His boots squelched in mud. Fall and winter were the rainy season in Eoforwic, as in the rest of Forthweg. At least I won’t have to worry much about snow, the way the Unkerlanters would if they were back home, Ealstan thought.

He spotted a mushroom, pale against the dark dirt of another muddy patch, and stooped to pick it. Like all Forthwegians, like all the Kaunians in Forthweg-- and emphatically unlike the Algarvian occupiers--he was wild for mushrooms of all sorts. He suddenly shook his head and straightened up. He was wild for mushrooms of almost all sorts. This one, though, could stay where it was. He knew a destroying power when he saw one. His father Hestan, back in Gromheort, had used direct and often painful methods to make sure he could tell a good mushroom from a poisonous one.

I wish the redheads liked mushrooms, he thought. Maybe one of them would pick that one and kill himself.

Algarvians directed Forthwegians hauling rubble to shore up the defenses against the Unkerlanter attack everyone in the city knew was coming. Forthwegian women in armbands of blue and white--Hilde’s Helpers, they called themselves-- brought food to the redheads, but not to their countrymen, who were working harder. Ealstan scowled at the women. They were the female equivalent of the men of Plegmund’s Brigade: Forthwegians who fought for King Mezentio of Algarve. His cousin Sidroc fought in Plegmund’s Brigade if he hadn’t been killed yet. Ealstan hoped he had.

Instead of joining the Forthwegian laborers as he often did, Ealstan turned away toward the center of town. He hadn’t been there for a while: not since he and a couple of other Forthwegians teamed up to assassinate an Algarvian official. They’d worn Algarvian uniforms to do it, and they’d been otherwise disguised, too.