Through the Darkness

Sixteen

Sergeant Pesaro glared at the constables lined up before him. Bembo looked back steadfastly, holding out a shield of burnished innocence to cover up whatever he might have done to rouse Pesaro’s anger. But Pesaro wasn’t angry at him. The sergeant seemed angry at the whole world. “Boys, we’ve got ourselves a problem,” he declared.

“Our problem is whatever’s eating him,” Bembo whispered to Oraste. The other constable grunted and nodded.

Pesaro pointed to a Forthwegian in a knee-length tunic walking past the barracks. “D’you see that bastard?” he said. “D’you see him?”

“Aye, Sergeant,” the constables chorused dutifully. Bembo made sure his voice was a loud part of that chorus.

Sergeant Pesaro kept right on pointing at the stocky, hook-nosed, black-bearded man. “You see him, eh? Well, all right-how do you know he’s not a stinking Kaunian?”

“Because he doesn’t look like a Kaunian, Sergeant,” Bembo said, and then, under his breath to Oraste, “Because we’re not bloody idiots, Sergeant.” Oraste grunted again.

But Pesaro was unappeased. “Do you know what those lousy blonds have gone and done? Do you? I’ll bloody well tell you what they’ve done. They’ve found themselves a magic that lets ‘em look like Forthwegians, that’s what. How are we supposed to tell who’s a stinking Kaunian snake in the grass if we can’t tell who’s a stinking Kaunian snake in the grass?”

Bembo’s head started to ache. If that Forthwegian really was a Kaunian- if you couldn’t tell who was who by looking-how in blazes were you supposed to keep the blonds in their own district?

Somebody stuck up a hand. Pesaro pointed to him, as if relieved not to be pointing at the Forthwegian-if he was a Forthwegian-anymore. The constable asked, “Can they make themselves look like us, too, or only like Forthwegians?”

“That’s a good question,” Pesaro said. “I don’t have a good answer for it. All I got told about was Kaunians looking like Forthwegians.”

Bembo stuck his hand in the air. “How do we know ‘em if we do find any? And what do we do if we catch one?”

“The way you know is, snip off some hair. If it turns blond once it’s cut, you’ve caught yourself a Kaunian. If you catch one, you take the bugger to the caravan depot and ship his arse west. If he’s a she, you can do whatever else you want first. Nobody’ll say boo. We’ve got to stop this.”

“Pretty miserable business, all right,” Bembo said. “The blonds don’t want to go west, so they stop looking like blonds. That’s not playing fair.”

“Too cursed right it isn’t.” Pesaro didn’t notice the joke. “If we’re going to lick the Unkerlanters, we need Kaunians. We can’t let ‘em slip out from between our fingers like snot. And if you nail the whoreson who came up with this magic, you can ask for the moon. They’d probably give it to you. Any more questions? No? Get your backsides out there and catch those buggers.”

He didn’t say how. Then Oraste raised his hand. Pesaro looked at him in some surprise; Oraste didn’t usually bother with questions. But when the sergeant nodded his way, he came up with a good one: “What shall we do, take along manicure scissors to snip hair with?”

“If you’ve got ‘em, why not?” Pesaro answered. “It’s a better idea than people with fancier badges than yours have come up with, I’ll tell you that. But listen-don’t spend all your time checking the prettiest girls. We want the bastards with beards, too. They’re likely to be more dangerous. All right? Go on.”

Off the constables went. Oraste asked Bembo, “You have a little scissors?”

“Of course I do.” Bembo was as vain of his person as most Algarvians. “How am I supposed to keep my mustaches and imperial in proper trim without one?”

“You could gnaw ‘em,” Oraste said helpfully. “Or you could let ‘em grow out thick and bushy all over your face, the way the Forthwegians do.”

“Thank you, but no thank you,” Bembo replied with dignity. “If I want fur, I’ll buy a ruff.” He pointed to the first reasonably good-looking Forthwegian girl he saw and called out, “You there! Aye, you. Stop.”

She did, and asked, “What do you want with me?” in pretty good Algarvian.

Bembo took the small scissors from his belt pouch. “I want a little lock of your hair, sweetheart, to make sure you’re not a Kaunian in disguise.”

“What will you do with it afterwards?” she asked in some alarm. “Make nasty magic against me?” She started to shrink away.

A fat lot of good our sorcery s done in Unkerlant, Bembo thought sourly, but even the Forthwegians are afraid of it. “No, no, no, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give it back to you, every single hair. You can dispose of it.”

She eyed him, plainly trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. At last, grimacing, she nodded. Bembo came up to her, stroked her cheek on the pretext of brushing the hair back from it, and snipped a lock. The hair he’d cut stayed dark. He handed it back to the girl, as he’d promised. She put it in her belt pouch and went off with her proud nose in the air.

“You see, darling?” Bembo called after her. “I keep my word.” She kept walking.

“Nice try, lover boy,” Oraste said. Bembo stuck his nose in the air.

They tramped on through the gray, battered, sorry-looking streets of Gromheort. Every so often, they would stop somebody and cut off a lock of hair. Explaining what they wanted was a lot harder when the people they stopped didn’t speak Algarvian. Trying to explain in Kaunian was hard for Bembo, to say nothing of the irony he couldn’t help feeling while using that language to search for sorcerously disguised blonds. “We should have learned some Forthwegian,” he told Oraste.

His partner shook his head. “All those other languages are just a bunch of grunting noises, anybody wants to know what I think. These whoresons don’t want to understand Algarvian, they’ll understand a club smacked into the side of their pot, they will. And you can take that to the bank.”

“I like the way you think,” Bembo said, halfway between mocking admiration and the genuine article. “Nothing’s ever hard for you, is it?”

By way of reply, Oraste grabbed his crotch. Bembo threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He and Oraste kept on prowling, kept on snipping, and caught not a single camouflaged Kaunian.

When they got back to the barracks at the end of their shift, though, Bembo had an inspiration. He went up to Pesaro and said, “What are all the crazy buggers in this whole stinking kingdom doing this time of year?”

“Driving me daft,” Pesaro said, giving him a sour look. Nobody from his squad of constables had come up with any Kaunians, and he wasn’t very happy about that.

Bembo refused to let himself get too annoyed. He said, “They’re all going out into the country to hunt fornicating mushrooms, that’s what. The blonds are as wild for those nasty things as the real Forthwegians are. If the gate guards checked everybody who came in and went out. .”

Slowly, a smile replaced the glower on Pesaro’s plump face. “Well, curse me!” he exclaimed. “There, do you see? You’re not as foolish as you look. Who would have believed it?”

“I’ve had good ideas before,” Bembo protested indignantly.

“Oh, so you have,” Pesaro said. “The one good idea you never could figure out was keeping your big mouth shut.” He pondered, stroking the tuft of hair on his chin. “But that is smart, dip me in dung if it’s not. Aye, I’ll pass it up the line.” He stroked his chin again. “Something else like that, too-if we shut off a whole city block, say, and snipped everybody in it, I bet we’d catch a few blonds by surprise.”

“That’s good, Sergeant,” Bembo said, partly because he meant it, partly because Pesaro was the fellow who told him what to do every day. “That’s really good. Maybe we’ll both get promoted.” He snapped his fingers. “Powers above, why think small? Maybe we’ll both get sent home!”

“That is a big thought,” Pesaro said. “Too big, most likely. And they won’t promote me, not without a drop of noble blood in my whole line unless I’m descended from some viscount’s bastard back three hundred years or so. They like quality in officers, so they do, even constabulary officers. You might get bumped up, though.”

“Lots of officers getting killed these days,” Bembo observed. “Not so many in the constabulary, I grant you, but lots and lots of soldiers. They’ll run short before too long, and then they’ll either promote commoners or they’ll bloody well do without officers. The Unkerlanters don’t fret too much about a man’s blood, by all I’ve heard.”

“That’s on account of most of their nobles got bumped off a long time ago,” Pesaro said. “Besides, who wants to be like the fornicating Unkerlanters?” But the sergeant’s tone was thoughtful, almost wistful; Bembo knew he’d put a flea in his ear.

No trips back to Tricarico came from either Bembo’s suggestion or Pesaro’s. No promotions came from them, either. Bembo cursed his superiors till the next time he got paid, when he found a two-goldpiece bonus. He wasn’t even too resentful to find out that Pesaro’s was twice as big. Pesaro was a sergeant, after all.

A few days later, he and Oraste stretched a rope dead line across a narrow street. The rope had a sign on it, written in Algarvian and Forthwegian: CLIPPING STATION. At the other end of the street, two more Algarvian constables stretched out another rope with an identical sign attached. All the Algarvians drew their sticks. “Nobody goes by without getting snipped!” Bembo yelled in his own language. One of the other pair spoke Forthwegian and translated. “Line up!” Bembo added. Again, his opposite number turned the words into Forthwegian.

Oraste spoke up: “Form your line. Over the rope one at a time. Get clipped. Anybody gets out of line, he gets blazed.” Once more, the Forthwegian-speaking constable did the honors.

Grumbling, the people trapped between the two ropes queued up. Bembo gestured them forward one by one. Oraste clipped. “This is all a waste of time, you know,” a Forthwegian told Bembo in excellent Algarvian.

“Mind your own business.” After a moment, Bembo recognized the fellow: the one who’d lost a son to a man from Plegmund’s Brigade. He’s a fine one to tell us what to do and how to do it, the plump constable said. Aloud, he said, “Fat lot you know about it, anyhow.”

“I know you’re looking for hair that turns yellow when it’s cut,” the Forthwegian answered; gossip was nothing to be sneezed at. “I also know any Kaunian with half a wit would dye his hair black before he risked a trap like this.”

Bembo stared. Back in Tricarico, folk of Kaunian blood had dyed their hair red to fit in with the Algarvian majority. Black hair didn’t make Kaunians look like Forthwegians-but this chap was right: it could further ward Kaunians sorcerously disguised to look like their neighbors. “Get out of here,” Bembo snarled, and the Forthwegian with the graying beard disappeared in a hurry.

A man three people after him in line did turn out to be a Kaunian with undyed hair. Bembo and Oraste beat the blond with their bludgeons. Oraste covered him while the rest of the line went through. He was the only Kaunian the constables caught. But even as they frog-marched him off toward the ley-line caravan depot for what would likely be his last journey, a question kept echoing and reechoing in Bembo’s mind: how many blonds had they missed?

The dye had an acrid reek Vanai found distasteful. She applied it twice, as the directions on the jar told her to do. Then, again following the directions, she combed her hair without drying it. Flicking her eyes to right and left, she could see the dark locks that fell damply to her tunic-and would probably end up staining it. Instead of going for a mirror, she asked Ealstan, “What do I look like now?”

“Strange,” he answered, and then found a word that meant the same thing but sounded nicer: “Exotic. There aren’t any black-haired folk on Derlavai with fair skin and light eyes. Maybe on some of the islands in the Great Northern Sea, but I don’t know of any even there.”

“There are plenty of Kaunians in Forthweg with dark hair now, or I hope there are,” Vanai said. “I wonder what went wrong and tipped off the Algarvians that we’d found a magic to let us look like everybody else.”

“Somebody must have stayed out too long, and had the magic wear off when a redhead was looking,” Ealstan said. “Something like that, anyhow.”

“Aye, you’re likely right,” Vanai agreed after a little thought. “But can you blame whoever did it? Trapped in that little district, never knowing if Mezentio’s men were going to haul him away and send him west? Wouldn’t you want to grab as much freedom as you could?”

“Likely so,” Ealstan said. “But I wouldn’t want to do anything that could put anybody else in danger.”

The answer was very much in character for him. He thought of others ahead of himself; Vanai had seen that for as long as she’d known him. It was unusual in someone so young. It was, from what she’d seen, unusual in people of any age. It was one of the things that had drawn her to him. It drew her to him now: she got up, went over to him, sat down beside him on the worn sofa, and gave him a kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Because I felt like it,” Vanai answered.

“Oh, really?” This time, Ealstan kissed her. “What else do you feel like?”

“We ought to wait till my hair is dry,” Vanai said. She lifted a lock from her shoulder and nodded. “See? It’s just what I thought-the dye’s stained my tunic. I don’t want to have to try to get it out of the bedclothes, too.”

He thought that over, then nodded. “I suppose I can wait,” he said, sounding as if he deserved a special order of merit for being able to. Vanai laughed a little. When it came to matters that touched the bedchamber, he had more trouble thinking of anyone but himself. But he could do it, which put him a long way ahead of Major Spinello.

Maybe Spinello’s dead by now, Vanai thought hopefully. Maybe they sent him down to that Sulingen place where the fighting goes on and on and on. If they did send him there, may he never come out again.

She had to make a deliberate effort to drive the Algarvian officer out of her mind. Sometimes even that didn’t work; sometimes memories of him got between her and Ealstan when they made love, killing her pleasure as if blazing it with a heavy stick.

Not tonight, though. Afterwards, she and Ealstan lay side by side, naked and sweaty. As he had when they’d made love after she first made her sorcery succeed, he reached out and plucked a hair from her bush. As she had then, she yelped now. “What was that for?” she demanded, more than a little irate.

He held the hair between thumb and forefinger. “It’s still blond,” he said.

“Well, of course it is!” Vanai exclaimed. “What do you want me to do, dye myself down there, too?”

To her astonishment, Ealstan nodded. “I think you’d better,” he said seriously. “Sooner or later, Mezentio’s men are going to figure out that Kaunians are dyeing their hair-the hair on their heads, I mean. What’ll they do then? Start yanking up tunics and yanking down drawers, that’s what.”

“They wouldn’t!” But then Vanai grimaced. “They might. They’re Algarvians, curse them, and Algarvians have no shame, not about such things.” Memories of Spinello surged upward again, and of the utterly blase way he’d acted when Brivibas walked in on him while he was taking his pleasure with her. “No,” she said in a low voice, “they have no shame at all.”

Ealstan, fortunately, didn’t know just what an intimate knowledge of Algarvian shamelessness she had. But he knew her well enough to see she was troubled. He took her in his arms. And when he did, he only held her. He didn’t try to make love with her again, though she had no trouble telling he would have been interested in doing so.

She thought about lying there and letting him have her-she would have taken no pleasure from a second round then. But she’d done that too many times with Spinello, because she’d had no choice. Now she did have one, and Ealstan seemed no more than slightly miffed when she got out of bed.

Even that little bit of annoyance vanished when he discovered she was going to take him up on his suggestion. Applying the dye down there was an awkward business. The stuff stung her tender flesh, too. When she was through, she giggled. She looked different in a way she’d never expected to be.

“Exotic,” Ealstan said again. Vanai let out another giggle. She knew what he meant by that: he meant he really did want another round. Being able to laugh made it easier for her to let him have one. She ended up enjoying it more than she’d thought she would, too.

The next morning, she worked the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian for a while. Ealstan hadn’t yet left to cast accounts. He nodded, confirming she’d worked the spell correctly. “It doesn’t change your looks as much now,” he said, “but it does change them.”

“All right,” she said, and left the flat without the shiver of terror she would have felt undisguised. When she got down to the street, what was she? As far as the eye could tell, just one Forthwegian among many. She wished she could go out as a Kaunian among Forthwegians, but that hadn’t always been easy even before the Algarvians overran Forthweg.

When she walked into the Forthwegian apothecary’s shop, he nodded to her from behind his high counter. “A good day to you, Mistress Thelberge,” he said; Vanai had taken to using the name Ealstan gave her. “And what can I do for you so early?”

“Since you seem to have a way of doing such things, sir,” she said, “you might want to pass word to … people who may be using dye to use it on … all their hair.”

She waited to see if he would understand. If he didn’t, she intended to be as blunt as she had to. A couple of years before, when she was still living with her grandfather, embarrassment would have paralyzed her. No more. She was a great deal harder to embarrass than she had been.

After a moment, the apothecary nodded. “I know what you’re saying, mistress, never you fear.” He paused, ground a powder with mortar and pestle- and with quite unnecessary vehemence-and added one more word: “Algarvians.”

“Aye.” Vanai nodded. “Algarvians.”

“Well, I will pass it along,” he said. “I think it may save a life or two. And as long as you’re here, can I try and sell you anything?”

Vanai smiled. “No, thanks, unless you’ve got some particularly fine mushrooms. I’m just out enjoying the morning air.” Being able to come out and enjoy the morning air felt very fine indeed.

After the words had left her mouth, she realized she’d all but told the apothecary she was a disguised Kaunian. She worried about it less than she would have with any other Forthwegian save Ealstan, but she couldn’t help worrying some. Then the apothecary said, “As a matter of fact, I’ve got some Kaunian Imperials here-a customer who was short of cash gave them to me to pay for a bottle of eyewash.”

He reached under the counter and brought out the splendid orange mushrooms. Vanai’s mouth watered. “What do you want for them?” she asked, bracing herself for a hard haggle.

“Take a couple,” the apothecary said. “It’s not always easy to get out of the city.” Aye, he knew she was a Kaunian, all right.

She bowed her head. “My thanks,” she said softly, and put two of the splendid mushrooms in her belt pouch. “That’s not the first good turn you’ve done me.” She took the mushrooms and left the shop.

A couple of Forthwegians who looked as if they were getting paid in spirits were pasting broadsheets on the walls. When Vanai stepped up and read one, she winced. The Algarvians hadn’t chosen to go yanking down everyone’s drawers, at least not yet. Instead, “in the interest of internal security,” they were making the manufacture and possession of black or dark brown hair dye illegal.

After a moment, though, Vanai started to laugh. She thought the redheads were likely to blaze off their own toes with this edict. Kaunians weren’t the only ones it would hurt. Plenty of vain and aging Forthwegians would want to keep the frost from showing in their hair and beards. She doubted whether Mezentio’s men would be able to make the prohibition stick.

Indeed, before she got back to the flat, she heard several Forthwegians-at least, she presumed they were Forthwegians-cursing the new ordinance. That made her laugh again. Sure enough, if the Forthwegian majority rejected this law, the occupiers could make as much noise as they chose; they wouldn’t change anything much. And if Forthwegians got dye, Kaunians who looked like Forthwegians would be able to get it, too.

With those things on her mind, Vanai paid less attention to what was going on around her than she might have, and got caught by an Algarvian clipping patrol. She queued up with the Forthwegians (and, for all she knew, other Kaunians) to wait for Mezentio’s men to finish their duty. With the hair on her head and that between her legs freshly dyed, she was safe unless they had a mage with them.

They won’t, a small, cold voice inside her said. They need their mages to make weapons of war or to kill my people.

And she proved right. An Algarvian constable, looking bored with the whole business, snipped off a lock of her hair. Thanks to the dye, it stayed dark. The redhead nodded and jerked a thumb down the street. “Going on,” he said.

Vanai went on. She would have to jeer at Ealstan: the Algarvians hadn’t thought to start checking people’s secret hair yet. But then she realized jeering wouldn’t do. Ealstan was right; that was something the redheads would come up with, and they probably wouldn’t take long. She muttered something vile. She didn’t look forward to dyeing herself there every couple of weeks.

For now, though, she was free to go through the streets of Eoforwic. The Algarvians couldn’t tell what she was. Neither could the Forthwegian majority. To the eye, she was one of them. She still wished she could go out and about as a Kaunian. Since she couldn’t, this was the next best thing.

She remembered the mushrooms in her pouch. “Not everyone hates me,” she whispered-but even the whisper was in Forthwegian, not in the ancient language she’d learned from birth.

The Kuusaman physician nodded to Fernao and said, “Good day,” in her own tongue.

“Good day,” the Lagoan mage said, also in Kuusaman. He’d always had an ear for languages, and was quick to pick up words and phrases. But when the physician went on, she did so far too fast for Fernao to follow. “Slowly, I beg you,” he said.

“Sorry,” said the physician, a little dark woman named Juhani. She went on in her own speech; again Fernao didn’t understand a word of it. Seeing as much, she switched to classical Kaunian: “Do you know this language?”

“Aye,” he answered. “I am fluent in it.”

“So you are,” Juhani agreed. “More so than I, perhaps. I was saying that I took you for a countryman because of your eyes. Some of us wear kilts, too. But you come out of the west, then?”

“Aye,” Fernao said again.

Juhani studied him. “There must have been some urgent need to bring you out of the west with the injuries to your arm and leg.”

“There was,” Fernao answered, and said no more. What he was doing in Yliharma was no one’s business but his own.

When the physician saw he was going to stay quiet, she shrugged. “Well, by all the signs, we can free your arm from its prison, anyhow.”

“Good,” the mage said. “It has been in plaster so long, it feels much as if it had been in prison indeed.”

“You will not like it so well once it comes out of its shell,” Juhani warned. Fernao only shrugged. The physician went to work getting the cast off.

And she turned out to be right. For one thing, the arm that had been broken was only a little more than half as thick as the other. And it also disgusted the mage because all the dead skin that would have sloughed off had been trapped by the cast. He looked like a man with a horrible disease.

Juhani gave him a jar of ointment and some rags. She even helped him clean off the dead skin. After they finished, the arm smelled sweet and looked no worse than emaciated. “Will my leg be the same way?” Fernao asked, tapping the plaster there.

“I have no doubt it will look worse,” the physician said, which made him shudder. She went on, “Were you in a ley-line caravan accident, or did you have a bad fall, or …?”

Fernao nodded. “That last one. I chanced to be rather too close to an egg when it burst. As you see, I am nearly healed now. For quite some time, however, I did not think the healers and mages had done me any favors by saving me.”

“Never give up,” Juhani said seriously. “Things may get better. Things have got better for you, have they not?”

“They have,” Fernao admitted. “It would have been difficult for them to get worse.” He reached for his crutches. As he did so, he tried to imagine making quick, complex passes with his newly freed arm. He laughed quietly. He couldn’t do it, not to save his life. Then he dipped his head to the physician as he levered himself to his feet. “My thanks, mistress. And what do I owe you for your services?”

When she told him, he blinked. He would have paid twice as much in Setubal. Everything was cheaper in Yliharma, but few things were so much cheaper. Seeing his surprise, she said, “My husband serves the Seven Princes. How can I enrich myself off someone who has already met the foe?”

“I can think of plenty of people who would have no trouble whatever,” Fernao replied as he steadied himself on his crutches. “Honor is where you find it. I hope your husband stays safe.”

He swung out to the street, pausing in the doorway to pull the hood on his tunic up over his head. A chilly drizzle was falling; on the other side of the Vaatojarvi Hills, from what Pekka said, it would be snow. As far as Fernao was concerned, rain was bad enough. Anything that made the sidewalks slippery was bad. He kept fearing he would fall. Just what I’d need: to break one leg when the other one’s finally healing.

He planted his crutches and his good foot with great care. Kuusamans on the sidewalk gave way before him when they saw he had trouble getting around. That never would have happened in Setubal. There, anyone who couldn’t keep up with the bustling throngs was liable to get run down and trampled. He had no trouble flagging a cab. The driver helped him get inside, again more considerate than a Lagoan would have been. “Where to?” the fellow asked.

That was another phrase Fernao had learned. “The Principality,” he replied. Grandmaster Pinhiero had grumbled about paying for his stay there, but yielded in the end. Fernao couldn’t very well impose on Ilmarinen (as far as he could tell, no one imposed on Ilmarinen) or Siuntio, and Pekka was staying at the Principality. The more he learned from the Kuusaman mages, the more he talked shop with them, the better off Lagoas would be. So he’d told the grandmaster, and he’d actually made Pinhiero believe it.

Several hostels in Setubal might have matched the Principality, but Fernao wasn’t sure any could have beaten it. The room in which he dwelt was large and luxurious; the food, even in wartime, was outstanding; and he was convinced that at least half the people who worked in the Principality spoke better Lagoan than he did. The doorman was one of those. “Let me give you a hand, sir,” he said, and helped Fernao up the stairs to the entrance. Going along on flat ground, Fernao thought he managed pretty well. When he had to climb stairs, he was glad for any help he could get.

Once he made it into the lobby, he flipped back the hood on his tunic and sighed with pleasure, enjoying the warmth that radiated from several coal stoves. He looked around, wondering whether any of his Kuusaman colleagues were around. He’d thought he might spot Siuntio or Ilmarinen, but didn’t- though he wouldn’t say they weren’t there till he made a trip to the bar.

He’d taken a couple of hitching steps in that direction when someone called his name. He stopped and looked around-and there sat Pekka, not far from one of the stoves. She waved to him. “Come and join me, if you care to,” she said in classical Kaunian.

“I would be very glad to,” he answered.

She had a skein of dark green yarn in her lap and a length of finished green cloth into which were inserted a pair of crocheting hooks. “If I am not the worst crocheter in the world, I pity the poor woman who is,” Pekka said. “Would you care for a muffler, Master Fernao? You had better say aye, for I cannot make anything else.”

“Aye, and thank you,” Fernao said. “If I asked you for something with sleeves, you would probably knit me to death with those things.”

“Knitting needles are different,” Pekka said. “I knit even worse than I crochet, which is why I do not knit at all anymore.” She pointed to his newly freed arm. “I leave knitting to you. And I am glad to see you are doing it well.”

Reminded of the arm, he scratched it. “A very able lady physician named Juhani took off the cast. You Kuusamans worry less about the differences between men and women than my people do.”

Pekka shook her head. “No, that is not so,” she answered. “We worry less about differences in what men and women do than most other folk. We know there are differences between men and women.” She smiled. “If there were not, the world would have ended a long time ago, or at least our place in it.”

“That is true enough.” Fernao smiled, too.

Pekka rolled her eyes. “I wonder what my son is doing now, down in Kajaani. Something to drive my sister mad, I have no doubt. And, speaking of the differences between men and women, I never behaved that way when I was seven years old.”

“No?” Fernao’s chuckle threatened to become a belly laugh. “Would your mother and father say the same thing about you?”

“I hope so!” Pekka exclaimed. “Their hair is still almost altogether dark. Mine, I think, will be white as snow by the time Uto grows to manhood.”

Fernao ran a hand through his own coppery hair, which was just beginning to be frosted with gray. “I have no children,” he said. “If my hair turns white overnight, it may be on account of what you Kuusamans have come up with.”

“That might do it to me, too.” Before saying anything more, Pekka looked around to see if anyone might be listening. So did Fernao. He spotted no one close by. Pekka couldn’t have, either, but she went on, “I mislike speaking of this in public. Shall we talk further in my rooms?”

To a Lagoan, that might have been an invitation of one sort or an invitation of another sort altogether. Fernao asked, “What would your husband say if he heard you asking me there?”

“He would say that he trusted me,” Pekka answered. “He would also say that he had reason to trust me. I presume you would not try to prove him wrong?”

“Now that you have spoken so, of course not,” Fernao said. “But I did wonder. Customs differ from one kingdom to another.”

“So they do. But I am telling you how things are here.”

“I said all right once,” Fernao replied, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. “If you do not believe me, take back the invitation.”

“If I did not believe you, Master Fernao, I would do more than take back the invitation.” Pekka sounded sterner than he’d thought she could. “I would do everything I could to have you sent back to Setubal. And I think I could do it.” Her smile had iron in it-no, she wasn’t a woman of the sort Fernao was used to dealing with. She got up. “But now, if you will come with me, we can go up to my rooms-and talk of business.”

Where Pinhiero grumbled about paying the price of a room at the Principality, the Seven Princes had installed Pekka in a suite far larger than the flat Fernao called his own back in Setubal. He said, “With all this, why did you bother coming down to the lobby at all?”

“I get lonely, in here with nothing to look at but the walls,” Pekka answered. “I would rather see open country, as I do out behind my house down in Kajaani, but even the lobby and the street are better than … walls.”

Fernao thought nothing of looking at the walls of his own flat for days on end. Hostel lobbies and city streets were his natural habitat, as was true of any native of Setubal. As for open country, he’d seen more than he’d ever wanted in the land of the Ice People. The only thing he could say about it was that he hadn’t quite died there.

He didn’t want to say anything at all about the land of the Ice People. Instead, he did talk of business: “If the implications of your experiments are what they seem to be, as Ilmarinen says-”

“Even if they are, I do not think we can exploit them,” Pekka said, and now she sounded even more angry than she had when she’d warned what she would do if she didn’t trust him. “I do not think memory can be conserved; I am not at all convinced physical existence can be conserved. The amount of energy released inclines me to doubt it.”

“How could we make an experiment to test that?” Fernao asked.

“Do we not have more obviously urgent things to do?” Pekka returned.

“More obvious? Certainly,” Fernao said. “More urgent? I do not know. Do you?” After a bit of thought, Pekka shook her head. She was honest. Maybe that was why she insisted on honesty from him.

Algarvian soldiers guarded King Gainibu’s palace these days, as they had for more than two years. Seeing redheads in kilts there still irked Krasta. Turning to Colonel Lurcanio in the carriage they shared, she said, “You should have left the king an honor guard of his own people.”

“I?” Her Algarvian lover spread his hands. He had fine hands-an artist’s hands, or a surgeon’s, with long, slim fingers-and was vain of them. “My sweet, it was not my decision that put them there; it was Grand Duke Ivone’s, or perhaps King Mezentio’s. You may take your complaint to either one of them, and I wish you joy of it.”

“You’re making fun of me!” Krasta said shrilly.

“No, only of your silly idea,” Lurcanio answered. Most Algarvians were excitable. He was often excitable himself. Tonight, he stayed calm, probably because that annoyed Krasta more. He went on, “Do you not see that a Valmieran honor guard might easily decide its honor lay in rebellion? That would be a nuisance to us, and unfortunate for King Gainibu.”

As far as Krasta was concerned, Gainibu was already unfortunate: a prisoner in his own palace, with nothing better to do than drink till the fact of imprisonment blurred along with everything else. But, after a moment, she realized exactly what Lurcanio meant. “You’d kill him!”

“I?” This time, Lurcanio shook his head. “My countrymen? It could be. Mezentio’s brother is King of Jelgava. His first cousin is King of Grelz. I am sure he has some other near kinsman who could do duty as King of Valmiera.”

“Of all the nerve!” Krasta exclaimed. Lurcanio only smiled. He might not be so reliably excitable as some of his countrymen, but he had the full measure of Algarvian arrogance. Krasta wanted to slap him. But he would slap her back, and he wouldn’t care that he did it in public. She cursed quietly, but held still.

One of the Algarvian guards approached the carriage and called a soft challenge in his own language. Lurcanio’s driver responded, also in Algarvian. Krasta heard Lurcanio’s name and her own, but understood nothing of what the driver said. The guard laughed and withdrew. Lurcanio also laughed under his breath. Krasta looked daggers at him, but to no avail.

Agile despite his years, Lurcanio descended from the carriage and held out his hand to help Krasta down. “Step carefully, my dear,” he said. “You would not want to trip on the cobbles in the darkness and turn your pretty ankle.”

“No, I certainly wouldn’t.” Krasta’s voice was testy. “If you’d beaten the Lagoans by now, I wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark. You could let lights shine without drawing dragons.”

“Once we settle Unkerlant, you may rest assured that Lagoas is next on the list,” Lurcanio said. The statement would have been more impressive had he not chosen that moment to stumble. He almost fell, but caught himself by flailing his arms.

Krasta didn’t laugh. Colonel Lurcanio, she’d learned, was as touchy about his dignity as a cat. She did say, “I wish Lagoas didn’t have to wait.”

“We had. . plans for Setubal. They did not work out quite as we would have wished.” Lurcanio shrugged. “Such is life.”

Something in his voice warned Krasta against asking questions about what sort of plans the Algarvians had had. Plans like the ones my brother wrote about? she wondered. She didn’t want to believe that. If what Skarnu had written was true, she walked arm in arm with a murderer, or at least with an acquiescing accomplice to his kingdom’s murders.

One thing, at least: Lurcanio hadn’t asked her any questions lately about her brother. And, though he’d left the mansion two or three times in the past few weeks, he’d always come back on the grumpy side. That told her he hadn’t caught Skarnu-if he’d gone out hunting her brother. It also told him he hadn’t caught some young, pretty Valmieran commoner, which relieved her nearly as much.

Once they’d passed into the palace through doors and curtains, Krasta paused and blinked till she got used to the explosion of light within. Beside her, Lurcanio was doing the same thing. With a wry chuckle, he said, “The lamps in this palace were made for happier, safer times, I fear.”

“Well, then, Algarve should go on and win the war-I’ve told you that already,” Krasta said. “That would bring back the good times-some of them, anyhow.” Things wouldn’t be so good as they had been if the Algarvians kept on occupying Valmiera, but Krasta didn’t know what she could do about that.

“Aye, you have told me that.” Lurcanio’s voice was sour. “What you have not told me is exactly how to gain the victory. That would be helpful, you know.”

When the war was young, before Valmiera was overrun, Krasta had come to the palace to present her ideas on winning the war to King Gainibu’s soldiers. They hadn’t listened to her, and what had their failure to listen got them? Only defeat. She wasn’t shy about speaking her mind to Lurcanio now: “The first thing you ought to do is quit fighting over that stupid Sulingen place. Powers above, how long can a battle for one worthless Unkerlanter city go on, anyhow?”

“Sulingen is not worthless. Sulingen is far from worthless,” Lurcanio answered. “And the battle shall go on until we have won the victory we deserve.”

“Sounds like foolishness to me,” Krasta said with a sniff. Having delivered her pronouncement, she stalked down the hall with her nose in the air. Lurcanio had to hurry after her, and couldn’t give her any more of his cynical retorts. She didn’t miss them; she’d already heard too many of that sort.

With her nose in the air, she got the chance to appreciate the ornate paintings on the ceiling of the hallway. Some looked back to the time of the Kaunian Empire; others showed Kings of Valmiera and their courts from the days when her kingdom was strong and the Algarvians to the west weak and disunited. Those days were gone now, worse luck. The paintings, though, were only to be properly seen with one’s nose in the air. To Krasta, that in itself justified the aristocratic attitude.

A Valmieran functionary checked her name and Lurcanio’s off the list of guests for King Gainibu’s reception. That cheered Krasta; at her previous visit, a redhead had done the job. But, before she could twit Lurcanio about this tiny sign of Valmieran autonomy, an Algarvian came up to check what her countryman had done. Again, she kept quiet.

She’d been in this hall many times, including the evening when Gainibu, along with representatives from Jelgava and Sibiu and Forthweg, declared war on King Mezentio. And now the Algarvians occupied all those kingdoms, and only lands that had stayed neutral then still carried on the fight. A lesson lurked there somewhere, but Krasta could not find it.

She and Lurcanio got into the receiving line that snaked toward King Gainibu-and toward the Algarvian soldiers and pen-pushers who really ran Valmiera these days. Lurcanio said, “We must be early-his Majesty is hardly even weaving yet.”

That was cruel, which didn’t make it wrong. From even a little distance, Gainibu looked every inch a king: tall, erect, handsome, the chest of his tunic glittering with decorations-most of which were earned in the Six Years’ War, not honorary. Only when Krasta got closer did she note the glass of brandy in his left hand and the broken veins in his nose and eyes that said it was not the first such glass, nor the hundred and first, either. She’d seen the king far deeper into the bottle than this. Here, now, he still showed traces of the man he’d once been. That wouldn’t last through too many more brandies.

“Marchioness Krasta,” the king said. Aye, he was better than usual-he didn’t always remember who she was. Gainibu turned his watery-or spirituous-gaze on Lurcanio. “And the marchioness’ friend.”

“Your Majesty,” Krasta and Lurcanio murmured together. Krasta sounded respectful, as a subject should. Lurcanio sounded aggrieved: the king hadn’t bothered remembering his name.

He got some of his own back by chatting in Algarvian with the redheads who really ran Valmiera. Since he was ignoring her, Krasta ignored him, too. She turned back to Gainibu and said, “There will be better days, your Majesty.”

“Will there?” The king-the king who didn’t even rule in his own palace any more-knocked back his brandy and signaled for another one. It arrived almost at once. He knocked it back, too. For a moment, his features went blank and slack, as if he’d forgotten everything but the sweet fire in his throat. But then he came at least partway back to himself. “The powers above grant that you be right, milady. But I would not hold my breath waiting for them.” As he had a moment before, he waved for a fresh glass.

Krasta left Lurcanio and made a beeline for the bar. Tears stung her eyes. She tossed her head so no one would see them. The servitor asked, “How may I serve you, milady?”

He didn’t know she was a noblewoman. Plenty of Algarvians had brought commoners into the palace; with them, flesh counted for more than blood. But he took no chances, either. Krasta said, “Brandy with wormwood.”

“Aye, milady.” The barman gave her what she wanted. That was what he was for.

Lurcanio came up behind Krasta and asked for red wine. When he saw the greenish spirit in her glass, he said, “Try not to drink yourself into a stupor this evening, if you would be so kind. You do not show your loyalty to your king by imitating him.”

“I’ll do as I please,” Krasta said. Since she was a child, she’d done exactly that-till Lurcanio forced his way into her life.

“You may do as you please,” he said now, “so long as you also please me. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

She turned her back. “I shall do as I please,” she repeated. “If that doesn’t suit you, go away.”

She thought he would tell her to enjoy her walk home, or something of the sort. Instead, he spoke in tones so reasonable, they startled her: “Because your king has become a sorry sot, do you have to as well?”

“You made him into a sorry sot.” Krasta pointed at Lurcanio, as if to say he’d done it personally. “He wasn’t like that before the war.”

“Losing is harder than winning. I would be the last to deny it,” Lurcanio said. “But you can yield, or you can endure.”

Krasta thought of her brother again. He was doing more than enduring: he still resisted the Algarvians. And she. . she’d yielded. Every time she let Lurcanio into her bed-indeed, every time she let him take her to a reception like this one-she yielded again. But, having yielded once, she didn’t know what else she could do now. If she’d been wrong about Algarve when she yielded in the first place, how could she make amends now? Admit to herself she’d been selling herself and living a lie for the past two years? She couldn’t and wouldn’t imagine such a retreat.

“If I want to get drunk, I will get drunk,” she told Lurcanio. That measured the defiance she had in her: so much, but no more.

The Algarvian officer studied her, then shrugged one of his kingdom’s expressive shrugs. “Have it your way,” he said. “If you will not see you are behaving like a fool and a child, I cannot show you.” Krasta strode back to the bar and demanded a fresh glass of spiked brandy. She’d won her tiny victory, which was more than Valmiera could say against Algarve.

Pekka and Fernao rode a cab to Siuntio’s home together. One of Fernao’s crutches fell over and bumped her knee. She handed it back to him. “Here you are,” she said-her spoken classical Kaunian was getting better by the day, because she had to use it so much with the mage from Lagoas.

“My apologies,” he said: he also used the tongue more freely than he had when he first came to Yliharma. “I am a nuisance, a crowd all by myself.”

“You are a man who was badly hurt,” she said patiently. “You ought to thank the powers above that you have regained so much of your health.”

“I do,” he said, and then corrected himself: “Now I do. At the time, and for some time afterwards, I would have thanked them more had they let me die.”

“I can understand that,” Pekka said. “Your wounds were very painful.”

Fernao’s grin had a skeletal quality to it. “You might say so,” he replied. “In saying so, you would discover that words are not always adequate to describe the world around us.”

In classical Kaunian, the sentiment sounded noble and philosophic. Pekka wondered how much torment it concealed. A good deal, surely: Femao did not strike her as the sort of man who would exaggerate suffering for sympathy. If anything, he used a dry wit to hold sympathy at bay most of the time.

“That is true not only of things pertaining to the body,” Pekka observed. “It is also why we have the mathematics of magecraft.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Fernao said. “You are right, though-I was not thinking in mathematical terms.”

They might have gone on with the philosophical discussion, but the cab stopped then. The hackman said, “We’re here, folks. That’ll be three in silver.”

Hearing plain, ordinary Kuusaman startled Pekka. She paid the driver, collected a receipt so she’d be reimbursed, and helped Fernao out of the cab. He stared at the cottage in which Siuntio lived, at the ivy that was all but naked because of the fall chill, at the yellowing grass in front of the home. “The greatest theoretical sorcerer of the day deserves better,” he said.

“I thought the same the first time I came here,” Pekka answered. “I thought he deserved a palace grander than the Prince of Yliharma’s. But this place suits him, not least because it has room enough for all his books. As long as they are where he can get at them when he needs one or wants one in particular, he cares little about anything else.” Pekka understood that feeling; she had a large measure of it herself.

Fernao said, “I wish I could be that way. But I am too much a part of the world not to wish I had more of what it can give along with more books and more time to read them.” He smiled that dry smile once more. “What I want is more of everything, I suppose.”

Before Pekka could answer, the front door opened. Siuntio waved to Fernao and her. “Come in, come in. Welcome, welcome. Very glad you could drop by this morning,” he said, once more making classical Kaunian sound more like a living language than one maintained by scholars. “You had better hurry up. Ilmarinen got here half an hour ago, and I cannot promise how long the brandy will hold out.”

He smiled as he spoke, but Pekka wondered if he were joking. Ilmarinen liked his drink, no doubt about it. Like Fernao, he didn’t pull back from life. On the contrary-he grabbed with both hands. Pekka supposed she ought to count herself lucky that he hadn’t tried to grab her with both hands.

Fernao made his slow way toward the door. Pekka walked alongside him, ready to help if he stumbled. He didn’t; he’d had a good deal of practice on his crutches by now. Siuntio said, “Good to see the two of you, both for the work we can do together and”-he lowered his voice-”because the three of us together may have some chance of keeping Ilmarinen under control.” He stepped aside to let Pekka and Fernao move past him and into the house.

Fernao got to the end of the foyer and stopped. Pekka was behind him in the narrow entry hall, so she had to stop, too. He muttered something in Lagoan that she didn’t understand, then caught himself and went back to classical Kaunian: “Master Siuntio, you had better search me when I leave. Otherwise, I am liable to steal as much of your library as I can carry.”

Pekka giggled. “I said the same thing the first time I came here. I suspect every mage who comes here for the first time says the same thing.”

Ilmarinen walked in from the kitchen. Sure enough, he had a glass of brandy in his hand-and a raffish grin on his face. “Not me,” he said. “I kept quiet-and walked out with whatever I happened to need.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Siuntio said, which made all the mages laugh. Siuntio went on, “When I no longer have any use for these books, they will go to someone who can profit from them. Till then, I intend to hold on to them. On to all of them.” He gave Ilmarinen a severe look. Ilmarinen’s answering gaze was as serene as if he’d never named himself a thief.

“Shall we get to work?” Pekka said. “Who knows what they are doing right this minute in Algarve?”

“Murdering people.” Ilmarinen took a good-sized swig of brandy. “Same as they’re doing in Unkerlant. And do you know what’s worst?” He finished the brandy while the other sorcerers shook their heads. “What’s worst is, we don’t always wake up screaming any more when they do it. We’re getting used to it, and if that isn’t a judgment on us, curse me if I know what it is.” He stared from one mage to the next, daring them to disagree with him.

“I had not thought of it so,” Pekka said slowly, “but you may well be right. When something dreadful happens for the first time, it is a horror that lives in the memory forever. When it happens again and again, the mind grows numb. The mind has to, I think; if it did not grow numb, it would go mad.”

“We’re all mad.” Ilmarinen’s voice remained harsh.

“Mistress Pekka is right: we need to work,” Siuntio said. “If you will come with me to my study…”

The hallways were lined with books, too. Pekka asked, “Master, how hard was it to pick up everything after the Algarvians attacked Yliharma?”

“It was quite difficult and painful, my dear,” Siuntio answered. “Many volumes were damaged, and some destroyed outright. A very sad time.”

Had he been in his study when the Algarvians attacked, he surely would have died, buried by the books he loved so well. Bookshelves climbed the wall from floor to ceiling; there were even two shelves above the door, and two more above each window. A ladder helped Siuntio get to books he couldn’t have reached without it.

“Can we all sit down?” Fernao asked. “Is there room enough around that table?”

“I think so. I hope so.” Siuntio sounded anxious. “I cleared it off as best I could. It’s where I work.” He’d piled the books and papers that had been on the table onto the desk, or so Pekka guessed-some of the piles on the desk looked newer and neater than others. She wondered how many years (or was it how many decades?) it had been since Siuntio could work at that desk.

“Here,” she said, doing her best to be brisk and practical. “We shall take these three seats, and leave Master Fernao the one closest to the door.” No one disagreed with her. She didn’t think Fernao could have squeezed his way between the bookshelves and the table to get to any of the other chairs. She had trouble herself, and she was both smaller than the Lagoan mage and unburdened by crutches.

“Plenty of paper. Plenty of pens. Plenty of ink,” Siuntio said. Like any theoretical sorcerer, he disliked all the jokes about absent-minded mages, and did his best to show they shouldn’t stick to him.

“Plenty of brandy,” Ilmarinen added, “and plenty of tea. If the one won’t get your wits working, maybe the other will.”

“Plenty of references, too, in case we need to check anything,” Fernao said. As he had in the front room, he looked around the study with covetous awe.

But Siuntio shook his head. “Few references for where we are going. What we do here will become the reference work for those who follow us. We are the trailblazers in this work.”

“We are references for one another, too,” Pekka added. “Master Siuntio and Master Ilmarinen and I have all used one another’s work to advance our own research.”

“And you have pulled a long way ahead of everyone else because of it,” Fernao said. “I have been studying hard since I came to Yliharma, but I know I am still a long way behind.”

“You were useful in the laboratory,” Pekka said, which was true, “and you have more practical experience than any of us.” Thinking of mages with practical experience reminded her of how much she missed her husband. But Leino was liable to get practical experience of a much nastier sort. Pekka pulled her thoughts back to the business at hand, adding, “And that makes you likely to see things we may have missed.”

Ilmarinen sniffed; he was the one who saw what others missed, and took pride in doing so. Pulling a sheet of foolscap off the pile Siuntio had set in the center of the table, he inked a pen and got to work. After a couple of ostentatious calculations, he looked up and said, “I aim to nail down the possibilities that spring from the divergent series: the ones having to do with the younger subjects, I mean.”

Siuntio coughed. “Be practical instead, if you possibly can. As Mistress Pekka implied, we need as much practicality as we can muster.”

“That is practical, if only you would see it.” Ilmarinen started calculating again, more ostentatiously than ever. Pekka wondered if he was right. Fernao seemed to think so, or at least that there was some chance of it. Lamplight glittered from the gold frames of Ilmarinen’s reading glasses as he scribbled; they were almost the only concession he made to age.

Pekka quickly lost herself in her own work. She was used to being alone when she calculated, but the presence of her colleagues didn’t disturb her. She asked Siuntio a couple of questions. He knew everything that was in the reference books. Why not? He’d written a good many of them.

She started when Fernao shoved his paper across the table to her. “Your pardon,” he said. She blinked and smiled, suddenly recalled to the real world. Fernao pointed to the last four or five lines he’d written. “I want to find out if you think this expression forbidden in the context in which I am using it.”

“Let me see.” Pekka had to go back up the page to get her bearings. As she worked her way down again, her eyebrows rose. “My compliments,” she said, passing the leaf of paper back to Fernao. “I never would have thought of attacking the problem from this angle. And aye, I think the expression is permitted here. If you expand it, see what you have.” She wrote two quick lines under his work.

He leaned forward to see what she’d done. His face lit up. “Oh, that is pretty,” he said. “I would have done it with parallels instead, and would have missed what the expansion shows. This is better-and you will be able to test it in the laboratory.”

Pekka shook her head, for two reasons. “I would not try it in a laboratory-we need open space, I think, to make sure we can do it without wrecking ourselves and our surroundings. And we will not test it.” She gestured at herself and her Kuusaman colleagues. “We will.” This time, her gesture included Fernao. His smile got wider. Pekka smiled, too, and told him, “With this, you have earned your place among us.”

Ilmarinen sniffed again. Pekka stuck out her tongue at him.

Every so often, Ealstan made a point of walking by the edge of the Kaunian quarter in Eoforwic. Looking at the blonds reminded him that however much he’d done by keeping Vanai safe, it was only a drop in the ocean. Too many, far too many, people went on suffering.

The Algarvian constables were jumpier than they had been before Vanai’s cantrip got into the Kaunian quarter. Almost every time Ealstan went near it, they clipped a lock from his hair. That didn’t worry him; he really was a Forthwegian, after all. That any of his people could like the Kaunians and wish them well seemed a notion alien to the redheads.

They certainly didn’t want Forthwegians wishing Kaunians well. New broadsheets went up every few days. THIS IS A KAUNIAN WAR! one shouted, showing Kaunian hands reaching into Algarve from all directions. Another cried, BRING DOWN THE NEW KAUNIAN EMPIRE! It showed ancient Algarvic warriors striding through the burning ruins of a Kaunian town.

But Kaunians weren’t the only ones the broadsheets savaged. UNKERLANT IS FORTHWEG’S FOE, TOO, one of them told passersby. Another was more sweeping: UNKERLANT IS DERLAVAl’s ENEMY. That one showed all the continent east of Unkerlant served up on a platter before a wild-eyed King Swemmel, who was about to devour it with a mouth full of pointed fangs.

Another broadsheet showed Algarvian soldiers and men from Plegmund’s Brigade marching side by side above the legend, WE ARE THE SHIELD OF DERLAVAI. When Ealstan saw one of those on a quiet street where nobody was paying him any attention, he spat on it.

He was lucky in his timing; an Algarvian constable came round the corner a moment after he’d let fly. Seeing him, the redhead asked, “You living here?”

“No,” Ealstan answered. “Just on my way somewhere.”

“Getting going, then,” the constable told him, and set a hand on the bludgeon he wore on his belt. Ealstan left in a hurry.

Inside the Kaunian quarter, life tried to go on as it always had. Blonds bought and sold from one another, although, from the glimpses Ealstan got of the goods they showed for sale, they had little worth having. And even in the Kaunian quarter, all the signs were in Forthwegian or Algarvian. Mezentio’s men had forbidden the Kaunians to write their own language not long after they overran Forthweg.

Out from the Kaunian distract came a squad of Algarvian constables leading several dozen glum-looking blonds: men, women, children. They headed off toward the ley-line caravan depot in the center of town. Fight! Ealstan wanted to yell at them. Run! Do something!

But he kept quiet, for fear of what would happen if he shouted. Shame choked him. The Kaunians stolidly marched along. Did they not believe what would happen to them once they got into a caravan car? Ealstan didn’t see how that could be, not after so long. Did they fear what would happen to the blonds still in the quarter if they showed fight? Maybe that made more sense.

Or maybe nothing made sense any more. Maybe the whole world had gone mad when the war started. Maybe I was the one who went mad, Ealstan thought. Maybe one day I’ll wake up and I’ll be home. Leofiig will be fine. None of this will really have happened.

How tempting to believe that! But Ealstan knew too well he couldn’t. What he wanted and what was real were-and would stay-two different things. And, if he woke up from a dream, he would wake up without Vanai. Having her at his side made everything else.. pretty close to bearable.

He walked on through Eoforwic, into the richer parts of town. Broadsheets were fewer there, as if the Algarvians worried more about offending prosperous folk than the poor of the city. And they probably did. They squeezed more taxes out of the rich, and relied on them to help keep the poor quiet. In exchange for being let alone otherwise, well-to-do Forthwegians were all too often willing to work hand in glove with the redheaded occupiers.

And one broadsheet he saw in the prosperous districts but nowhere else put things as starkly as could be. UNKERLANT WOULD BE WORSE, it read. A lot of Forthwegians-Forthwegians of non-Kaunian blood, of course-probably believed that. But the broadsheet said nothing about a free and independent Forthweg. For Ealstan, that was the only thing worth having.

The doorman at Ethelhelm’s block of flats still hadn’t resumed his post outside the building. Ealstan supposed the fellow could use the cool, rainy fall weather as an excuse. His own opinion was that the doorman lacked the nerve to show his face on the street after the latest riots. But no one much cared about his opinion. He’d seen that too many times to have any doubts.

“And a good day to you, sir.” The doorman nodded to him. “Ethelhelm told me I was to expect you, and here you are.” If Ethelhelm said it, it had to be true-so his tone implied.

“Here I am,” Ealstan agreed in a hollow voice. He wished he weren’t. But Ethelhelm was too good a client to throw over, even if he’d turned out not to be such a good friend. Sighing, Ealstan climbed the stairs to the drummer and bandleader’s flat.

Ethelhelm swung the door open as soon as he knocked. The musician didn’t seem to notice that Ealstan’s liking for him had cooled. “Good to see you,” he said. “Aye, very good to see you. Come in. Drink some wine, if you care to.”

“I wouldn’t turn down a cup, thanks,” Ealstan said. Ethelhelm always had something smooth and rich to drink in the flat. Why not? Ealstan couldn’t think of many Forthwegians who could afford it better.

Today, he poured from a jar of a splendid, tawny vintage. Peering into his glass, he said, “That’s just about the color of a Gyongyosian’s beard, isn’t it?”

“If you say so, I won’t quarrel with you,” Ealstan answered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Gyongyosian in the flesh.” He paused, thought, and shook his head. “I’m sure I haven’t. Can’t imagine what a Gyongyosian would have been doing in Gromheort.” Ethelhelm already knew where he was from.

“Ah, well, if you want to get technical, I’ve never seen a Gyongyosian, either,” Ethelhelm admitted. “I’m just going by what everybody says.”

“People do that too often,” Ealstan said. If Forthwegians didn’t go so often by what everybody said, the Kaunians in the kingdom would have had an easier time. He wished he could say so to Ethelhelm’s face. He didn’t dare, especially not after the bandleader had seen Vanai in her Forthwegian semblance and drawn his own conclusions from it.

Ethelhelm fed him olives and crumbly white cheese that went well with the wine. Then he said, “Now you’d better see if I’ve got any money left.”

He’d made that joke before. The more often he made it, the more he seemed to prosper. Ealstan assumed the same would hold true again. But when he finished casting Ethelhelm’s accounts, he stared at his client. “Powers above, where’s your silver going?”

“You’re the bookkeeper. You tell me.” Ethelhelm’s voice had an edge to it. So did his smile.

“That’s hard to do when you haven’t got much in the way of receipts, and when you’re calling most of what you’ve spent ‘miscellaneous expenses.’ “ Ealstan studied the books he’d just worked up, then glanced at the musician. He’d seen that sharp, sour smile on other people, his father among them. When he’d seen it on Hestan’s face. . “Are you paying the redheads that much?”

Ethelhelm started, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Well, I knew you were clever. I wouldn’t want you working for me if you weren’t clever. Now I have to live with it. Aye, I’m paying the redheads that much.” He bared his teeth in what wasn’t a smile at all anymore. “I’ll probably be paying them twice as much before too long, too.”

“But why?” Ealstan asked, bewildered. “Up till now, they weren’t hitting you anywhere near this hard.”

With seeming irrelevance, Ethelhelm answered, “When I saw you in the park with your Forthwegian lady friend-her name’s Thelberge, isn’t that right? — I thought you were a pretty clever fellow. You’d had a liability, or I think you had, and you disposed of it. Times like these, that’s what you’ve got to do … if you can.”

A liability. He was talking about Vanai, of course. She wasn’t a person in his mind, only a problem. Ealstan glanced at his wineglass. It was empty. If it hadn’t been, he might have dashed its contents in Ethelhelm’s face.

“What’s Thelberge got to do with. . this?” he asked, tapping the ledger cover with a fingernail.

“You disposed of your liability,” Ethelhelm repeated. He stood up. He was several inches taller than Ealstan, if narrower through the shoulders. “Aye, you disposed of yours. How do I get rid of mine?”

No matter how sharp he was, Ealstan needed a couple of heartbeats to understand. When he did, ice ran through him. He said, “They’re squeezing you on account of your blood?”

“Nothing else but,” the bandleader agreed mournfully. “And once Algarvians start garbage like that, it never gets better. No, it never gets better. It just gets worse.” His laugh might have had broken glass in it. “Of course, if I don’t like them squeezing me, I can always go to the Kaunian district. That’d be jolly, wouldn’t it?”

“Jolly.” It wasn’t the word Ealstan would have chosen. He tapped the ledger again. “If they squeeze you a whole lot harder than this, you’re going to have trouble holding on to the flat here, you know.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me different, because that’s how it added up to me, too,” Ethelhelm answered. “I’m taking the band out on tour again as soon as I can-as soon as the redheads let me. I make more money touring than I do sitting here, I’ll tell you that. Can’t play Eoforwic every day. I’d wear out my welcome pretty cursed quick if I tried.”

That made sense. Ethelhelm was a good businessman as well as a good musician. Ealstan had seen as much. But the bandleader had made his accommodations with the occupiers, and what had it got him? Only more trouble. Thinking aloud, Ealstan said, “You’d have to sing whatever they wanted you to.”

“Don’t remind me,” Ethelhelm said sourly. “Sometimes I wish I’d never …” He didn’t finish, but Ealstan had no trouble doing it for him. I wish I’d never started bending in the first place-he had to mean something like that.

He went on, “I do think they will let me tour. Why shouldn’t they? The more I make, the more they can steal from me.”

“That’s what they do,” Ealstan said. “That’s what they’ve done to the whole kingdom.” You thought you could stay free of it because you were already rich and famous. All you had to do was make a little deal. But bargains with the redheads always have more teeth than you see at first.

“Be thankful your problems are smaller than mine, Ealstan,” Ethelhelm said. “Smaller now, anyhow.” Ealstan nodded. He didn’t laugh in the bandleader’s face, but for the life of him he had trouble figuring out why not.