“Eateries with indifferent food keep things dark, so you don’t know exactly what you’re getting. The Imperial, now, the Imperial has confidence.”
“Yes, sir, we do,” the waiter said, drawing out Krasta’s chair so she could sit down. “I hope, sir, when your meal is done, you will be able to tell me our establishment deserves to have such confidence.”
“I hope so, too,” Lurcanio answered. “As a matter of fact, I had better be able to.” His smile had sharp edges, reminding the waiter who was occupier and who occupied. The fellow gulped, nodded, and fled.
When he returned, he brought menus and a list of potables. Krasta chose a dark ale, Lurcanio wine from the Marquisate of Rivaroli. “An excellent selection, sir,” the waiter said.
“I think so,” Lurcanio said. “Now that Algarve has taken Rivaroli back from Valmiera, the least I can do is take a bottle of her wine.” That sent the waiter away in a hurry again. Krasta stared across the table in some annoyance; she’d been ready to order supper, too, and now she couldn’t.
She looked around the Imperial. More than half of the men eating supper were Algarvians. The blond men with them had the sleek look of those who’d done well for themselves since Valmiera fell to King Mezentio’s men. Their yellow-haired lady friends were almost as elegant, almost as lovely, as those who accompanied the redheads.
Idly, Lurcanio asked, “Does the name Pavilosta mean anything to you?”
“Pavilosta?” Krasta shook her head. “It sounds like it ought to be a town. Is it? Out in the provinces somewhere, I suppose. Who cares where?” As far as she was concerned, the civilized world ended a few miles outside of Priekule. Oh, it had extensions in fashionable resorts, but she was certain Pavilosta wasn’t among them. She would have known more about it if it were.
“Aye, out in the provinces,” Lurcanio said. “You would not by any chance have got a letter from there lately?”
“Powers above, no!” Krasta exclaimed. She wasn’t clever in most senses of the word, but she did have a certain shrewdness to her. Pointing at her companion, she went on, “And if I had, you’d know about it before I did.”
Lurcanio chuckled. “Well, I hope I would, but you never can tell.”
He might have said more, but the waiter came back with his wine and Krasta’s ale. This time, Krasta got to order. She chose the pork chop stuffed with crayfish meat. “Ah, you’ll enjoy that, milady,” the waiter said. He turned to Lurcanio and dipped his head. “And for you, sir?”
“Roast chicken-dark meat, not white,” Lurcanio answered. “Very simple-just brush it with olive oil, garlic, and pepper. All the rich things you Valmierans eat, I marvel that you’re not round as footballs.”
“We’ll need a little time to prepare it that way, sir,” the waiter warned. Lurcanio nodded in acquiescence. The waiter departed once more.
“If you come to a place like this, you shouldn’t be simple,” Krasta said. Simplicity, to her mind, was anything but a virtue.
Lurcanio had different ideas. “Done well, simplicity makes for the highest art,” he said. Krasta shook her head again. No, that wasn’t how she looked at the world. With a whimsical shrug, Lurcanio changed the subject: “Shall we return to the uninteresting village of Pavilosta?”
“Why, if it’s so uninteresting?” Krasta asked, sipping her ale. “Let’s talk about interesting things instead. How many drops of poppy juice do you suppose I’d have to give Bauska’s little bastard to make her stop yowling so much?”
“I am a good many things, but an apothecary I am not,” Lurcanio replied. “You might silence the baby for good if you gave it too much. I do not think this a good idea.”
“That’s because you don’t have to listen to it-except when you’re up in my bedchamber, that is,” Krasta said. “When you’re over in the west wing, you probably don’t even know when it’s pitching a fit.”
Instead of answering that, Lurcanio made a steeple of his fingertips. “If you brother the marquis were still alive, do you think he would have done his best to reach you and let you know his situation?”
“Skarnu?” Krasta raised an eyebrow. She didn’t think of her brother much these days-what point, when he hadn’t come home from Valmiera’s debacle? “Aye, I think so. I’m sure of it, in fact.”
Lurcanio eyed her, not as a man eyes a woman but more like a cat eyeing a mouse. She glared at him; she didn’t care for that. More often than not, he ignored her glares. This time, he looked away. “It could be,” he said at last. “The investigators in those parts do not know everything there is to know. They’ve proved that often enough- too often, in fact.”
“What
“Nothing,” Lurcanio answered with another fine Algarvian shrug. “It might have been something, but it turns out to be nothing.” He sipped the golden wine he’d ordered, then nodded solemn approval.
“I’ll tell you what,” Krasta said. “If I ever get a letter from my brother-or from anyone else in this Pavilosta- in-the-wilderness place-you’ll be the first to know about it.”
“Oh, I expect I will, my dear-you said so yourself,” the Algarvian colonel answered with a laugh. Krasta took offense at its tone. They might have squabbled some more, but the waiter chose that moment to bring their suppers on a tray. Not even Krasta felt like quarreling when faced with that lovely food. And Lurcanio, having tasted his chicken, said, “Aye, simplicity is best.” He beamed at Krasta. “You prove that every day, my dear.” She smiled back, taking it for a compliment.
Pekka sat in her Kajaani City College office staring up at the ceiling, staring up through the ceiling. After a long stretch where the theoretical sorcerer scarcely moved, she bent to the paper in front of her and scribbled two quick lines and then, after a moment, another. A smile chased the abstracted expression she had worn from her broad, high-cheekboned face.
Plenty of mages would have disagreed with her. That bothered her not at all. Her husband was one of those mages. That bothered her only a little. Leino was good at what he did.
Through her open window, she heard a mason’s trowel scraping across mortar as he set bricks in place to repair a wall damaged in a laboratory accident. That was all most people knew about what had happened here a few weeks before. Pekka devoutly hoped it was all the Algarvians knew about what had happened here. She, though, she knew better.
After looking up at the ceiling a while longer, she wrote another line and slowly nodded. One step at a time, she and Siuntio and Ilmarinen were learning more about the energy that lay at the heart of the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity. The hole in the wall the mason was repairing was one of the lessons the master mages hadn’t learned quite so well as they thought they had.
“If we figure out how to release the energy where and when we need it, we can shake the world,” Pekka murmured.
Sometimes, thinking about what they might do terrified her and made her wish they’d never started down this ley line. But whenever she thought about what Mezentio’s wizards had done first against Unkerlant and then to Yliharma, the capital of her beloved Kuusamo, she hardened her heart. The Algarvians hadn’t needed the new sorcery to shake the world. Old-fashioned sorcery on a large and bloodthirsty scale had been plenty for that.
Kuusamo wouldn’t have to, if Pekka and her colleagues could gain the understanding they needed. If they didn’t, the land of the Seven Princes was liable to plunge into the sea. Pekka stared down at her latest sheet of calculations. If she couldn’t come up with answers fast enough … She’d never imagined that sort of pressure.
When someone knocked on the office door, she jumped in surprise. It was still light outside, but it would stay light outside the whole day through, or almost. Kajaani lay so far south, it made the most of summer.
Pekka opened the door. There stood Leino. “Another day done,” her husband said. He worked in neat chunks of time, not as mood and inspiration struck him.
“Let me pack up my things,” Pekka said. She didn’t leave calculations lying around the office, as she had in
