She leaned down and kissed him. “Go to sleep now, sweetheart. Nothing’s going to happen till the morning.” Saxburh would, inevitably, wake up between now and then, but Ealstan couldn’t do anything about that.
When the baby did wake up, Ealstan didn’t even hear her cries; he kept on breathing deeply, not quite snoring, in the bed beside Vanai. His breathing didn’t change when she slid out of bed. She shook her head in bemusement. Back in the days when he’d gone to work and she’d had to stay in the flat for fear of being seized as a Kaunian, he’d often risen without waking her. Now the shoe was on the other foot.
Occasional flashes of light came through the shutters as Vanai changed Saxburh’s wet linen and put the baby to her breast: bursts of sorcerous energy, along with the fires those bursts could start. Those flashes meant men shrieking and buildings crashing to ruin, but they looked and sounded like nothing so much as a thunderstorm without the drumming rain.
Saxburh nursed. She burped. She went back to sleep without much fuss. Vanai laid her in the cradle, then lay down beside Ealstan. All sorts of questions filled her mind. Would this uprising do Forthweg any good? If it did, would Ealstan come through safe? The second mattered more to her than the first. If anything happened to Ealstan, she didn’t care what happened to Forthweg.
And then she fell asleep herself. No matter how worried about Ealstan she was, she couldn’t hold her eyes open another moment.
When she woke, it was beginning to get light outside. She found herself alone in bed. She hurried out to the kitchen. Ealstan had left a note behind. /hope I see you again soon, he’d written in classical Kaunian. Whatever happens, I shall love you as long as I live. She stared at that. Tears filled her eyes.
Saxburh chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. Vanai scooped her out of the cradle and sat down to give her her breakfast. As the baby began to nurse, they were both crying.
Ealstan wondered whether he’d been wise to go home during the lull in the fighting. He loved Vanai, and wanted to see her as much as he could. His new little daughter entranced him. But seeing them, while it reminded him of why he was fighting, also reminded him of how much he had to lose. He didn’t need that reminder, not if he was going to lay his life on the line against the redheads.
Leofsig did it, he thought. That brought his fury up to the proper pitch. If it hadn’t been for the Algarvians, his cousin Sidroc never would have quarreled either with him or with his brother. Ealstan hoped Sidroc was dead these days. If he wasn’t, he was still fighting in Plegmund’s Brigade on the Algarvian side. Recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade remained on some walls, though the Forthwegian rebels who held most of Eoforwic had whitewashed the greater number of them.
Ealstan picked his way through rubble up to the barricade of brickwork and boulders and benches behind which the rebels sheltered. A fellow named Beortwulf, who’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army and served as a captain here, nodded to him. “Pretty quiet right now. The redheads have been busy further west.” He pointed across the Twegen before continuing, “To them, we’re an afterthought. They’re really sweating about Swemmel’s men.”
“Afterthought, eh?” Ealstan bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “Let’s seem ‘em try moving men through Eoforwic and call us an afterthought.”
“Something to that,” Beortwulf agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below can eat Algarve and Unkerlant both.”
“Aye.” Ealstan nodded. “It’d make things a lot easier for Forthweg, that’s certain.”
Before Beortwulf could answer, a runner called Ealstan’s name. When he admitted to being in the neighborhood, the fellow said, “Come on with me. The big boss wants to have a chat with you.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Ealstan said. “Suppose I don’t feel like talking to him?” But he followed the man deeper into Eoforwic, to find out what Pybba had in mind. Whatever it was, the Algarvians wouldn’t like it.
Pybba still worked out of the pottery, and ran the rebellion from there as he’d run the underground before seizing the chance to strike at Mezentio’s men. The Algarvians still hadn’t figured out who their chief tormentor was. Had they done so, eggs would surely have smashed Pybba’s establishment to potsherds.
“What now?” Ealstan asked when he came into Pybba’s sanctum. “Do you want me to cast accounts for you?”
“I’d ask you to if I didn’t have something better for you to do,” the pottery magnate replied with a laugh. He turned to the two Forthwegians already in the room with him and said, “Here’s the clever lad who figured out how to make us look like Algarvians when we need to.”
Both the other Forthwegians were in their mid-to late thirties: old men, Ealstan thought uncharitably. Then he took a second look at them and realized either one could tear him to pieces without breaking a sweat. He prudently kept his unkind thought to himself. Pybba’s pals were looking him over, too. One of them said, “I suppose he’ll have to come along, then. He looks like he might be able to cut it.”
“He’s already got himself an Algarvian stick,” the other noted, approval in his voice.
Ealstan refused to let himself be baited. He also refused to show undue curiosity, no matter what he felt. He just nodded to Pybba and said, “Tell me what you need me to do.”
Pybba nodded, too. So did the other two, unnamed, Forthwegians. The one who’d spoken first said, “Kid sounds like he’s got his head on straight. He may do.”
“He’s got gall,” Pybba said, high praise from him. He turned back to Ealstan. “The redheads are still hanging on to the royal palace and the ley-line caravan depot and one ley-line route through Eoforwic. That lets ‘em ship some men west, and it lets ‘em give us a hard time. If their military governor all of a sudden came down with a slight case of loss of life…”
“Ah.” Ealstan nodded again, doing his best to stay dispassionate. “You’ll have the right kind of Algarvian uniforms to let us get away with a masquerade?”
“Kid’s no dummy, sure enough,” one of the-assassins?-said to his comrade. The fellow suddenly switched to unaccented Algarvian: “You understand me, kid? Can you talk like this, too?”
“I understand,” Ealstan answered in the same language. “If I talk much, I give us away. I do not talk well.”
“Could be worse,” the other Forthwegian said. “All right, you’ll be junior to us. We’ll do the talking. At least you’ll know what’s going on. How long does your fancy spell hold?”
“Six or eight hours,” Ealstan said.
That seemed to please both of the men in the office with Pybba and him, and the pottery magnate as well. “Plenty of time,” Pybba said. “You can get into your new clothes just before sunup and sneak into Algarvian territory, do what you want to do, and then lie up somewhere till you can get back to our lines.”
“Why lie up?” Ealstan asked. “Why not hustle back to our lines?”
“Ha! You don’t think of everything after all,” one of the rough men said. “We hustle back looking like redheads, our fornicating pals’ll fornicating blaze us before we can tell ‘em who we are.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ealstan said. “I can turn us back as easy as I can make us look like Algarvians.” Everyone else beamed; maybe he hadn’t mentioned that part of the sorcery to Pybba before.
Before sunrise the next morning, Ealstan put on an Algarvian sergeant’s uniform, while his comrades-he still didn’t know their names-donned the clothes of a captain and a major. Ealstan had to fiddle with his cantrip a little to shift it from first person to third so it would work on the other two men. He cast it twice in quick succession, and the other two men took on the appearance of the enemy. Then he used the original version on himself. A grunt from one of the others told him it had worked; he couldn’t sense it on himself, any more than Vanai could tell that she looked like a Forthwegian after casting her own disguising spell.