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"Easier for both sides," Tantris said. "When it's mud, we've got the edge on the redheads."

"Oh, aye, no doubt," Garivald agreed. "We can move a little, and the stinking Algarvians can hardly move at all."

He'd intended that for sarcasm, but Tantris took him literally and nodded. "If you can get any kind of advantage, no matter how small, you grab it with both hands," he said. "That's how you win."

For once, Obilot agreed with him. "We have the best chance to hurt the Algarvians now," she told Garivald inside the tent the two of them had started sharing. "The real army is getting close. Mezentio's whoresons will be careless of us. They'll have bigger things, worse things, on their minds."

"Aye." Garivald knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn't help it. If the army wasn't so far away from here, it was even closer to Zossen… Zossen, where his wife and son and daughter lived. One of these days, he would have to go back, which meant that one of these days there would be no place for Obilot in his life.

He reached for her. She came to him, a smile on her face. They made love under a couple of blankets; it was cold in the tent, and getting colder. At the moment when she stiffened and shuddered and her arms tightened around him, she whispered his name with a kind of wonder in her voice he'd never heard from anyone else. He missed his wife and children, but he would miss her, too, if this ever had to end.

Afterwards, he asked her, "Do you think about what life will be like once the army takes back all of Grelz?"

"When there's no more need for irregulars, you mean?" she asked, and he nodded. She shrugged. "No, not very much. What's the point? I haven't got anything to go back to. Everything I had once upon a time, the redheads smashed."

Garivald still didn't know what she'd had. He supposed she'd been a wife, as Annore was his wife back in Zossen. Maybe she'd been a mother, too. And maybe it wasn't just her family that didn't exist anymore. Maybe it was her whole village. The Algarvians had never been shy about giving out lessons like that.

"Curse them," he muttered.

"We'll do worse than curse them," Obilot answered, "or maybe better. We'll hurt them instead." She spoke of that with a savage relish at least as passionate as anything she'd said while she lay in his arms.

And she left the woods the next morning to go spy out the roads and the nearby villages. Both the Algarvians and the Grelzers paid less attention to women than they did to men. In a way, that made sense, for more women were less dangerous than most men. But Obilot was different from most women.

When she came back the next day, excitement glowed on her face. "We can hurt them," she said. "We can hurt them badly. They're mustering at Pirmasens for a strike against the head of the column of regulars moving east."

That made Tantris' eyes glow. "Aye, that's what we'll do," he said. "That's what we're for."