Through the Darkness

From behind another tree, he heard a snicker. Obilot stepped out. She’d been on sentry-go; she had a stick in her hand. “I’ve seen that done better,” she said. “You looked as clumsy as a redhead there.”

Having just quarreled with Munderic, Garivald found himself in a sour mood. Instead of laughing at himself, as he usually would have, he growled, “And if you’d put your foot where I did, you’d look even clumsier.”

Obilot glared at him. “I got out here without slipping and sliding like an otter going down a bank.”

Garivald glared back. He bowed low, almost as if he were an Algarvian and not a poorly shaved Unkerlanter peasant in a dirty tunic and muddy felt boots a couple of sizes too big. “I’m so sorry, milady. We can’t all be as beautiful and graceful as you.”

Obilot went white. When she started to swing the business end of her stick toward him, he realized that was killing rage. She realized it a moment later, and lowered the stick before Garivald had to decide whether to try to jump her or to dive behind the tree he’d grabbed.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she whispered, very likely more to herself than to him. She took a deep breath, and got back a little color. When she spoke again, she did aim her words at him: “Be thankful you don’t know what you’re talking about. Be thankful you don’t know where I’ve heard things like that before.”

She never had said much to him about what had driven her into the irregulars. “Something to do with one of Mezentio’s men,” he guessed.

Her nod was jerky. “Aye. Something.” Her voice made the cutting wind seem a warm breeze out of the north. “Something.” She gestured with the stick again, this time in a peremptory way. “Go on. Leave me in peace. Peace!” She laughed. Garivald all but fled.

Compared to facing Obilot, going out and trying to sabotage an Algarvian-held ley line seemed safe and easy to Garivald. Or it would have, had she not been one of the irregulars coming along on the raid. Garivald stayed as far away from her as he could.

He also wanted to stay away from Sadoc. Since the would-be mage and Obilot wouldn’t stay close to each other, Garivald had to balance repulsions as best he could.

Munderic was blind to all that. He had other things to worry about. “Careful with the eggs,” he kept telling the irregulars who carried them. “If you’re not careful, we’ll all end up very unhappy.”

Where the eggs had come from, Garivald didn’t know. They appeared in the camp every so often, almost as if they were magicked into being. They had plenty of magic inside them; Garivald knew that. The characters on their cases weren’t in Unkerlanter. He couldn’t read, but he could recognize the characters of his own language. If these weren’t Unkerlanter, they had to be Algarvian. Had Munderic stolen them out from under the redheads’ noses? Or had the Algarvians given them to puppet King Raniero’s Grelzer troops, with a Grelzer soldier friendlier than he seemed passing them on to the irregulars?

Asking Munderic struck Garivald as more trouble than it was worth. He and the leader of the band had dickered too often to make him think he would get a straight answer. He slogged along down the muddy path under the ever barer branches of the trees.

And then, quite suddenly, the irregulars weren’t under the shelter of the trees any more, but tramping up the path through an overgrown meadow that hadn’t been grazed for at least a year. Munderic waved the men with the eggs-- and a good many others with them--off the path and into the grass. “Have a care, lads,” he said. “The redheads have gone to burying eggs in the roadway again.”

That made several more irregulars skitter off the track. Then Obilot spoke up, her voice a clear bell in the darkness: “Sometimes they bury eggs alongside the roads, too, to get the clever buggers who know enough to get off onto the safe ground--only it isn’t.”

Sadoc said, “I’ll douse out any eggs; see if I don’t.” Carrying a forked stick, he strode boldly down the middle of the road, as if daring an Algarvian egg to burst under him.

“If he doesn’t douse out an egg, we’ll see it, all right,” Garivald murmured to another irregular nearby. The fellow chuckled, though it was funny only in a grisly way. Garivald didn’t think Sadoc could find the sun at noon, with or without a dowsing rod, but he held his tongue. If Sadoc proved him right, everyone would know about it.

He tramped along under the dark, moonless sky. Nights grew ever longer. That gave the irregulars an advantage they lacked in summertime: they could travel farther under cover of darkness at this season of the year. If he were back in Zossen now, he would be wondering if he had enough jars of spirits to keep him drunk through most of the winter. Unless this winter were very different from any that had gone before, he would have enough, too.