Tantris went off by himself into the darkness. The eggs were his; he knew the spell that would make them burst, and he jealously guarded the knowledge. Garivald made out only one word from him- "Now!" -and then four nearly simultaneous roars shattered the night and shattered the bridges. Chunks of wood rained down on the irregulars. Someone let out a yowl of pain. Nobody would cross the river by either of those ways for a good long while.

But then, even before Garivald could order the irregulars back toward the woods, challenges rang out and beams began to flicker in the night. The Grelzers had had patrols on the move- he'd just been lucky enough to miss them. Now… Now there were a lot of shouts of "Raniero!" and a lot of men rushing down from Pirmasens to join the hunt for the bridge-wreckers. Garivald's mouth went dry. Some Grelzer soldiers would sooner surrender than fight. Some were very good men indeed. My luck to run into that kind again, he thought. And they can pin us against the river. We can't use those stinking bridges, either.

The Grelzers plainly intended to do just that. Garivald had no idea how to stop them. If Tantris did, he kept it as secret as the bursting spell. Another thought ran through Garivald's mind. We're going to die here. We're all going to die here. A beam zipped past him. For a moment, the air smelled of thunderstorms.

No sooner had that crossed his mind than lightning smote the Grelzers, not once but again and again. Each crash of cloven air dwarfed the roars that had come from the bursting eggs. No snow. No rain. Only bolt after bolt of lightning, peal after peal of thunder.

Through those peals, Garivald heard someone laughing like a man possessed. Sadoc, he realized. Awe- or perhaps the aftereffects of lightning- made the hair prickle up on his arms and at the nape of his neck. He's found himself at last. And then, as the Grelzer soldiers fled howling in fear, Well, for sure he picked the right time.

As the ley-line caravan glided to a stop on the eastern outskirts of Eoforwic, Vanai squeezed Ealstan's hand in excitement. "Oh, I can hardly wait!" she exclaimed.

He was grinning, too. They both got to their feet and descended from the caravan car. They both popped open umbrellas; it was drizzling. The misty rain hid all but the nearest houses. There weren't so many, anyhow; the city faded away into meadows and orchards and farmland- exactly the sort of landscape Vanai wanted now.

Along with her umbrella, she clutched a wickerwork basket. Ealstan had one just like it. Vanai jumped in the air from sheer high spirits. "Mushrooms!" she squealed, as if it were a magic word. And so, for her, it was.

"Aye." Ealstan nodded. They walked away from the caravan stop. Their shoes got muddy. Neither of them cared. They both had on old pairs. They weren't the only ones who'd got off at this stop, either. Half a carload of eager Forthwegians scattered to pursue their kingdom's favorite fall sport.

"You don't know what this means to me," Vanai said once the other mushroom hunters were out of earshot.

"Maybe a little," Ealstan said. "I remember how excited you were after you found the sorcery last year, just to be able to go to a park and look for mushrooms there. This has to be even better."

"It is." Vanai gave him a quick kiss. He did try to understand in his head. Maybe he even succeeded there. But how could he understand in his belly what being cooped up inside that flat for most of a year had been like? How could he understand the fear she'd felt every time somebody walked along the hall past the door? A pause, a knock, could have meant the end for her. It hadn't happened, but it could have. She'd know that in her belly.

Her husband's thoughts were traveling a different ley line. "There in the park, that was where you got your Forthwegian name," Ealstan said. "It was the first one that popped into my head when we ran into Ethelhelm and his friends."

"Thelberge." Vanai tasted it, then shrugged. "It took me by surprise then. I'm used to it by now, or pretty much so, anyway. Everybody who calls me anything calls me Thelberge these days- except you, every once in a while."

"I like you as Vanai," he said seriously. "I always have, you know." Despite the chilly drizzle, that warmed her. Ealstan shifted his basket to the hand that also held the umbrella so he could put his free arm around her. He went on, "You've had a better year than Ethelhelm did, and that's the truth."

"I know." Her shiver had nothing to do with the weather, either. "I wonder what's become of him since he ran away from everything. He had nerve, there in the street in Eoforwic when his spell wore off. He started singing and playing and bluffed his way through."

"If he'd had more nerve earlier, it might not have come to that." Ealstan had never had much bend to him. As far as he was concerned, things were right or they were wrong, and that was that. "But he wanted to stay rich even though the Algarvians were running the kingdom, and he ended up paying the price."

"You can't blame him too much," Vanai said. "Most people just want to get along as best they can. He did better than almost anybody else with Kaunian blood in Forthweg… for a while, anyhow."

"Aye. For a while." Ealstan sounded grim.

Part of that, Vanai knew, was what he reckoned friendship betrayed. She said, "Maybe we haven't heard the last of him yet."

"Maybe," Ealstan said. "If he has any sense, though, he'll go on lying low. The Algarvians would be on him like a blaze if he started making waves. And Pybba would know about him, too, if he were trying to give the redheads a hard time. Pybba hasn't heard a thing."

"Would he tell you if he had?" Vanai asked.

Before Ealstan answered, he stooped to pick some meadow mushrooms and toss them into his basket. Then he said, "Would he tell me? I don't know. But there would likely be some sign of it in his books, and there isn't. You poke through a fellow's books, you can find all sorts of things if you know how to look."

"You could, maybe," Vanai said. He spoke with great assurance. His father had trained him well. At nineteen, he was a match for any bookkeeper in Eoforwic.

And how did your grandfather train you? Vanai asked herself. If there were need for a junior historian of the Kaunian Empire, you might fill the bill. Since the Algarvians have made it illegal to write Kaunian- and a capital offense to be Kaunian- you're not good for much right now.

She walked on for another couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly that Ealstan kept going on for a bit before realizing she wasn't following. He turned back in surprise. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." She'd been feeling flutters in her belly the past few days, maybe even the past week. She'd put them down to gas and a sour stomach; her digestion wasn't all it might have been. But this wasn't gas. She knew what it was, knew what it had to be. "Nothing's wrong. The baby just kicked me."

Ealstan looked as astonished as he had when she'd first told him she was pregnant. Then he hurried back to her and set his own hand on her belly. Vanai looked around, ready to be embarrassed, but she couldn't see anyone else, which meant no one else could see him do such an intimate thing. He said, "Do you suppose he'll do it again?"

"How should I know?" Vanai said, startled into laughter. "It's not anything I can make him do."

"No, I guess not." Ealstan sounded as if that hadn't occurred to him till she pointed it out.

But then, with his palm still pressed against her tunic, the baby did stir again within her. "There!" she said. "Did you feel that?"

"Aye." Now wonder filled his face. "What does it feel like to you?"

Vanai thought about that. "It doesn't feel like anything else," she said at last. "It feels as if somebody tiny is moving around inside me, and he's not very careful where he puts his feet." She laughed and set her hand on top of his. "That really is what's going on."