Into The Darkness

Ealstan and Sidroc were halfway home when one of Count Brorda': constables held up a ceremonial sword to halt foot traffic and wagons I their street. He shouted curses at a luckless man who didn't stop fast enough to suit him. "What's going on?" Sidroc asked, but Ealstan's ears had already caught the rhythmic clip-clop of cavalry.

Both boys shouted cheers as the unicorns trotted by. One of the officers made his mount rear for a moment. The sun shone bright as silver off its iron-shod horn and off its spotless white coat, a white that put whitewash to shame. Most of the troopers, though, had sensibly daubed their mounts with paint. Dun and sand and even muddy green were less likely to draw the notice of the foe and a streak of spurting fire, even if they seemed less magnificent than white.

A couple of slim, fair, trousered Kaunians, a man and a woman, cheered the cavalry along with everyone else. In their hatred of Algarve, they and the rest of the folk of the Kingdom of Forthweg agreed. After the constable waved traffic forward, Ealstan watched the woman's hips work in those revealing pants. He licked his lips. Forthwegian women went out in long, loose tunics that covered them from neck to ankles and kept their shapes decently disguised. No wonder people talked about Kaunians the way they did. And yet the woman strode along as if unaware of the spectacle she was creating, and chattered with her companion in their own sonorous language.

Sidroc watched her, too. "Disgusting," he said, but, by his avid voice and by the way he eyes kept following her, he was perhaps not altogether disgusted.

"Just because they dressed that way in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they think they have the right to keep on doing it," Ealstan agreed. "The Empire fell more than a thousand years ago, in case they hadn't noticed."

"Because the Kaunians de-gen-er-ated from wearing clothes like that." Sidroc pronounced with exaggerated care the long word he'd learned from the history master earlier in the year.

He and Ealstan had gone a couple of more blocks when someone came running up the street behind them shouting, "He's dead! He's dead!"

"Who's dead?" Ealstan called, but he was afraid he knew.

"Duke Alardo, that's who," the man answered.

"Are you sure?" Ealstan and Sidroc and several other people asked the question at the same time. Alardo of Bari had been at death's door more than once in the nearly thirty years since his domain was forcibly detached from Algarve in the aftermath of the Six Years' War. He'd been vigorous enough to pull through every time. If only, Ealstan thought, he'd been vigorous enough to sire a son…

But the man with the news was nodding vigorously. "I have it straight from my brother-in-law, who has it from Count Brorda's secretary, who heard the message with his own ears when it reached the keep by crystal."

Like everyone else in Gromheort, Ealstan fancied himself a connoisseur of rumors. This one sounded highly probable. "King Mezentio will claim Bari," he said grimly.

"If he does, we'll fight him." Sidroc sounded grim, too, grim and excited at the same time. "He can't fight Forthweg and VaIrmiera and Jelgava all at once. Not even an Algarvian would be crazy enough to try that. "

"Nobody knows what an Algarvian is crazy enough to try," Ealstan said with conviction. "He may have more enemies than that, too - Sibiu doesn't like Algarve, either, and the islanders are supposed to be tough. Come on - let's hurry home. Maybe we can be first with the news."

They both began to run.

As they ran, Sidroc said, "I bet your brother will be glad to get the chance to slaughter some stinking Algarvians."

"Not my fault Leofsig was born first," Ealstan panted. "If I were nineteen, I'd have gone into the King's levy, too." He pretended to spray fire around, so recklessly that, had it been real, he would have burned down half of Gromheort. He dashed into his own house shouting that Duke Alardo was dead."

"What?" His sister Conberge, who was a year older than he, came in from the courtyard, where she'd been trying to keep the flower garden flourishing despite Forthweg's savage summer heat. "What win Mezentio do now?" ,"He will seize the Duchy." That wasn't Ealstan; it was his mother, Elfryth: She'd hurried out of the kitchen, and was wiping her hands on a linen towel. "He will seize it, and we will go to war." She did not sound excited, but about to burst into tears. After a moment, she gathered her self and went on, "I was about your age, Conberge, when the Six Years' War ended. I remember the uncles and cousins you never got to know because they didn't come home from the war." Her voice broke. She did begin to cry.

Ealstan said, "Leofsig will fight for Forthweg. He won't be dragooned into Algarve's army, or Unkerlant's, either, the way so many Forthwegians were in the last war."