Out of the Darkness

Again halfway thinking along with him, Pekka said, “Uto will look up to you, I think.” She smiled. “How can he help it, when you’re so tall?” But the smile slipped. “I don’t know about Elimaki. I’m sorry.”

“It would be simpler if her husband hadn’t run off with somebody else, wouldn’t it?” Fernao said.

Pekka nodded. “It’s too bad, too. I always liked Olavin,” she said. “But these things do happen.” We ought to know, Fernao thought. He kept that to himself; he didn’t want to remind Pekka that she’d been carrying on with him before her husband got killed. And her thoughts hadn’t gone in that direction, for she added a one-word parenthesis: “Men.” Again, Fernao found it wiser to keep quiet.

The driver took them right up to the caravan depot at Joensuu, the little town closest to the hostel. As far as Fernao could see, Joensuu had no reason for existing except lying on a ley line. When the ley-line caravan glided into the depot, he was briefly startled to note it was northbound. Then Pekka said, “Remember? I warned you about this. We have to go around three sides of a rectangle to get to Kajaani.”

He snapped his fingers in annoyance, no happier than any other mage at forgetting something. “Aye, you did tell me that, and it went clean out of my head.” He put his arm around her. “Must be love.”

From a Lagoan, that was an ordinary sort of compliment. As Fernao had seen, though, Kuusamans were more restrained in how they praised one another. Pekka still seemed flustered as they climbed up into the caravan car.

They had to switch caravans twice, once to a westbound line and then to the southbound one that would finally take them to Kajaani. Fernao hoped his baggage made the switches, too. Pekka was going home. She would have more clothes there. If his things didn’t arrive, he’d wear what he had on his back till he could buy more-and he wasn’t sure Kuusaman shops would have many garments for a man of his inches.

What with the delays in changing caravans, they traveled all through the night. Their seats reclined, as was true in most caravan cars, but still made only poor substitutes for real beds. Fernao dozed and woke, dozed and woke, the whole night long. When he was awake, he peered out the window at the snow-covered countryside. The night was moonless, but the southern lights glowed in shifting, curtainlike patterns of green and yellow. He’d seen them brighter on the austral continent, but the display here was far more impressive than it ever got up in Setubal.

The sun was just coming up over the horizon when the ley-line caravan topped the last forested rise north of Kajaani and glided down toward the port city. Even with the bright sun of early spring on it, the sea ahead looked cold. Maybe that was Fernao’s imagination working overtime, and maybe it wasn’t. That sea led southwest to the land of the Ice People.

Pekka yawned and stretched. She’d had a better night than Fernao. Seeing familiar landscape and then familiar buildings slide past the window, she smiled. “Oh, good! We’re here.”

“So we are.” What Fernao saw didn’t impress him. Kajaani, to him, looked like a Kuusaman provincial town, and nothing more. He knew he was spoiled; to him, any city save Setubal was likely to seem just a provincial town. He asked, “Can we see Kajaani City College from here?”

Shaking her head, Pekka pointed across the car, to the right. “It’s on the western edge of town. If we get a chance, I’ll take you over there. Having an illustrious Lagoan theoretical sorcerer along with me will make Professor Heikki unhappy, and I do what I can to keep her that way.”

“Aye, you’ve told me about some of your squabbles,” Fernao said. “What’s your chairman’s specialty? Veterinary magic? Is that what you said?”

“That’s right,” Pekka said. “And she’s nobody of any consequence there. She’d make a splendid clerk, though. That’s why she’s been chairman so long,

I suppose. But she inflicts herself on people who do real work, so nobody in the department can stand her.”

“Kajaani!” the conductor called as the caravan, nearing the depot, slowed. “Everybody out for Kajaani, on account of this is the end of the line.”

End of the world, Fernao thought. The ley-line caravan eased to a halt. The conductor opened the door at the front of the car. Pekka got to her feet. So did Fernao, leaning on his cane to help himself up. His leg and shoulder both complained. He’d known they would. I’m lucky to have both legs, he thought, and then, if this is luck.

Pekka got down ahead of him. She watched anxiously as he came down the little portable stairway. She was, he saw, ready to catch him if he stumbled. Being somewhere close to twice her size, he made sure he didn’t, and reached the ground safely.

Someone-a woman on the platform-called Pekka’s name. She turned. “Elimaki!” she exclaimed. A moment later, she added, “Uto!”

“Mother!” The boy swarmed toward her. He was, Fernao saw, nine or ten, with a good deal of Pekka in his face. When he sprang into her arms for a hug, the top of his head came past her shoulder. The woman who followed him also looked a good deal like Pekka. Of course she does, you idiot, Fernao thought. She’s her sister, by the powers above. Elimaki was a couple of years younger, and a little stockier. She too hugged Pekka, but even as she did it she was eyeing Fernao with curiosity both undisguised and, he thought, more than a little hostile.

“I’m so glad to see both of you again,” Pekka said, kissing first Uto and then Elimaki. She took a deep breath. “And I want you both to meet my. . friend, Fernao of Lagoas.”

Uto held out his hand. “Hello, sir,” he said gravely. Sure enough, he added, “I didn’t think you would be so tall.” He was curiously studying Fernao, too.

Not a lot of Lagoans or other Algarvic folk got down here, Fernao suspected. He clasped Uto’s hand, not his wrist, as he would have with one of his own countrymen. “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you from your mother.”

Pekka rolled her eyes. Even Elimaki had trouble holding her face straight. Uto looked more innocent than he had any hope of being. “I don’t do that so much anymore,” he said, leaving that carefully unspecified.

“You do too, you scamp,” Elimaki said. She nodded to Fernao. “And I have heard a lot about you.”

“I probably don’t do that so much anymore, either,” he answered, deadpan.

Pekka’s sister gave him a sharp look, then smiled. “You’ll have a carpetbag, won’t you?” she said, looking back toward the caravan’s baggage car.

“I do hope so,” Fernao said. “I’d better find out.”

“Why do you have that cane?” Uto asked as he limped toward the baggage car.

“Because I got hurt in the war, down in the land of the Ice People,” he said.

“The Algarvians?” Uto asked, and Fernao nodded. The boy’s face worked. “They killed my father, too, those-” He called the Algarvians a name nastier than any Fernao had known at the same age. Then he burst into tears.

While Pekka comforted him, Fernao reclaimed his carpetbag. It was there, which made him think kindly thoughts about the people who ran the Kuusaman ley-line caravans. He carried it back to Pekka and her son and her sister. Elimaki said to him, “I was thinking. . The two of you might want to stay at my house tonight, not next door at Pekka’s.”

“I don’t know.” Fernao looked to Pekka. “What do you want to do? Either way is all right with me.”

“Aye, let’s do that,” Pekka said at once, and shot her sister a grateful glance. “I don’t want to go into my old house right now. It would tear me to pieces.” Once she said it, it made good sense-indeed, perfect sense-to Fernao. With all those memories of past times with her dead husband there, he would seem nothing but an interloper.

“Let’s go, then,” Elimaki said. They caught a local caravan going east through the city, then walked up a hill past pines and firs to the street where Elimaki’s house and Pekka’s stood side by side. Seeing Fernao labor on the way up the hill, Pekka whispered to Uto. He took Fernao’s carpetbag from him and carried it with pride.

Elimaki’s house struck Fernao as enormous. In Setubal, the biggest city in the world, people were crowded too close together to let anyone but the very wealthy enjoy so much space. An advantage to provincial towns I hadn’t thought of. “You’ll want something to eat,” Elimaki said, and disappeared into the kitchen. Pekka followed her. That left Fernao alone with Uto.

He didn’t know what to say. He’d never had much to do with children. If I want to stay with Pekka, though, I’ll have to learn. While he searched for words, Uto found some: “Aunt Eli says you’re