He thought about that-and then dismissed the notion after one section of the army followed a looping country track through the woods that proved to double back on itself, so they took their comrades in flank. If they’d been northerners, his force would have been in trouble. As things were, straightening out the traffic jam and getting everybody on the right road took almost as long as smashing through the entrenchments in front of Dareton had.

Could we do this at night? George wondered. He shook his head. It struck him as unlikely. Weariness wasn’t the only reason armies halted when darkness fell.

And so the army encamped at sunset well short of Fat Mama. Campfires sent savory smoke into the sky, smoke made more savory by the meat roasting above a good many of those fires. Some of the meat came from cattle the army had brought along. Some, George was sure, came from local beasts that had met an untimely demise thanks to southron foragers. That was against the rules of war King Avram had set forth. To the king, the northerners remained his subjects and were not to be despoiled. The reality was that the northerners hated Avram and his soldiers, and those soldiers returned the disfavor. If they were hungry, they would eat whatever they could get their hands on.

Some commanders discouraged them. Doubting George looked the other way. The harder the time the north had, the sooner the war would end-that was how he thought of things.

And, as always happened when southron armies penetrated into a new part of the north, blonds on the run from their liege lords started coming into camp. Some were men alone, others whole families together. The army had plenty of use for laborers and washerwomen, and the liege lords who had to do without the labor of their serfs would, with luck, contemplate the cost of rebellion against their rightful sovereign.

Taking in blonds also had costs, though. George remembered the one who’d murdered his wife and the officer who’d been trifling with her, though he’d also died, at the officer’s hands. That had been a nasty business all the way around.

George grunted and shook his head. That was a nasty business on a small scale. The nasty business coming up would be much larger and much worse. One way or the other, this campaign and Marshal Bart’s in Parthenia would say who won the war, and why. “It had better be us,” George said, and rode on toward the north.

Captain Gremio found the little town of Fat Mama remarkable in no way but its name. It held a couple of thousand people, taking Detinans and blonds together, and had a main street full of shops, a few streets full of houses, the local baron’s keep, and not much else. Lesser nobles’ manor houses dominated the countryside, with the serfs’ shacks usually close by.

Except for the glideway path that ran through Fat Mama and the low hills to the east and south of the town, Joseph the Gamecock never would have stopped there. Gremio was sure of that. As things were, his company, along with the rest of Colonel Florizel’s regiment, filed into trenches already waiting for them, trenches Joseph had had the local serfs dig ahead of time.

“I’m sick of earthworks,” Florizel grumbled. “I’m sick to death of them, as a matter of fact.”

“But, your Excellency, it’s a lot easier to catch your death outside of earthworks,” Gremio said.

In the Karlsburg circles he’d frequented before the war, such wordplay would have got the groan it deserved, whereupon everyone would have gone about his business. But Florizel gave Gremio a look straight out of a Five Lakes blizzard and then limped on down the trench. Gremio wondered what he’d done wrong. Figuring that out, unfortunately, took but a moment. You just contradicted the regimental commander.

He sighed. Back in Karlsburg, he wouldn’t have been so foolish as to call a presiding judge a fool, even if he was one. He would have been especially careful not to do such a thing, in fact, if the presiding judge was a fool. But he was a free Detinan, and free Detinans had the privilege of saying what was on their minds. Now he saw that having such a privilege and using it weren’t necessarily one and the same.

From behind him, someone said, “I thought you were funny, sir-and you told the truth.”

He turned. “Thank you, Sergeant Thisbe,” he replied. “Sometimes, though, the truth is the worst thing you can possibly tell.”

Thisbe’s eyebrows rose. “You say that, sir? You, a barrister? If there’s no truth in the lawcourts, where can we hope to find it?”

“Lawcourts are for finding truth, sure enough,” Gremio said. “That doesn’t mean it’s there to begin with. And there are ways to tell the truth and still not tell all of it, and to tell it in a way that makes you look good and the fellow you’re at law against the greatest villain still unburned.”

“That’s… not the way it should be, sir.” Thisbe was an earnest young man, much given to thought about the way things should be.

Gremio shrugged. “It’s the way things are in a lawcourt. And remember, the other fellow has a barrister trying to play all the same tricks you are.” He waved toward the south. “King Geoffrey wouldn’t need a big army if that abandoned fool of an Avram didn’t have one, too.”

Thisbe thought that over before finally nodding. “I suppose that’s true, sir. Things have to balance out, don’t they? But there aren’t any judges in this fight, the way there are in a court.”

“Of course there’s a judge,” Gremio said. Thisbe gave him a quizzical look. He explained: “The lawcourt of history will say who won. It’s got to be either King Geoffrey or King Avram.”

“Do you think we can still win this war?” Sergeant Thisbe asked.

“As long as we hold on to Marthasville, as long as we hurt the southrons every day, we can win,” Gremio answered, and then, precise as a barrister, corrected himself: “We can make King Avram quit. We’re not going to give up the fight, come what may. The only way the southrons can beat us is to knock us flat. But if they get sick of funeral pyres and of soldiers never coming home, then Geoffrey will be king in the north for a long time.”

“Ah.” Thisbe nodded again and rubbed his smooth chin. “That explains why Joseph the Gamecock is making the kind of fight he is. He’s trying to get the southrons to sicken of the war.”

“Yes, I think so,” Gremio replied. “As long as we can stay in the field, as long as Marthasville stays in our hands, we’ve got a decent chance.”

Before Thisbe could answer, a sentry sang out from the south: “The dust is stirring. I think the southron soldiers are coming.”

Gremio muttered something under his breath. He hadn’t expected General Hesmucet’s men to get to Fat Mama quite so soon. The brigade down at Dareton should have held them up for quite a while. He wondered what had gone wrong. Something surely had, for the sentry was right: that rising cloud of dust could only come from the feet of thousands of marching men, the hooves of thousands of unicorns and asses, the wheels of thousands of supply wagons and engine-hauling carts. Even as he watched, the reddish cloud on the southern horizon grew taller and thicker.

Before too long, he started making out little flashes of light within the dust cloud. “Unicorns’ iron-shod horns,” he murmured.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Thisbe nodded once more and said, “Yes, and the heads on the spears the pikemen carry.”

Watching the army General Hesmucet led come forward and deploy on the flat farmland east of the hills warding Fat Mama was awe-inspiring. Regiment after regiment of gray-clad unicorn-riders, pikemen, and crossbowmen seemed to fill every available inch of space.

“How can we hope to hold them back, let alone beat them?” Now Thisbe seemed to be talking to himself. “See how many men they have!”