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stinking like the Hellfire and Brimstone his minister father had so often and so eloquently described. He closed his eyes and braced himself for terrible pain.
    Instead of pain, he heard a deafening explosion. Then the wolf smashed into him, knocking the wind out of him but thankfully not sinking its teeth into his flesh.
    He opened his eyes to the blurred movements of someone throwing off the wolf carcass. The next thing he saw was the face of Captain Nicomoth, his aide-de-camp.
    "Your Majesty! Are you hurt?"
    He looked down and saw bloodstains on his breeches. He quickly felt his legs. No pain or cuts; the blood must be the wolf's. He shook his head, sighing in relief. The prospect of a bite-wound without reliable antiseptics was bad enough, but more than a score of his subjects had died this winter of rabies. That possibility frightened him more than all of Styphon's armies.
    "Sire..." Nicomoth stammered. "I don't know what to say...I can't understand how you rode so far ahead of the rest of the party. What will I tell the Queen?"
    "Nothing, Captain. She has a breeding woman's fears, and I want nothing to upset her now." Particularly since I'll be on the sharp end of her tongue, not you! "Understood?"
    "Yes, Sire."
    "What about our party? Was anyone hurt?"
    "Yes, one. Petty-Captain Vantros. He was badly mauled by one of the wolves. He will most likely never use his left leg again."
    If he survives, thought Kalvan, cursing to himself. One more victim of the hard winter and one less trooper to fight the war that would arrive with spring.
    "Mount up," he ordered. He waited until Vantros had been strapped into his saddle before giving the order to move out. He examined what the wolves had left behind: the body of a heifer calf, dead and already half-eaten in the few minutes the wolves had been at it. He could also see the fire more clearly now; it was the thatched roof of a log barn, blazing merrily and quite out of control. In the glare he saw figures in peasants' clothing darting among the other farm buildings, beating out embers with old sacks or dousing them with buckets of snow. Two stood guard over what looked like a cow and a couple of pigs. Half a dozen clipped turkeys ran in circles.
    No bandits, just an accidental fire and an escaped calf to draw the wolves. They had paid a high price for their half-eaten meal, too. Now what could he do for the people on the farm? Kalvan dug in his spurs and set his horse at the slope.
    He didn't find any surprises at the farm: animals with their ribs showing, a father and two grown sons with eyes too large in thin faces, the plaintive cry of a baby from inside the house. The men stared at Kalvan without making the slightest sound or gesture of respect. Was it because they didn't know him, or were they too awed by the presence of Dralm-sent Great King Kalvan? Or maybe they just thought their being hungry was his fault.
    A big war or a long one in an agricultural society always meant trouble; some parts of Germany took two centuries to recover from the Thirty Years War. Last year's war with Styphon's House had been both long and big, with raids all over the place, even when the main armies weren't in the field. There'd also been a high percentage of the peasantry sucked into the poorly trained militia, where casualties were always the highest. Cannon fodder.
    Crops that weren't burned by the enemy or trampled down by either side rotted in the fields because the harvesters were dead, on campaign or had run away. Hostigos had harvested barely half its normal crops, war-ravaged Nostor still less. The people of Hostigos were facing a hungry winter even before the snows began and the temperature dropped. It was the worst winter in living memory, so everyone said—and Kalvan wasn't about to argue. He hadn't felt cold like this since Korea.
    All winter snow had clogged the roads, so there was no carrying food from places that had a surplus to those where rations were short. To fill their