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"As you say, your Majesty." Rathar knew there were traitors aplenty in Grelz. His men had already run up against Grelzer soldiers: men of good Unkerlanter blood wearing dark green tunics and fighting for Raniero, the Algarvian puppet king. Some of those companies and battalions broke and fled when the first eggs burst near them. Some fought his men harder and with more grim determination than any Algarvians. That was what Swemmel's reign had sown, and what it now reaped.

If Swemmel himself realized as much, he gave no sign of it. "Carry on, then, Marshal," he said. "Purify the land. Purify it with fire and water and sweet-edged steel." Before Rathar could answer, the king's image disappeared. The crystal flared and then became nothing but an inert globe of glass.

"Do you require any other connections, lord Marshal?" the crystallomancer asked.

"What?" Rathar said absently. Then he shook his head. "No. Not right now."

He took his umbrella and left the ruined house where the crystallomancer had set up shop. Rain thrummed on the umbrella's canvas when he stepped outside. His boots squelched in mud. Two years before, the fall rains and mud had slowed Mezentio's men on their drive toward Cottbus. Now they slowed the Unkerlanters in their assault on the invaders. Rain and mud were impartial. Curse them, Rathar thought, squelching again.

Every house in this village was wrecked, to a greater or lesser degree. The Algarvians had fought hard to hold the place before sullenly, stubbornly withdrawing. Curse them, too, Rathar thought. Nothing in this summer's drive toward the east had been easy. The redheads never had enough men or behemoths or dragons to halt his men for long, but they always knew what to do with the ones they had. Despite the rain, the stench of death was strong here.

Eggs burst, somewhere not far away. No, the redheads hadn't given up, nor the Grelzers they led, either. If they could stop the Unkerlanters, they would. And if they couldn't, they would make King Swemmel's soldiers pay the highest possible price for going forward. He'd seen that, too.

"Urra!" a peasant shouted as Rathar walked down the street toward what had probably been the firstman's house. Rathar nodded at him and went on. The peasant was gray-haired and limped. Maybe he'd been wounded in the Six Years' War. That might keep Swemmel's impressers from hauling him into the army once the front moved a little farther east. The younger, haler men in the village, though, those of them that were left, would probably be wearing rock-gray and carrying sticks before long.

Those of them that were left. A sour expression on his face, Rathar surveyed the village. Aye, it had been fought over. But he'd been through plenty of other villages that had been fought over. Once the fighting was over, the peasants came back from wherever they'd been hiding and got on with their lives. Here in Grelz, a lot of them didn't. A lot of them fled east with the retreating Algarvians. He'd seen some of that before, in lands to the south and west. He'd never seen it to the degree he was seeing it here, however.