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By the time he got to the top, he wasn't smiling anymore. When Vanai opened the door to let him in, he thrust the letter into her hand. She quickly read it, then let out a long sigh. "I wish I were sorrier to hear they'd caught my grandfather," she said at last. "He was a fine scholar."

"Is that all you have to say?" Ealstan asked.

"It's bad luck to speak ill of the dead," she answered, "so I said what good I could." Brivibas had raised Vanai from the time she was small; Ealstan knew as much. He didn't know what had estranged them, and wondered if he ever would. Later that evening, he found his father's letter, a balled-up wad of paper, in the wastebasket. Whatever her reasons, Vanai meant them.

***

Lieutenant Recared's whistle squealed. "Forward!" the young officer shouted.

"Forward!" Sergeant Leudast echoed, though without the accompaniment of the whistle.

"Urra!" the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted, and forward they went. They'd been going forward ever since they cut off the redheads down in Sulingen, and Leudast saw no reason they shouldn't keep right on going forward till they ran King Mezentio out of his palace in Trapani.

He had no sure notion of where Trapani was. Until Swemmel's impressers hauled him into the army, he'd known only his own village not too far west of the border with Forthweg and the nearby market town. He'd seen a lot more of the world since, but few pleasant places in it.

The village ahead didn't look very pleasant. It did have one thing in common with Trapani, wherever Trapani was: it was full of Algarvians. Mezentio's soldiers had never quit fighting through their long, hard retreat from southern Unkerlant; they simply hadn't had the manpower to hold back the Unkerlanters over a broad front. In any one skirmish, though, there was no guarantee Leudast and his countrymen would come out on top.

That thought crossed Leudast's mind even before eggs started bursting among the advancing Unkerlanters. He threw himself down in the snow, cursing as he dove: nobody had told him the Algarvians had a couple of egg-tossers in the village. Some of his men dove for cover, too. Some- the new recruits, mostly- kept running forward in spite of the eggs. A lot of them went down, too, as if a scythe had sliced through them at harvest time. Their shrieks and wails rose above the roar of the bursting eggs.

Algarvian pickets in carefully chosen hidey-holes in front of the village blazed at Leudast and his comrades. "Sir," he shouted to Lieutenant Recared, who sprawled behind a rock not far away, "I don't know if we can pry them out of there by ourselves."

At the start of the winter campaign, Recared would have called him a coward and might have had him blazed. They'd been ordered to take the village, and orders, to Recared, might have been handed down by the powers above. But action had taught the company commander a couple of things. He pointed off to the left, to the west. "We don't have to do it by ourselves. We've got behemoths for company."