Out of the Darkness

the cars had bars across the windows. A Lagoan guard favored the captives with a nasty smile. “Like the ones you used for Kaunians you killed, eh?” he said in Algarvian, a comparison Lurcanio could have done without.

After Lurcanio and the other captives and most of the guards boarded the caravan car, it glided away. The bars didn’t keep Lurcanio from peering avidly out the windows. As the caravan drew near the border with Valmiera, he saw long columns of redheaded, kilted men and women and children trudging westward, some pushing handcarts, some with duffels slung over their shoulders, a lucky handful with a horse or a donkey to bear their burdens.

That Algarvian-speaking guard said, “The Valmierans throw you whoresons out of the Marquisate of Rivaroli. No more trouble there. No more treason there, either.”

Algarvians had lived in Rivaroli for more than a thousand years. Even when Valmiera annexed the marquisate after the Six Years’ War, no one had talked of expelling them. But a generation and more’ had gone by since then. These were new times-hard times, too.

At a stop by the border, the Lagoan guards left the caravan car. Blonds in trousers took their place. “Now you get what is coming to you,” one of them said, proving he too spoke Algarvian. His laugh was loud and unpleasant.

“Go ahead. Have your joke,” the irrepressible sergeant said. “I bet you ran away from the fighting, too, just like all your pals.” The Valmieran spoke in a low voice to his comrades. Four of them beat the sergeant bloody while the rest held sticks on the other Algarvian captives to make sure they didn’t interfere.

“Any other funny men?” the guard asked. No one said a word.

On through Valmiera glided the ley-line caravan. In the early afternoon, the landscape started looking familiar to Lurcanio. Before long, he saw the famous skyline of Priekule. I enjoyed myself here, aye, he thought. All the same, I’d sooner have kept the memories.

Krasta paid as little attention to news-sheet hawkers as she could. When she came to the Boulevard of Horsemen, she came to spend money, to get away from her bastard son, and to show herself off. She had her wig all done up in curls, in the style of the glory days of the Kaunian Empire. A lot of Valmieran women wore their hair that way these days, perhaps to affirm their Kaunianity after the Algarvian occupation. The wig was hot and uncomfortable, but her own hair hadn’t grown out far enough for her to appear in public without its help. Better-far better-discomfort than humiliation.

Hawkers who worked the Boulevard of Horsemen were supposed to be discreet and quiet, so as not to disturb the well-heeled women and men who shopped there. Such rules had gone downhill since the Algarvians pulled out, though. These days, the men who waved the sheets on street corners were about as raucous here as anywhere else in Priekule.

“Redheads coming back for justice!” one of them yelled as Krasta came out of a clothier’s. During the war, the dummies in the window had worn some of the shortest kilts in town. These days, of course, they were all patriotically trousered. The vendor thrust a sheet in Krasta’s face. “It’s our turn now!”

She started to wave him away in annoyance, but then checked herself. “Let me have one.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought, or even looked at, a news sheet, and had to ask, “How much?”

“Five coppers, lady,” the fellow answered apologetically, adding, “Everything’s up since the war.”

“Is it?” Krasta paid as little attention to prices as she could. She gave him a small silver coin, took the news sheet and her change, and sat down on a local ley-line caravan bench to read the story.

It was what the hawker had said it was: an account of how a dozen Algarvians who’d helped rule Valmiera for King Mezentio were being brought back to Priekule to stand before Valmieran judges and answer for their brutality and atrocities. It is to be hoped, the reporter wrote, that the vicious brutes will get no more mercy than they gave.

“That’s right.” Krasta nodded vigorously.

She had to turn to an inside page to find out what she really wanted to know: the names of the Algarvians coming back to Priekule. Those didn’t seem to matter to the fellow writing the story: as far as he was concerned, one Algarvian was as good-or rather, as bad-as another. At last, though, the reporter came to the point. Krasta shook her head when he called an Algarvian brigadier a fiend and a known pervert, a man who took pleasure in killing. She’d met the officer in question at several feasts and dances. Maybe he liked boys, but he liked women, too; he’d pinched her behind and rubbed himself against her like a dog in heat.

“What do reporters know?” she muttered.

But then she saw the next name, the name she’d wondered if she would find. With the previously mentioned officer is his henchman, the vile and lecherous Colonel Lurcanio, who made our capital a place of terror for four long years. Lurcanio openly boasts of the child he sired on Marchioness Krasta, from whose mansion at the edge of the capital he leaped out like a wolf on honest citizens.

Krasta read that twice, then furiously crumpled up the news sheet and flung it in a trash bin. “Powers below eat him!” she snarled. Had Lurcanio stood before her and not a panel of judges, he wouldn’t have lasted long. She’d thought him a gentleman, and one of the things a gentleman didn’t do was tell.

He hadn’t just told-he’d told the news sheets. People who knew her of course knew her baby had hair the wrong color. Some of them had cut her- including some who’d been at least as cordial to the occupiers as she had. But this… in the news sheets. . Every tradesman she’d ever dealt with would know she’d had an Algarvian’s bastard.

Heels clicking on the slates of the sidewalk, she hurried down the Boulevard of Horsemen to the cross street where her carriage waited. When she got there, she found her new driver reading the news sheet. She wished she still had the one who drank to while away the time. “Put down that horrible rag,” she snapped.

“Aye, milady,” the driver said, but he carefully folded the sheet so he could go on reading it later. “Shall I take you home now?” He spoke as if certain of the answer.

But Krasta shook her head. “No. Drive me to the central gaol.”

“To the central gaol, milady?” The driver sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

“You heard me,” Krasta said. “Now get moving!” She sprang into the carriage, slamming the door behind her.

He took her where she wanted to go. If he hadn’t, she would have fired him on the spot and either engaged a new driver or tried to take the carriage back to the mansion herself. She was convinced she could do it: drivers certainly weren’t very bright, and they had no trouble, so how hard could it be?

Luckily for her-she’d never driven a carriage in her life-she didn’t have to find out. “Here you are, milady,” the driver said, stopping in front of a fortresslike building not far from the royal palace.

Krasta descended from the carriage and swarmed toward the gaol, an invading army of one. “What do you want?” asked one of the men at the entrance.

Were they constables? Soldiers? She didn’t know and she didn’t care. “I am the Marchioness Krasta,” she declared. “I must see one of the nasty Algarvians you have locked up here.”

Both the guards bowed. Neither of them opened the formidably stout door, though. “Uh, sorry, milady,” said the fellow who’d spoken before. “Nobody can do that without the warder’s permission.”

“Then fetch the warder here at once.” Krasta’s voice rose to a shout: “At once, do you hear me?”

If they’d read the news sheet, if they’d paid attention to her name, they might not have been so willing to do as she said. But Valmierans were used to yielding to their nobles. One of them left. He returned a few minutes later with a fellow in a fancier uniform. “May I help you, milady?” the warder asked.

“I must see Colonel Lurcanio, one of your Algarvian captives,” Krasta said, as she had before.

“For what purpose?” the warder asked.

“To ask him how he dares have the nerve to tell so many nasty, lying stories about me,” Krasta said. That the stories might be nasty but weren’t lies had entirely slipped out of her memory.

“What was your name again?” the warder inquired. Fuming, Krasta told him. “Marchioness Krasta. .” the man repeated. “Oh, you’re the one who.. ” By the way his expression sharpened, Krasta could tell he’d read the day’s news sheet himself. “You say these are lies?’ he asked.

“I certainly do say that,” Krasta answered. Saying it, of course, didn’t mean it had to be true. She dimly remembered that distinction.

The warder didn’t note it. He bowed to her and said, “All right. You come with me.”

She came. The place was grimier and smellier than she’d imagined. The warder led her to a room with two chairs separated by a fine but strong wire mesh. To her annoyance, he not only made her leave her handbag