In that close combat, Captain Gremio’s sword was good for something. The blade, nicked where the bolt had hit, soon had blood on it. Men strained and cursed and smote and screamed and bled and died. And, because the fight was province against province, sometimes brother against brother, each side understood every word its enemies said.

When the southrons started crying, “Fall back!” Captain Gremio not only understood but grinned in something reasonably like triumph. “Yes, you’d better fall back!” he yelled. “Provincial prerogative forever!”

“By the Thunderer’s beard, sir, we stopped them,” said Sergeant Thisbe, who wore no beard of his own.

“They didn’t bring enough men forward,” Gremio agreed. “I rather thought they would make a better fight of it.”

Thisbe panted. He had a cut above one eye and another on his arm, but neither seemed in the least serious. “I’m not sorry they didn’t, sir, and that’s the truth.” After a moment, he added, “You handled that sword of yours mighty well.”

“Thank you,” Gremio said. He wasn’t used to such praise, and didn’t think he deserved it-which didn’t stop him from enjoying it when it came.

Out in the open land between the northerners’ trenches and those of the foe, a southron let out a shriek-somebody’d shot him when he went out to pick up a wounded comrade. Other southrons shouted, “Shame!” and, “No fair!” Men making pickup, like men answering calls of nature, were usually reckoned improper targets.

“Life isn’t fair,” Thisbe said.

“Of course not,” Gremio answered. “If it were, the southrons’ army wouldn’t be twice the size of ours.” And no one would need barristers, either, he thought. But he didn’t say that aloud.

King Geoffrey’s men celebrated their victory at the enemy bridgehead till the late afternoon. That was when word came of the breakthrough the southron unicorn-riders had made at the far northern end of the line Joseph the Gamecock had been defending. Victory or no victory, Gremio’s company, along with the rest of the northerners, abandoned the trenches they’d just held and retreated to the north once more.

Joseph the Gamecock had the nerve to be proud of himself. Of all the disgrace and embarrassment attached to the retreat from Commissioner Mountain, that galled Lieutenant General Bell more than anything else. As they rode north, Joseph turned to him and said, “We haven’t left them anything they can use, not a single, solitary thing. One of the cleanest escapes ever, if I do say so myself.”

“Huzzah,” Bell said sourly. “How many more retreats can we make before we go clean past Marthasville?”

That got home. Joseph flushed and scowled. He said, “I still intend to hold Marthasville. Holding Marthasville is the point of this campaign.”

“Really?” Bell raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed that it had any point at all, except perhaps giving ground. In the name of the gods, when do we get to fight back instead of running away?”

“Lieutenant General, you are grossly insubordinate,” Joseph the Gamecock snapped.

“If I am, sir”-Bell larded the commanding general’s title of respect with as much scorn as he could pack into it- “I’d say it’s about time somebody was. Now we’ve gone and lost Hiltonia and Ephesus, too, and how are we going to hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee River against the southrons? We have to hold it, wouldn’t you say, seeing as it’s the last line in front of Marthasville?”

He’d hoped to whip Joseph into a greater anger than that which already gripped him. Maybe the general commanding would do something unforgivable. Considering how little faith King Geoffrey had in Joseph the Gamecock, it might not take much.

But Joseph, instead of igniting, smiled a smile so superior, it made Lieutenant General Bell’s own temper kindle. “How will we hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee?” Joseph echoed. “I’ll tell you how: with some of the finest field works ever made, that’s how. I’ve had serfs digging for weeks. If you’d been paying attention, even a little, I daresay you might have found out. But that would be too much to hope for, wouldn’t it?”

Bell glared blackly. And he had a comeback ready: “Field works, is it? How many lines of field works have the southrons already turned? I’ve lost track of just how many, but there isn’t one they haven’t turned. I know that for a fact.”

“Sooner or later, they may push us back over the river,” Joseph the Gamecock allowed. “But we also have good positions on the other side.”

“How lucky for us,” Bell said, acid in his voice. “And what happens when the southrons flank us out of those, too?”

Joseph the Gamecock exhaled in exasperation. “They won’t, by the gods. We can hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee, and we will.” He didn’t wait for Bell’s next contradiction, but spurred his unicorn forward and away.

Although Lieutenant General Bell could have ridden in pursuit of the commanding general, he didn’t. For one thing, riding fast hurt even more than riding at a regular pace. For another, Joseph knew his opinions quite well enough already. And, for a third, Bell didn’t want to give too much away. If Joseph the Gamecock got a little more suspicious of him…

Well, how much difference would it make? How much was left to save here in Peachtree Province? Did the northerners have enough of an army here to save it? Of course we do, Bell thought, provided we have a man in charge who’s not afraid to use it.

When the army started filing into the trenches covering the approaches to the Hoocheecoochee and the bridges over it, Bell discovered, to his surprise and not a little to his dismay, that Joseph the Gamecock had known whereof he spoke. The field fortifications in front of the river were formidable, and wouldn’t be easy to force. Marthasville and the vital glideway routes east that ran through it remained protected.

But for how much longer? Bell wondered. What will go wrong? Something always has. We’ve been retreating for two months now. We can’t fall back much farther, because we’ve nowhere to fall back to.

While he scowled and fumed, Major Zibeon found him a farmhouse behind the line in which he could make his headquarters. His aide-de-camp said, “Sorry it isn’t anything fancier, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bell answered. “Help me down from this beast, if you’d be so kind.” His head buzzed with laudanum; riding was hard on him. Zibeon undid the ties that kept him on the unicorn and steadied him while he positioned his crutches. “Thank you kindly,” Bell said, though the pain of the crutch in his left armpit was hardly less than he’d known while riding. Plant, swing forward; plant, swing forward. He made his way into the farmhouse.

The farmer had already fled north, for which Bell was duly grateful; he didn’t feel like having to be sociable. A couple of serfs’ huts stood by the main house. Maybe the fellow who’d lived here had been a petty baronet, or maybe he’d just been a yeoman who’d come into the land to which the serfs were attached. The huts stood dark and empty now, with no naked blond children playing around them. The serfs had fled, too, though odds were they hadn’t fled north.

“Is everything to your liking, sir?” Major Zibeon asked after he went inside.

“If everything were to my liking, Major, we’d be fighting a good many miles south of this place,” Bell answered. His aide-de-camp grunted and gave him a reproachful look. He relented: “Seeing as we are here, this house will do well enough.”

“Thank you, sir,” Zibeon said. “That is what I had in mind-as I think you knew well enough.”

Few men were bold enough to reproach Lieutenant General Bell to his face. Joseph the Gamecock did it, but that hardly counted. Zibeon had the nerve to speak his mind. Because he did, Bell treated him with more respect than he would have otherwise. “Well, maybe I did,” he admitted.