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Raniero's name was the password that got Leudast taken from division headquarters to army headquarters to a battered firstman's house in a village that looked to have changed hands a good many times. The soldier who came out of the house had iron-gray hair and big stars on the collar tabs of his tunic. Marshal Rathar eyed the captive, nodded, and told Leudast, "That's Raniero, all right."

Leudast saluted. "Aye, sir," he said.

Rathar seemed to forget about him then. He spoke to Raniero in Algarvian, and King Mezentio's cousin answered in the same language. But Rathar wasn't one to forget his own men for long. After giving Raniero what looked like a sympathetic pat on the back, he turned to Leudast and asked, "And what do you expect for bringing this fellow in, eh, Sergeant?"

"Sir, whatever seems right to you," Leudast answered. "I've figured you were fair-minded ever since we fought side by side for a little while up in the Zuwayzi desert." He didn't expect the marshal to remember him, but he wanted Rathar to know they'd met before. And he added, "Kiun here was the one who first recognized him."

"A pound of gold and sergeant's rank for him. And, Lieutenant Leudast, how does five pounds of gold on top of a promotion sound for you?" Rathar asked.

Leudast had expected gold, though he'd thought one pound likelier than five for himself. The promotion was a delightful surprise. "Me?" he squeaked. "An officer?" Officer's rank wasn't quite so much the preserve of bluebloods in Unkerlant's army as in Algarve's- King Swemmel had killed too many nobles to make that practical- but it wasn't something to which a peasant could normally aspire, either. "An officer," Leudast repeated. If I live through the war, I've got it made, he thought dizzily. If.

***

Vanai had heard that there came a time when a woman actually enjoyed carrying a child. During the first third of her pregnancy, she wouldn't have believed it, not for anything. When she hadn't been nauseated, she'd been exhausted; sometimes she'd been both at once. Her breasts had pained her all the time. There had been days when she'd not cared to do anything but lie on her back with her tunic off and with a bucket beside her.

This middle stretch seemed better, though. She could eat anything. She could clean her teeth without wondering if she would lose what she'd eaten last. She didn't feel as if she needed to prop her eyelids open with little sticks.

And the baby moving inside her was something she never took for granted. Maybe, in a way, Ealstan had been right: no matter how emphatically she'd known before that she was with child, its kicks and pokes did make that undeniably real, the more so as they got stronger and more vigorous with each passing week.

And… "Just as well I'm Thelberge in a Forthwegian-style tunic these days," she told Ealstan over supper one evening. "If I still wore trousers, I'd have to buy new ones, because I wouldn't be able to fit into the ones I had been wearing anymore."