Into the Darkness

14.

Garivald hated inspectors on general principles. Any Unkerlanter peasant hated inspectors on general principles. Tales that went back to the days when the Duchy of Grelz was a kingdom in its own right had inspectors as their villains. If any tales had inspectors as their heroes, Garivald had never heard of them. As far as he was concerned, inspectors were nothing but thieves with the power of King Swemmel’s army behind them.

He particularly hated the two inspectors who had come to Zossen to put a crystal in Waddo’s house. For one thing, he did not want Waddo getting orders straight from Cottbus. For another, the inspectors were swine. They ate and drank enough for half a dozen men, and paid nothing. They leered at the village women, and even pawed at them.

“They might as well be Algarvians,” Annore said after one of the inspectors shouted a lewd proposition at her while she was walking home from visiting a friend. Unkerlanters were convinced Algarve was a sink of degeneracy.

“If they touch you, I’ll kill them,” Garivald growled.

That frightened his wife. “If anyone in a village murders an inspector, the whole village dies,” she warned. That wasn’t legend; it was law and somber fact. Some kings of Unkerlant had been known to show mercy in applying it, but Swemmel was not one of them.

“They deserve it,” Garivald said, but inside he was glad Annore had reminded him of the law. That gave him a chance to back away from his threat without sounding like a coward.

“I just wish they’d go away,” Annore said.

“We all wish they’d go away,” Garivald answered. “Waddo may even wish they’d go away by now. But they won’t. Any day now, we’re going to have to start making a cell to hold prisoners in till they get round to cutting the bastards’ throats to make the crystal work.”

“And that’s another thing,” his wife said. “What if these robbers or murderers or whatever they are get loose somehow and start robbing and murdering us? Will the inspectors care? Not likely!”

“I asked Waddo about that very thing the other day,” Garivald said. “He told me they’re going to bring in a couple of guards to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Oh,” Annore said. “Well, that’s a little better.”

“No such thing!” Garivald exclaimed. “A crystal to tie us to Cottbus, guards here all the time… We couldn’t breathe very free before. We won’t be able to breathe free at all now.”

Annore found another question: “Well, what can we do about it?”

“Not a cursed thing,” Garivald said. “Not a single cursed thing. The only thing we could ever do about orders from Cottbus was pretend we never got them. Now we won’t even be able to do that.”

A couple of days later, he was one of the villagers the inspectors commandeered to build the cell to hold the condemned prisoners whose life energy would power the crystal. He couldn’t work in the fields. He couldn’t tend his garden or his livestock. The inspectors didn’t care. “This has to be done, and it has to be done on time,” one of them said. “Efficiency.”

“Efficiency,” Garivald agreed. Whenever anyone said that word, everyone who heard it had to agree with it. Dreadful things happened to those who failed to agree. Garivald worked on the cell with a will, sawing and hammering like a man beset by demons. So did the other peasants dragooned into building it. The sooner they got it done, the sooner they could get back to work that really needed doing, work that would keep them fed through the winter. That was the sort of efficiency Garivald understood.

After a couple of hours of offering suggestions that didn’t help, the inspectors wandered off to find something to drink, and maybe something to eat, too. Garivald wouldn’t have expected anything different; since the inspectors weren’t devouring their own substance, they made free with the village’s.

He said, “The really efficient thing to do would be to put the criminals in Waddo’s house. He’s the one who wants the crystal so much, so we ought to let him deal with what having it means.”

“Aye,” said one of the other peasants, a scar-faced fellow named Dagulf. He glanced over toward the firstman’s home, which stood out from the others in Zossen, and then spat on the ground. “Would hardly put him out, even. After all, he built that cursed second story, didn’t he? He could put the captives up there and slit their throats right by the cursed crystal.”

“Now, that would be efficient,” somebody else said.

“Who’s going to be the one to tell Waddo to do it, though?” Garivald asked. Nobody answered. He hadn’t expected anybody to answer. He went on, “He’d bawl like a just-gelded colt if anybody had the nerve to tell him he ought to do that. All that precious space is for his family, don’t you know?”

“Like anybody needs that much space,” Dagulf said, and spat again.

Everyone working on the cell grumbled and complained and called curses down on Waddo’s head and the heads of the inspectors. But all the curses were so low-voiced, no one more than a few feet away could have heard them. And no one would have guessed the peasants were complaining from the way they worked.

Not even the inspectors could find anything to complain about over the speed with which the cell went up. “There, you see?” one of them said when it got done two days sooner than they’d demanded. “You can be efficient when you set your minds to it.”

Neither Garivald nor his fellow carpenters chose to enlighten them. Annore had been doing much of Garivald’s work along with her own. The work had to get done. Who did it mattered less. That was efficiency, too, efficiency as the peasants of Unkerlant understood it.

Once built in such a driving hurry, the jail cell stayed empty for three weeks. Every time Garivald walked past it, he snickered. That was efficiency as King Swemmel’s men understood it: do something fast for the sake of nothing but speed, then wait endlessly to be able to do whatever came next.

At last, a column of guards marched up the road from the market town. There were a dozen of them to protect the villagers from four scrawny captives whose chains clanked and rattled with every step they took. Half the guards headed back toward the market town. The others prepared to settle down in Zossen. The first meal the villagers served them showed they were even more ravenous than the inspectors.

“Now all you need is the crystal and the mage to work the sacrifice and give it life, and you’ll be connected with the rest of the world,” one of the inspectors said, his tone somewhat elevated by strong drink. “Won’t that be grand for you?”

Garivald thought it would be anything but grand. The inspectors, however, had long since made it plain they cared nothing for his opinion or that of anyone else in Zossen. He kept quiet.

Sharp-tongued old Uote, though, was moved to speak up: “You mean you haven’t got a crystal here?”

“Of course we haven’t,” the inspector answered. “Do we look like mages?”

Uote rolled her eyes. “Call that efficiency?” she said. Maybe she’d had a good deal to drink herself, to dare to ask such a question.

Both inspectors and all six guards stared at her. A great silence fell over the village square. The inspector who’d spoken before snapped, “Efficiency is what we say it is, you ugly old sow.”

“Sow, is it?” Uote said. “You’re the pigs in the trough.”

The silence got louder and more appalled. “Curb your tongue, old woman, or we shall assuredly curb it for you. When the crystal does come here, would you have King Swemmel learn your name?” The inspector’s smile said he looked forward to informing on her.

Garivald had no use for Uote; even sober, she was a nag and a scold. But she was from his village. Hearing that gloating anticipation from the inspector—the king’s man, the city man—made him feel like a piece of livestock, not a man. And Uote crumpled like a scrap of paper. She sneaked away from the gathering in the village square and stayed inside her house for several days afterwards. Garivald did not think it would do her any good, not unless the crystal came so late, the inspector found other villagers at whom to be angry in the meanwhile.

When the crystal did arrive a week or so later, it too was escorted by a squad of guards. So many strangers didn’t come to Zossen in the course of an ordinary year. Along with the guards came a mage. His red nose and cheeks and red-tracked eyes said he had a fondness for spirits. So did the way he gulped from the flask at his belt.

Annore watched in distaste. “They’ve sent us a wreck, not a wizard.”

“Must be all they think we deserve,” Garivald answered. He shrugged. “It doesn’t take much of a mage to sacrifice a man.”

He never found out how they chose which condemned prisoner to sacrifice first. He’d done his best to pretend the prisoners and the guards and the mage weren’t anywhere near the village. Some of the villagers had got friendly with the condemned men, bringing good food to the cell instead of just enough swill to keep them alive till they were used up. He thought that pointless; odds were the guards ate the meat and jam instead of giving them to the captives.

The guards staked the prisoner out in the middle of the village square. “I didn’t do anything,” he said over and over. “I really didn’t do anything.” No one paid any attention to his feeble protests. Garivald stood and watched along with a lot of other villagers. No one had been sacrificed in Zossen for a long time. What was strange was always interesting.

Up came the wizard, wobbling as he walked. He set the crystal on the condemned criminal’s chest, then took a knife from his belt. Garivald wouldn’t have wanted to handle a knife while that drunk. He would have been as likely to cut himself as what he was supposed to be cutting.

“I really didn’t do—” The condemned man’s words faded into a wet, choking gurgle. Blood spurted from his neck, just as it did from that of a butchered hog. The mage chanted, hiccuping in between the words. Garivald wondered if he was too drunk to get the spell right, but evidently not: through the blood that covered it, the crystal began to glow.

One of the inspectors picked it up and carried it over to a bucket of water to wash it off. The other inspectors pointed to the criminal’s body, which was occasionally twitching. “Bury this carrion,” he said, and pointed to several men. “You, you, you, and you.”

Garivald was the second you. As he pulled up one of the stakes to which the condemned man had been tied, the inspector with the crystal said, “I’ve got Cottbus inside there.” He sounded pleased. Garivald wasn’t. That he wasn’t pleased changed things not at all. He picked up the dead man’s leg and helped carry him away.

Leudast tramped along the western bank of a small stream that marked some of the border between the part of Forthweg Unkerlant occupied and the part Algarve held. On the other side of the river, an Algarvian patrol mounted on unicorns drew near his squad.

One of the Algarvians waved to his squad. Not knowing whether to wave back, he glanced toward Sergeant Magnulf. Only when the squad leader raised a hand did he do the same. The Algarvians reined in. Their mounts were painted in splotches of dull brown and green. Unkerlant did the same thing, as had Forthweg when Forthweg had unicorns with which to fight. It made the beasts harder to see and to blaze. It also made them much uglier.

“Hail, Swemmel’s men,” an Algarvian called in what might have been either Forthwegian or Unkerlanter. “You understanding me?”

Again, Leudast looked toward Magnulf. He was a corporal, but Magnulf was the sergeant. Unkerlant and Algarve remained at peace. But they had been at war before, many times, and they might be again before long. All the drilling Leudast had been through lately made him think that likely. What if a military inspector found out he and his comrades had spoken with the almost-enemy?

“You understanding me?” the Algarvian called again when no one answered right away.

Magnulf must have been worrying about the same things as Leudast. The other side of the goldpiece was, what if the Algarvians had something important to say, something his superiors needed to know? “Aye, I understand you,” the sergeant said at last. “What do you want?”

“You have burning water?” the cavalryman asked. He tipped back his head and put a fist to his mouth as if it were a flask.

“He means spirits, Sergeant,” Leudast said.

“I know what he means,” Magnulf said impatiently. He raised his voice: “What if we do?”

“Want to tread?” The Algarvian smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “No—want to trade?”

“What have you got?” Magnulf asked. In a low voice, he added to his comrades, “It had better be something good, if they want us to trade spirits for it.”

“Aye,” Leudast said, the same thought having crossed his mind. All he wanted to do with spirits was drink them himself.

The Algarvian who was doing the talking held up something that glittered in the warm northern sunlight. Squinting across the stream, Leudast saw it was a dagger. “Fancy knife,” the redhead said, evidently not knowing how to say dagger in a language the Unkerlanters could understand. “Taking from Forthwegians in war. Got plenty.”

Magnulf rubbed his chin. Speaking to his fellow Unkerlanters, the sergeant said, “We ought to be able to trade fancy daggers for more spirits than we give the Algarvians to get ’em, eh?” The soldiers nodded. Magnulf started shouting again: “All right, come on across. We’ll see what we can do.” He waved to invite the Algarvians over to the west side of the river.

“Peace between us?” the redhead asked.

“Aye, peace between us,” Magnulf answered. The Algarvians urged their unicorns into the river. Magnulf spoke to his own men: “Peace as long as they keep it. And don’t let your cursed jaws flap, or the inspectors will pull out your tongues by the roots.” Leudast shivered, knowing the sergeant wasn’t likely to be either joking or exaggerating.

The river was shallow enough that the unicorns had to swim only a few yards in midstream. They came up on to the western bank, dripping and snorting and beautiful in spite of paint splashed over their hides. Their iron-shod horns looked very sharp. Some of the Algarvians dismounted; others stayed on the unicorns, alert and watchful. They were veterans, all right. Leudast, a veteran himself, wouldn’t have taken anything for granted, either.

“Let’s see these daggers close up,” Magnulf said.

“Let us seeing—” The Algarvian spokesman made that drinking gesture again.

Magnulf nodded to the soldiers in his squad. Leudast let his pack slide off his shoulders. He opened it and took out a flask. He was unsurprised to see that every one of his squadmates had a similar little jug. Such flasks were against regulations, but keeping Unkerlanters and spirits apart was like keeping ham and eggs apart when the time to cook supper came.

Leudast held out his flask to an Algarvian. The redhead was several inches taller than he, but several inches narrower through the shoulders. Leudast had never seen anyone from Mezentio’s kingdom before, not close up, and curiously studied the Algarvian. The fellow pulled the stopper from the flask, sniffed, and whistled respectfully. He took a couple of staggering steps, as if drunk from the fumes. Leudast chuckled. Maybe the Algarvians weren’t so fearsome as people said they were.

This one put the stopper back in the flask, hefted it and shook it to see how much it held, and then took two knives off his belt. He pointed to one and then to the spirits before pointing to the other and the spirits. Leudast understood: the Algarvian was saying he could have one or the other but not both.

He examined the daggers. The blade on one was an inch or so longer than that on the other. The one with the shorter blade had a hilt decorated with what looked like jewels: red, blue, green. If they were jewels, that dagger was worth a lot. But if the dagger was worth a lot, the redhead wouldn’t swap it for a flask of spirits. The other knife had a hilt of some dark wood, highly polished, with Forthweg’s stag stamped into it and enameled in blue and white.

“I want this one,” Leudast said, and took the less gaudy knife. He closely watched the Algarvian as he did so. The man from the east made a good game try at not looking surprised and disappointed, but not good enough. Leudast didn’t smile, not on the outside of his face, but he was smiling inside. He handed the Algarvian the flask of spirits. That made the man in tunic and kilt look a little happier, but not much.

Leudast looked around to see how his comrades were making out in their bargains. Two or three of them had chosen the daggers with the colorful jewels. They were men he’d already tabbed as greedy. Now he did smile. Greed would get them what greed usually got. He had no doubt he’d done better.

Sergeant Magnulf, now, was not a man to be easily fooled. He and the Algarvian who had a smattering of Unkerlanter and Forthwegian were still dickering. At last, the redhead threw up his hands. “All right! All right! You winning!” he said, and gave Magnulf not only a knife Leudast thought quite fine but also a couple of Algarvian silver coins. He angrily snatched the flask of spirits from Magnulf’s hands.

“If you don’t want it, I’ll give you back your stuff,” Magnulf said.

“I wanting!” the Algarvian said. He seemed to get excited about everything, and clutched the flask to his bosom as if it were a beautiful woman. Then, relaxing a little, he asked, “We fighting war, you Unkerlanterians and we?”

Before Leudast could cough or otherwise warn Magnulf the question had teeth, the sergeant showed he’d figured that out for himself. He shrugged and answered, “How should I know? Am I a general? I hope not, is all I can tell you. Nobody who’s seen a war can like one.”

“Here you talking true,” the Algarvian agreed. He turned to his men and spoke to them in their own language. The ones who were on foot swung up into the saddle. Again, they looked like soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing. In a real fight, though, the unicorns would suffer terribly before they could close with their foes.

The Algarvians forded the river once more and resumed their patrol on the eastern bank. The trooper who could make himself understood to the Unkerlanters turned to wave to Sergeant Magnulf’s squad. Magnulf waved back. The Algarvians rode behind some bushes and disappeared.

“Not bad,” Magnulf said to the men he led. “No, not bad at all. Since these are Forthwegian daggers, nobody needs to know we were trading with the Algarvians.”

“What would happen if somebody found out?” one of his men asked.

“I’m not sure,” the sergeant said. “I don’t think trying to see would be the most efficient thing we could do, though.” No one disagreed with him.

But after they’d walked on for another half a mile or so, Leudast went up to Magnulf and spoke in a low voice: “Sergeant, maybe we ought to let somebody know we did some talking with the redheads. That one Algarvian was spying on us, curse me if he was doing anything else. Don’t you think our officers need to know the Algarvians are worried about us attacking them?”

Magnulf looked him up and down. “I thought you were a smart soldier. You came through the mountains in one piece. You came through the desert in one piece, and with a stripe on your sleeve. And now you want to stick your own sausage into the meat grinder? Why don’t you just cut it off with your pretty new knife instead?”

Leudast’s ears got hot. But his stubbornness was one of the reasons he’d come through the fighting he’d seen, and so he said, “Don’t you think our officers would forgive us for trading with the Algarvians when they find out what we learned?”

“Maybe they would—maybe the line officers would, anyhow,” Magnulf answered. “But this is intelligence information, and that means it would have to go through the inspectors. We couldn’t very well tell them where we got it without telling them we broke regulations, could we? When have you ever heard of an inspector forgiving anybody for breaking regulations?”

“Not lately,” Leudast admitted, “but—”

“No buts,” Magnulf said firmly. “Besides, what makes you think we’ve been able to find out anything the inspectors don’t already know? If ordinary soldiers are asking other ordinary soldiers about what’s going to happen next, don’t you think the spies on both sides are keeping busy, too?”

“Ah.” Leudast nodded. That made sense to him. “You’re likely right, Sergeant. That’d be the efficient thing for ’em to do, anyhow.”

“Of course it would,” Magnulf said. “And so, my most noble and magnificent corporal”—his expression was as jaundiced as that of a Zuwayzi camel—“is it all right with you that we keep our mouths shut?”

“Aye, Sergeant, it is,” Leudast said, and Magnulf pantomimed enormous relief. Leudast went on, “Sergeant, do you think we’ll be fighting the Algarvians next?”

That was not only a different question, it was a different sort of question. Magnulf walked on for several strides before saying, “Do you suppose we’d have done all that drilling against behemoths and such if we weren’t going to fight them? Our generals aren’t always as efficient as they might be, but they aren’t that inefficient.”

Leudast nodded. That also made sense to him: all too much sense. He said, “What’s your guess? Will they hit us, or will we jump them first?”

Now Magnulf laughed out loud. “Answer me this one: when have you ever known King Swemmel to wait for anything or anybody?”

“Ah,” Leudast said again. He looked east across the little river into Algarvian-occupied Forthweg. From a distance, the countryside over there looked no different from the chunk of Forthweg Unkerlant held. Leudast got the feeling he’d be seeing that distant countryside up close before too long.

Vanai had not enjoyed going out on to the streets of Oyngestun since the Algarvians occupied the village. (She hadn’t much enjoyed going out on to the streets of Oyngestun before the war began, either, but chose not to dwell on that now.) But, with Major Spinello paying court to her grandfather these days, going out on to the streets of Oyngestun had become an impossible ordeal.

Before the war began, before the Algarvian major and scholar began calling at Brivibas’s home, the Kaunians of Oyngestun had been well-inclined to her, even if the Forthwegians sneered at her because of her blood and leered at her because of her trousers. The Forthwegians still sneered and leered, as did the Algarvian troopers of Oyngestun’s small garrison. Vanai could have dealt with that; she was used to it.

These days, though, her own people also rejected her, and that was like a knife in the heart. When she walked through the district in which most of Oyngestun’s Kaunians lived, the politer folk turned their backs on her, pretending she did not exist. Others—mostly those closer to her own age—called her more filthy names than she’d found in the seamiest classical Kaunian texts.

“Look out!” The cry raced up the street ahead of her as she walked toward the apothecary’s. “Here comes the redhead’s dripholder!”

Laughter floated out through the small windows opening on to the street. Vanai held her head up and her back straight, however much she wanted to cry. If her own people pretended they could not see her, she would pretend she could not hear them.

The apothecary, a pale, middle-aged man named Tamulis, liked money too well to pretend Vanai did not exist. “What do you want?” he demanded when she came inside, as if anxious to get her out again as soon as he could.

“My grandfather suffers from headache, sir,” Vanai answered in a low, polite voice. “I would like a jar of the willow-bark decoction, if you please.”

Tamulis scowled. “You and Brivibas make all the Kaunians of Oyngestun suffer from headache,” he said coldly. “Who else sucks up to the Algarvians as you do?”

“I do not!” Vanai said. She started to go on to defend her grandfather, but the words stuck in her throat. At last, she did find something she could truthfully say: “He has brought no harm to anyone else in the village. He has accused no one. He has denounced no one.”

“Not yet,” Tamulis said. “How long will it be before that comes, too?” But he bent and searched the shelves behind the high counter until he found the decoction Vanai wanted. “Here. That will be one and six. Take it and get out.”

Biting her lip, she gave him two large silver coins. He returned half a dozen small ones. She put them in her pocket. After a moment, she put the jar of willow-bark decoction in another pocket. When she walked down the street carrying something, boys had been known to run by and strike it out of her hand. They thought that great sport. Vanai didn’t.

Tamulis spoke more kindly than he had before: “Have you nowhere you might go, so your grandfather’s disgrace does not stick to you?”

“He is my grandfather,” Vanai said. The apothecary scowled, but then reluctantly nodded. Were Kaunian family ties not strong, no recognizable Kaunians would have been left in Forthweg. Vanai added, “Nor have I ever heard that pursuing knowledge brought disgrace with it.”

“Pursuing knowledge, no,” Tamulis admitted. “Pursuing food when others go hungry—that is a different matter. And you may tell Brivibas I say so. I have said as much to his face.”

“He has not pursued food,” Vanai said. “By the powers above, he has not!”

“Your loyalty does you credit: more credit than your grandfather deserves,” Tamulis said. “Tell me also that he has not accepted the food the redheads give him to keep him sweet.” When Vanai stood mute, the apothecary grunted and gave another of those reluctant nods. “You are honest, I think. You may discover, though, that being honest does you less good than you might expect.”

“You need not fear, sir.” Vanai let her bitterness come out. “I have already discovered that.” She dipped her head in what looked very much like respect, then left the apothecary’s shop.

Going back to the house in which Brivibas had raised her, she ran the gauntlet again. Some people ignored her, often ostentatiously. Others shouted abuse at her or about her. Her strides grew longer and more determined as she neared her house. If her fellow Kaunians could not see that they’d hurt her, then in some the way they hadn’t.

Her heart sank when she saw a bored-looking Algarvian trooper standing in front of the house. That meant Major Spinello was inside, and also meant her grandfather’s reputation—and hers—would sink even lower, if such a thing was possible. Blood started pounding at her temples and behind her eyes. Maybe she would take some of the willow-bark decoction herself.

The Algarvian soldier stopped looking bored the instant he spotted her. Instead, he looked like a hound that had just had a pork chop waved in front of it. He blew Vanai a loud, smacking kiss. “Hello, sweetheart!” he said in loud, bad, enthusiastic Forthwegian.

“I am sorry. I do not understand what you are saying,” Vanai answered in Kaunian. The redhead did not seem the sort who would have studied the classical tongue in school. Sure enough, he looked blank. Before he could make up his mind whether she was lying, she walked rapidly past him and into the house. The door had been unbarred when she went out. She made sure she barred it behind her now.

Brivibas’s voice, and Spinello’s, too, came from the direction of her grandfather’s study. As quietly as she could, Vanai went into the kitchen and set the jar of medicine on the counter there. Regardless of whether or not her grandfather had a headache, she did not want the Algarvian major with a passion for ancient history to know she was there. He’d never tried to do anything with her or to her, but, like all Algarvians, he watched her too hard.

“But, sir,” he was saying now in his really excellent Kaunian, “you are a reasonable man. Surely you can see this would be in your own best interest and in that of your people here.”

“Some people may well find lying to be in their best interest. I, however, am not any of those unfortunate individuals.” When Brivibas sounded stuffiest, he was also stubbornest. “And how a lie can benefit my people is also beyond me.”

Major Spinello’s sigh was quite audible; from it, Vanai guessed he and her grandfather had been arguing for some time. The Algarvian said, “In my view, sir, I have asked you for no untruth.”

“No, eh? The Algarvian occupation of Forthweg and Valmiera is in your view a positive good for Kaunianity?” Brivibas said. “If that be your view, Major, I can only suggest that you see an oculist, for your vision has suffered some severe derangement.”

Vanai hugged herself for joy. She wished her grandfather had spoken thus to Spinello at his first visit. But Spinello hadn’t talked of anything but antiquarian subjects then, and Brivibas enjoyed playing the master to a bright student, even a bright Algarvian student. It was, in a way, the role he played with Vanai.

“I think not,” Spinello answered. “Tell me how wonderfully the Forthwegians treated you Kaunians when they ruled here. Were they not as barbarous as their Unkerlanter cousins?”

Brivibas didn’t answer right away. That meant he was thinking it over, analyzing it. Vanai did not want him bogged down in an argument over details, where the main point would get lost. Hurrying into the study, she said, “That has nothing to do with the way the Algarvian army overran Valmiera.”

“Why, so it doesn’t, my dear child,” Major Spinello said, which made Vanai see red that had nothing to do with his hair. “So good to see you again,” he went on. “But had we not overrun Valmiera, King Gainibu’s army would have overrun us, is it not so? Of course it is so, for that is what the Valmierans did during the Six Years’ War. Now do please run along and let your elders discuss this business.”

“There is nothing to discuss,” Brivibas said, “and Vanai may stay if she so desires, this being her home, Major, and not yours.”

Spinello bowed stiffly. “In this you are of course correct, sir. My apologies.” He turned and bowed to Vanai as well, before giving his attention back to Brivibas. “But I continue to maintain that you are being unreasonable.”

“And I continue to maintain that you have not the faintest notion of what you are talking about,” Brivibas said. “If occupation by King Mezentio’s soldiers be such a boon for us Kaunians, Major, why have you Algarvians ordered that we may no longer set our own language down in writing, but must use Forthwegian or Algarvian? This, mind you, when Kaunian has been the language of scholarship since the days of antiquity you say you love so well.”

Major Spinello coughed and looked embarrassed. “I did not give this order, nor do I approve of it. It strikes me as overzealous. As you hear, I have no objections to your language: on the contrary.”

“Whether it be your order does not matter,” Brivibas said. “That it is an Algarvian order does. The Forthwegians never restricted us so: one more reason I fail to view the present order of things as beneficial to Kaunians.”

“Oh, good for you, my grandfather!” Vanai exclaimed. At his best, Brivibas aimed logic like the beam from a stick, and, she thought admiringly, with even more piercing effect.

“Your reasoning is elegant, as always,” Spinello said. “I have, however, another question for you: do you view the present order of things as beneficial to yourself and your charming granddaughter, as compared to other Kaunians here in Forthweg? Think hard before you answer, sir.”

Vanai sighed. So this was what Spinello had been after all along. She’d had a pretty good notion he was after something. Turning her grandfather into an Algarvian tool made excellent sense from his point of view. But Brivibas’s integrity, while on the fusty side, was real—and Brivibas had never cared for redheads.

How much did he care for a full belly? Vanai wondered how much she cared for a full belly herself. She’d learned all she cared to about hunger before Major Spinello started paying court to her grandfather. Maybe it was just as well Spinello hadn’t asked her.

Brivibas said, “Good day, sir. If you care to discuss the past, we may perhaps have something to say to each other. We do not appear to view the present in the same light, however.”

“You will come to regret your decision, I fear,” Spinello said. “You will regret it very soon, and very much.”

“That is also part of life,” Brivibas answered. “Good day.” Spinello threw his hands in the air, then bowed and departed.

As the door to the street closed behind him, Vanai said, “My grandfather, I am proud of you. We are free again.”

“We are free to starve again, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said. “We are free to endure worse than hunger, too, I fear. I may have made a mistake that will cost us dear.”

Vanai shook her head. “I’m proud of you,” she repeated.

Her grandfather smiled a small, slow smile. “Though it may be unbecomingly immodest to say so, I am also rather proud of myself.”

Cornelu wished the land ahead of him were one of the five islands of Sibiu. Had the Lagoans ordered him to strike a blow at the Algarvians occupying his own kingdom, he would have felt more useful. He tried to console himself with the thought that any blow against Algarve was a blow toward eventually freeing Sibiu. He had never before realized what a melancholy word eventually was.

He patted Eforiel, bring the leviathan to a halt a couple of hundred yards from the southern coast of Valmiera. If she came any closer to land, she ran the risk of beaching herself. That would have been a disaster past repair—not for the war, no doubt, but for Cornelu.

He turned and spoke in a low voice: “You go now.” The words were in Lagoan, a command he had carefully memorized.

“Aye.” That word was almost identical in Lagoan and Sibian and, for that matter, Algarvian, too. Half a dozen Lagoans with rubber flippers on their feet let go of the lines wrapped around Eforiel to which they had clung while the leviathan ferried them across the Valmieran Strait. Eforiel also carried some interesting containers under her belly. No one had told Cornelu what those held. That was sound doctrine; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t reveal if captured. The Lagoans undid the containers and swam with them toward the beach.

No shouts of alarm and anger rose from the land. Whatever the Lagoans were going to do, they could at least begin it without interference. In a way, that made Cornelu glad, as would anything that hurt the Algarvians. Still, he sighed as he urged Eforiel back out to sea. Had something gone wrong, it would have given him an excuse to ignore his orders to return to Setubal. He wanted an excuse to fight King Mezentio’s men, and resented the Lagoans for making war out of what seemed no more than a sense of duty.

“Why should they care?” he asked Eforiel. “War has not come to their kingdom. I do not think war can or will come to their kingdom unless Kuusamo attacks them from the east. How Algarve would get an army across the Strait of Valmiera is beyond me.”

Then he slapped the surface of the sea in his own alarm and anger. No one in Sibiu had imagined the Algarvians could get an army across the sea to overrun their islands. Algarvian imagination, Algarvian ingenuity, had proved more flexible, more capacious, than those of King Burebistu’s generals and admirals. Could a like misfortune befall Lagoas?

“Powers above grant that it not be so,” Cornelu muttered. Exile was bad. How bad exile was, he knew to the bottom of his soul. However bad it was, conquest would be worse. He knew that, too.

Beneath him, Eforiel’s muscles surged as the leviathan swam south. Every now and then, the leviathan would twist away from the exact course back to Setubal to pursue a mackerel or squid. She’d fed well on the way up to Valmiera; had Cornelu wanted to keep her strictly to her work, he could have done so without harming her in the least. But he let her have her sport. If he returned to his cold, gray barracks an hour later than he might have otherwise, what of it?

One of those twists probably saved his life. He watched the sea for leviathans with Algarvian riders and for Algarvian ships sliding along the ley lines. He looked up at the sky, too, but only when he thought to do it, which was less often than it might have been. When he rode Eforiel, the water was his element. The air was not. Had he wanted to be a dragonflier, he would never have gone to sea.

Some Algarvian youth who had wanted to be a dragonflier released an egg from a great height. Had Eforiel not turned aside to go after squid, it would have burst on top of Cornelu and her, whereupon the small creatures of the sea would have feasted on them rather than the other way round.

As things were, they almost did. Even a near miss from an egg could kill, the outward pressure from the burst jellying a man—or a leviathan—the burst of energy itself did not reach. Cornelu did not quite know how close he and Eforiel came to being jellied, but he and the leviathan could not have escaped by much.

Eforiel gave a pained, startled, involuntary grunt when the egg burst, as a man might have done if suddenly and unexpectedly hit in the pit of the stomach. Cornelu felt as if he were being crushed in an olive press, but only for one brief, horrifying instant. Then, as she had been trained, Eforiel dove and swam away from the burst as fast as she could. Cornelu had only to hang on to the lines that moored him to the leviathan; Lagoan spells for breathing underwater were quite as effective as those Sibiu used.

Another egg burst, this one farther away. Eforiel swam harder—and deeper—than ever. Cornelu’s guiding signals grew more urgent. Even with his sorcerous aids, the weight of the sea would crush him before it harmed the leviathan. If Eforiel gave way to panic and forgot that, the egg might as well have done its work, at least as far as he was concerned.

But the trainers at Tirgoviste had known their business, and Eforiel was a clever beast, little given to panic. After the first few frantic flaps from her flukes, she realized Cornelu was giving her signals, realized and obeyed. Her plunge to the depths of the sea slowed, then stopped. She angled up toward the surface once more.

Cornelu wished the Lagoan mages had used a spell to let the leviathan breathe underwater. So far as he knew, no such spell existed, though adapting the one the mages had used on him didn’t strike him as likely to be difficult. Till this war, though, no one had seen the need, just as no one had seen the need to keep watch against sailing ships or to mass swarms of behemoths or …

When Eforiel spouted, Cornelu twisted his body to look up at the sky. He let out a startled grunt of his own, and ordered the leviathan to dive once more. That Algarvian dragon was stooping like a hawk, trying to get close enough to flame. He did not know whether dragonfire could kill a leviathan. He knew all too well that it could kill him.

He’d hoped the dragon would flame even though he and Eforiel had already submerged. If it ran out of flame, the leviathan and he would be safer. But no blast of flame boiled the sea above his head. He mumbled curses. The Algarvian up there, unfortunately, knew what he was about. And he would be able to watch for Eforiel to rise, where Cornelu would not, could not, know where he was until already exposed to danger.

Exposed or not, though, sooner or later Eforiel would have to breathe. Cornelu ordered her to swim north; going back the way he had come seemed likeliest to put distance between her and that cursed dragon. North and south, east and west, were all one to the leviathan. Cornelu sometimes thought his insistence on going this way or that way as opposed to any which way annoyed Eforiel. Sometimes, by the wiggle she gave when obeying his commands, he thought it amused her.

He let her swim as far as she could before surfacing. When she spouted, Cornelu looked around anxious for the dragon and the Algarvian flying it. He spotted the creature and its rider well off to the south, and nodded in no small satisfaction: he’d outguessed the dragonflier this time.

But his satisfaction did not last long. He’d wanted to give Eforiel a little while to rest, but the dragonflier spotted her almost as soon as Cornelu saw him. On came the great beast, the thunder of its wingbeats growing in Cornelu’s ears above the plashing of the strait.

He sent Eforiel down below the surface well before the dragon got close enough to flame—and was glad he did, for a couple of sharp hisses above him said beams from the Algarvian’s stick were boiling bits of ocean. They would have burned through him and the leviathan, too.

Cornelu sent Eforiel east this time, now worrying in earnest. Children in every kingdom played hiding games. When they lost them, though, the worst that happened was that they had to search next. If Cornelu lost this game, tiny fish would nibble the flesh from his bones.

After a long run under the protecting mantle of the sea, Eforiel came up to breathe once more. Cornelu looked around, trying to scan every direction at once. He spied the dragon off to the north. The Algarvian riding the stupid creature was anything but stupid himself. He hadn’t stayed around and waited to see what Cornelu would do, and had nearly guessed right—Cornelu had thought hard about having Eforiel swim north again.

This time, the Sibian exile took the leviathan underwater as soon as she had breathed. He didn’t know whether the dragonflier had spotted this surfacing or not. With a little luck, he would lose the Algarvian in the immensity of the sea.

Eforiel swam southeast; Cornelu wasn’t yet ready to return to the straight course toward Setubal, the likeliest track on which the dragon would be hunting for him. So long as he reached the Lagoan coast anywhere, he could find his way back to the capital and its harbor.

But the dragonflier, realizing he’d been outfoxed, had gained altitude so he could survey a broad stretch of ocean. And, when he spotted Eforiel and Cornelu, he sent his mount winging after them.

Why doesn’t he give up? Cornelu thought resentfully. It’s not as if I’ve done anything to him personally, the way he has to me, the way his kingdom has to mine. Back in Tirgoviste, he had a son or daughter. He did not know which. He did not know how his wife was. Not knowing ate at him; it left an empty place where his heart should have been.

When Eforiel twisted and turned after fish, he let her. If he didn’t know in which direction she was going, how could the dragonflier guess?

Logically speaking, that was perfect. Logical perfection didn’t keep Cornelu and the leviathan from almost dying a few minutes later. When Eforiel surfaced, her spout nearly soaked the dragon’s tail. However he’d done it, that cursed Algarvian had gauged almost perfectly where the leviathan would rise.

Cornelu watched the dragon’s head start to twist on its long, snaky neck, back under its body. He sent Eforiel diving, hard and fast as he could. The sea above them turned to a sheet of flame. That terrified the leviathan, which, a creature of water, knew nothing of fire. She swam farther and faster than Cornelu would have dreamt she could.

Her fear might have saved her, for the hunting dragon could not draw near enough to flame or for its rider to blaze when she surfaced again, and guessed wrong on the direction of her next run, so Cornelu was at last able to escape the stubborn dragonflier’s pursuit.

“Routine,” he said back in Setubal, when his Lagoan superiors asked how the swim to Valmiera had gone. “Nothing but routine.” He did not think they were able to tell he was lying.

Bembo peered east, toward the Bradano Mountains, with nothing but relief. The Jelgavans didn’t look like breaking out on to the plains after all, which meant the emergency militia wasn’t drilling any more. Not marching under the eye of that fearsome sergeant warmed Bembo’s heart.

If Algarve needed a pudgy constable to help hold back her foes, the kingdom was in desperate straits indeed.

A broadsheet showed one blond in trousers running away from an Algarvian on a behemoth, with another blond cowering in a trench. The first trousered soldiers was labeled VALMIERA, the second JELGAVA. COWARDLY KAUNIANS, declared the legend below the picture.

Hardly knowing he was doing it, Bembo nodded as he swaggered by the broadsheet. Kaunians had always been cowards, even back in the ancient days. If they hadn’t been, Tricarico would still be a city of the Kaunian Empire, and the Algarvians pinned back in the forests of the far south.

He kept an eye out for blonds who weren’t on posters. Orders to take nothing for granted when it came to Kaunians had gone out to every constable in town—and, Bembo suspected, to every constable in the kingdom. Such orders made sense to him. It was, he supposed, possible for folk of Kaunian blood to be loyal to King Mezentio. Possible, aye—but how likely? Not very, in his judgment.

That Balozio, for instance, remained locked up. He hadn’t been able to prove he wasn’t a Jelgavan spy, and nobody felt like taking a chance on him. That also made sense to Bembo. How loyal would Balozio be after spending a while in a cell? Again, not very, not so far as the constable could see.

Bembo’s eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth. He spied only a couple of blonds on the street: Kaunians weren’t going out much these days. One was an old man hobbling along with the help of a cane, the other one of the ugliest, dumpiest women he’d ever seen in his life. He didn’t bother either of them. The old man would have had trouble being dangerous to a snail, let alone a kingdom. As for the woman—had she been pretty, he probably would have found some questions to ask her. Since she was anything but, he pretended—and did his best to pretend to himself, too—he hadn’t noticed her.

He marched past a hair-dressing salon, then stopped. He’d been in there not long before the war started, to investigate a burglary. He never had tracked down the thief, even though the man and woman who ran the place slipped him some cash to look extra hard. They were both blonds.

Whistling, he turned and walked back to the doorway. If they’d paid him back then to look for a burglar, they would likely pay him even more now to leave them alone. Constables never made enough money. Bembo didn’t know a single colleague who would have disagreed with him. He opened the door and went inside.

The husband of the pair was trimming a customer’s goatee while the wife curled a woman’s hair. Another woman sat reading a news sheet, waiting to be served. They all raised their heads to stare at him.

He stared at them, too. The man and woman doing the work had red hair, as did all their customers. Had he come into the wrong place? He couldn’t believe it. Maybe the Kaunians had sold the business. That made better sense to him.

Before he could apologize and leave—bothering ordinary Algarvians might land him in trouble—the man with the little scissors in his hand said, “Look, Evadne, it’s Constable Bembo, who tried so hard to catch that miserable burglar.” He bowed. “A good day to you, Constable.”

Automatically, Bembo returned the bow. The woman—Evadne—said, “Why, so it is, Falsirone.” She dropped Bembo a curtsy. “A very good day to you, Constable.”

Bembo bowed again. These were the people he’d seen about the burglary. They had ordinary Algarvian names and spoke Algarvian with an accent like his own. But they’d been blonds the last time he saw them. “You’ve dyed your hair!” he blurted as realization struck.

“Aye, we have.” Falsirone nodded. “We got plumb sick and tired of people cursing us for dirty Kaunians whenever we struck our faces out the door. Now we fit in a mite better.”

“That’s right,” Evadne said. “Life’s been a lot simpler since we did it.”

Their features still had a Kaunian cast, being rather sharper than those of most Algarvians. And their eyes were blue, not green or hazel. But those were details. The color of their hair wasn’t. They could pass for ordinary Algarvians in the street, no questions about it.

Which meant… Bembo’s jaw dropped when he thought about what it meant. “You, you, you!” he snapped to the other three people—the other three redheaded people—in the salon. “Are you Kaunians, too?”

He watched them all think about lying—as a constable, he had no trouble recognizing that expression. As he looked at them, he realized they were of Kaunian stock. They must have seen as much on his face, for, one by one, they nodded.

“It’s like Falsirone told you,” said the man in the chair in front of the barber. “All we want is for people to leave us alone. With our hair red, they mostly do.”

“Powers above,” Bembo said softly. He pointed to Falsirone. “How many Kaunians have you turned into redheads?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you, sir, not exactly,” Falsirone answered. “A fair number, though, I’d say.” Evadne nodded. Her husband continued, “All we want to do is get along, not make any trouble for anybody and not have anybody make any trouble for us. Nothing wrong with that, is there, sir? It’s not against the law.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is,” Bembo said abstractedly. The law hadn’t considered that Kaunians who found trouble as blonds might reach for the henna bottle. The law could be pretty stupid.

“Are we in trouble, sir?” Evadne asked. “If we are, I do hope you’ll give us the chance to make it right.”

She meant she hoped Bembo would take another bribe. Like most Algarvian constables, he was seldom known to turn one down. This, though, looked to be one of those rare times. He thought he could get more from his superiors for telling what he’d learned than he could from the Kaunians for keeping quiet.

“I don’t think there’s any problem,” he said, not wanting to give the game away. Evadne and Falsirone and their customers looked relieved. They looked even more relieved when Bembo left. Only after he headed back to the constabulary station did he realize he could have taken their money and that from his superiors. As constables went, he was relatively honest.

“What are you doing here, Bembo?” Sergeant Pesaro demanded when he came into the station. “You’re supposed to be out there protecting our poor, endangered citizens from each other.”

“Oh, bugger our poor, endangered citizens,” Bembo said. “Bugger ’em with a pinecone, as a matter of fact. This is important.”

“It had better be, after a buildup like that,” the fat sergeant said. “Come on, give forth.” He spread his hands in anticipation.

And Bembo gave forth. As he did, Sergeant Pesaro’s expression changed. Bembo smiled to himself. Pesaro had been waiting for him to come out with something not worth interrupting his usual beat to deliver. Had he done so, the sergeant would have taken unholy glee in roasting him over a slow fire. But if what he had to say wasn’t worth mentioning, he didn’t know what would be.

“Why, those dirty, sneaking whoresons!” Pesaro burst out when he was through. “Going around hiding what they are, are they? We’ll put paid to that, and bugger me with a pinecone if we don’t.”

“Right now, there’s no law on the books against it,” Bembo said. “I’m only too bloody sure of that. Used to be, the cursed Kaunians would flaunt what they were: wave their hair in our faces, you might say. They can’t get away with that any more, so they’re doing their best to turn into chameleons instead.”

“They won’t get away with it.” Pesaro heaved his bulk out of the chair behind the front desk. “I’m going to have myself a talk with Captain Sasso. He’ll know what we can do about the miserable yellow-hairs, law or no law.”

“Aye, so he will.” Bembo picked his next words with care: “Let me come along with you, Sergeant, if you’d be so kind. The captain will surely want to hear the details straight from the man who found them.”

Pesaro glared at him as if he were half a worm in an apple. Bembo knew what that meant: the sergeant had been planning to grab all the credit himself. If he were a heartless enough bastard, he could still do it. For a moment, Bembo thought he would. But that would infuriate not just Bembo—which wouldn’t have bothered Pesaro in the slightest—but all the other ordinary constables, too. Still looking sour, Pesaro nodded and jerked his head toward the stairs leading up to Captain Sasso’s office. “Come on, then.”

Sasso was a lean, middle-aged man with a startling streak of white in his cinnamon hair. He had a scar on his scalp from a knife fight in his youth, and the hair along it had been silver ever since. He looked up from paperwork as Pesaro and Bembo stood in the doorway waiting to be noticed. “All right, boys, come on in,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Constable Bembo here noticed something I think you ought to know about, sir,” Pesaro said: if he couldn’t take all the credit, he’d take some. He nudged Bernbo with an elbow. “Go on, tell the captain what the dirty Kaunians are up to.”

“Kaunians, eh?” Sasso leaned forward, his form almost silhouetted against the window in front of which he sat. “Aye, do tell me.”

Before Bembo could begin, shadows dappled the street outside. “A lot of dragons flying these days,” he remarked. “Powers above be praised they’re ours, and not the cursed Jelgavans’.”

“Aye.” Captain Sasso’s smile displayed sharp teeth. By the way his eyes gleamed, Bembo got the notion he knew more than he was saying. Bembo got no chance to ask questions; Sasso gestured impatiently. “Out with it, Constable.”

“Aye, sir.” As Bembo had for Pesaro, he told Sasso how the Kaunians were dyeing their hair to become less conspicuous in Tricarico.

“Well, well,” the constabulary captain said when he was through. “I heard a natural philosopher talk once about spiders that looked like flowers, so the bees and butterflies would come right up and get eaten. Sounds like what the Kaunians are doing, doesn’t it? And if they’re doing it in Tricarico, sure as sure they’re doing it all over Algarve.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, sir,” Bembo said, which was true. Officers got paid to worry about the whole puzzle; he had enough trouble trying to keep track of what was going on in his own little piece.

“We’ll put a stop to it, though—curse me if we don’t,” Sasso said, his voice thoroughly grim. He nodded to Bembo and Pesaro. “And your name will be remembered, Constable, for ferreting this out, and yours, Sergeant, for bringing it to my notice. On that you both have my solemn word.”

“Thank you, sir,” the two men chorused. They beamed at each other. Bembo was willing to share the credit, so long as he got some. So was Pesaro, even if he had tried to steal it for himself. That made them both uncommonly generous for Algarvian constables.

Pekka had always maintained that a mage’s most important tools were pen and paper: a fitting attitude for a theoretical sorcerer. Now she was in the laboratory rather than behind her desk. Instead of the abstracted expression she usually wore while practicing her craft, the look on her face at the moment was one of intense frustration.

She glowered at the acorn on the table in front of her. “Better you should have been fed to a pig,” she told it. It lay there, mute, inert, unhelpful. It might also have reproached her for clumsy technique—and she was far more frustrated than she’d imagined, if she invested an acorn with the power to reproach.

She felt like reproaching the little brown nut far more loudly and stridently than she already had. Kuusaman restraint won out, but only barely. The foreign sailors whose loud foreign oaths sometimes spilled out of the harbor district of Kajaani never left any doubt of how they felt about things. Pekka envied the release they gained so easily.

“Let me learn the truth,” she murmured. “That will release me.”

If the acorn knew the truth, it wasn’t talking. She’d thought she’d found a way to coax the truth from it, but hadn’t managed that yet. She muttered again. She had no doubt Leino would have seen half a dozen ways to improve her experiment. Any mage with a practical bent would have. But she wasn’t supposed to let her husband know about the work she was doing. She wasn’t supposed to let anyone know but her colleagues—and they were theoretical sorcerers, too.

She gave the acorn another glare. For good measure, she walked across the laboratory and glared at the other acorn in the experiment. It sat on a white plate identical to that on which the first acorn rested. The two plates sat on identical tables. The two acorns themselves were tightly similar—Pekka had picked them and several more from one branch of an oak—and had been in contact not only through the tree but also in a single jar here in this chamber. She knew they’d touched. She’d made sure they touched.

And all her care had got her… nothing, so far. She strode back to the table that held the first acorn. Angry footsteps on the stone floor served her almost as well as angry curses served foreign sailors. She wanted to pick up the acorn and fling it out the window. With more than a little effort, she checked herself.

“It should have worked,” she said, and then laughed in spite of her anger and frustration. That was the sort of thing Uto might have said. No one would have, no one could have, blamed a small boy for thinking that way. Pekka, however, was supposed to know better.

“But it should have,” she protested, and laughed at herself again. Aye, she sounded very much like Uto.

Sounding like her son didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong. If she wanted to get to the bottom of the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion, till now reckoned the basic laws of sorcery, what better way to approach it than through acorns, the basic forms of oaks? She’d thought herself very clever to come up with that. It seemed the sort of notion a seasoned experimenter might devise.

Sometimes, of course, even seasoned experimenters failed. Up till now, Pekka certainly had. For all she’d learned, the laws of similarity and contagion might as well not have existed, let alone any relationship between them.

“And wouldn’t that be grand?” she said with a small shiver. “Nothing but the mechanic arts forevermore?” She imagined disproving the laws of similarity and contagion and, as knowledge of the disproof spread, mage-craft grinding to a halt. Then she shook her head, so violently that she had to brush her coarse black hair back from her face. It couldn’t happen, and she was heartily glad it couldn’t.

But what had gone wrong here? She still couldn’t figure that out. When she’d done something to one acorn, nothing had happened to the other, even though they were similar and had been in contact. That made no sorcerous sense.

Pekka snapped her fingers. “I’ll try something different,” she said. “If that doesn’t work… Powers below eat me, I don’t know what I’ll do if that doesn’t work.”

She carried a bucket and a trowel outside and scooped up some moist soil. Then she went back to the laboratory chamber and stirred the soil around as thoroughly as she could before dividing it into two equal piles. Using a tossed coin to make sure she chose the piles randomly, she buried one acorn in the first and the other in the second.

That done, she began to chant over one of the acorns. The chant sprang from one horticultural mages used to force fruits and flowers to flourish out of season, but she’d spent some time strengthening it so she could see results more quickly. One day, if she ever found the time—and if the chant proved useless to her present project, and so would not be reckoned a princely secret—she thought she might license out the improvements, which could well bring in enough money to make her brother-in-law smile.

Unlike some of the others she’d tried, this spell seemed to perform as it should have. An oak sapling sprouted up through the soil and stretched toward the ceiling, compressing several months’ growth into half an hour. Satisfied, Pekka stopped the chant and looked over toward the other table, where the other acorn should have shown similar growth.

But it hadn’t. Real fear ran through Pekka. If the other acorn hadn’t grown, maybe the laws of similarity and contagion weren’t so universal as she’d thought. Maybe nothing lay beneath them, and she’d reached through the fabric of belief to grasp it. Maybe magic really would start falling apart.

“Avert the omen,” Pekka murmured. She hurried over to the other table, wondering what was wrong with the acorn on it.

There lay the white plate, with a mound of soil on it but with no sapling coming up. Pekka spread the soil aside to get at the acorn. Maybe, she thought hopefully, it was infertile. If it was, that would explain why her experiments kept going awry: it wouldn’t be truly similar to the other. A very simple sorcerous test would tell her whether that was so.

“Where is the cursed acorn?” she said. She knew she’d buried it: about a thumb’s breadth from the top of the mound of soil. It wasn’t there. She sifted through all the soil, spreading it out till it slopped off the plate and on to the table. Still no sign of the acorn.

Careless of the dirt on her fingers and palms, Pekka set hands on hips. She knew perfectly well that she’d set an acorn in the pile of soil. She couldn’t have carried it over to the other pile and put it in there along with the other acorn—could she? She did that kind of thing around the house now and again. Everybody did. But she couldn’t have been so careless in the laboratory… could she?

“Powers above,” she said. “If I did that, Leino would never let me forget it. If I did that, nobody ought to let me forget it.”

She walked back to the first table. If she had somehow—she couldn’t imagine how—set both acorns in one pile of dirt, she should have got two saplings springing up toward the ceiling. If she’d made a major blunder and the other acorn was somehow infertile… She shook her head. How slim were the odds that two improbables had both gone wrong at the same time.

“But if they haven’t, where’s my acorn?” she demanded of the laboratory chamber. She got no answer. By then, she wouldn’t have been too surprised had one of the tables up and spoken.

She sifted through all the dirt in the pile from which the sapling had sprouted. She did not find the missing acorn. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. On the one hand, she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid. On the other hand, if she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid, the earlier question recurred: where had the bloody acorn gone?

“I know where it should be,” Pekka said, and went back to the pile of dirt in which she had—she knew she had—planted the acorn now missing.

Could it have fallen off the table? Pekka couldn’t see how, but she couldn’t see how it had disappeared, either. She got down on hands and knees and, backside in the air, stuck her nose down to the stone floor and looked all around. She still couldn’t find the acorn. It had been there. She was sure of that. It wasn’t any more. She was becoming sure of that, too.

“Then where is it?” she asked herself and the world at large. “How am I supposed to write up my experimental diary if I don’t know what to put in it?”

She started a list of all the places the acorn wasn’t: in the soil, on the plate, on the table, on the other plate or table, anywhere on the floor—anywhere in the chamber, as far as she could tell. That was all good, solid information. It belonged in the diary, and she put it there.

It was, however, information of a negative sort. Where was the acorn? Positive information was a lot harder to come by. The acorn, she wrote, was carried off by Gyongyosian spies. Then she made sure that was too thoroughly scratched out to be legible, even though it made as much sense as anything else she’d thought of, and more sense than most of the things.

She tried again. The parameters of the experiment were as follows, she wrote, and set down everything she’d done, including the alterations she’d made to the horticultural magic that formed the basis for her spell. The control acorn performed as expected in every way. The other acorn, although emplaced in a setting attuned to the first through both similarity and contagion, did not germinate as a result of the spell and, in fact, could not be located despite diligent search at the close of the experiment.

There. That told the truth, even if in a bloodless way. She didn’t know what it meant. Maybe one of her clever colleagues would be able to figure it out after seeing exactly what she’d done. Maybe, on the other hand, all her clever colleagues would laugh themselves silly at her clumsy technique.

“Suppose,” she said to the air, “just suppose, mind you, that my technique wasn’t clumsy. Suppose something did happen.”

Imbued with fresh purpose, she nodded. Odds were, she had done something foolish. Repeating the experiment as exactly as she could would tell her, one way or the other.

To reduce the risk of magical contamination, she used different tables, different plants, and fresh soil for the new trial. Obviously, she used new acorns, too. This time, she took care to note where each of them went. She chanted over one. A sapling duly sprouted. No sapling grew at the other table. She went back there and sifted through the dirt. She found no acorn.

“It’s real,” she breathed. Then she started to laugh. It might have been real, but she had no idea what it meant.