Istvan whirled. The sorcerer’s apprentice and corporal was right behind him, dirty mess tin in hand. “If I could figure it out, would I be going, ‘What on earth?’ “ Istvan asked in some irritation. “And I know bloody well that you didn’t hear as much of it as I did, so what makes you so fornicating smart?”

“Your friend there is a mage of sorts, aye?” Kun said. He waited for Istvan to nod, then went on, “What was Captain Frigyes doing with us when all the Kuusamans in the world jumped on our company?”

“Huh?” The jump there was too wide for Istvan to follow him across it. “What are you talking about?”

Patiently, Kun guided him across: “Our company commander was good and ready to sacrifice us all, to let the mages make the magic that would have thrown the slant-eyes off Becsehely, remember? But they captured us before he got us to wherever the wizards were. And so…” He waited.

He needed to wait a while; Istvan had trouble with the jump even with a guide. At last, though, Istvan’s mouth fell open. “You think he was talking with Borsos about making that same kind of sorcery here!” Once the words were out of his mouth, they made a horrid kind of sense. He wished they hadn’t.

And Kun nodded. “That’s just what I think. Captain Frigyes wants to go on fighting the war. How else can he do it?”

“Could Borsos make that kind of magic here?” Istvan asked. “He’s a dowser, mostly. Does he even know enough to cast that kind of spell?”

“Ask him,” Kun answered. “I can’t tell you.”

With a shudder, Istvan shook his head. “I don’t think I want to know.”

Kun clicked his tongue between his teeth in sharp disapproval. “You should always want to know. Knowledge is bad, but ignorance is worse.”

“Is that a fact?” Istvan said, and Kun nodded as if it most assuredly were. Istvan put his hands on his hips. “If knowing is such a great thing, how come we both wish the mages had never figured out how to use the magic they get from killing people? Answer me that, O sage of the age.”

“It’s not the same,” Kun said stiffly. “The only reason our mages turned toward that spell was that the Unkerlanters used it against us. We have to be able to fight back.”

Istvan shook his head again. “You’re not really answering me. You’re just pushing it back one step. Don’t you wish the Unkerlanters hadn’t worked out how to use that spell, then? You can’t be real happy about it, or you wouldn’t have been so very thrilled to volunteer to help power the sorcery.”

Now Kun winced. “Volunteer to have my throat cut, you mean. No, may the stars turn their light from me if I was happy about that. And I suppose you’ve made your point. Huzzah for ignorance!” He held his hands in front of his face, as if playing a fanfare on a trumpet.

I got him to admit I was right, Istvan thought proudly. The pride was in proportion to how seldom that happened. But then he wondered what Captain Frigyes would do, and what he could make Major Borsos do. He didn’t know, and wished he did. As soon as the wish crossed his mind, he realized Kun wasn’t entirely wrong. He thought about admitting as much, but in the end did no such thing. He gained such triumphs too seldom not to want to savor them to the fullest.

Leudast had got used to life in the bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Fluss. The Algarvians kept pounding away, trying to drive the Unkerlanters back over the river and seal off the bridgehead. They kept throwing in attacks every so often, too, going at the Unkerlanter regiments on the east side of the Fluss as if the whole war depended on wiping them out.

After Swemmel’s men had beaten back one such assault, a trooper in Leudast’s company said, “Isn’t this the worst fighting you’ve ever seen in all your days, Lieutenant?”

The fellow couldn’t have been above seventeen. Unkerlanter soldiers in the field didn’t get to shave very often, but his cheeks remained smooth and beardless even when he was nowhere near a razor. Leudast wanted to laugh in his face. Instead, he just shook his head. “Sonny, I was wounded down in Sulingen. They fixed me up in time to let me fight in the Durrwangen bulge. After those scraps, anything the redheads have done to us here is like a walk in the meadow with a pretty girl.” He thought of Alize, back in the village of Leiferde.

Sergeant Kiun shook his head. “Oh, it’s not so easy as that, sir,” he said. “More like a walk through the meadow with an ugly girl, if you want to know what I think.”

“Who wants to know what you think?” Leudast returned. They grinned at each other. Why not? Between the two of them, they’d captured the Algarvian noble who’d called himself King of Grelz. Just as Leudast wasn’t quite an ordinary lieutenant, so Kiun wasn’t an ordinary sergeant.

The young soldier was unimpressed. “You’re making fun of me!” he said, and his voice broke in the middle of the sentence, going from the baritone he would have as a grown man to the squeaky treble he was just escaping.

“Well, what if we are, Gilan?” Leudast asked. “You said something silly. If you don’t expect people to make fun of you after you say something silly, you’re making a big mistake.”

“But I didn’t know it was silly,” Gilan protested.

“That makes it more silly, not less,” Leudast said. Had he been that naive when King Swemmel’s impressers pulled him into the army? If he had, how in blazes had his sergeants and officers put up with him? He thought of Sergeant Magnulf, who’d died in the first year of the war with Algarve. They’d shared a hole in some village they were trying to defend. Had he looked out of the hole when the egg burst in front of it, he would be dead now and Magnulf might still be alive. It had happened the other way round. He knew neither rhyme nor reason for it.

As if the mere thought of eggs were enough to conjure them up, they started bursting not far from the trench in which he and Kiun and Gilan stood. They weren’t quite close enough to make the soldiers throw themselves flat, but they weren’t much farther off than that. “Powers below eat the redheads,” Kiun said. “I thought they were supposed to be moving everything north to fight our push there.”

“Lots of odds and sods in the men they’re throwing at us,” Leudast said. “Those Forthwegian whoresons are almost as bad as Grelzers-you can’t tell they’re the enemy till too late. And now these blond Kaunian buggers.”

“They fight hard,” Kiun said.

“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “There were a few Kaunians not so far from my village. I grew up pretty close to the border with Forthweg, you know. They’re just… people who don’t look like us. What I don’t get is how come they’ll fight for the Algarvians when the redheads kill ‘em to make their magic.”

“These aren’t Kaunians from Forthweg,” Kiun said. “They’re from way the demon off in the east somewhere. I hardly even know the names of the kingdoms on the other side of the world.”

“They’re Valmierans,” Leudast said. Before Kiun could put in a jab, he held up his hand. “Only reason I know is because Captain Recared told me. He knows all that stuff. But still, they’re blonds, and so are the Kaunians from Forthweg. So why would they help Mezentio’s bastards?”

“Have to take some prisoners, squeeze it out of’em,” Kiun said.

“I suppose so,” Leudast allowed.

Unkerlanter egg-tossers started answering the Algarvians. They still didn’t respond as fast as the redheads, but they were there in numbers in the bridgehead. Nothing the Algarvians or the foreigners fighting for them had done had stopped Unkerlant from bringing egg-tossers and behemoths forward, which was not the least of the reasons they still held the foothold on this side of the Fluss.

Dragons flew by, dragons painted rock-gray. “They’ll drop their loads on the Algarvians’ heads, too,” Leudast said. “Serves the redheads right-this is what they used to do to us all the time.”