Out of the Darkness

Mother’s friend, her special friend.”

As gravely as Uto had on meeting him, Fernao nodded. “That’s true.”

“Does that mean you’re my special friend, too?”

“I don’t know,” Fernao said. “It’s not just up to me, you know. It’s up to you, too.”

Pekka’s son pondered that with the care his mother gave a new spell. At last, he nodded. “You’re right. I guess I have to think about it some more.” After another pause, he said, “I know I’m not supposed to ask you much about what you’re doing, but you’re helping Mother find magic to beat the Algarvians, aren’t you?”

Fernao nodded again. “I can’t tell you much about what I’m doing, either, but I can tell you that much. That’s just what I’m doing.”

A fierce light kindled in Uto’s eyes. “In that case, I do want you to be my special friend. I’m still too little to pay them back for Father myself.” However fierce he sounded, he started to cry again. Fernao held out his arms. He didn’t know whether the boy would come to him, but Uto did. Awkwardly, he comforted him.

“Breakfast’s ready,” Elimaki called from the kitchen. Uto bounded away. He still had tears on his cheeks, but he was smiling again. Fernao followed more slowly. As he came into the kitchen, Elimaki saw Uto’s tears. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he answered carelessly, and turned to his mother, who was serving up plates of smoked salmon scrambled with eggs and cream. “I like your friend.”

“Do you?” Pekka said, and Uto gave an emphatic nod. She tousled his hair. “I’m glad.” Pekka looked toward her sister, as if to say, I told you so. Fernao pretended not to notice.

“I like him, too,” Elimaki said, and then tempered that by adding, “More than I expected to,” so Fernao wasn’t sure how much credit he’d earned. Some, anyhow: by the relief in Pekka’s eyes, perhaps even enough.

Vanai, these days, was a better housekeeper than she’d ever been, at least when it came to keeping the floor of her flat clean. She hadn’t really sought such neatness; she’d had it forced on her. Saxburh crawled all over the flat. She could go surprisingly-sometimes alarmingly-fast. If she found anything she thought was interesting, it was liable to end up in her mouth before Vanai could take it away from her. The cleaner the floor was, the fewer the chances she had to eat anything disgusting or dangerous.

Saxburh didn’t appreciate her mother’s vigilance. As far as the baby was concerned, everything she could reach was supposed to go into her mouth. How could she tell what it was if she couldn’t taste it? She fussed and squawked when Vanai took things away from her.

“Fuss all you like,” Vanai told her after one rescue in the nick of time. “You can’t eat a dead cockroach.” By the way the baby wailed, she was liable to be stunted for life if she didn’t get her fair share of dead bugs.

Keeping such things out of her hands and, more to the point, out of her mouth was Vanai’s second-biggest worry. It was the biggest one about which she could do anything. Ealstan was and remained somewhere far away to the east. She wondered if she’d even know if anything-powers above, forbid it! — happened to him. She’d heard not a word since he got dragooned into King Swemmel’s army. If he didn’t come back after the war ended, that would tell her what she needed to know-or it might, for the Unkerlanters could simply have hauled him off to the other end of their vast kingdom.

How would I be able to find out, one way or the other? she wondered. The answer there was painfully obvious: I wouldn’t. She pushed the worry to the back of her mind, as she did whenever she started fretting about what she couldn’t help.

If only Ealstan were here… If Ealstan were here, he would find life in Eoforwic easier than it had been at any time since he and Vanai came to the Forthwegian capital. It had been weeks since Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. Gromheort still held out, but the rest of Forthweg belonged to Unkerlant these days-and, nominally, to King Beornwulf as well.

Beornwulf seemed to be doing what he could (and, perhaps, what the Unkerlanters would let him) to be a good king. Broadsheets outlawing price-gouging in the marketplace went up alongside sheets singing the praises of Swemmel’s soldiers. Vanai looked out her kitchen window. A work crew was pasting up fresh broadsheets even now. I wonder if I could put glass in the window again, Vanai thought. It wouldn‘t get broken right away, not any more.

She couldn’t afford to look out the window for long. She looked back toward Saxburh instead. It wasn’t a dead cockroach this time-just a dust bunny. Vanai got it away from the baby. When Saxburh fussed, Vanai said, “Come on-let’s go see what the new sheets say.”

Scooping her daughter off the floor, she carried her down the stairs and out into the street. A few other people were looking at the new broadsheets, too, but only a few. There’d been too many broadsheets-from King Penda, from the Algarvians, and now from the Unkerlanters and their puppet king-for anybody to get very excited over one more. Vanai wasn’t very excited, just curious and looking for an excuse to get out of the flat for a little while.

A Forthwegian man reading one of the new broadsheets pasted to a fence turned away with a disgusted gesture. Another one said, “Well, here’s something else that won’t fly.”

The first fellow said, “And what if it did? Doesn’t hardly matter anymore, does it? I ask you, is this a waste of time or what?” Shaking his head, he walked off.

Vanai went up to a broadsheet. “Oh,” she said softly when she saw its title; the headline was CONCERNING KAUNIANS. She still wore her sorcerous disguise, and so still looked like a Forthwegian herself. Back before the war, Eoforwic had a name as the place where Forthwegians and Kaunians got on better than they did anywhere else in the kingdom. The reputation held some truth; Forthwegians and Kaunians here had rioted together on learning that the Algarvians were shipping blonds west to be murdered. But plenty of Forthwegians here despised Kaunians, too. Vanai had seen that along with the other.

And what would King Beornwulf have to say on the subject? She went up closer to the broadsheet so she could read the smaller print. The new edict came straight to the point, declaring, All laws, orders, and regulations imposed by the Algarvian occupiers of the Kingdom of Forthweg concerning persons of Kaunian blood are henceforth and forevermore null and void. Persons of Kaunian blood legally residing in the Kingdom of Forthweg are and shall remain citizens of the said Kingdom, with full rights and privileges appertaining thereto, including the right to publish works in the Kaunian language (subject to the same limits of taste and decency as hold for works in the Forthwegian language). The status of persons of Kaunian blood residing in the Kingdom of Forthweg shall be and shall remain precisely what it was before the obscene and vicious Algarvian occupation, which in law shall be judged never to have occurred. Issued this day by order of King Beornwulf I of Forthweg, with the concurrence of his Unkerlanter allies.

Unkerlanters didn’t care much one way or the other about Kaunians. Only a handful of blonds lived in the far northeast of Unkerlant, not enough to make anyone in Swemmel’s kingdom nervous about them. That was one of the few good things Kaunians from Forthweg had to say about Unkerlanters: they weren’t Algarvians.

Vanai read aloud from the edict: “… the obscene and vicious Algarvian occupation, which in law shall be judged never to have occurred.” She looked around at the wreckage and rubble of Eoforwic and laughed bitterly. And the wreckage of the city-the wreckage of the whole kingdom-wasn’t the worst of it. People could rebuild ruined shops and houses and schools. How to go about rebuilding the lives the redheads had stolen, to say nothing of those they’d wrecked?

Publishing in Kaunian was legal again. But would anyone bother? Maybe some scholars would: people who wanted to be read by a wider audience, an audience in Kuusamo or Jelgava or even Algarve that had never learned Forthwegian. But how many writers now would turn their hands to romances or poetry or plays or new sheets in classical Kaunian? How many people were left alive to read them?

“Powers below eat King Mezentio,” Vanai whispered. He hadn’t killed off all the Kaunians in Forthweg. But he was liable to have killed Kaunianity here. That black thought had crossed Vanai’s mind before. Having it come back after she read an edict favoring her people made tears sting her eyes.

Saxburh squirmed. She wanted Vanai to put her down and let her crawl around out here. It was a mild spring day. Birds chirped. A warm breeze blew down from the north. Vanai said, “No,” to her daughter anyway, adding, “You’re not going to get to eat any bugs out here.”

She wished for a park with smoothly trimmed grass. She would take Saxburh there. The closest park she knew might not have had its grass trimmed since before the Derlavaian War. The ground there was bound to be cratered by bursting eggs. And every other park in and around Eoforwic was sure to be in the same state. So much rebuilding to do …