Out of the Darkness

formed a bar over his eyes. “His Majesty not be happy. You are right man for job. Algarvian. Noble. You don’t like Mezentio.”

“I think you misunderstand something,” Sabrino said. “Shall I be very plain?” With the decoction of poppy juice in him, he could hardly be anything else.

“Say on,” Vatran rumbled ominously.

“You know I disagreed with King Mezentio,” Sabrino said, and the Unkerlanter officer’s big, heavy-featured head went up and down. “And because of that, you think I would be able to work well with your king.”

General Vatran nodded once more. “Aye. It is so.”

But Sabrino shook his head. “No. It is not so. And, sir, I will tell you why it is not so.” He wagged that forefinger at Vatran again. “It is not so because I wanted my kingdom to beat yours every bit as much as King Mezentio did. Believe me: I wanted to march through Cottbus in triumph every bit as much as Mezentio did.” He glanced down at the asymmetrical shape under the sheet on the cot. “But we didn’t march through Cottbus, and I won’t be doing any marching now.”

“Why you quarrel with your king, then?” Vatran demanded. His voice held a certain amount of respectful wonder. Sabrino thought he understood that. From everything he’d heard, quarreling with Swemmel was something an Unkerlanter did at most once.

“Why? Purely over means, not over the end,” Sabrino said. By Vatran’s new frown, he saw the Unkerlanter didn’t follow that. He spelled it out: “I didn’t think killing Kaunians was a good idea. I never thought it was a good idea. I thought it would make all our enemies hate us and fear us and fight us harder than ever.”

“You right,” Vatran said.

And much good that did me, Sabrino thought. I never imagined you Unkerlanters would slaughter your own to strike back at us. None of the eastern kingdoms would have done such a thing. You knew this fight was to the death, too. Aloud, he said, “I suppose I was. I thought we would have beaten you without doing any such thing. Maybe I was right about that, and maybe I was wrong. But that was my quarrel with my king, the long and the short of it.” Mezentio didn’t dispose of me for arguing with him, the way Swemmel would have. But he never forgave me, either.

Vatran grunted. “This why you a colonel when war starts and you still a colonel when war stops? I wonder some on that. Make more sense now.”

“Aye, that’s why,” Sabrino agreed. “And so, you see, you cannot rely on me to make a puppet King of Algarve, either. I am no man’s puppet, not even my own sovereign’s.”

“You brave to say this,” Vatran observed. “You maybe stupid to say this, too. You likely stupid to say this.”

“Why? Will Swemmel blaze me for it?” Sabrino asked.

“Don’t know,” Vatran replied. “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

Sabrino shrugged. “Well, if he does, he does. I’ve been through too much to worry about it. Let him do what he will do.”

“This is your last word?” Vatran asked. Sabrino nodded. The Unkerlanter general sighed. “All right. I take it away with me. You are brave man. You are also fool.” There, for the first time, he almost tempted Sabrino to change his mind. If being a fool qualified a man for the kingship, he reckoned himself the best qualified sovereign Algarve had ever had.

After General Vatran left, the healer came back into Sabrino’s chamber. Curious-nosy-as any Algarvian, he asked, “What did the barbarian want?”

“He wanted to proclaim me King of Algarve,” Sabrino answered.

He waited to see what the healer would make of that. For a moment, the fellow just gaped, not sure how to take it. Then he started to laugh. “Well, I asked for that, didn’t I?” he said. “All right, your Majesty, I’ll be careful around you from now on.”

“I’m not anyone’s Majesty,” Sabrino said. “I turned him down.”

That only made the healer laugh harder. “I can see why you would have. A chap like you, you have to hold out for a really good position, eh?”

No wonder Mezentio got so testy, Sabrino thought. He ruled a whole kingdom full of people like this. I suppose I was just another little nuisance to him. Till Vatran’s offer, he’d never tried to imagine what the world looked like from the perspective of a king. Powers above! Why would anybody want the job?

Still laughing, the healer said, “Why didn’t you ask him if you could be King of Unkerlant instead? There’s a place that could really use a civilized man running things.”

“I don’t want to be King of Unkerlant.” Sabrino wondered if an Unkerlanter mage was somehow listening to every word he said. Given some of the things he’d heard about King Swemmel, he wouldn’t have been surprised. He didn’t want that mage hearing anything untoward. “I don’t want to be king at all, not any place.”

“Well, all right.” The healer plucked at his mustachios, which he’d managed to keep perfectly waxed throughout Algarve’s collapse, conquest, and occupation. “If it were me, though, I’d grab anything I could get.” He plucked some more. “Maybe we ought to switch you to a decoction that’s not quite so potent.”

He thinks I imagined the whole thing, Sabrino realized. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I made up the Unkerlanter general, too,” he said.

With a shrug, the healer answered, “Who knows what’s real these days?” Sabrino laughed, but it wasn’t as if the fellow didn’t have a point.

“Another letter!” Vanai said to Saxburh as she fished it out of the brass letterbox in the lobby of her block of flats. The envelope bore no return address, and was addressed to her as Thelberge. Her heart leaped when she recognized the script. “And it’s from your father!”

“Mama,” Saxburh said. She didn’t say dada so much these days. Had Ealstan been here, had she had someone to say it to, that would have been different. Vanai was sure of it.

She picked up her daughter and the jug of olive oil she’d bought. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs, and we’ll find out what he says.” She longed for the days when Saxburh would be able to walk up those stairs by herself; the baby wasn’t a lightweight any more. She wasn’t so much of a baby any more, either. She’d started taking her first few toddling steps without holding on to anything, and her first birthday was only a few days away.

Of course, she didn’t care anything about the letter. “Hat!” she said, as soon as she got back to the flat. She found her special little hat and jammed it down onto her head. “Hat!”

“That’s a hat,” Vanai agreed. She almost tore Ealstan’s letter in her eagerness to get it out of the envelope. Hello, sweetheart! Ealstan wrote. That you’re seeing this proves I’m not an Unkerlanter soldier any more. They kept me long enough to use me up, then decided they didn‘t want me with a hole in my leg.

I would like you and Saxburh to come back here to Gromheort to live. I wouldn‘t have said that before everything that happened. Eoforwic used to be the easiest place in the kingdom for your people and for mixed couples to get along. Now. . Now I don’t know how easy it will be anywhere. I wish I didn’t have to say something like that, but I’m afraid it’s true.

Vanai feared it was true, too. As he usually did, Ealstan made hard, solid sense. That was one of the things that had interested her in him from the beginning. Now that she’d seen a letter from his father, she had a better notion of how he came by it.

I don’t know how your money is holding out, he wrote: a bookkeeper’s son and a bookkeeper himself, he thought of such things. If you need more, let me know. If you don’t, buy passage on the first ley-line caravan car you can and come east. Don’t wait to write us which caravan you‘II be on. You know where we live. Take a cab from the depot. This old town went through a lot in the siege, but the rubble is out of the streets and you can get from there to here.

All my kin here can’t wait to meet you and see you and find out what you look like-both ways-and to see our little girl. Conberge is going to have a baby, too, so Saxburh will have a cousin to grow up with. And I miss you more than I can tell you, and I can’t wait to hug you and kiss you and do whatever else I can talk you into. With all the love there is-your husband, Ealstan.

Pack up everything she could carry? Wait not a minute? Vanai started to shake her head, then paused. She’d done that before, when she came here to Eoforwic with Ealstan. How glad she’d been to get out of Oyngestun, too!