasn't listening. "Aye, when Raniero falls into our hands, we'll flay him and draw him and unman him and- oh, whatever else strikes our fancy."
"We almost ought to thank Mezentio for him," Rathar said. "One of our own nobles on the Grelzer throne in Herborn would have brought more traitors to the Algarvian side than Raniero has a hope of luring."
"Traitors everywhere," Swemmel muttered. "Everywhere." His eyes darted this way and that. "We'll kill them all, see if we don't." During the Twinkings War and even after it, there had been a good many real plots against him. There had also been a good many that existed only in his fevered imagination. Real plotters and imagined ones were equally dead now, with no one to say who was which. "Traitors."
To Rathar's relief, Swemmel wasn't looking at him. Almost desperately, the marshal said, "As I was telling you, your Majesty, our plans-"
Swemmel spoke in peremptory tones: "Set all the columns moving now. The sooner we strike the Algarvians, the sooner they shall be driven from our soil." Did he mean the soil of Unkerlant or his own, personal soil? Rathar often had trouble telling.
"Do you not agree, your Majesty, that your armies have had more success when you waited till everything was ready before striking?" Rathar asked. He'd had trouble getting Swemmel to see that throughout the war. He didn't want more trouble now.
Swemmel, of course, cared nothing for what his marshal wanted. Swemmel cared only for what he wanted. And now, glaring down at Rathar from his high seat, he snapped, "We have given you an order. You may carry it out, or someone else may carry it out. We care nothing about that. We care only that we should be obeyed. Do you understand us?"
Sometimes, a threat to resign would bring Swemmel to his senses when he tried to order something uncommonly harebrained. Rathar didn't judge this would have been one of those times. The king wouldn't have summoned him from the south for anything but a show of unquestioned allegiance. And Swemmel would remove him and likely remove his head if he balked. Rathar looked down at the carpet and sighed. "Aye, your Majesty," he said, casting about in his mind for ways to say he obeyed while in fact doing what really needed doing.
"And think not to evade our will with plausible excuses," King Swemmel barked. He might not have been a very wise man, but no denying he was clever. Rathar sighed again.
Back before the Derlavaian War broke out, Skarnu had been a marquis. He still was a marquis, when you got down to it, but he hadn't lived like one for years. And, if the Algarvian occupiers of his native Valmiera ever got their hands on him, he wouldn't live anymore at all. This was what he got for carrying on the fight against the redheads after King Gainibu surrendered.
Had he made his peace with the conquerors, he could have been living soft in the familial mansion on the edge of Priekule, the capital. Instead, he found himself holed up in a dingy cold-water flat in Ventspils, an eastern provincial town of no great distinction- indeed, of no small distinction he could think of.
His sister still lived in that mansion. He growled, down deep in his throat. Krasta, curse her, had an Algarvian lover- Skarnu had seen them listed as a couple in a news sheet. Colonel Lurcanio and the Marchioness Krasta. Lurcanio, curse him, had come too close to catching Skarnu not long before. He'd had to flee the farm where he'd been living, the widow he'd come to love, and the child- his child- she was carrying. He hoped Lurcanio's men had only been after him, and that Merkela was safe.
Hope was all he could do. He didn't dare write to the farm outside the southern village of Pavilosta. If the Algarvians intercepted the letter, their mages might be able to use the law of contagion to trace it back to him. "Powers below eat them," he muttered. He wanted to pour out his soul to Merkela, but the enemy silenced him as effectively as if they'd clapped a gag over his mouth.
He went to the grimy window and looked down at the street three stories down. Wan winter sunshine filtered between the blocks of flats that sat almost side by side. Not even sunshine, though, could make the cobbles in the streets, the worn slates of the sidewalks, and the sooty, slushy snow in the gutters and in the corners by stairways anything but unlovely. The wind shook bare-branched trees; their shifting shadows put Skarnu in mind of groping, grabbing skeleton hands.
Blond Valmierans in tunics and trousers trudged this way and that. From what Skarnu had seen, nobody in Ventspils did much more than trudge. He wondered if he could blame that gloom on the Algarvian occupation, or if life in a provincial town would have been bloody dull even before the invaders came. Had he lived his whole life in Ventspils, he suspected he would have been gloomy most of the time himself.
Up the street came a couple of Algarvian soldiers or constables. He didn't recognize them by their red hair; like a lot of his countrymen, they wore hats to fight the cold. He didn't even recognize them by their pleated kilts, though he soon noticed those. No, what set them apart was the way they moved. They didn't trudge. They strutted, heads up, shoulders back, chests out. They moved as if they had vital business to take care of and wanted everybody around them to know it.
"Algarvians," Skarnu said with fine contempt. If they weren't the most self-important people on the face of the earth, he didn't know who was. He laughed, but not for long. Their pretensions would have been funnier if they hadn't dominated all the east of Derlavai.
And then they came up the stairs to his block of flats. When he saw that, he didn't hesitate for a moment. He grabbed a cloth cap, stuffed it down as low on his head as it would go, and left his flat, closing the door behind him as quietly as he could. His wool tunic would keep him warm for a while outside.
He hurried to the stairs and started down them. As he'd thought he would, he passed the Algarvians coming up. He didn't look at them; they didn't look at him. He'd gambled that they wouldn't. Their orders were probably something like, Arrest the man you find in flat 36. But there wouldn't be any man in flat 36 to arrest when they got there. If Skarnu hadn't seen them coming…
Vapor puffed from his mouth and nose as he opened the front door and went out onto the street. He was already hurrying up the sidewalk in the direction from which the redheads had come- a clever touch, he thought- when he realized he didn't know for a fact that they'd been after him. He laughed, though it wasn't funny. How likely that this block of flats held two men the Algarvians wanted badly enough to send their own after him instead of entrusting the job to Valmieran constables? Not very.
A youth waved a news sheet in his face. "Algarvians smash Unkerlanter drive south of Durrwangen!" he cried. The news sheets, of course, printed only what King Mezentio's ministers wanted Valmiera to hear. They'd stopped talking about Sulingen, for instance, as soon as the battle there was lost. They made the victories they reported these days sound like splendid triumphs instead of the desperate defensive struggles they had to be.
Skarnu strode past the vendor without a word, without even shaking his head. He turned a corner and then another and another and another, picking right or left at random each time. If the Algarvians came bursting out of the block of flats hot on his trail, they wouldn't have an easy time following him. He chuckled. He didn't know himself where he was going, so why should the redheads?
That didn't stay funny long, though. He had to pause and get his bearings- not easy in Ventspils, since he didn't know the town well. In Priekule, he could have looked for the Kaunian Column of Victory. That would have told him where in the city he was… till the Algarvians knocked it down. The victory it celebrated was one the Kaunian Empire had won over the barbarous Algarvic tribes- a victory that still rankled the tribesmen's barbarous descendants more than a millennium and a half later.
Though he took longer than he should have, he finally did figure out where he was. Then he needed to figure out where to go. That had only one answer, really: the tavern called the Lion and the Mouse. But the answer wasn't so good, either. Were the Algarvians after him in particular, or were they trying to smash all the resistance in Ventspils? If the former, they might know nothing of the tavern. If the latter, they were liable to be waiting in force around or inside it.
He muttered under his breath. A woman passing by gave him a curious look. He stared back so stonily, she hurried on her way as if she'd never looked at him at all. Maybe she thought him a madman or a derelict. As long as she didn't think him one of the handful who kept the fight against Algarve alive, he cared nothing for her opinion.
I've got to go, he realized. The Lion and the Mouse was the only place where he could hope to meet other irregulars. They could find him somewhere else to stay or spirit him out of Ventspils altogether. Without them… Skarnu didn't want to think about that. One man alone was one man helpless.
He approached the tavern with all the caution he'd learned as a captain in the Valmieran army- before the Algarvians used dragons and behemoths to smash that army into isolated chunks and then beat it. He couldn't see anything that looked particularly dangerous around the place. He wished Raunu, his veteran sergeant, were still with him. Having been in the army as long as Skarnu was alive, Raunu knew far more about soldiering than Skarnu had learned in something under a year. But Skarnu was a marquis and Raunu the son of a sausage seller, so Skarnu had led the company of which they'd both been part.
After twice walking past the doorway to the Lion and the Mouse, Skarnu, the mouse, decided he had to put his head in the lion's mouth. Scowling, he walked into the tavern. The burly fellow behind the bar was a man he'd seen before- which meant nothing if the man was in bed with the Algarvians.
But there, at a table in the far corner of the room, Skarnu spied a painter who was one of the leaders of the underground in Ventspils. Unless he proved a traitor, too, the Algarvians didn't know about this place. Skarnu bought a mug of ale- nothing wrong with Ventspils' ale- and sat down across the table from him.
"Well, hello, Pavilosta," the painter said. "Didn't expect to see you here today." That sounded polite, but harsh suspicion lay under it.
Skarnu's answering grimace was harsh, too. He didn't care to have even the name of the village he'd come from mentioned out loud. After a pull at the ale, he said, "A couple of redheads came into my block of flats an hour ago. If I hadn't spied 'em outside, they would've nabbed me."
"Well, we can't expect the Algarvians to love us, not after we yanked those Sibian dragonfliers right out from under their noses," the local underground leader said. "They'd want to poke back if they saw the chance to do it."
"I understand that." Like the painter, Skarnu kept his voice low. "But are they after underground folk in Ventspils, or me in particular?"
"Why would they be after you in particular?" the other man asked. Then he paused and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "I keep forgetting you're not just Pavilosta. You're the chap with a sister in the wrong bed."
"That's one way to put it, aye," Skarnu said. It was, in fact, a gentler way to put it than he would have used. It also avoided mentioning his noble blood- common women could and did sleep with the redheaded occupiers, too.
After a pull on his own mug of ale, the painter said, "She knew where you were down in Pavilosta- she did, or else the Algarvian she's laying did. But how would she know you've come to Ventspils? How would the redheads know, either?"
"Obvious answer is, they're squeezing somebody between Pavilosta and here," Skarnu said. "I had a narrow escape getting out of there; they might have stumbled onto somebody who helped me." He named no names. What the other fellow didn't know, King Mezentio's men and their Valmieran stooges couldn't squeeze out of him. Skarnu wouldn't have been so careful about security even during his duty in the regular Valmieran army.
"If they've got hold of a link in the chain between here and there, that could be… unpleasant," the painter said. "Every time we take in a new man, we have to wonder if he's the fellow who's going to sell the lot of us to the Algarvians- and one fine day, one of them will do it."
Someone Skarnu had seen once or twice before strolled into the Lion and the Mouse. Instead of ordering ale or spirits, he spoke in casual tones: "Redheads and their dogs are heading toward this place. Some people might not want to hang around and wait for them." He didn't even look toward the corner where Skarnu and the painter sat.
Skarnu's first impulse was to leap and run. Then he realized how stupid that was: it would make him stand out, which was the last thing he wanted. And even if it didn't, where would he go? Ventspils wasn't his town; aside from the men of the underground, he had no friends and hardly any acquaintances here.
After a last quick swig, the painter set down his empty mug. "Maybe we'd better not hang around and wait for them," he said, with which conclusion Skarnu could hardly disagree.
Skarnu didn't bother finishing his ale. He left the mug on the table and followed the other man out. "Where do we go now?" he asked.
"There are places," the painter said, an answer that wasn't an answer. After a moment, Skarnu realized the underground leader had security concerns of his own. Sure enough, the man went on, "I don't think we'll have to blindfold you."
"I'm so glad to hear it." Skarnu had intended the words to be sarcastic. They didn't come out that way. The Unkerlanters might have the Algarvians on the run in the distant west, but here in Valmiera the redheads could still make their handful of foes dance to their tune.