Darkness Descending (59 page)

In a few terse sentences, he explained what he was doing in Oyngestun, finishing, “After Sidroc wouldn’t wake up, I knew I had to get out of Gromheort. There was only one place I wanted to come, and here I am.”

Vanai flushed; with her fair skin, far paler than Ealstan’s, the progress of the blush was easy—and fascinating—to watch. She knew why he wanted to come to Oyngestun. “But what will you do now?” she asked. “You can’t have a lot of money.”

“More than you think,” he answered. “But I’ve been doing odd jobs, too: anything I can to get my hands on some extra cash so I don’t go through what I’ve got so fast.” As a bookkeeper’s son, he understood he needed income to balance his expenses.

“All right. Good.” Vanai nodded; she had a briskly practical streak. Then she repeated the question she’d asked before: “What will you do now?”

Ealstan knew what he wanted to do. Holding Vanai would have put the thought in his mind had it not been there already. But that wasn’t what she meant. And he’d had time to think, pacing along the Street of Tinkers. He said, “If you want, we could go to Eoforwic together. From all I’ve heard, there are more mixed couples there than in the rest of Forthweg put together.”

Vanai flushed again. “Maybe there were, back before the war—in fact, I know there were, back before the war,” she said. “But now, under the Algarvians... Do you want to put yourself through that?”

“Why else would I have come to Oyngestun?” Ealstan asked. Vanai murmured something too low to hear and looked down at her shoes. Ealstan said, “You aren’t talking about your grandfather, the way you always did before.”

“No, I’m not talking about my grandfather,” Vanai agreed wearily. “I think I may have said everything there is to say about him, and done everything there was to do for him. And he’s certainly said everything there was to say about me.” Her jaw set. Ealstan thought she was a year or so older than he. Suddenly, she looked a good deal older than that and harder than he’d dreamt she could.

He started to ask what her grandfather had said about her. A second glance at her face convinced him that wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead, he said, “Will you come with me?”

Her laugh had a raw edge to it. “This is only the fourth time we’ve ever set eyes on each other. We haven’t spent more than a few hours together, and we’ve sent a few letters back and forth. And because of that, you want me to leave behind everything and everybody I’ve ever known and go off with you to a place neither one of us has ever seen?”

Dull embarrassment filled Ealstan. He’d let his hopes run away with him. Life as you lived it wasn’t really much like what it was once the writers of romances got through with it. Kicking at the cobbles once more, he began, “Well, I—”

“Of course I’ll come with you,” Vanai broke in. “By the powers above—the powers above who are deaf and blind to everything we Kaunians have suffered—how could whatever happens to me there be worse than what’s happened to me here?”

He knew he didn’t know everything that had happened to her here in Oyngestun. Once more, he realized asking wouldn’t be smart. In any case, joy and astonishment left him little room to worry about such things. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” he said. “Not ever.”

To his astonishment, her face worked. She bit her lip, plainly fighting back tears. “Nobody but you has ever said anything like that to me,” she whispered.

“No?” Ealstan shook his head in bewilderment. “A lot of people have wasted a lot of chances, then.” He saw he’d flustered her again. Since he didn’t want that, he asked, “Will your grandfather be all right if you leave him alone?”

“I hope so. In spite of everything, I hope so,” Vanai answered. “But the redheads are as likely to scoop me up on the way to Eoforwic as they are to grab him here. I can’t do anything about that. I managed to keep him from going out and having to work himself to death on the road, but those days are gone now.”

“How did you stop the Algarvians from sending him out to do road work?” Ealstan asked.

“I managed,” Vanai repeated, and said no more. Her face went hard and closed again. None of the pictures that flooded into Ealstan’s mind was any he wanted to see. He asked no more questions, which seemed to relieve Vanai.

Now she tried to break the tension: “How can we go to Eoforwic? I don’t think they’ll let us ride together in a caravan car, and I wouldn’t feel safe in one, anyhow. Too easy for the Algarvians to stop the caravan and haul away everybody with yellow hair.”

Ealstan nodded. “I think caravans are dangerous, too. That leaves walking, unless we find someone to give us a wagon ride for part of the way.” He grimaced. “With the two of us, I don’t know how likely that is.”

“Not very,” Vanai said succinctly, and Ealstan nodded again. She went on, “Let me take this to my grandfather and get a heavier cloak and some stouter shoes.” She sighed. “I’ll leave him a note to tell him some of what I’m doing, so he wont think the Algarvians got me. He’ll have some learning to do, but I think he can. He’s not stupid, even if he is a fool. Wait for me here. I’ll be back soon.” She hurried away.

Instead of waiting, he went up to his room and gathered his own meager belongings, then returned to the apothecary’s shop. Good as her word, Vanai came up a few minutes later. She was wearing the heavier cloak, and had a cloth bag slung over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” Ealstan said. Side by side, they started out of Oyngestun, heading east.

As soon as a grove of pale-leaved olive trees hid the village behind them, they began holding hands. They leaped apart when a Forthwegian on a mule came past them, but then resumed. Not long after that, they were kissing. Not too much longer after that, they went off the road into another, thicker grove. It wasn’t perfect privacy, but it was good enough. When they started walking again, they both wore foolish smiles. Ealstan knew he was in trouble, but had a hard time worrying about it. He was, after all, only seventeen.

Thirteen

P
riekule was a gray, unhappy town after more than a year and a half of Algarvian occupation. Krasta still frequently left her mansion to visit the shops and cafes in the heart of the city, but what she found there satisfied her less and less often.

The food in the cafes seemed to get nastier every week. Sometimes a mere sniff after she went inside one was enough to send her stalking out again, elegantly straight nose high in the air. Jewelers hardly ever showed anything new. And the clothes. . . She’d occasionally worn kilts back in the days when Valmiera and Algarve were at peace, but only trousers—proper, traditional Kaunian garments—ever since. These days, though, more and more clothiers were showing kilts for both men and women. She knew people who wore them. She couldn’t make herself do it.

After walking out of one such display, she angrily strode along the Boulevard of Horsemen: tall, lean, arrogant. A news-sheet vendor called, “Fierce Algarvian counterattack in Unkerlant! Read all about it!”

Krasta stomped past him. She didn’t care two figs about Unkerlant. Out there in the distant west, it might have been on the far side of the moon as far as she was concerned (the same held true for virtually the entire world outside of Priekule). She did know mild surprise that the Algarvians hadn’t conquered it yet, as they had every other kingdom they’d assailed. But the details of the fighting mattered not at all to her.

A few days farther on, she paused, staring at three words whitewashed onto the window of a confectioner’s shop: NIGHT AND FOG. The shop was closed. It looked to have been closed for some little while. She wondered when, or if, it would open again.

Another vendor, peddling a different news sheet, waved it in her face. Krasta impatiently pushed past him and strode on down the sidewalk. She decided she wished after all that the Algarvians had taken Cottbus. Then the war would have been over, or as near as made no difference. After that, maybe the world could have started coming back to normal.

A couple of Algarvian soldiers, cloaked against the chill of Priekule’s winter, strode up the street toward her. They both leered shamelessly; as far as the occupiers were concerned, any woman was fair game. Krasta stared straight through them, as if they didn’t exist. They doubtless didn’t know she was a noblewoman and wouldn’t have cared had they known—what were the ranks of the conquered to the conquerors?

One of them proved as much: still undressing Krasta with his eyes, he spoke in bad Valmieran: “Sleeping with me, sweetheart?” He reached under his cloak and shook his belt pouch. Coins jingled and clinked.

Krasta’s temper kindled, as it had a way of doing. “Powers below eat you, you son of a whore,” she said, slowly and distinctly—she wanted to make sure he understood. “May it rot. May it fall off. May it never stand again.”

She started by the soldiers. The one who hadn’t spoken grabbed her by the arm—maybe he understood some Valmieran, too. He did; he said, “Not talking like that, bitch.” His trilling accent grated on her ears.

“Take your hands off me,” she told him, ice in her voice.

“I don’t thinking so,” he said with a nasty smile. “You insulting us. You paying for that.”

He was one of the conquerors, all right, used to doing whatever he wanted with and to Valmieran women. Later, Krasta realized she should have been afraid. At the time, only fury filled her. “Take your hands off me,” she repeated. She had a trump to play, and played it without hesitation: “I am the woman of Colonel Lurcanio, the count of Albenga, and not for the likes of you.”

That did the trick. She’d been sure it would. The Algarvian soldier let go of her arm as if magecraft had suddenly turned it red-hot. He and his comrade both hurried away, babbling ungrammatical apologies.

Nose in the air again, Krasta went on down the Avenue of Horsemen. Triumph filled her narrow soul—hadn’t she just given those boors a lesson in whom they might annoy? Had she been more introspective, she might have realized that defending herself by proclaiming she was a prominent occupier’s mistress only showed how low Valmiera had fallen. Such insight, though, was beyond her, and probably would be for all her days to come.

She kept on walking to the end of the boulevard full of expensive shops: farther than she’d intended, but she needed to burn off the rage with which the arrogant Algarvians had filled her. Arrogant herself, she recognized no one else’s right to be that way—except Lurcanio’s, and he intimidated her far more than she was willing to admit.

At the end of the Boulevard of Horsemen was one of Priekule’s many parks, the grass dead and yellow now, with muddy ground showing through here and there. Trees sent bare branches reaching toward the cloudy sky, as if they were so many skeletons supplicating the powers above. Pigeons and sparrows begged for crumbs from the few people who sat on benches by the brick walkways, probably because they had nowhere better to go.

In the center of the park towered the Kaunian Column of Victory. The marble column had stood there for more than a thousand years, since the days of the Kaunian Empire. How many years more than a thousand it had stood there, Krasta couldn’t have said. She hadn’t done well in history—or in many other subjects—at the series of finishing schools and academies she’d attended till everyone gave up on her education. She did know the victory it celebrated was of civilized imperials over the Algarvian barbarians who even in those ancient days had swarmed out of their forests to attack the Empire. Algarvian eggs had damaged the column during the Six Years’ War, but it had been restored since.

Now, a good many kilted Algarvians stood at the base of the Column of Victory. They gestured with the theatrical enthusiasm of their kind. Life, to Algarvians, was melodrama. A couple of Valmierans looked to be arguing with them. A tan-clad soldier knocked down one of Krasta’s countrymen.

Because she gave herself to Colonel Lurcanio, no redhead of lower rank could cause her much trouble. Conscious of that near-immunity, she strode down the sidewalk toward the column. “What on earth is going on here?” she demanded in a loud, harsh voice.

The Valmieran who’d been knocked down got to his feet. One trouser knee was torn, though he seemed not to notice. He had a pinched, intelligent face—not the sort of man Krasta would normally have looked at twice, or even once. He was intelligent enough to recognize her rank, saying, “Milady, these men mean to topple the column.”

“What?” Krasta stared not at the Algarvians but at her fellow Valmieran. “You must be out of your mind.”

“Ask them.” The man pointed to the redheads. Some were ordinary soldiers, like the one who’d pushed him to the bricks. Some were officers, including, Krasta saw, a brigadier. She wondered if she was as immune from trouble as she’d thought. And a couple had the indefinable air of mages about them, the air of seeing and knowing things ordinary people didn’t see and couldn’t know. They set Krasta’s teeth on edge.

She turned to the Algarvians. “You can’t be thinking of doing what he says.”

“Who are you to say we can’t?” That was the brigadier, a big-bellied fellow in his mid-fifties—twice her age, more or less—with graying red mustachios and chin beard all waxed to spikelike points. He spoke Valmieran well—almost as well as Lurcanio did.