"Do I have to tell you again that everything you say will be remembered?" Tantris asked.
"Do you care to remember that I told you the truth?" Garivald answered. He stepped up his pace. Tantris didn't try to stay with him.
He caught up with Obilot just as the sun came red over the horizon. Her eyes, he thought, shone brighter than it did. "We did well there, even if they were only Grelzers," she said.
"Aye." Garivald nodded. Her words weren't much different from what Tantris had given him, but warmed him far more. He could have done without the regular's approval; at times, he would gladly have done without the regular altogether. But what Obilot thought mattered to him. All at once, hardly thinking what he was doing, he reached out and took her hand.
She blinked. Garivald waited to see what would happen next. If she decided she didn't like that, she was liable to do something much more emphatic than just telling him so. But she let his hand stay in hers. All she said was, "Took you long enough."
"I wanted to be sure," he answered, though he'd been anything but. Then he took his hand away, not wanting to push too hard.
The band got back under the trees without having lost a man- or a woman, either. Garivald left sentries behind to warn of a Grelzer counterattack if one came. The rest of the irregulars returned to the clearing for as much of a celebration as they could manage, though a lot of them wanted nothing but sleep.
Garivald caught Obilot's eye again. He wandered into the woods. If she followed, she did. If she didn't… He shrugged. Pushing Obilot when she didn't care to be pushed was a good way to end up dead.
But she did follow. When they found a tiny clearing far enough from the main one, they paused and looked at each other. "Are you sure?" Garivald asked. He'd been away from his wife and family for more than a year. Obilot nodded. He thought she had no family left alive, though he wasn't sure. He took her in his arms. None of what they said to each other after that had anything to do with words.
Flying over the plains of southern Unkerlant, Count Sabrino felt a strong sense of having done all this before. By the way things looked, the war against Unkerlant, the war the Algarvians had thought they would win in the first campaigning season, would go on forever.
His mouth twisted. Appearances were liable to be deceiving, but not in the way for which his countrymen would have hoped. If they'd broken through to Cottbus, if they'd broken past Sulingen, maybe even if they'd torn the heart from the Unkerlanter defenses in the Durrwangen bulge…
But they hadn't. They hadn't done any of those things. And how many Algarvian behemoths lay rotting on the battlefields of the Durrwangen salient? Sabrino couldn't have said, not to the closest hundred, not even to the closest five hundred, not to save his own life. But he knew the answer just the same. Too many.
These days, the Algarvians had to hold on tightly to the behemoths they had left. If they incautiously threw them away, they'd have none at all. Oh, that wasn't quite true- but it came all too close. And it would be at least another year, more likely two or three, before new beasts came off the breeding farms in anything like adequate numbers.
Meanwhile… Meanwhile, the Unkerlanters still had behemoths and to spare. And they handled them better than they had when the war was new. Why not? Sabrino thought bitterly. They've spent the past two years learning from us.
They had behemoths. More came from their breeding farms in a steady stream. How many breeding farms did they have, there in the far west beyond the reach of any Algarvian dragon? Those same two words formed again in Sabrino's mind. Too many. They had footsoldiers in endless profusion, too. And they had mages willing to be as ruthless as- maybe more ruthless than- any who served King Mezentio.
No wonder, then, that Sabrino was flying a good deal north and east of Durrwangen these days. The Unkerlanters were the ones moving forward now, his own countrymen the ones who tried to slow them, tried to stop them, tried to turn them back. He wished they would have had more luck at it.
The Algarvians did have a counterattack going in now, a blow at the flank of an advancing Unkerlanter column. Sabrino knew a certain somber pride as he watched the footsoldiers down there far below crumple up the Unkerlanters. They were still better versed in the art of war than King Swemmel's men. Where they gained anything close to local equality, they could still drive the foe before them.
He spoke into his crystaclass="underline" "Forward! If we take out their egg-tossers, our boys may be able to pin the Unkerlanters against the river and do a proper job of chewing them up."
Captain Orosio said, "Can't hurt to try. Sooner or later, we've got to stop these bastards. Might as well be now."
"That's right. We've got the edge here. We'd better take advantage of it." Sabrino said nothing of conquest. He said nothing of driving the enemy back to Durrwangen, let alone to Sulingen or Cottbus. His horizons had contracted. A local victory, an advance here instead of a retreat, would do well enough for now.
He spotted the egg-tossers in what had been a field of rye but was now overgrown and full of weeds. The dragonfliers of his wing behind him, he dove on them. For a few splendid minutes, everything went the way it had back in the first days of the war. One after another, the Algarvians released their eggs and then rose into the sky once more. Looking over his shoulder, Sabrino saw the bursts of sorcerous energy send the enemy egg-tossers and their crews flying in ruin.
"That's the way to do it," he said. The enemy would have a harder time hurting the Algarvian soldiers on the ground. He and his wing flew on toward the west, gaining height. There was the river, sure enough. He spoke into the crystal again: "We'll turn around and flame the crews we might have missed with our eggs. Then back to the dragon farm and we'll get ourselves some rest."
Rest. He laughed. He had trouble remembering what the word meant. He patted the scaly side of his dragon's neck. The vicious, stupid beast had trouble remembering, too. Of course, it had trouble remembering everything.
No sooner had that thought struck him than he spied the Unkerlanter dragons winging their way up out of the south, straight for his wing. They were very fast and flew in good formation- some of Swemmel's top dragon-fliers, mounted on prime beasts. It was an honor of sorts, though one Sabrino could have done without. He shouted into the crystal, warning his men.
The Unkerlanters had the advantage of numbers and the advantage of height, as well as the advantage of fresh dragons. All Sabrino and his men had left to them was the advantage of skill. Up till now, it had always sufficed to let them hurt the foe worse than he hurt them, to bring most of them back safe to whichever dragon farm they were using that day.
"One more time, by the powers above," Sabrino said, and swung his dragon toward the closest Unkerlanter. However weary it was, it still hated its own kind; its scream of rage proved as much.
Sabrino blazed one of King Swemmel's dragonfliers off the back of his mount. The dragon, without control, went wild and struck out at the beast closest to it, which was also painted Unkerlanter rock-gray. Sabrino whooped. He'd just made life harder for the foe.
And then his own dragon twisted and convulsed beneath him, bellowing in the agony he'd inflicted on so many of his enemies. While he'd been dealing with the foe in front of him, he'd let an Unkerlanter dragon get close enough to his rear to flame. In any sort of even fight, it would have been a rookie mistake. Outnumbered as his countrymen were, it had to happen every so often. So he told himself, at any rate. Excuses aside, though, it was liable to kill him.
His dragon, he saw at once, wouldn't be able to stay in the air. He looked back. Sure enough, its right wing was badly burned. The only consolation he could draw was that it didn't plummet to earth at once, which would have put an immediate end to his career, too.