safer, happier, more innocent times.
“How’s it going?” Leino asked as they walked across the campus toward the caravan stop where they’d board the car that would take them close to their home.
“Pretty well,” Pekka answered. She gave her husband a wry grin. “I always seem to do my best thinking just before you come and get me.” The breeze, smelling of the sea, blew a lock of her coarse black hair across her face. She flipped it back with a toss of the head.
“Aye, that’s the way of it,” Leino agreed. “I hope I didn’t knock right in the middle of an inspiration, the way I have a few times.”
“No, it wasn’t too bad,” she said. “I’d just written something down, so I have a fair notion of where I ought to be going when I pick up in the morning.” She sighed. “Now I have to hope the ley line I’m traveling actually leads somewhere.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Leino said. “If it led anywhere more important, dear Professor Heikki would have to worry about a whole new laboratory wing, not just a chunk of wall.”
“Don’t say that.” Pekka looked around anxiously, though none of the other students and scholars on the walks was paying any attention to her husband and her. “Anyway, it’s not so much what we’re doing as controlling what we’re doing that’s turning into the biggest problem--aside from the department chairman, of course. And even she wouldn’t be so bad if she’d just leave me alone.”
“You’ll manage.” Leino sounded more confident than Pekka felt. A fair-sized crowd of people was waiting at the caravan stop. He fell silent. He didn’t worry about spilling secrets quite so much as she did, but he was no blabbermouth.
Somebody at the stop was waving a news sheet and exclaiming about what a splendid job Kuusaman dragons were doing against the Algarvians down in the land of the Ice People. “There’s good news,” Pekka said.
“Aye-for now,” Leino replied. “But if we poke the Algarvians down there, what will they do? Send more men across the Narrow Sea, most likely- they can do it easier than we can.” He paused. “Of course, everybody they send to the austral continent is somebody they can’t use against the Unkerlanters, so that might not be so bad after all.”
“Then again, it might,” Pekka said. “I know Swemmel’s an ally these days, but we’re mad if we fall in love with him. The only reason he’s better than Mezentio is that he wasn’t the one who started slaughtering people to make his magic stronger. But he didn’t wait very long before he started doing it, too, did he?”
“If he had waited, Cottbus probably would have fallen,” Leino said, and held up a hand before his wife could snap at him. “I know, he’s no great bargain. But we’d be worse off if the Algarvians weren’t fighting him, too, and you can’t tell me that isn’t so.”
Since Pekka, however much she wished she could, truly couldn’t tell him that, she pointed down the ley line and said, “Here comes the caravan.”
“I hope we’ll be able to get seats and not have to wait for the next one,” Leino said.
As things turned out, Pekka got a seat. Her husband stood beside her, hanging onto the overhead rail, till a good many people got out at the downtown stops and not so many came aboard. Then he sat down beside her. They rode together as the caravan glided along the energy line of the world’s grid to their stop. When they got out, they climbed the hill that led up to their house hand in hand.
Before they got home, they stopped next door to pick up their son from Elimaki. “And how was Uto today?” Pekka asked her sister.
“Not so bad,” Elimaki answered, which, given Uto, wasn’t the smallest praise she might have offered.
“Have you heard from Olavin lately?” Leino asked. Elimaki’s banker husband had gone into the service of the Seven Princes, to keep the army’s finances running smoothly.
“Aye-I got a letter from him in the afternoon post,” Elimaki said. “He’s complaining about the food, and he says they’re trying to work him to death.” She laughed a little. “You know Olavin. If he said everything was fine, I’d think someone had ensorceled him.”
Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on, let’s get you home. I’m going to give you a bath after supper.” That produced as many piteous howls and groans and grimaces as she’d expected. Indifferent to all of them, she gave her sister relief from Uto and took charge of him herself.
“What’s for supper tonight?” Leino asked as they went into the house.
“I have some nice mutton chops in the rest crate, and a couple of lobsters, too,” Pekka answered. “Which would you rather have? If you’re starving, I can do the chops faster than the lobsters.”
“Let’s have the mutton chops, then,” Leino said.
“No, let’s have lobster,” Uto said. “Then I won’t have to have a bath so soon.”
“Maybe I could use the hot water from the lobsters to bathe you in,” Pekka suggested. Uto fled, squalling in delicious horror. “Mutton chops,” Pekka said to remind herself. She shook her head. If she wasn’t acting like one of the absent-minded mages comics made jokes about, what was she doing?
She took the lid off the rest crate, which broke the spell that kept the crate’s contents from aging at the same rate as the world around them. In a different way, the crate did some of the same things as her experiments, but it did them undramatically, by conserving sorcerous energy rather than releasing it in bursts. She reached into the crate for the mutton chops, which lay wrapped in butcher paper and string.
A moment later, she called for her husband. When Leino came into the kitchen, she thrust the package of chops at him. “Here,” she said. “You can throw these in a pan as well as I can. I need to do some calculating.”
“You’ve had an idea,” Leino said in accusing tones.
“I certainly have,” Pekka answered. “Now I want to get some notion of whether I’m right or not.”
“All right,” Leino said. “If you’re not going to worry about whether they come out half done or burnt, I won’t, either. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Aye, there is,” Pekka said. “Keep Uto quiet. I’m going to need to be able to hear myself think.”
“I’ll try,” Leino said. “I make no guarantees.” Pekka blazed him a look that warned he’d better do his best to offer a guarantee. His grimace said he understood that, even as Pekka understood life-and Uto-could include the unexpected.
She went into the bedchamber she shared with her husband, took out pen and paper, and began to calculate. She knew the parameters of rest crates well; it wasn’t as if she were stumbling around half in the dark, as she so often was while calculating implications of the still-murky relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.
“It could work,” she breathed. “By the powers above, it truly could.” She hadn’t been more than half serious when she gave her husband the chops. By the time he called that they were ready, she’d found most of what she needed to know. The results startled her.
“You’ve got something,” Leino said as he served up mutton chops and a salad of spinach and scallions. “I can see it on your face.”
“I do,” Pekka agreed, still sounding surprised. “And I want to kick myself for being such a fool, I didn’t see it before. I want to get on the crystal and talk with Ilmarinen and Siuntio. They might have better notions of where to go with this than I do.”
“Either be vague or send them a letter,” Leino answered. “You never can tell who’s liable to be listening.”
“That’s true enough. It’s too true, in fact,” Pekka said. Absently, she added, “These chops are good.” That surprised her almost as much as the possible new use for rest crates had.
“Thanks.” Leino turned to Uto. “There. Do you see? I wasn’t trying to poison everybody after all. Now eat up.”
“Did he really say that?” Pekka asked. Leino nodded. Pekka wagged a forefinger at their son. “Don’t say things like that again, or you’ll spend some more time sleeping without your stuffed leviathan.”
That was a threat to make Uto behave himself, at least for a little while.
As Skarnu buried the egg in the middle of the ley line that ran between the farm on which he lived and
