"Milady, what on earth -?" he began.

"Shut up!" Krasta snarled. Careless of her left breast peeping out from the undone tunic, she leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. "Take me home this instant. Make your stupid beasts move or you'll be sorry for it, do you hear me?"

"Aye, milady," the coachman answered: not a word more, which was wise of him. He flicked the reins. After what sounded like surprised snorts, the horses moved up into a trot. Krasta looked back over her shoulder. Valnu took a couple of steps in pursuit of the carriage, then gave up. He vanished in the darkness behind her.

Absently, Krasta did up the toggles he had opened. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, again and again. Disgust filled her, so much that she almost had to lean out of the carriage and vomit it forth into the road way. It wasn't what she'd been doing; she'd done that before, and always been amused how such a small thing could make a man behave as if treacle filled his veins.

But that her mouth had gone where a commoner's - a pretty little shop girl's, Valnu had said - mouth went before… She could imagine nothilig more revolting. She felt ritually unclean, like a man of the Ice People, who had accidentally slain his fetish animal.

After she got back to the mansion, she routed Bauska out of bed had the servant fetch her a bottle of brandy. She rinsed her mouth sever times, then imperiously thrust the bottle back. Bauska took it awful without a word. Like the coachman, she'd learned better than to ask questions of her mistress.

With his comrades, Tealdo tramped along the wooden quay in the harbor of Imola toward the Ambuscade, from whose flagpole fluttered the Algarvian banner. All the army that had spent so long training was now filing aboard the ships that filled the harbor in the former Duchy of Bari.

Tealdo marveled to see the men all together. He marveled even more to see the ships A together. "We haven't put together a fleet like this for a cursed long time," he said over his shoulder to Trasone, who marched along behind him.

"Not for a thousand years the officers say" his friend agreed

"Silence in the ranks there!" Sergeant Panfilo bellowed. Someone fortunately, someone well away from Tealdo - made a noise that probably came from his mouth but sounded as if it had a different origin. Panfilo stormed off to see if he could catch and terrorize the miscreant.

Up the gangplank Tealdo went. His feet thudded on the timbers of the deck. The sailors scurrying around there and the men who traveled the lines of the rigging like outsized spiders did not strike him as an ordinary naval crew. That was only fair - they weren't an ordinary naval crew, nor anything close to it. Every one of them was a highly trained yachtsman.

But that art was no longer obsolete, thanks to the ingenuity of Algarve's generals and admirals. Tealdo wished he would be able to watch the great sails fill with wind as the fleet weighed anchor. Instead he went down to a poorly lit compartment with whose cramped dimensions he was all too familiar. There he and his company would stay till their journey ended… or till something went wrong.

Maybe Captain Larbino had something similar on his mind, for he said, "Men, what we do here tonight will go a long way toward winning the war for Algarve. The Sibians shouldn't realize we're coming till we shop up on their doorstep - we'll catch them with their kilts down.

Nobody has gone to war with a fleet of sailing ships for hundreds of years.

They'll never expect it, and their mages likely won't be able to give'em much warning, either. If we sail over a ley line… so what? We don't draw any energy from it, so they won't notice us. We'll be as safe as we would on dry land till we get into Tirgoviste harbor. Make yourselves comfortable and enjoy the trip."

Tealdo made himself as comfortable as he could, which wasn't very. He listened to more soldiers tramping into their assigned compartments, and to sailors running around and shouting things the thick oak timbers that surrounding him kept him from understanding. But tone carried, even If words didn't. "They sound like they're having a mighty good time, don, t they?" he said to Trasone.

"Why shouldn't they?" Trasone answered. "Once they get us to Sibiu, their job is done. They can sit back and drink wine. We're the ones who get to pay the bill after that."

He wasn't quite being fair. If the Sibs got the chance, they'd blaze at ships as well as soldiers. Before Tealdo could point that out, the motion of the Ambuscade changed. The pitching from bow to stem became more emphatic, and the ship began to roll from side to side as well. "We're off," Tealdo said.

His stomach took the ship's motion in stride. Before long, though, he discovered that, as painstaking as the company's combat rehearsals had been, they hadn't covered everything. Several soldiers started puking.

The compartment did have buckets to cope with such emergencies, but the emergency often arrived before the bucket did. In spite of everyone's best efforts, the compartment became a very unpleasant place.

The amused contempt the yachtsmen showed as they carried buckets away did not endear them to their passengers. "If I could move, I'd kill those bastards," a sufferer groaned.

Nobody could move much. The compartment held too many men for that. Tealdo hoped no one would heave up dinner on to his shoes. Past that, he squatted and chatted with the men around him and took [..breatlis..] as shallow as he could.

Time dragged on. He supposed it had grown dark outside. He couldn't have proved it, not down here. Every so often, someone fed the lantern oil. Those flickering flames were all the light he and his comrades had. For A he knew, they were below the waterline, which would have made portholes a bad idea.

He wished lie were a horse or a unicorn, so he could sleep while he wasn't lying down. A couple of soldiers did start to snore. He envied them. Because he envied them, he laughed all the louder when [.i.] roll bigger than usual made them topple over.

After what seemed like forever, the Ambuscade heeled sharply. Sailors shouted in excitement. "Get ready, boys," Sergeant Panfilo said. "I think the shop is about to open for business."

While Captain Larbino was saying the same thing in more elegant words, the Ambuscade proved him right by thudding against a quay - Tealdo hoped that was what had happened, at any rate, and that the ship hadn't struck a rock instead. The door to the compartment flew open.

"Out! Out! Out!" a yachtsman screamed.

Out the company went, and up the narrow stair-way that led to the deck. "Nobody falls!" Panfilo bellowed. "Nobody falls, or he answers to me." And nobody did fall. The men had rehearsed going up stairs like these so many times, they might have been stairs to the houses in which they'd grown up.

Cold, fresh air smelling of sea salt and smoke slapped Tealdo in the face. Not far away, another Algarvian ship burned brightly, lighting up the darkened harbor of Tirgoviste. Tealdo hoped the soldiers had been able to get off the ship. Every man counted in this assault. If the

Algarvians did not conquer Sibiu, they would not be going home again.

After that, he stopped worrying about anything except what he was supposed to do. He followed the man in front of him over the gangplank and on to the quay. That too went off as it should have done. No one fell into the water. Had anybody done so, the weight of his kit would quickly have dragged him under.

"Move!" Captain Larbino shouted. "We have to move fast! Don't stand there gaping. We've still got the headquarters building to take."

No one was standing around gaping, either. That would have been handing the Sibians an invitation to blaze the men. Nobody with sticks had set up at the landward end of the quay, and Tealdo, and his comrades didn't propose to wait till someone did. "Easier than practice, so far," he said.