“Spoilsport,” Smitty said. After a moment, he added, “I can think of one man in the company who isn’t happy to see the captain again.”

“Who, Lieutenant Griff?” Rollant shook his head. “You’re wrong, Smitty. I saw him-he was grinning fit to burst.”

“So he was,” Smitty agreed. “But he’s not the fellow I meant. It’s Hagen who isn’t happy to see Captain Cephas back, and that’s because Corliss is.”

“Oh.” Rollant glanced toward the serfs he’d brought in from just outside of Rising Rock. Sure enough, smiles wreathed Corliss’ pretty face. And, sure enough, her man scowled at Cephas’ back. “I don’t like that,” Rollant said. “I don’t like that one bit, as a matter of fact. That could be trouble. It could be a lot of trouble.”

“You’re repeating yourself,” Smitty remarked. “Not only that, you’re saying the same thing over and over.”

“Well, what if I am?” Rollant said. “I’ll tell you something else-once. I wouldn’t want to be Captain Cephas if he does start messing around with Corliss, or even if Hagen just thinks he is.”

“You’re worrying too much,” Smitty said with a dismissive wave. “Gods above, Rollant, Hagen is only a-” Several words too late, he broke off. Even with his swarthy skin, his flush was plain to see.

Rollant took off his cap and displayed his own head of blond hair. “Just in case you’d forgotten, I’m only a serf, too. Only a runaway serf, come to that. If you want to take me across the lines to my old liege lord, you’d put some gold in the pockets of your pantaloons.”

“Oh, shut up,” Smitty said. “I didn’t mean it like that. You’ve proved you’re a man, by the gods.”

“And Hagen hasn’t?” Rollant was unwilling to let it go. “Is that on account of the color of his hair?”

“Gods dammit, it’s on account of he’s not a soldier.” Now Smitty was starting to sound angry, too. “Anybody who’s no soldier and tries to take on one of us’ll be sorry he was ever born-but not for very long, because it’s the last thing he’ll ever do.”

That held some truth-enough to melt some of Rollant’s anger. Not all of it, though. “How long are blonds going to have to keep on proving themselves in Detina?” he asked bitterly. “We didn’t invite you black-bearded bastards to sail over here. How long are we going to stay strangers in our own land?”

With anyone but Smitty, that would have put him in trouble. It was one step over the line, or more likely two. Before King Avram succeeded, Rollant never would have dared say such a thing to an ordinary Detinan: he would have been too likely to end up in gaol as an insurrectionary. But Avram had taken over the Black Palace promising to free the northern serfs from their bondage to the land and, by implication, to turn them into something like ordinary Detinans themselves. If that didn’t let Rollant speak his mind every now and again, what ever would?

Slowly, Smitty said, “The more you look at things, the more complicated they get, don’t they?”

It wasn’t an apology, but it felt like a step toward one. Rollant said, “That’s what this war is all about-to make sure Detina doesn’t stay the way it used to be.”

“All I joined up for was to make sure Grand Duke Geoffrey didn’t change Detina into two different kingdoms,” Smitty said. “That’s all most of us joined up for. This other business, it… just happened.”

Rollant should have got used to being an afterthought in Detinan affairs. He should have, but somehow he hadn’t. And, if blonds were an afterthought, why had the north tried to set up its own kingdom to keep them tied to the land?

He almost threw that in Smitty’s face, too. Almost, but not quite. A blond who pushed too hard only ended up pounding his head against a wall. And most of Smitty’s heart was in the right place. If not quite all of it was, when had the world ever been perfect?

Sergeant Joram strode by. He nodded to Rollant. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he remarked.

Incautiously, Rollant answered, “If you ask me, it’s chilly.”

Sergeant Joram beamed. “Then you need some work to warm you up, don’t you? Draw yourself an axe and chop firewood.”

“Sergeant!” Rollant said, cursing having grown up in the milder autumns that prevailed down in Palmetto Province. He didn’t think Joram was picking on him because he was a blond. Joram picked on people because he was a sergeant, and that was all sergeants were good for-or so things seemed to common soldiers, at any rate.

Incautiously, Smitty laughed at Rollant’s fate. Joram beamed at him, too. “Misery loves company,” the sergeant observed. “You can chop wood, too.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant!” Smitty howled. Joram went on his merry way. For a heartless man, he walked very well. Even the blond warriors who’d fought against Smitty’s ancestors had surely known hearts were in short supply among underofficers.

“Misery loves company,” Rollant repeated spitefully. What Smitty said to him was a good deal more pungent than have a heart. Smitty didn’t have to waste politeness on a common soldier who was a blond to boot.

Mist shrouded the top of Sentry Peak and turned Proselytizers’ Rise, off to the west, into a vague dark gray shape hardly visible against the lighter gray of the sky. Smitty, still grumbling at everything, said, “This stinking fog means we can’t see what Thraxton the Braggart’s up to.”

“He can’t see what we’re up to, either,” Rollant pointed out as his axe thudded into a log. “Which counts for more?”

“I don’t know,” Smitty answered. “But after what that old he-witch did to us there by the River of Death, I want to keep an eye on him every gods-damned minute of the day and night.” He attacked the log in front of him as if it were Count Thraxton.

Rollant grunted with effort as he swung his own long-handled axe. Smitty had a point, perhaps a better one than he realized. To Detinans, magic was just another craft, just another skill. A man could be a fine mage in the same way as he could be a good cook. Rollant lived in that world, but wasn’t altogether of it. Among his people, magic was more personal, more dangerous. He dreaded a man like Count Thraxton in a way Smitty didn’t.

But when our magecraft met theirs, they smashed ours again and again, he thought. That must mean they’re right, or closer to right than we were, mustn’t it? However little he liked the idea, he supposed it had to be true.

He’d been sure Joram would come by to see how they were doing. The sergeant smiled sweetly. “Feeling warmer now?” he inquired.

“Just fine,” Smitty said. Rollant didn’t say anything. Joram might have turned whatever passed his lips into an excuse to pile more work onto his shoulders. Of course, if Joram was looking for an excuse to pile more work onto his shoulders, he could always just invent one.

But he said, “All right, boys, that will do for now. Get Hagen to haul it off to the cooks.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, Hagen! Got a job for you.”

“What do you need, Sergeant, sir?” The serf treated Joram as if the underofficer were his liege lord. “You tell me what to do, I do it.” He grinned. “Not only that, you even pay me to do it.” He liked money. And Sergeant Joram had never bothered his wife-if Corliss was bothered.

“Take this firewood to the cooks,” Joram said.

“Yes, sir, Sergeant, sir,” Hagen said. Joram grinned, enjoying every word of that. Rollant did his best not to grin, too. His amusement sprang from rather different sources. He’d laid flattery on with a trowel a few times himself, or perhaps rather more than a few. He remembered getting out of trouble with Baron Ormerod more than once by pretending Ormerod was just this side of a god. The Detinan noble had eaten it up. What man wouldn’t?

As the blond whom Rollant had brought in to the company picked up a big armload of wood, Rollant and Smitty quietly got out of Joram’s sight, lest the sergeant find them something else to do. They were gone before Joram bothered to look for them. He could have yelled and called them back, but he didn’t bother. He could pick on any common soldier in the company; he didn’t need to concentrate on the two of them.