“You’re not being very helpful,” complained the woman who’d asked the question.
“You’re not being very imaginative,” Fernao said. “Would I have talked about this if you didn’t need to know it?”
“Well, you never can tell,” the woman said.
Later, Fernao did some complaining of his own to Pekka: “I wanted to pound my head against the wall. We’ve made this as simple as we can. Have we really made it simple enough for the people who’ll have to use it? Can we make it simple enough for these people to use it?”
Instead of giving him the sympathy he craved, she annoyed him by laughing. “I’ve spent years trying to pound sorcery into the heads of people who don’t much want to learn it,” he said. “The ones we have here are pretty bright.”
“Powers above help our kingdoms!” he exploded.
“I hope they will. I hope they do,” she answered, and he found nothing to say to that. Then she added, “They must be looking out for me. Otherwise, how would I have met you?”
Fernao’s annoyance evaporated. His ears heated. That must have been visible from the outside as well as palpable from within, for Pekka giggled. Fernao bowed. “You do me too much credit, I think.”
Pekka shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “If I did, would you make me so happy?” Before his head swelled to the point where her chamber couldn’t hold it, she added, “If I didn’t think so, would I have let my life get so complicated when I didn’t intend to?”
He found nothing to say to that, either. His life wasn’t complicated. His life had been complicated before they found themselves together, because he’d wanted to be with her when she hadn’t wanted to be with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, everything was fine. Of course, he wasn’t torn in two directions at once. However much he wished Pekka weren’t, he knew she was.
They lay close together on her narrow bed after making love that night when she suddenly said, “It’s snowing.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“The way the air feels-all still and quiet,” she said, and turned on the bedside lamp. “There-you see?” Sure enough, the light showed snowflakes softly striking the double-glass window that helped hold cold at bay.
“It doesn’t have to be still and quiet for snow,” Fernao said. “Down in the land of the Ice People, it blows like this.” He held his forearm parallel to the mattress. Then he added, “And I’d sooner look at you than at snow any day.” Pekka kissed him. He gathered her in. Before too long, he sighed. “Ten years ago, I could have promised you twice in a row. Now I have to be lucky for that-not that I’m not lucky, you understand.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “The holding is fine, too, all by itself.” She reached out to turn off the lamp. They fell asleep in each other’s arms-and woke up a couple of hours later, Fernao with an arm asleep, Pekka with a leg that seemed dead below the knee. As they untangled themselves and Fernao got into his clothes to go back to his own room, he yawned and thought, So much for romance.
Something closer to romance came the next day, when they rode out to the blockhouse under furs in a sleigh, as they’d done when they first began experimenting down in the Naantali district. He’d been conscious of Pekka as an attractive woman even then. Now… If his hands wandered a bit, and if hers did, the furs kept the driver from noticing.
But when they and the other theoretical sorcerers got down from the sleighs and went into the blockhouse, Pekka was all business. “You know what we’re going to try today,” she said. “We’re going to use the energy from the sorcery we’ve developed to touch off a landslide and close off a pass in the Bratanu Mountains, to make the Algarvians have a harder time moving men and supplies from their kingdom east into Jelgava. I don’t think anyone has ever projected so much sorcerous power so far and so precisely in the history of the world.”
That’s bound to be true, Fernao thought. It’s a demon of a long way from here to the border between Jelgava and Algarve. Some of the excitement of what they’d been doing came back to him. Making everything cut and dried so people with no spark, no flair, of their own could use it had drained away a lot of that excitement. He was glad to feel it return; he’d wondered if it would.
“I begin,” Pekka said, and chanted the ritual phrases Kuusamans used before every conjuration. Fernao had snickered behind his hand when he first heard them. He’d heard them so many times by now, magecraft undertaken without them would have felt strange, unnatural.
He’d only half understood them when he first heard them. He’d understood hardly anything of the Kuusaman cantrips that followed. He did these days. He wouldn’t have wanted to try drafting an original spell in Kuusaman, but he had no trouble following one now. If anything went wrong, he knew much more than he had about how to repair it.
Ilmarinen and Piilis joined the incantation. So did Raahe and Alkio. Fernao felt the power build. Part of it was his, flowing from him through Pekka, whose hand he held. It put him in mind of pleasure building when they made love. But when his eyes flicked her way, her face was serious, intent, nothing at all like the way she looked when the two of them were alone. She didn’t glance at him. She kept on chanting, doing what she had to do. That’s all any of us are doing, he thought. What else is there?
If not for the world’s energy grid more commonly used in traveling along ley lines, they never could have located the mountain pass so precisely. An alert Algarvian mage somewhere between the Naantali district and the pass might have detected the sorcery when at last it burst forth. He might have detected it, but that would have done him no good. By the time he knew it was there, he would have been far too late to stop it.
Fernao felt the spell seize the stones and the already-drifted snow along the sides of the pass, felt it seize them and jerk them and send them crashing down onto the road and the ley line at the bottom. Mezentio’s mages might have achieved the same effect by killing a camp full of Kaunians, but never from this range: never, probably, from a quarter of this range. And this spell was clean-no murder attached to it.
Afterwards, all the mages sighed. Now Fernao could squeeze Pekka’s hand without distracting her. She smiled and nodded. “We did it,” she said. “I could feel that we did it.”
“Aye.” Fernao nodded, too. “The Algarvians will have harder work now in Jelgava.”And it’s likelier your husband will come through safe. Should I be happy about that? Aye, curse it, I should. Leino’s not my enemy. He’s fighting my enemies. He kept his face straight. Hedidn’t want Pekka to know what he was thinking there. We do have to be civilized about these things… curse it.
Ever since she’d spied Spinello stalking through the wreckage of Eoforwic, Vanai had known she would try to kill him if she ever saw even the slightest chance. She hadn’t known how badly she needed to go looking for that chance till the day before Pybba’s rebels surrendered to the Algarvians, the day the redheads agreed to treat the Forthwegians as proper war captives instead of butchering them for bandits.
Ealstan had slipped out of the pocket Pybba’s men still held. He’d slipped into and out of that pocket a good many times before then. Vanai had always hated it, but she couldn’t deny he knew what he was doing. And, when he’d come home full of gloom, she’d thought she understood. However foolish she reckoned Forthwegian patriotism, Ealstan felt it in his heart, in his belly, just as she felt her own Kaunianity.
But she hadn’t understood, or hadn’t understood everything, even if she’d thought she had. She’d found that out a couple of hours later, after putting Saxburh down for a nap. Ealstan, by then, had gone through a good deal of the wine in the flat. She hadn’t even worried about that, though Kaunians often sneered at Forthwegians for drunkenness. She’d long since seen Ealstan didn’t let wine and spirits rule him, and that day he’d had more sorrows to drown than usual.
He’d also had more sorrows to drown than she knew. He’d looked up from the mug when she walked into the kitchen, looked up from i
t and- voice not blurry in the least, he’d asked, “Did you ever run across a redhead named Spinello?”
The question had crashed into her like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. Her face must have given her away, for she’d seen his mouth tighten. After that, what point to lying? “Aye,” she’d answered quietly. “Back in Oyngestun. How did you know?”
Maybe that hadn’t been the perfect question, for it had made him gulp down all the wine left in his mug. “I heard him… mention your name talking to his men. How could he know I speak Algarvian?”
Mentioning her name undoubtedly meant going into obscene detail over all the things he’d made her do back there in her home village. With a sigh, Vanai had said, “He wanted to get my grandfather to collaborate with the redheads. That would have meant something in scholarly circles. You saw him once, when he was out looking at an imperial Kaunian site with my grandfather and me.”
“I remember,” Ealstan had said. He’d hesitated then; Vanai gave him credit for it. But he’d gone on: “He wanted something else from you.”
Vanai had nodded. What else could I have done? she wondered. Nothing. Nothing at all. “My grandfather said no,” she’d told Ealstan. “He kept saying no. You met him. You have some small idea what a stubborn man he was. And so Spinello threw him into a labor gang. He wasn’t young. He’d never done work like that in his life. It was killing him. I watched it happen for a little while. I couldn’t stand it. Whatever else he was, he was the only kin I had left in the world. And so I…” Up till then, she’d managed to sound as cool, as detached, as if she were talking about building a fence. But the last few words came out in a ragged gulp as tears spilled down her cheeks: “I made a bargain with Spinello.”
She’d stood there waiting once she got it out. What would Ealstan do? Slowly, he’d climbed to his feet. Is he going out the door? she remembered thinking. Will he come back? Will he even look back? Will he hit me? This once, I could bear it without hating him afterwards.
He’d come toward her. She remembered bracing herself, too. Then he’d put his arms around her and switched from the Forthwegian they’d been speaking to his slow, clear, classical Kaunian: “Brivibas, I think, was luckier in you than he realized-perhaps luckier than he deserved. And may the powers below eat that Spinello.”
Vanai really had burst into tears then, and buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder. They were very nearly of a height; she hadn’t had to stand on tiptoe to do it. She remembered whispering, “Thank you,” over and over again, but she still wasn’t sure if she’d said it loud enough for Ealstan to hear.
But she was sure what he’d said before she looked up again: “May the powers below have some help eating that Spinello.” He’d sounded thoroughly grim.
He’d sounded so grim, in fact, that he’d terrified her. She’d thought about killing Spinello. He’d sounded as if he intended to march out right that minute and do it. And so she’d clung to him and exclaimed, “No! He’s not worth the risk of you. By the powers above, heisn’t, Ealstan! And besides, before long the Unkerlanters are bound to do it for us.”
“They haven’t done it yet,” he’d grumbled. But he hadn’t gone charging out of the flat then, and, so far as Vanai knew, he hadn’t tried stalking Spinello since. She hoped that meant he’d listened to her as well as hearing her. She hoped so, but she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seemed any different with her after that dreadful day, and he hadn’t seemed any different with Saxburh, either. Vanai dared take that for a good sign.
Even so, she knew that, if she was going to try to get rid of Spinello, sooner was definitely better. Ealstan, she feared, would also try-and even if he succeeded, he was all too likely to get caught. If he did try, he would pick the most obvious, most direct way. Vanai knew him too well to have any doubts on that score. But what Algarvian would pay any particular attention to a Forthwegian woman? Vanai wasn’t standing by a mirror to see her own smile, but suspected it showed a lot of pointed teeth. Every now and then, being Thelberge to the world had its advantages.
But being anyone in Eoforwic these days also had its disadvantages, and they were many and large. Few Unkerlanter eggs had burst close to the block of flats, but that didn’t mean Swemmel’s soldiers couldn’t start lobbing them this way whenever they chose. Staying in Eoforwic meant living with danger.
Staying in Eoforwic also meant living with hunger. Not a lot of food came into the Forthwegian capital, and the redheads kept more than their share of what did. People haunted the markets. They also pocked through the wreckage that made up so much of the city, looking for jars of olives and for smoked or salted meat and for wine and, most of all, for rest crates filled with sorcerously preserved food. Find one of those-and get it home without having it stolen-and you might eat well for a long time. Find silver or jewelry and you could pay the piratical prices in the markets.
And, as happened every fall, people hunted mushrooms over every inch of bare ground in Eoforwic. Sometimes Vanai would go out with Ealstan and they would pass the baby back and forth. No matter how dismal things were, Saxburh could make Ealstan smile. “If it weren’t for mushrooms, you wouldn’t be here,” he would tell her. She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but she always gurgled with delight when he talked to her.
And sometimes Vanai would take Saxburh out by herself. Nobody in shattered Eoforwic seemed to need bookkeepers, but there were plenty of day-laborer jobs, and Ealstan took them without complaint, especially when he got paid in food instead of silver. Plenty of Forthwegian women took them, too, but Vanai couldn’t. Even if she’d had someone to take care of Saxburh, she didn’t dare stay out in public for the long shifts such work required. If her sorcerous disguise wore off… She didn’t want to think about that.
No one kept track of a mushroom hunter’s hours, though. Head down, the baby in the crook of her arm or sometimes in a cloth harness she’d made from scraps of old clothes, she eyed damp ground in the park where she’d first shown herself to the world as Thelberge-where, in fact, Ealstan had given her the name she’d used ever since.
Sometimes she had good luck, sometimes not so good. More people were harvesting a lot less space than had been true around Gromheort and Oyngestun. But mushrooms weren’t like gold or silver-getting some out of the ground today didn’t mean more wouldn’t spring up tomorrow. You couldn’t live on mushrooms alone, but they did help. And they made barley-often stale barley, sometimes moldy barley-much more bearable and less monotonous than it would have been without them.
Paying close attention to small patches of ground helped Vanai keep from noticing how ravaged the park was. Sometimes, though, as when a score of new craters from bursting eggs pocked its face like some ghastly disease, she couldn’t help it. Ealstan was along with her that morning. With a sad sigh, she said, “This place was shabby when you brought me here a couple of years ago. Now-now it’s like looking at a corpse.”
“A murdered corpse,” he agreed. “But if we’d been here when those eggs came down, we’d’ve been the ones who got murdered.”
“Maybe,” Vanai said. “But maybe not, too. I’ve had to jump into craters a few times when the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs across the river, or when their dragons came over the city. It’s just something we need to do these days, that’s all.” She wondered what her former self from Oyngestun-herself from before the war-would have made of that calm, matter-of-fact statement. She would have reckoned it madness. She was sure of that. What else could it possibly be?
But why, if it were madness, was Ealstan soberly nodding? “I’ve had to do the same thing myself,” he answered, and showed his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Life in the big city. It isn’t even what irks me these days. You know what is?”
“Tell me,” Vanai said, but then she stopped listening because she’d seen some meadow mushrooms peeping out from the edge of a clump of woods. She hurried over, picked them, and put them in her basket. “I’m sorry. Now tell me.”
“You know about
Plegmund’s Brigade? Everybody knows about Plegmund’s Brigade,” he said, and Vanai nodded. Ealstan muttered something under his breath about his cousin Sidroc, then got back to things at hand:
“The Algarvians have cooked up something like that for Forthwegian women now, powers below eat them.”
“For women?” Vanai said. “Do they give them sticks?”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “They call themHilde ’s Helpers-you know, after Plegmund’s queen. And whatHilde ’s Helpers do is, they cook and they bake like maniacs, and then they give the redheads everything they make. They just ignore Forthwegian laborers-I’ve seen that, too, curse them. I heard one of them say the Algarvians deserve the best of everything because they’re defending us from Swemmel’s savages.”
“Do people really believe that? Can people really believe that?” Vanai asked.
“This gal did,” Ealstan said. He held Saxburh up in front of his face. “She didn’t even know as much as you do. She didn’t come close.” Saxburh laughed.
Vanai didn’t. No Kaunian, of course, could prefer Algarvians to Unkerlanters. But, even now, some Forthwegians evidently could. Fools, she thought. But there were also Forthwegians who preferred the Algarvians not in spite of what they’d done to the Kaunians of Forthweg but because of it.
She saw some ofHilde ’s Helpers a couple of days later. They wore blue-and-white armbands-Forthwegian colors-and, sure enough, carried baskets and trays of food. They all looked well fed themselves, too. Vanai quietly cursed them. And, had they known what she was, they would have cursed her.
She hoped Unkerlanter dragons would raid Eoforwic whileHilde ’s Helpers were serving Algarvian soldiers. If that wasn’t poetic justice, what was? “They would deserve it,” she told Saxburh. The baby smiled, showing a new tooth that had cost Vanai an almost sleepless night. Babies didn’t argue, except when you wanted them to go to bed.
And then Vanai smiled, too, and kissed Saxburh. Her daughter laughed out loud. A moment later, so did Vanai. She knew what she needed to do. She knew how to do it. “I’ll have to get another basket,” she said, “a little one. A special one. And I’ll need a bit of luck. But do you know what, sweetheart? For once in my life, I won’t need much.” Saxburh grinned, as if proud of that new tooth. So did Vanai.
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