A farmer looked up from the field he was cultivating as Rollant’s company marched past. He was old and stooped with endless years of labor; otherwise he probably would have been fighting for Geoffrey, too. Shaking his fist at the men in gray, he shouted, “By the seven hells, why don’t you sons of bitches get on home and leave us alone? We never done nothing to you.”

Rollant pushed his way to the edge of the company so the farmer could see him. “Say that again!” he called to the northern man. “Go ahead-try and make me believe it. I could use a good laugh.”

“You!” The fellow shook his fist again. “Wasn’t for your kind, we wouldn’t have no trouble. I hope the Lion God bites your balls off, you stinking runaway.”

Rollant started to bring up his bow and pull back the string, then checked himself and laughed instead. “What’s funny?” Smitty asked him. “Nobody would’ve blamed you for shooting that bugger.”

“I was just thinking-he hasn’t got any serfs of his own,” Rollant answered. “He couldn’t dream of a farm big enough to work with serfs. Look at his homespun tunic. Look at those miserable pantaloons-out at the knees, a patch on the arse. But he thinks he’s a duke because his hair is brown.”

“A lot of these northerners think like that,” Smitty said. “If they didn’t, Grand Duke Geoffrey would have to fight the war by himself, because nobody would follow him.”

“Conquerors,” Rollant muttered darkly. His own people had had real kingdoms in the north when the Detinans landed on the coast. They’d had bronze spearheads and ass-drawn chariots-which hadn’t kept them from going down to defeat before the iron-armored, unicorn-riding invaders, whose magecraft had proved more potent, too. In the south, blonds had been thinner on the ground, and more easily and thoroughly caught up in the kingdom that grew around them.

Such musings vanished from his head when a troop of unicorns ridden by men in blue burst out of the pine woods behind the farmer’s fields and thundered toward his company. “Geoffrey!” the riders roared as their mounts galloped over and doubtless ruined the crops of the northerner with the ragged pantaloons and the lordly attitude.