“Ah,” Orosio said, again as if Sabrino had offered him a philosophical revelation.
Sabrino wasn’t feeling philosophical. He was just feeling battered and abused. The last thing he needed was someone pounding on the door to the hut. He flinched at the racket. So did Orosio. The only way to make it stop was to open the door. When Sabrino did; he marveled at how young and clean-cut the crystallomancer looked. “Well?” he growled—softly.
The crystallomancer seemed oblivious to his fragile condition. He said, “Sir, we’ve got ten new dragons and ten new dragonfliers coming in as soon as the weather clears enough.”
“Do we?” Sabrino said, and the youngster nodded. “Ten? Really?” Sabrino asked. The crystallomancer nodded again.
“That’s about half the strength we’ve got here now,” Orosio said.
“Aye, and it brings the wing up to something close to half-strength,” Sabrino added. Though at the start of the war he’d never imagined it would be, that was something to celebrate. He went back into the hut, poured a mug full of spirits, and thrust it at the crystallomancer. “Here,” he said. “Have a drink.”
“I’m off to the Boulevard of Horsemen,” Krasta said with as much gaiety as she could muster.
Colonel Lurcanio looked up from his paperwork, but not for long. “Try not to buy more than the carriage can carry back here,” he told her: even for one of the Algarvian occupiers, he was notably cynical.
“I was hoping one of the lingerie shops might finally have something new,” she said.
“Were you?” That got Lurcanio’s notice, as Krasta had thought it would. If it hadn’t, she would have been offended, and she would have let him know about it, too. He ran his eyes up and down her, as if imagining her in a new negligee, or perhaps being peeled out of a new negligee. “Here’s hoping they do.”
“If you come to my bedchamber tonight, maybe you’ll find out,” Krasta purred. “Maybe. If I decide to open the door and let you in.” Giggling, she hurried out of his office. “Enjoy your papers,” she called from the empty antechamber. No new adjutant had replaced Captain Gradasso, who was off somewhere in the barbarous wilds of Unkerlant.
Krasta’s driver greeted the news that he was to take her into Priekule with something less than unrestrained enthusiasm. “Oh, very well, milady,” he said. “It’ll be a bit, though: I have to get the horses ready.” When Krasta went out to the stables, she discovered, not for the first time, that getting the horses ready also involved getting his trusty flask ready.
But he still handled the carriage well enough. So long as that remained true, Krasta didn’t care if he drank. He was a commoner, after all, and what were commoners but a pack of drunks?
The lingerie shop had the same wares it had displayed the last time she’d shopped there, a few weeks before—and on her visit before that, too. She’d sneered then. Today she bought a gown of filmy blue silk that would play up her eyes—as well as some other assets. She’d seen it before, aye, but Colonel Lurcanio wouldn’t have.
She didn’t even harass the shopgirl while making the purchase, which proved she had something on her mind. Carrying the parcel in her hand—the silk folded up into next to nothing—she hurried out of the shop. On the sidewalk, she paused and looked around. Everything looked as normal, and as dreary, as could be.
Shoes clicking on the slates, she hurried off the Boulevard of Horsemen and onto a side street. The blocks of flats there had a look of good breeding even wartime poverty and neglect couldn’t mar. People who lived in them were people to be reckoned with. Krasta looked around again. She didn’t see any of the people who’d been on the Boulevard when she left the lingerie shop. Satisfied, she ducked into one of the blocks of flats and went up to the third floor.
It’ll be the one farthest from the stairs, she reminded herself. The hallway had carpeting thicker and softer than her mansion boasted. She knocked on the door.
Viscount Valnu opened it. “Well, come in, sweetheart,” he said, smiling his bright, predatory, skeletally handsome smile. “No one followed you here, I hope?”
“I don’t think so,” Krasta said, before remembering that trusting him was liable to be even more dangerous than trusting Lurcanio. Hastily she added, “If I don’t come back, I’ve left enough behind in writing to make sure you get what you deserve.”
Smiling still, Valnu said, “I don’t believe you.” Alarm blazed through Krasta, for she was bluffing. Before she could say anything, before she could do anything, Valnu went on: “Before the war, though, you never would have had the wit to come up with the lie—so maybe it isn’t a lie. Invasions are so educational, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about,” Krasta snapped.
Valnu laughed. “Well, that sounds more like you. But the question isn’t what you don’t know. The question is what you do know, and what you intend to do about it.”
“I know …” Krasta paused and took a deep breath. “I know you’re part of the underground, because if you weren’t, Count Amatu wouldn’t be dead.”
“And so?” Valnu asked. “What do you propose to do about that? That Algarvian colonel’s been in your bed ever since the redheads marched into Priekule. I don’t care to have my name come up in pillow talk, you know.”
The parcel Krasta was holding crinkled a little. That reminded her of what was inside the paper. Her cheeks heated. Even so, she said, “If you didn’t care to have that happen, you shouldn’t have tried molesting me at one party or another—at one party and another, I should say.”
“Molesting you?” Valnu threw back his head and laughed. “My dear, you didn’t seem molested. And who, if I may ask, was doing just what to whom?”
Krasta needed a moment to sort through that, too. Once she did, she put the parcel down on a table and walked right up to Valnu. “The last time we got caught,” she said, putting her arms around him, “I was doing something like this.” She kissed him.
He didn’t respond for a moment. Then, his mouth still joined to hers, he started to laugh, and he kissed her back.
“That’s better,” she said after a while. “I was starting to wonder if those handsome Algarvian officers were the only ones who mattered to you any more.”
“I already said you have a handsome Algarvian officer in your bed,” Valnu replied. “Why shouldn’t I have some in mine?” He was, as usual, altogether flagrant and altogether unabashed.
“Why?” Krasta said. “I’ll show you why.” She kissed him again, this time so hard that she tasted blood—hers or his she neither knew nor cared. Whatever his interest in Algarvian officers, she knew she’d excited him in the past. By the bulge in his trousers, she was exciting him again, too. Now she laughed in the middle of a kiss, laughed and ground her hips against him.
“I asked you once, who was molesting whom?” Valnu panted. His left hand cupped her right buttock; his right squeezed her left breast.
“Oh, shut up,” she told him, and rubbed him with her hand.
Deft and sure, his right hand undid the wooden toggles that held her tunic closed. He bent to her and teased her nipples with his tongue. Whatever his interest in Algarvian officers, he remembered how to excite her, too.
She fumbled with his belt. Once she got it unbuckled, she yanked his trousers down. She fell to her knees in front of him. But as she began, as one of his hands went to the back of her head to guide her, he said, “The last time you put your mouth there, you threw me out of your carriage when you found out a pretty little shopgirl had done that before you.”
“And so?” Krasta rocked forward and back a couple of times. Valnu’s breath sighed out of him. Krasta paused and said, “She was just a commoner.” She returned to what she’d been doing. His fingers tangled in her hair. His hand urged her forward again, urged her on. In spite of it, she paused again and looked up at him. “I presume all your handsome Algarvians were of noble blood?”
He gaped. Then he laughed. He laughed so hard, he lost the most ob
vious evidence of his excitement. “There’s no one like you, is there?” he said.
“I should hope not,” Krasta replied indignantly, and set about repairing the damage. It didn’t take long. She hadn’t thought it would.
After a bit, Valnu pulled away. “Shall we go back to the bedchamber?” he asked.
Krasta considered. “No,” she said, and pulled him down onto the floor with her.
She regretted that in short order: thrashing about on the carpet wasn’t so comfortable as it would have been on a soft, resilient mattress. But that regret was only a small thing, especially after Valnu poised himself above her, her thighs clasping his lean flanks. He had stamina and to spare, and also had the courtesy to help her along with a finger so that she gasped and shuddered and stiffened at the same instant he drove himself deepest into her.
Afterwards, he didn’t have the courtesy to keep all his weight on his elbows and knees. That mattered more on a hard floor than it would have in bed, too. “Let me up,” Krasta said, and bit him on the shoulder to make sure she got the point across.
“So much for romance,” Valnu said, but he did as she asked.
“Romance hasn’t got anything to do with getting squashed.” Krasta spoke with great conviction. She rubbed her backside. She hadn’t noticed the carpet burn while she and Valnu were making love, but she did now.
He started putting on his clothes. As he did up the toggles on his tunic, he asked, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“Mine, of course,” Krasta replied at once. Before she got dressed, she used the privy. As she returned, she asked a question of her own: “Did you expect anything else?”
“I never know what to expect with you, darling,” Valnu said, running a comb through his hair. He cocked his head to one side, studying her. “I don’t think anyone knows what to expect from you.”
“Good,” she said, which made him laugh again.
But then he sobered. “Not necessarily,” he told her. “You ought to know, you’ve almost had the same sort of unfortunate accident poor Count Amatu did.”
People in the underground have wanted to kill you, was what that meant. Krasta knew she had to keep up a bold front. “Just remember,” she said, “that kind of accident wouldn’t be unfortunate only for me.” Without giving him a chance to answer, she picked up the paper-wrapped parcel and swept out of the flat.
Her driver hadn’t drunk himself into a stupor. He touched the brim of his cap when she came up. “Home, milady, or on to more shops?” he asked.
“Home,” Krasta said. He nodded and took her there without another word.
Colonel Lurcanio met her in the entrance hall. “I trust you had a successful campaign?” he asked, as if she’d gone to war rather than to the Boulevard of Horsemen.
How much did he know? Was he spying on her? Before, that would only have infuriated her. Now it might be deadly dangerous. As calmly as she could, she answered, “Aye,” and held up the parcel as if it were spoils of war.
“Ah.” Lurcanio’s eyes lit up. “You will have to show me your plunder, then.”
“Tonight,” Krasta promised, doing her best to sound alluring. Lurcanio was a good lover. She’d first let him into her bed more from fear than for any other reason, but she’d come to want him, too. That wouldn’t be so easy tonight, though, not after what had happened in the flat off Priekule’s chief shopping boulevard. She sighed, and hoped he didn’t notice. The more she wished things were simple, the more complicated they got.
After supper, she went up to her bedchamber and put on the negligee. Lurcanio knocked on her door not much later. When she opened it, he looked her up and down. “A successful campaign indeed,” he said, and surprised her by picking her up and carrying her back to the bed.
He surprised her again when his attentions gave her a full share of pleasure, just as Valnu’s had. Lazy in the afterglow, she leaned over and kissed him. If she was on her own side and no one else’s, she’d won twice today.
Ealstan glared at Pybba. “You don’t care,” he said bitterly. “You’ve never cared. She’s a Kaunian. As far as you’re concerned, the powers below are welcome to her.”
The pottery magnate glared back at Ealstan. “Aye, now that you mention it.” Before Ealstan could hurl himself at him, Pybba went on: “But you’re worth enough to me that I’d do something for her if I could. Only thing is, I can’t.”
“You haven’t tried!” Ealstan exclaimed.
“What exactly do you think I can do?” Pybba asked. “If she’s still in Forthweg at all, she’s here in Eoforwic in the Kaunian district, right? Some of the guards there are Algarvians. The rest of the whoresons, the Forthwegians, are the ones who’re just a step away from Plegmund’s Brigade. They don’t want to have anything to do with Kaunians except maybe to blaze ‘em, and they don’t want to have anything to do with me, either. I’m sorry, kid, but what does that leave?”
He didn’t sound particularly sorry, and Ealstan knew he wasn’t particularly sorry. But Ealstan also knew he had a point… or part of a point. “My father says you can always bribe an Algarvian if you go about it the right way.”
“Go ahead and try,” Pybba said. “Most of the time, your old man’d be right. But they’ve tightened up about the blonds. They need ‘em too bad to want to turn any more of’em loose.” He shrugged. “It’s a sign they’re in trouble. If you think that breaks my heart, you’re daft.”
He had a point there, too. Ealstan didn’t want to admit it, not when Pybba was talking about Vanai. “But—” he began.
“Shut up,” Pybba said flatly. “I’ve listened for as long as I’m going to listen. Get your arse back to work. What you try by yourself, you try, that’s all. But if anything goes wrong, you can bet I’ll kill you before the stinking redheads get the chance to squeeze you. You know too bloody much.”
“I don’t know enough to do what I need to do,” Ealstan said, though that wasn’t what Pybba meant.
“You didn’t know enough to keep from getting the hots for a blond girl,” the pottery magnate told him, though that wasn’t what he’d meant before, either. Pybba jerked a thumb at the door that led out of his inner office. “Go on. Get out of here. I haven’t got the time to waste on you, and you haven’t got the time to waste, with all the work piled on your desk.”
If Ealstan said he was caught up on his work, Pybba would just give him more. He knew that. He had no choice but to leave. He slammed the door behind him. Pybba only laughed. Plenty of people slammed the door coming out of his office. It was usually a sign he’d got his way.
“Not this time,” Ealstan muttered. A couple of people in the outer office glanced at him, but not with any enormous surprise. Plenty of people muttered to themselves coming out of Pybba’s office, too.
To make things worse, one of the first items Ealstan had to enter in Pybba’s ledgers was the payment the Algarvians had made for another large shipment of Style Seventeen sugar bowls. The potter magnate made plenty of money from the redheads—money he turned around and used against them. But would he do anything for Vanai? Ealstan shook his head. What you try by yourself, you try, that’s all.
“Powers below eat you,” Ealstan whispered. He clenched his fist till his nails bit into the palm of his hand, I will try. And I will get her out, too.
Mechanically, he worked through the day, as he’d worked through every day since coming home to find Vanai vanished. At last, quitting time came. He hurried out of Pybba’s establishment and onto the streets of Eoforwic.
He didn’t go straight home. He saw no point in going straight home. Without Vanai there, his flat was only a place to eat and sleep. He didn’t want to spend time there, not any more. Spending time there reminded him of what he was missing, and that hurt too much to bear.
Instead, as he often did these days, he hurried to the edge of the Kaunian district. Prominently posted signs outside it declared that any Forthwegians caught inside the district would be blazed without warning, THUS WE THWART
THE KAUNIANS’ VILE SORCERIES, the signs proclaimed. THEY SEEK TO CONCEAL THEIR EVIL, BUT WE SHALL NOT LET THEM MASQUERADE AS DECENT PEOPLE.
As Forthwegians, was what that meant. Most of the guards patrolling the edge of the quarter were Forthwegians themselves; Pybba had been right about that. He’d also been right that they seemed enthusiastic about their work. Did that make them decent people? Ealstan couldn’t see it.
One of the guards saw him. The fellow swung his stick Ealstan’s way, not quite pointing it at him but ready to do just that. “You keep sniffing around here,” the guard said. “I catch you again, you’ll be sorry. You got that?”
“Aye,” Ealstan said, and beat a retreat. He cursed and kicked at pebbles all the way back to his fiat, wishing each one of them were the guard’s face. How could he get into the Kaunian quarter to bring Vanai out when his own countrymen were so determined to keep her and all the other blonds in there till the Algarvians needed them?
Once he got home, he ate bread and olive oil and almonds and a chunk of smoked pork, washing them down with red wine. He hadn’t bothered fixing himself anything fancier than that since the redheads had seized Vanai. He probably would have botched things anyhow. He’d never had to learn to cook for himself.
She’s going to have a baby, he thought as he washed his few dishes. Don’t the Algarvians care? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that only too well.
He thought about pouring himself more wine, about drowning his worries in it. But then he shook his head, as if someone had suggested the idea to him out loud. As far as a lot of Kaunians were concerned, Forthwegians were a bunch of drunks. I can’t afford to get drunk now. If I’m drunk, I know I won’t come up with any way to get my wife free.
The only trouble with that was, even sober he couldn’t find any way to get Vanai free. He’d tried and tried, and had no luck. He wandered out of the kitchen and into the front room. Like the bedroom, it had several cheap bookcases filled with secondhand books. Back before Vanai had come up with the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian, she’d had to stay in the flat all the time, with words on paper her only escape from boredom.
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