Through the Darkness

want anything worse to happen, either.”

“I know,” Vanai said, “but if only I were free to move around in Eoforwic-well, after things calm down again, anyhow. Earlier today, I was thinking that being caged up here wasn’t so bad. I haven’t thought anything like that for a long time. I don’t think I ever thought anything like that before.”

Ealstan nodded. “I don’t blame you. It’s.. pretty bad out there. Some of the fighting came right up to Ethelhelm’s block of flats, and that sort of thing doesn’t usually go on in the fancy parts of town.”

“What did your singer friend have to say?” Vanai asked. “Was he cheering the rioters on? Anybody with Kaunian blood ought to be.”

“I don’t quite know.” Ealstan sighed. “He doesn’t like the redheads- we’ve seen that-but he doesn’t want to lose what he’s got, either. To hang on to it, he has to play along with them, at least some. And when he plays along with them, he starts …” He groped for a phrase.

Vanai suggested one: “Forgiving things?”

“No, that goes too far.” Ealstan shook his head. “Not seeing things, maybe.” He held up a hand before Vanai could say anything. “Aye, I know that’s just about as bad. Maybe not quite, though.”

“Maybe.” Vanai didn’t believe it, but didn’t feel like starting an argument.

Again, Ealstan seemed to want to change the subject: “If you can get the magic to work, that would be wonderful. It would mean we’d be safe moving out of this flat, since. .” He shook his head. “We could move out.”

What hadn’t he said there? Not since you wouldn’t look like a Kaunian anymore. If he’d meant that, he would have said it. What then? Another possibility sprang into Vanai’s mind: since Ethelhelm knows where we live and might blab to the Algarvians. Ealstan wouldn’t want to say that out loud. He probably didn’t even want to think it. But maybe he hadn’t changed the subject after all.

He cocked his head to one side. “I wonder what you’d look like as a Forthwegian. Would you feel different, too?” He used his hands to sketch figures in the air, contrasting her slimness to his own more solid build, which was typical of Forthwegians.

“I don’t know,” Vanai answered. “I’m not really a mage, remember.” Her grandfather would have been able to say. She was sure of that. Brivibas knew a lot about magecraft, especially the history of magecraft. He’d used sorcery in his own historical research. She wondered how much else he might use if he wanted to. A good deal, she suspected. But would he ever think to do so? That was another question altogether.

Ealstan’s thoughts had been running along another, and a distinctively masculine, ley line. With a small chuckle, he said, “If you look different and feel different, too, it would almost be like making love to somebody else.”

“Would it?” Vanai eyed him from under lowered brows. “And do you want to be making love to somebody else?”

He was bright enough to recognize the danger in that one, and hastily shook his head. “Of course not,” he answered, and Vanai had to hide a smile at how emphatic he sounded. But he didn’t quite back away from everything he’d said: “It would just be like choosing a different posture, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Vanai said. Ealstan was fonder of different postures than she was, for Major Spinello had forced them on her. But Ealstan didn’t know about Spinello, for which Vanai was heartily glad. She gave her lover the benefit of the doubt. “All right, sweetheart.”

And then, while Ealstan worked on columns of figures (“Powers above only know when I’ll be able to get these to my clients,” he said, but kept working anyhow), Vanai went back to picking the Forthwegian spell to pieces and rebuilding it in classical Kaunian. When she noticed her new version had a partial rhyme scheme, her hopes lifted: the original surely would have rhymed, to make memorizing it easier. She tried alternative words to give more rhymes. Some she discarded; others fit as well as a snug pair of trousers.

“I have it, I think,” she told Ealstan. “Shall I try it?”

“If you want to,” he answered, “and if you think you can reverse anything that goes wrong.”

Vanai studied her new text. She wasn’t sure of that, and Ealstan, she had to admit, showed good sense in asking her to be. She sighed. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and then, “Can you bring me some books on magecraft?”

“Tomorrow? No,” Ealstan said. “When things settle down? Of course.” Vanai sighed again, but then she nodded.

Cornelu didn’t like walking through the streets of Setubal. For one thing, he still had trouble reading Lagoan, which reminded him how much a stranger he was in the capital of Lagoas and how much a stranger he’d remain. He had never wanted to be a Lagoan; what he wanted was to be a free Sibian in a free Sibiu.

But walking through Setubal also reminded him that even a free Sibiu could never hope to measure itself against Lagoas again. That hurt. Setubal alone held as many people, did as much business, as all the five islands of his native kingdom. And, while Setubal was the greatest city in Lagoas, it was far from being the only Lagoan city of consequence.

How do people live here without going mad? Cornelu wondered as Lagoans streamed past him, every one of them moving faster than he cared to. More ley lines came together at Setubal than anywhere else in the world; that was why the city had blazed into prominence over the past couple of hundred years. And the sorcerous energy seemed to fill the people as well as the place. Cornelu knew that couldn’t be literally true, but it felt as if it were.

A hawker waved a news sheet in his face and bawled something half comprehensible. He caught the words Ice People, and supposed the headline had to do with the Lagoans’ continuing advances on the austral continent. He was all for those advances, as he was all for anything that hurt the Algarvians, but he didn’t care to spend money on a sheet he could barely puzzle out. The news-sheet vendor said a couple of uncomplimentary things that weren’t much different in Lagoan from what they would have been in Sibian.

A few blocks later, Cornelu turned the corner and strode up to the ornate neoclassical headquarters of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. No one stopped him from approaching the great white marble pile, and no one stopped him from going inside, either. It wasn’t so much that he looked like a Lagoan; he could have been as hairy as a man of the Ice People and no one would have stopped him. Business was business.

He knew the way to Grandmaster Pinhiero’s offices. He’d been there before. He hadn’t got what he wanted, but he did know the way. The grandmaster’s secretary, a portly fellow named Brinco, looked up from the papers he was methodically going through. He beamed. “Commander Cornelu! Good to see you again!” He spoke Algarvian, which he knew Cornelu understood.

“Good day,” Cornelu answered. Brinco had met him only once, and that months before. But the mage remembered him right away. That bespoke either some unobtrusive sorcery or a well-honed recollection.

When Cornelu said no more, Brinco asked, “And how may I serve you today, your Excellency?”

He sounded as if nothing would delight him more than doing Cornelu’s bidding. Cornelu knew that to be untrue, but couldn’t decide whether it flattered or irked him. He decided to stick to the business on which he’d come: “I have heard that the mage Fernao, whom I once brought back from the land of the Ice People and who had the misfortune to go there again, was wounded. Is it so?”

“And where did you hear this?” Brinco asked, nothing in his face or voice giving any sign about whether it was so. Cornelu stood mute. When it became clear he wouldn’t answer, Brinco shrugged, said, “Good to see you again,” once more, and returned to his papers.

Curse you, Cornelu thought. But Brinco had power and he had none; that was part of what being an exile meant. His stiff-necked Sibian pride almost made him turn on his heel and walk out. In the end, though, he growled, “I was in a tavern with the dragonflier who brought in a man he thought to be Fernao.”

“Ah.” Brinco’s nod was almost conspiratorial. “Aye, dragonfliers will run on at the mouth. I suppose it comes from being unable to talk with their beasts, the way you leviathan-riders do.”

“It could be.” Cornelu waited for the Lagoan to say more. When Brinco didn’t, Cornelu folded his arms across his chest and fixed the grandmaster’s secretary with a cold stare. “I answered your question, sir. You might have the common courtesy to answer mine.”

“You already have a good notion as to that answer, though,” Brinco said. Cornelu looked at him. It wasn’t a glare, not really, but it served the same purpose. A slow flush mounted to Brinco’s cheeks. “Very well, sir: aye, that