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A youth waved a news sheet in his face. "Algarvians smash Unkerlanter drive south of Durrwangen!" he cried. The news sheets, of course, printed only what King Mezentio's ministers wanted Valmiera to hear. They'd stopped talking about Sulingen, for instance, as soon as the battle there was lost. They made the victories they reported these days sound like splendid triumphs instead of the desperate defensive struggles they had to be.

Skarnu strode past the vendor without a word, without even shaking his head. He turned a corner and then another and another and another, picking right or left at random each time. If the Algarvians came bursting out of the block of flats hot on his trail, they wouldn't have an easy time following him. He chuckled. He didn't know himself where he was going, so why should the redheads?

That didn't stay funny long, though. He had to pause and get his bearings- not easy in Ventspils, since he didn't know the town well. In Priekule, he could have looked for the Kaunian Column of Victory. That would have told him where in the city he was… till the Algarvians knocked it down. The victory it celebrated was one the Kaunian Empire had won over the barbarous Algarvic tribes- a victory that still rankled the tribesmen's barbarous descendants more than a millennium and a half later.

Though he took longer than he should have, he finally did figure out where he was. Then he needed to figure out where to go. That had only one answer, really: the tavern called the Lion and the Mouse. But the answer wasn't so good, either. Were the Algarvians after him in particular, or were they trying to smash all the resistance in Ventspils? If the former, they might know nothing of the tavern. If the latter, they were liable to be waiting in force around or inside it.

He muttered under his breath. A woman passing by gave him a curious look. He stared back so stonily, she hurried on her way as if she'd never looked at him at all. Maybe she thought him a madman or a derelict. As long as she didn't think him one of the handful who kept the fight against Algarve alive, he cared nothing for her opinion.

I've got to go, he realized. The Lion and the Mouse was the only place where he could hope to meet other irregulars. They could find him somewhere else to stay or spirit him out of Ventspils altogether. Without them… Skarnu didn't want to think about that. One man alone was one man helpless.

He approached the tavern with all the caution he'd learned as a captain in the Valmieran army- before the Algarvians used dragons and behemoths to smash that army into isolated chunks and then beat it. He couldn't see anything that looked particularly dangerous around the place. He wished Raunu, his veteran sergeant, were still with him. Having been in the army as long as Skarnu was alive, Raunu knew far more about soldiering than Skarnu had learned in something under a year. But Skarnu was a marquis and Raunu the son of a sausage seller, so Skarnu had led the company of which they'd both been part.