“Aye, I think you’re right.” Spinello’s bones creaked when he started moving, but move he did. Unkerlanters were bound to be prowling in this swamp. If they caught up with him, he’d never make it out the other side to reconnect himself to the Algarvian army. He wondered if any Algarvian army remained in northern Unkerlant to be reconnected to. He couldn’t prove it, not at the moment, not by the way Mezentio’s forces had collapsed under the hammer blow the Unkerlanters dealt them.

He went into muddy water again before reaching the bushes. This time, he pulled himself out without help from Jadwigai. The water was also stagnant and smelly. The last time he’d risked a fire, he’d used a lighted twig to get a leech off his leg. Mosquitoes hovered in buzzing, thrumming clouds.

As he and Jadwigai had hoped, the bushes marked slightly higher ground. He stretched out, almost ready to fall asleep right there where he lay. Jadwigai sat down beside him. Maybe she was still full of luck-he was still breathing, after all. Or maybe he’d broken the regiment’s luck, and the whole northern army’s as well, when he first brought her to his bed.

“Or maybe that’s nonsense,” he muttered.

“What?” Jadwigai asked.

“Nothing,” he told her. “Or I think it’s nothing, anyway.” He rolled onto his side and leaned on one elbow, studying her. “Ask you something?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Why are you still here with me? You might do better to let the Unkerlanters catch up with you. Especially…” Spinello’s voice trailed away. Especially since we’re killing Kaunians, and they’re not didn’t strike him as the most politic thing to say, no matter how true it was. He sometimes wondered why she hadn’t cut his throat while he lay sleeping. Asking her that didn’t seem politic, either. Last thing I need is to put ideas in her head if she hasn‘t got ‘em already.

Jadwigai shook her head. “I’d just be a body to them, I think. They don’t care about Kaunians. We always made jokes about them in my village-it wasn’t that far from the border with Unkerlant.”

She might well have been right. Both sides here in the west fought the war without restraint. Algarvian soldiers did as they pleased with Unkerlanter women in villages they’d overrun. The Unkerlanters sometimes killed Algarvians they captured in lingering, painful ways and left their bodies where their comrades could find them.

“Besides,” Jadwigai went on, “I know you’ll keep me safe when we find the rest of the army.”

“I’ll do my best.” Spinello wondered how good that best would be. A colonel normally would have no trouble getting whatever he wanted for his mistress. But times weren’t normal, and most mistresses weren’t Kaunians. More urgent worries reared their head at the moment. “What have we got left to eat?”

“Bread. Hard and stale, but bread,” Jadwigai answered. “And spirits. If we mix the spirits with swamp water, we can drink the swamp water, too.” She was right again. Spinello shuddered all the same. The swamp water tasted as nasty as it smelled, and that remained true regardless of whether it would give him a flux of the bowels.

The bread wasn’t just hard; it could have done duty for a brick. Spinello and Jadwigai shared. “If I had bad teeth, I’d starve,” he said.

Before Jadwigai could answer, eggs burst off in the distance. “What’s happening to the army?” she asked. “Have you got any idea?”

“In detail? No,” Spinello said. “In general? Aye. They threw more at us than we could stand up against, and they broke us. I was afraid they were going to do that, but they’ve done more than I thought they could. They used columns of behemoths to smash through our lines, then turned in so they’d either surround us or make us fall back… and they did it over and over and over. I didn’t know they had that many behemoths-or dragons, either. I don’t think anybody in Algarve knew what all Swemmel had before this fight started.”

“You might have done better if you had known,” Jadwigai remarked.

“Aye, that’s so.” Spinello admitted what he could hardly deny. “But it’s too late to dwell on it now. Now we have to hope we can stay alive”-when he said we, he meant not only himself and Jadwigai, but every Algarvian in the north of Unkerlant-”and somehow stop the enemy.”

More eggs burst. “Do you think we can?” Jadwigai asked.

“Sooner or later, we have to,” Spinello replied. “They’ll run out of men and beasts and supplies. If we have anything at all left by then, we’ll stop them. But when? Where?” He shrugged an elaborate Algarvian shrug. The answer was important, but he couldn’t do much to influence it, not as a harried fugitive he couldn’t. He took off his hat and laid it under his head for a pillow.

Jadwigai lay down beside him in the bushes. They’d made love a few times during the grinding retreat, but they were both too weary now. Spinello reached out to pat her hand. Then he dove headlong into oblivion.

He woke a little before dawn. Jadwigai still slept. With care and worry gone from her face, she looked improbably young. Spinello shook his head. She was as tough as she was pretty. She’d done as well as she could for herself in a situation as near impossible as made no difference. She’d done far better than most of the rest of the Kaunians from Forthweg. And if she stayed with him now, that was bound to be hard self-interest.

He shook her awake, ready to clap a hand to her mouth if she made more noise than she should. She’d done that once or twice. Not now, though. Reason came into her eyes almost at once. “Let’s get going,” Spinello said quietly.

“Aye.” Jadwigai nodded. “Maybe you can blaze some of these marsh birds.”

“Maybe.” But Spinello remembered a coot he’d killed. It hadn’t been worth eating once dead. Of course, when you got hungry enough…

The sun was still low in the southeast when they came on a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers. For a moment, Spinello thought himself a dead man. Then he realized they were Algarvians, stragglers like himself. No, not stragglers: just defeated men in full retreat. They even had a crystallomancer with them. “We’re supposed to have a strongpoint in Volkach,” the fellow said. “If we can get there, maybe we’ll get back to the real war.” Under his breath, he added something like, “If there’s any real war left up here.” But he didn’t say it loud enough to make Spinello ask him to repeat it.

As they fought their way through the swamp, one of the troopers asked, “Where’d you pick up the twist, Colonel?” He sounded curious and a little jealous, as he might have had Spinello carried a knapsack full of smoked pheasant and fine wine.

Unlike a knapsack, Jadwigai could speak for herself. “I’m not a twist, you-” What she called him proved she’d learned soldierly Algarvian. “I was-I am-the luck of the Alberese Regiment.”

“Oh!” To Spinello’s surprise, the soldier bowed to her as if to an Algarvian duchess. “I’ve heard about you. A lot of folks up here have heard about you.”

“Aye, that’s right.” Another soldier nodded. He turned to Spinello. “Anybody gives you a hard time about her, Colonel, you just yell. There’s plenty of people won’t let anything happen to her.”

“That’s good to hear,” Spinello said.

He sounded less happy when they came out of the swamp and up onto solid ground. The vast plains of northern Unkerlant were ideal ground for behemoths. Back in the early days of the war, that had all been to Algarve’s advantage. Now, when the Unkerlanters could put three, four, five beasts in the field for every Algarvian animal, moving across the plains made sweat trickle from his armpits and down the small of his back.

Swemmel’s men had been through here, on their way farther east. Bloated, stinking corpses, many of them still wearing kilts, lay here and there. But no Unkerlanters were in sight now. “Get your bearings on this Volkach place,” Spinello told the crystallomancer. “Is it still holding?”