Out of the Darkness

“But isn’t that part of what being a marquis is about?” Merkela asked. “Even a son of a whore like Enkuru would do it every so often. ‘My people,’ he would call us, as if he owned us. But we liked to come into Priekule to listen to him. It gave us a break from what we did every day.”

Skarnu thought about that. Back in Priekule, nobles were common as dirt. Remembering some of the people in the capital, Skarnu knew the resemblance didn’t end there. And, with King Gainibu at the apex of the social hierarchy, one count or marquis more or less didn’t matter much.

Here in the countryside, things were different. People here won’t ever meet the king or even see him. So who’s at the top of the column, then? I am, by the powers above. I’m the one everybody’s going to be looking at.

Slowly, he nodded. “You’re right,” he told Merkela. “I’m going to have to get out there and show myself, even if I don’t much want to do it.”

“It needs doing,” she said seriously.

“All right,” Skarnu said. “But that means you’re going to have to get out and show yourself a lot, too. After all, you’re the main connection I’ve got to this part of the kingdom. You’re the one who’s lived here all her life. You’ll have to help me.”

Merkela had been smiling when she told Skarnu he’d need to face the people. The smile slipped when he suggested she needed to do it, too. The shoe pinched differently on her foot. Even if she needed a moment to gather herself, though, she nodded, too. Skarnu had expected that she would. He put his arm around her. Of one thing he was abundantly certain: she didn’t run away from anything.

Sabrino’s mother had died while he was fighting in the Six Years’ War. He’d got compassionate leave to go home and see her laid on her pyre, but he hadn’t been there during her last illness. His father had lived another fifteen years before passing away from a slow, painful wasting disease. He remembered going into the sickroom one day and realizing what he saw on the old man’s face was death.

He looked at Algarve now. What he saw on his kingdom’s face was death.

Not far west of his wing’s dragon farm, the last Algarvian army holding the Unkerlanter hordes back from Trapani was breaking up. That it was breaking up didn’t surprise him. If anything, the surprise lay in how long it had held together and how badly it had hurt Swemmel’s soldiers. His wing, with a paper strength of sixty-four dragons, had eight ready to fly right now. They’d flown and flown and flown. They’d done everything they could, despite exhaustion, despite being without cinnabar. Every Algarvian in uniform had done everything he could.

The kingdom was dying anyhow. Not enough Algarvians remained in uniform to matter.

“Maybe we ought to stand aside, surrender, let the Unkerlanters and the cursed islanders finish overrunning us,” Sabrino told Captain Orosio as they ate black bread and drank spirits in a miserable little tent that some pen-pushing idiot back in Trapani had surely recorded on a map as the headquarters of a full-strength wing. “Everything would be done then, and the kingdom wouldn’t get trampled like a naked man trying to stand up to a herd of behemoths.”

Orosio looked up from his mug. “Colonel, you’d better be careful what you say, and who you say it to,” he answered. “Even now-maybe especially now- you can’t talk about giving up. They’ll grab you for treason and blaze you.”

Sabrino’s laugh held all the bitterness in the world. “And much difference that would make, to me or to Algarve. I don’t think it’ll happen, anyhow. Mezentio was going to raise us to the powers above. Instead, he’s dropped us down to the powers below, and he won’t quit till they’ve eaten every fornicating one of us.” He took a swig. The spirits held out, if nothing else did. “Won’t be long now.”

“You can’t talk that way, sir.” Orosio sounded worried. “It really is treason.”

“Go ahead and report me, then. You’ll make yourself a hero, a hero of Algarve!” Sabrino said. “The king’ll pin the medal on you himself, and give you your very own wing. You too can command eight dragons, you poor, sorry sod. That’s half as many as a squadron is supposed to have, but who’s counting?”

“Sir, I think you’d better go to bed,” Orosio said stiffly. He would never report Sabrino, but the wing commander realized he’d pushed further than even his longtime comrade could go. With a sigh, Orosio asked, “What’s left for us now?”

“What?” Sabrino waved his hand. “Nothing.”

“No, sir.” The younger man sounded very sure. “We have to go on till we can’t go on any more. No point to quitting now, is there? We’ve come too far for that.”