Against which, Algarve has… what? Sabrino wondered as the dragon clawed its way back up into the air again. Experience came to mind. He, for instance, had been flying dragons and commanding this wing since the day the war began. But so many dragonfliers were dead, and their replacements raw as any Unkerlanters.

They’re so young, Sabrino thought. It wasn’t that they were young enough to be his sons. Some of them were young enough to be his grandsons, he having fought in the Six Years’ War. They’re so young, and so brave. They’re braver than I am-powers above know that’s true. They go up there not knowing anything, and knowing they don’t know anything. But they go up anyway, with a smile, sometimes even with a song. I couldn‘t do that, not for anything.

Here came a swarm of Unkerlanter dragons, all in the dingy rock-gray paint that made them so hard to see, especially against autumn clouds. The men who flew them were better at what they did than they had been when the war was new. The Unkerlanters used many more crystals than they had in those days, and responded to trouble much more quickly. It made fighting a war against them look altogether too much like work.

But they held formation as rigidly as if they’d been glued together. That was how they’d been trained: to follow their leader and do as he did. Some few of them outgrew it and became pretty good dragonfliers. More, though, never learned. Sabrino wasted no pity on them. If they survived his lessons, they would pick up something. He hoped they didn’t.

“Melee!” he shouted into his crystal. “Break apart and melee!”

Against good dragonfliers in formation, the order would have been suicidal: break up a smaller force to oppose a larger, better-disciplined one? Madness, nothing but madness.

The Unkerlanters, though, weren’t good dragonfliers: this wasn’t a wing of freelancers, of the skilled fliers the Algarvians called Swemmel’s falcons. These were just the men who’d been closest to the battle by Mavromouni. And if you could rely on any one thing from such men, you could rely on their holding formation too bloody long.

Sure enough, when the Algarvians started swooping at their tails and up from below at their dragons’ bellies, they didn’t break out of their box till several of them had already tumbled from the sky. Sabrino had seen that time and again. If they’d just broken up and put two or three dragons on every one of his, as they could have, he would have had a much harder time of it. But they didn’t. They wouldn’t. They never did.

They paid for their rigidity, too, as they usually did. By the time Sabrino ordered his wing back toward its latest makeshift dragon farm, he’d counted nine Unkerlanter dragons slain. He’d lost three of his own followers. The only thing troubling him was that, even at three losses for one, the foe could afford it better than he.

Down fluttered his dragons, some of them burned, all of them weary, to the dragon farm in what had probably been some Yaninan peasant’s turnip field. Dragon handlers trotted forward to secure the beasts to their iron stakes and tend to their wounds and feed them whatever meat they’d managed to scrounge from the surrounding countryside. The handlers were all Algarvians. Yaninan handlers, nowadays, tended only Yaninan dragons, and Yaninan dragons flew alongside the rock-gray beasts of Unkerlant.

Sabrino wondered how Major Scoufas fared these days. Were it not for Scoufas, he would probably have been languishing in a captives’ camp. He wished the Yaninan officer no ill-but if they met in the air, he would do his best to kill him.

Can I? The question was more interesting than he would have liked.

Scoufas made a first-rate dragonflier, no doubt about it. He would be flying a fresher dragon, and one brim-full of brimstone and quicksilver. Sabrino kicked at the muddy ground, angry at himself. If you don’t think you can win every time you go up, you ‘d do better staying on the ground.

That was an obvious truth. Another obvious truth was that he couldn’t afford to do any such thing. He kicked at the wet dirt again. No Algarvian could afford to do anything but whatever he was best at that might hold back the Unkerlanter tide, and to keep doing it till he either got killed or he collapsed from exhaustion. Sabrino knew he wasn’t far from either.

A road ran not far from the dragon farm. Some Yaninans fled east along it. They couldn’t stomach the Unkerlanter alliance, no matter what King Tsavellas might have to say about it. But others moved west, something Sabrino hadn’t seen before. Maybe they lived farther east, and were hoping to avoid long battles in their own neighborhoods. Or maybe they hated Algarvians as much as their countrymen hated Unkerlanters. Some Yaninans did.

Being the wing commander, Sabrino got the abandoned farmhouse instead of a tent. With his old bones, he was glad to have the comfort of four walls around him, even beat-up, shabby walls.

He lit a couple of big tallow candles. They filled the one-room farmhouse with the stink of hot fat. By their flickering light, he started to write a report on the fight his wing had just been through. How many reports have I written in this war? Too bloody many, that’s certain sure.

And then another, even less happy, thought occurred to him. How many of them have done any bloody good? He didn’t know the answer there, not in numbers, but he knew what he needed to know. Not many. Not enough- that’s certain sure, too.

He wondered why he bothered. Would anyone in Trapani care if he fell silent? Someone might-his silence could give a superior who wanted to sack him the excuse he needed to do it. That thought alone was plenty to keep Sabrino stubbornly writing. He didn’t make things easy for the foe. Why should he for his alleged friends?

A sentry knocked on the door and said, “Someone to see you, sir.”

“I don’t want to see anyone,” Sabrino answered, not looking up.

“I think you should, sir,” the sentry said.

That made Sabrino raise an eyebrow. It also roused his curiosity. He stuck his pen into the bottle of ink, got to his feet, and went to open the door. There stood the sentry. And there behind him, in a common soldier’s cloak and boots, stood King Mezentio. “What in blazes are you doing here?” Sabrino asked harshly.

“Seeing how things fare in the field,” the King of Algarve answered. “And that should be, ‘What in blazes are you doing here, your Majesty?’ May I come in?”

“Aye.” Numbly, Sabrino stood aside. Mezentio walked in and closed the door behind him. Sabrino said, “I have some spirits, if you want any.”

“No, thank you, your Excellency.” Mezentio took off his hat and cocked his bald head to one side. “Who knows? You might poison them.”

Sabrino shook his head. “I wouldn’t go that far. I might say, ‘I told you so.’ I cursed well did tell you so, your Majesty, and you, powers below eat you, you wouldn’t listen to me.”

“And do you think it would have made a counterfeit copper’s worth of difference if I had?” Mezentio retorted. “We had no chance to take Cottbus without doing what we did, and we couldn’t whip Unkerlant unless we took Cottbus. And so-”

“So what?” Sabrino said. If Mezentio felt like executing him for the lese majesty of interrupting, he didn’t much care. “So fornicating what? We did it, and we still didn’t take fornicating Cottbus, and how many Kaunians and Unkerlanters are dead now who’d be alive if we’d left well enough alone? How many tens of thousands?”

Mezentio shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. The Kaunians have been our deadly foes since time out of mind. They deserve whatever happened to them. If they all had a single neck, I would have been rid of every one of them at the same time. I may yet manage that.”

“You would do better to make peace,” Sabrino said. “How many Lagoans and Kuusamans think our name is a stench in the nostrils of civilization these days? All of them, or near enough.”