Through the Darkness

“No,” Vanai said, and handed him one of the glasses. She raised the other. “Here’s to your sister. May she be happy.”

“Aye. Conberge deserves to be happy.” Ealstan drank. The wine was nowhere near so fine as the fancy vintages Ethelhelm served, but it would do. He finished reading the letter, then winced in sympathy. “My father says he and my mother are just rattling around in the house. They never expected it to empty out so soon.”

Vanai stepped up and held him for a moment. He’d had to flee Gromheort, his brother was dead--at least Conberge had left the way she should have.

And something else occurred to him: something, he realized, he should have thought of quite a while before. He slipped his arm around Vanai. “I wish I could marry you properly,” he said. “If I ever get the chance, I will, I promise.”

She looked up at him and started to cry. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. Vanai spent the rest of the night finding ways to show him he hadn’t.

Down below Sabrino, Heshbon burned. In a few spots among the ruins, Algarvian and Yaninan holdouts still struggled against the advancing Lagoan army. Most of the men who’d survived the sorcerous debacle in the land of the Ice People, though, had long since surrendered.

Being a dragonflier, Sabrino enjoyed more choices than surrender or hopeless resistance. Along with his wing, along with all the dragons on the austral continent, he’d been recalled to Derlavai. The order still left him more than a little startled. He’d expected King Mezentio to send another army across the Narrow Sea to take the place of the one his mages, in their bloodthirsty arrogance, had thrown away. But the king had chosen to cut his losses instead. That wasn’t like Mezentio. It wasn’t like him at all. Sabrino wondered what had happened in Trapani to persuade Mezentio to take such a course.

He’d find out before long. His wing was ordered to the great dragon farm outside the capital of Algarve: they’d get their next assignment there. He assumed they would also get a few days of rest and recuperation, during which he intended to learn all he could. He knew he had a lot of catching up to do; down on the austral continent, he might as well have been cut off from what went on in the wider world.

His dragon eagerly flew north over the gray-green waters of the Narrow Sea: toward the sun, toward the warmth, toward civilization--though of course the beast cared nothing for that last. Sabrino glanced back over his shoulder. No, the Lagoans and Kuusamans weren’t pursuing. They kept on pounding Heshbon with eggs. If the Algarvians wanted to leave the land of the Ice People, they would let them.

Before long, Sabrino spied a black line ahead: land crawling up over the edge of the world to mar the smooth horizon between land and sea. The swamps and forests of southern Algarve, though the homeland of his folk, were not the part of the kingdom of which he was fondest. They’d always struck him as dull and gloomy. No wonder the ancient Algarvic tribes had waged endless war against the Kaunian Empire--the Kaunians held most of the land worth living in.

Sabrino wasn’t in the habit of talking to his dragon, as leviathan-riders often did with their beasts; he knew too well that dragons neither knew nor cared about words. But he broke his own rule now, saying, “Do you know, after the land of the Ice People this doesn’t look so bad.”

In among the woods and the swamps, farmers grew turnips and parsnips and beets, and grain along with them. Little by little, the trees thinned out, the land got drier, and fields of wheat and barley supplanted the root crops. With every few miles farther north Sabrino flew, the greens of growing things got brighter.

Trapani lay still within the swampy belt, but toward its northern edge. One after another, the dragons in Sabrino’s wing spiraled down out of the sky. Handlers took charge of them, exclaiming at how thin and ill-used they were.

Tapping himself on the chest, waving toward his weary men, Sabrino demanded, “And how ill-used do you think we are?” The handlers stared at him. That a dragonflier could be as ill-used as a dragon had never crossed their minds.

One of them asked, “Colonel, uh, lord Count”--Sabrino, as usual, wore his badge of nobility on his tunic--”what went wrong, down there in the land of the Ice People?”

It was a good question. Sabrino pondered it for a moment, then answered, “We did.” The handler started to ask him something more. He pushed past the fellow and strode toward the commandant’s office.

He got no satisfaction there. A captain told him, “I’m very sorry, sir, but General Borso didn’t come in today, due to an unfortunate indisposition.”

In bed with his mistress, or with a hangover? Sabrino wondered. He was almost indiscreet enough to do his wondering out loud. In the end, all he asked was, “Have you any idea why we were summoned home from the austral continent?”