With a shrug, the man from whom she was buying said, “That’s on account of I used to have twice as much to sell. If you don’t want to pay it, sweetheart, somebody else will.”

He was doubtless right about that. Vanai paid. She did have plenty of silver. She paid for cheese and beans and almonds and peas, too. Nothing exciting there, only stuff that would keep and could go into easy stews and porridges. She wasn’t worrying about fancy meals these days, only about holding starvation at bay.

Saxburh started to cry when Vanai was about halfway back to her block of flats. Vanai didn’t know whether the baby was hungry or wet or just sick of being toted around like-quite literally-one more sack of beans. She didn’t care, either. She couldn’t do anything with Saxburh till she got back to the flat, not unless she wanted to put all the food down. And that was about the last thing she wanted to do. In a city at war, getting back out of sight was far and away the smartest course.

She soon found out just how true that was. Something-noting motion in the sky, perhaps-made her look up in spite of the constant struggle to keep her feet. She gasped in horror. Flying straight toward her, hardly higher than the housetops, were half a dozen dragons, all of them painted in gaudy, crazy patterns of red, green, and white-Algarvian beasts. They carried eggs slung under their bellies.

Vanai shrank back against a wall, not that that would have done the slightest bit of good had they decided to flame her or drop those eggs close by. But they swept on past, so low that their wings kicked dust up from the ground into her eyes. Without a free hand to rub at them, she blinked frantically.

A moment later, eggs burst in the market square. The noise smote her ears. Saxburh’s wails grew louder. She heard screams behind her, too. “I can’t do anything, sweetheart,” Vanai said, jiggling the baby up and down in the crook of her elbow. “I’m just glad we went out early.”

Saxburh wasn’t glad, and didn’t care who knew it. Vanai couldn’t do anything about that without slowing down, and she wasn’t about to slow down for anything or anybody, Saxburh included. Getting home was the most important thing she could do. She’d already had that thought. It was especially true now. And she did it, wailing baby or no wailing baby.

Getting the door to the block of flats open without putting anything down proved another adventure, and getting up the stairs another one still. But she did what needed doing, and she was able to set some of her bundles on the floor in the hallway in front of her flat so she could use a key to open the door. That done, she hustled groceries inside and closed and barred the door behind her.

By then, Saxburh wasn’t just red in the face; she was a nasty, blotchy purple. “I know,” Vanai said soothingly. “I know. Nobody was paying enough attention to you. Now I can.” She cuddled the baby and nursed her. Saxburh settled down and quickly went to sleep. Vanai wished somebody could calm her down as easily as that.

She put the grain and nuts and vegetables and cheese in the kitchen cupboards. Then she turned the tap. Only a trickle of water came out. She said something in classical Kaunian that surely would have shocked Brivibas, then something even more incendiary in Forthwegian. Up till now, she’d always been able to rely on the water. If she couldn’t…

Cursing again, she put a pot under the tap to catch as much water as it would give. Where could she get more? The fancier parts of Eoforwic had a good many fountains. This grimy district? No. She would have to get some from somewhere. You could live a lot longer without food than without water.

The trickle stopped. Vanai stared in dismay. Maybe people would repair the mains, and the water would come back on again soon. Maybe they wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t. However things turned out, she had to do her best. If I can, she thought. If I can.

Marshal Rathar could look east across the Twegen River and watch Eoforwic burn. The sight didn’t make him unhappy-not in the least. On that side of the river, Algarvian soldiers were fighting and dying and using up uncounted eggs and behemoths and sorely needed sacks of cinnabar for their dragons- and none of it cost him so much as a single soldier.

General Gurmun was looking east, too, through a spyglass. Lowering it, he said, “I’ve never been one to have much use for delay, but I’ve got to admit that just sitting here serves us pretty well right now.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Rathar agreed. “I was thinking the same thing, as a matter of fact. King Swemmel is shrewd, no doubt about it.”

“That he is,” Gurmun said enthusiastically. “The redheads could be fighting us street by street in Eoforwic. Can you imagine how expensive that would be? Instead, they’re fighting the Forthwegians. It saves lots of wear and tear on us, and it gets rid of troublemakers we would have had to worry about later on.”

“True enough.” Rathar suspected-no, he was certain-the Forthwegians didn’t think of themselves as troublemakers. In their own minds, they were surely patriots. Of course, what they were in their own minds mattered only so much to Rathar. He had to look at them as his sovereign would.

Gurmun asked, “Do you know what the king plans to do here in Forthweg? He’s not going to let that son of a whore of a Penda come back and king it, is he?”

“His Majesty has not told me what he plans for Forthweg,” Rathar said carefully. “The only order he has given me in that regard is to make no settlement on my own. He holds everything in his own hands.”

“As a king should do.” Gurmun was one of Swemmel’s men in a way even Rathar wasn’t: he’d been a boy, not a man, when the king came to power, and had no standards of comparison. Whatever Swemmel decided was automatically right for him.

And Marshal Rathar dared not show he disagreed. Even if Gurmun didn’t betray him in the hope of becoming Marshal of Unkerlant in his place, someone else was liable to. Unkerlant-especially Unkerlant under King Swemmel -ran on betrayals and denunciations.

“What would you do here if you were king?” Gurmun asked.

Watch my back, Rathar thought. Aloud, he answered, “I’m not king. I don’t want to be king. How about you, Gurmun? What would you do?” How do you like the boot on the other foot, Gurmun?

“Me? I don’t know anything about running a kingdom. I don’t much care, either,” Gurmun answered, as any Unkerlanter who wanted to live to a ripe old age had to do. “All I want is the chance to let my behemoths loose and smash on through the Algarvians again.” He pointed across the river once more. “And I can see my odds of doing that will be better later on than they are right now.” He wasn’t smooth as a courtier, but he got the job done: he didn’t criticize Swemmel and he didn’t show ambition, at least not of the dangerous sort.

“You’ll get your wish, I expect,” Rathar said. “We’ve got that bridgehead over the Twegen north of Eoforwic, and the other one south of the city. The Algarvians haven’t a chance of breaking either one of those, not with the Forthwegians inside Eoforwic keeping them so busy.”

“That’s right.” Gurmun nodded. “And we can really use the lull, to get our supply lines straightened out. We outran everything when we chased the Algarvians out of Unkerlant this summer, and the redheads did a cursed good job of sabotaging the ley lines and burning the fields and planting eggs in the roads as they fell back. Powers above only know how we managed to keep bringing things forward.”

“We did it,” Rathar said. “That’s what matters. I’ll tell you something else, too: I’d rather manage moving things forward than moving them back.” I had too much practice doing that the first two years of the war. He almost said so out loud, but held back. He would have told that to General Vatran, whom he trusted, but not to Gurmun. Gurmun was probably a better soldier-Rathar wondered if even the Algarvians had a finer commander of behemoths-but Vatran knew a confidence when he heard one, while the younger officer didn’t.