rarely sentences: as he seized one phrase, two more would slip past him. After perhaps half a minute, Vatsyunas returned to his archaism-littered version of Valmieran: “I am persuaded you have reason. I crave you pardon for mine earlier hasty speech.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Skarnu spoke as he might have in his days as an officer on pardoning a soldier for some minor offense.
Vatsyunas gave him a measuring stare. Only then did he realize the Kaunian from Forthweg might have recognized that tone for what it was, and might have drawn his own conclusions from it. Skarnu decided that wasn’t so bad. If he could trust any man, he could trust Vatsyunas.
Having Vatsyunas and Pernavai here made such a visit more likely. He knew as much. So did Merkela. So did Raunu. Skarnu poured himself more ale from the pitcher. Some risks weren’t just worth taking. Some had to be taken.
Seven
Colonel Lurcanio chucked Krasta under the chin. She hated that; it made her feel as if she were a child. But, from Lurcanio, she endured it. As the carriage rolled toward Valmiera’s royal palace, Lurcanio said, “This should be a gay gathering tonight.”
“For you, maybe,” Krasta replied; Lurcanio gave her a longer leash for what she said than for what she did. “I don’t see the sport in watching King Gainibu crawl into a brandy bottle nose-first.”
“Do you not, my sweet?” Lurcanio sounded genuinely surprised. “His father presided over Algarve’s humiliation after the Six Years’ War. Since the father is no longer among the living, we have to avenge ourselves on the son.” He chuckled. “With the way Gainibu drinks, I must say he helps.”
The driver had no trouble tonight picking his way through Priekule’s dark avenues. As they pulled up in front of the palace, the redheaded soldier spoke to Lurcanio in their own language. Lurcanio laughed and said something back.
He turned to Krasta. “He says he’s going to do some drinking, too, while he waits for us to come out. I told him he had my leave; it’s not as if he were a king, to do it on his own.”
Krasta made cruel jokes like that herself. They were almost the only jokes she did make. She enjoyed them less when, however justly, they were aimed at the man she still thought of as her sovereign. Lurcanio seldom let such considerations worry him. He handed her down from the carriage and, his night sight seemingly as good as an owl’s, led her to the palace.
Once past the doors and curtains that kept light from leaking out, Krasta blinked against the glare. Servitors gave her and her companion precisely calibrated bows. She was a marchioness and Lurcanio only a count, but he was an Algarvian and she only a local, so they bent fractionally lower for him than for her. That had irked her the first time it happened, and still irked her now. By the way Lurcanio smiled, he knew it irked her, too.
A herald bawled out their names as they strode into the grand salon where Gainibu was receiving his guests. As usual, Krasta scanned the room to see what sort of crowd it was and where she fit into it. At first, she thought it was very much the usual sort: Valmieran noblemen, Algarvian soldiers, and the tarts- some noble, some not-who clung to their arms and smiled at their jokes.
Then, off in one corner of the salon, she noticed an Algarvian in tunic and kilt of civilian cut surrounded by six or eight Valmieran men, some of them quite disreputable-looking. They all ignored the receiving line that led up to King Gainibu (and to the always full glass in his free hand). Most of them were holding glasses, too, and their talk- their arguments, really-bid fair to drown out everything else.
“Who
“You have not made the acquaintance of the Algarvian comptroller of publications?” Lurcanio returned.
“If I had, would I be asking about him?” Krasta tossed her head. “Well, that explains why the others, the Valmierans, are acting the way they are. What can you expect from a pack of writers? I wonder how many of them will take spoons home in their pockets.”
“Some very good work has been done since we took charge of publications,” Lurcanio said. Krasta shrugged. She hadn’t read very much before the Algarvians overran Valmiera, and she still didn’t. Lurcanio went on, “Before the war, Iroldo there used to teach Algarvian at a college in some Valmieran provincial town. He knows your writers well, and wants to get the best from them.”
“Well, of course,” Krasta said. “That makes Algarve look good, too.”
Lurcanio started to say something, stopped, and then said something else altogether: “Every so often, you come out with something surprisingly astute. If you did it more often, it would cause me more concern.”
“What do you mean?” Krasta hardly heard what he’d said; she’d spotted Viscount Valnu, and was waving across the salon at him.
“Never mind.” Chuckling a little, Lurcanio gave her backside an indulgent pat. “Go and see your friend. If the two of you hadn’t been out talking together, who knows what might have happened when that egg burst at the reception the Duke of Klaipeda’s nephew was putting on?”
Krasta didn’t like to think about that. She was much happier thinking about cuckolding Lurcanio with Valnu. Her Algarvian lover-and keeper- thought Valnu liked boys. Valnu, as a matter of fact, probably did like boys, but he liked women, too. Of that Krasta had no doubt whatever.
He gave her a dazzling smile as she came up to him; it made him look like a suave, affable skull. “Hello, darling!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Hello yourself,” Krasta said coolly. She let Valnu introduce her to his friends, most of them young Algarvian officers at least as pretty as he was. They were polite, but none of them seemed interested in Krasta for her own sake. A couple of them gave Valnu sidelong glances, as if wondering how he could possibly find a woman appealing.
As if to explain himself, he said, “We were having a drink together, the marchioness and I, outside that mansion when the saboteur’s egg burst inside it. If we’d stayed there, we might both have been killed.”
“Ah,” the Algarvian officers said, almost in one breath. They could accept a twist of fate as an explanation, where mere animal attraction would have offended them. Krasta had to work not to laugh in their faces. As she’d known more about Valnu than Lurcanio did, so she also knew more about him than did these fellows.
He took her by the arm. “Let’s get something to drink, and you can tell me how you’ve been since.” The pretty Algarvian officers rolled their eyes; again, Krasta had to hold in a laugh.
As Valnu steered her toward the bar, she stroked his cheek and archly murmured, “Are you going to sneak me out of here a minute before this place goes up in flames, too?”
He stopped, which rather surprised her. “I hadn’t planned on it, no,” he replied in unwontedly serious tones. Then he grinned and added, “If that happens tonight, it’ll catch both of us by surprise-and a lot of other people, too.” He waved to one of the tapmen. “Ale for me.”
“Aye, sir-ale,” the fellow said. “And for you, milady?”
“Brandy with wormwood,” Krasta told him. After a couple of shots of that, she would have an excuse for any sort of outrageous behavior. She’d been pretty outrageous the last time she drank it with Valnu, back in the days when Valmiera was still a kingdom in its own right and not an Algarvian appanage.
Having at last been eased from the receiving line, King Gainibu had made a beeline for the bar. He waved to the man behind it. “The same for me as the lady here is having,” he said. Only the slow precision of his diction marked how much he’d already poured down. As the bartender handed him the glass of blue-green spirits., he remarked, “Soon I will find a chair and go to sleep. Then the Algarvians will be happy, and so will I.”
Valnu steered Krasta away from the sodden king, as he’d steered her away from the Algarvian officers. “That’s not the way a sovereign should talk,” he said. “That’s not the way a sovereign should have to talk.”
“No, I don’t think so, either,” Krasta said. “He’s a laughingstock for the redheads. The worst part is, he knows it.” Sensitive to slights herself-or at least to being on the receiving end of them-she had some notion of how poor drunken Gainibu had to feel.
