Out of the Darkness

“Ah,” Sidroc said, and smiled. He hadn’t thought of that. He and the ruffian had been giving each other a hard time for a couple of years. Now, at last, he had the upper hand. Of course, if he rode Ceorl too hard, he was liable to end up dead in the attack on the bridgehead regardless of whether the Unkerlanters blazed him. Neither the Phalanx of Valmiera nor Plegmund’s Brigade worried overmuch about keeping hard cases from their ranks.

When Sidroc got back to his squad-his squad indeed, now-Ceorl greeted him with, “Well, here’s a fine outfit ruined.”

“Plegmund’s Brigade’s been in trouble ever since it took you in,” Sidroc retorted. But he went on, “We may be ruined, if we really do have to try and smash the Unkerlanter bridgehead. It won’t be easy. That job never is.”

Lieutenant Puliano hadn’t been joking. Sidroc wished it were otherwise. He didn’t get so much as the chance to sew his new insignia of rank to his tunic before he and the men with him got ordered forward. Some behemoths came with them. The beasts wore snowshoes to help them get over and through the drifts: an Unkerlanter notion that had dreadfully embarrassed the Algarvians the first winter of the war, and that Mezentio’s men had since stolen. Seeing behemoths with Algarvians aboard them raised Sidroc’s spirits. It proved the redheads were serious about this attack.

They also brought up egg-tossers to pound the Unkerlanter positions on the east side of the Skamandros. The pounding didn’t last long. All too soon, officers’ whistles shrilled. “Forward!” Puliano shouted, along with his fellow commanders. To his credit, he went forward, too. Algarvian officers led from the front, one reason Mezentio’s men needed so many replacements.

Sidroc ran past a few dead and dying Unkerlanters whose blood stained the snow. For a heady moment, he thought the attack might have surprised Swemmel’s soldiers. Then they struck back. Dragons-some of them painted Yaninan red and white-streaked over from the west side of the river. The Algarvians didn’t have nearly enough beasts in the air to hold them off. Despite the Algarvian behemoths stiffening the attack, far more Unkerlanter animals trudged forward to oppose them. As always, the Unkerlanters turned a bridgehead into a spiky hedgehog as fast as they could.

This time, they didn’t wait for the Algarvians to start killing Kaunians or Yaninans before striking back in kind. The ground shuddered beneath Sidroc’s feet. Violet flames shot up from it. Men shrieked. Behemoths bellowed in mortal agony. And, when the Algarvian mages did resort to their own murderous magic, it was to defend against what Swemmel’s sorcerers were doing, not to aid in the attack.

Crouching behind a great gray stone, Sidroc called out to Puliano: “We cannot do this.”

“We have to,” the Algarvian lieutenant answered. “If we don’t, they’ll futter us later.”

“If we do, they will futter us now,” Sidroc retorted.

He hoped Puliano would tell him he was full of nonsense, but the redheaded veteran only grimaced. Another attack did go in. The Unkerlanters held it off and beat it back. After that, sullenly, the Algarvians-and the Forthwegians and Valmierans and Grelzers and the handful of Yaninans who couldn’t stomach serving Swemmel-drew back. Sidroc knew what that meant. It meant trouble; Puliano was dead right. And it means we aren’t strong enough to stop the trouble, he thought. He shrugged a broad-shouldered shrug. He’d been in a lot of trouble in this war. What was once more?

In all his life, Garivald had never gone through-had, in fact, never imagined- a winter without snow. He came from a little village called Zossen, down in the Duchy of Grelz. Blizzards there were so much a fact of life that every peasant hut had its doorway facing north or northeast, away from the direction from which the bad weather was likeliest to come. Even in his time as an irregular in the woods west of Herborn, the Grelzer capital, he’d known no different winters. Zossen, these days, no longer existed. The Algarvians had made a stand there when Unkerlanter armies fought their way back into Grelz, and nothing was left of the village or of the family Garivald had had there. And Swemmel’s impressers, a few months later, had efficiently dragged him into the army, even though he and Obilot, the woman with whom he’d taken up while in the irregulars, were working an abandoned farm well away from any other village.

An Algarvian egg burst, not too far from Garivald’s hole in the ground in the Unkerlanter bridgehead south of Eoforwic. No snow here: just rain through the fall and into the winter. People had told Garivald it would be like that, but he hadn’t believed it till he saw it himself.