Through the Darkness

know how it is. People aren’t friendly nowadays.”

Looking at the wrinkled, toothless grannies who’d come out with their menfolk, Sidroc didn’t much feel like being friendly to them. What went through his mind was, If I ever get that desperate, I think I’d sooner blaze myself Maybe Werferth’s mind was traveling along the same ley line, for all he said us, “Give us food and spirits and we won’t give you a hard time.”

After the fellow who’d been in Forthweg translated that into Unkerlanter or Grelzer or whatever they spoke hereabouts, the old men and women hurried to obey. Black bread and pease porridge and smoked pork weren’t very exciting, but they filled the belly. Instead of spirits, Sidroc drank ale. Like any proper Forthwegian, he would sooner have had wine, but the next vineyard he saw in this part of the world would be the first.

“King Raniero good, eh?” he asked the wizened old lady who fetched him his mug of ale. Good wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent.

But the old woman looked at him with beady eyes-one of them clouded by a cataract-and said something in her own language that, coupled with her outspread hands, had to mean she didn’t understand him. Sidroc didn’t believe her for a minute. She just didn’t want to answer, which meant the answer she would have given was no.

Anger surged in Sidroc. He didn’t have to take anything from these cursed Unkerlanters. If they’d been on his side, most of the people in this village wouldn’t have lit out as soon as they found the men from Plegmund’s Brigade were coming. “We ought to have some fun here,” he said, a nasty sort of anticipation in his voice.

One of his squadmates, the ruffian named Ceorl, spoke up: “Can’t have as much fun as we might. Everything’s too stinking wet to burn the way it should.”

“We can always slap these buggers around,” Sidroc said. “Pity none of the younger women hung around. We’d have better sport then.” Nobody was inclined to say no to a man who carried a stick. Sidroc had watched Algarvian soldiers making free with Kaunian women-and with some Forthwegians, too-back in Gromheort. Now that he carried his own stick, he enjoyed imitating the redheads.

As he spoke, he eyed the old woman who’d brought him ale. She couldn’t hide the fear on her face. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, she understood some of what he and his pals were saying. As far as he was concerned, that was reason enough to slap her around … in a little while. Till then, she could bloody well keep on serving him. He thrust the mug at her and growled, “More.”

She understood that, all right. She hurried off to fill up the mug again. Sidroc poured the ale down his throat. No, it wasn’t nearly as good as wine. But it would do. It put fire in his belly, and fire in his head, too.

He started yet another mug of ale, fully intending to start raising a ruckus when he finished that. He was just draining it, though, when a horseman came splashing up the villages main, and only, street. The fellow called out in unmistakable Forthwegian: “Ho, men of Plegmund’s Brigade!”

Sergeant Werferth was the senior underofficer. He pulled his hood down low over his eyes, stepped out into the rain, and said, “We’re here, all right. What’s toward?”

“We’re all ordered back to the encampment outside Herborn,” the courier answered.

“Now there’s a fine piece of bloody foolishness,” Werferth said. “How are we supposed to hold down this stinking countryside if we sit in that cursed encampment with a thumb up our arse?” Werferth liked fighting, all right.

But the courier gave a blunt, two-word reply: “We’re not.”

That brought not only Werferth but Sidroc and Ceorl and almost all the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade out into the rain. “Then what in blazes will we be doing?” Sidroc demanded. Several other men threw out almost identical questions.

“We’ll be getting on a ley-line caravan and heading south and west,” the courier said. “If the lousy Grelzers want to go out and chase their own brigands, fine. If they don’t, the powers below can eat ‘em up, for all we care from now on. They’re sending us off to fight the real Unkerlanter armies, not these odds and sods who sneak through the woods.”

“Ahh,” Werferth said, a grunt of satisfaction that might almost have come from a man who’d just had a woman. “It won’t get any better than that.” He turned to his troopers. “The Algarvians have decided we’re real soldiers after all.”

“My arse,” Ceorl muttered to Sidroc. “The Algarvians have lost so many men of their own, they’re throwing us into the fire to see if we can put it out.”

Sidroc shrugged. “Anybody wants to kill me, he won’t have an easy time of it,” he said. Werferth nodded and slapped him on the back. Rainwater sprayed off his cape.

Captain Gradasso bowed to Krasta. “An you be fain to closet yourself with Colonel Lurcanio, milady, I am to tell you he hath gone forth into Priekule, but his return is expected ere eventide.”

Krasta giggled. “You talk so funny!” she exclaimed. “It’s not quite classical Kaunian anymore, but it’s not really Valmieran, either. It’s a mishmash, that’s what it is.”

Lurcanio’s new aide shrugged. “Bit by bit, I come to apprehend somewhat of the modern speech. Though my locutions be yet archaic, I find also that I make shift for to be understood. An my apprehension gaineth apace, ere o’er-much time elapseth I shall make of myself a fair scholar of Valmieran.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Krasta advised him, an idiom which, perhaps fortunately, he didn’t catch. Her expression sharpened. “What’s Lurcanio doing in Priekule?”

Captain Gradasso shrugged again. “Whatsoever it be, I am not privy to’t.”

“Privy to it?” That set Krasta giggling once more. Her mirth puzzled Gradasso. She didn’t feel like explaining, and took herself off. When she looked back over her shoulder, Gradasso was staring after her, scratching his head. “Privy to it!” she repeated, and dissolved into still more giggles. “Oh, dear!”

The Algarvians who helped Lurcanio administer Priekule all eyed Krasta curiously as she threaded her way back past their desks. They often saw her angry, sometimes conspiratorial, but hardly ever amused. Some of them, the bolder ones, smiled and winked at her as she went by.

She ignored them. They were small fry, not even worthy of her contempt unless they let their hands get bolder than their faces. And her giggles soon subsided. When she thought of the privy, she thought of disposing of the pieces into which she’d torn the broadsheet her brother had written.

Skarnu’s alive, she thought, and shook her head in slow wonder. She still didn’t know who’d sent her the broadsheet or where it had come from, but she couldn’t have been wrong about her brother’s script.

As she went upstairs to her bedchamber, something new occurred to her. Some while before, Lurcanio had asked her about some provincial town or other. She frowned, trying to remember the name. It wouldn’t come. She kicked at a stair. But her Algarvian lover-her Algarvian keeper-had seemed to think this town, whatever its name was, had something to do with Skarnu.

She couldn’t ask Lurcanio about it, not if he was out. How inconsiderate of him, she thought. Then she realized she couldn’t ask him about it even after he got back. He had a cursedly suspicious mind and a cursedly retentive memory. He would still know the name of that miserable little town, and he was all too likely to figure out why she’d started asking questions about it. No, she would have to stay silent.

“Curse him!” she snarled, an imprecation aimed mostly at Lurcanio but also at her brother. For Krasta, staying silent was an act far more unnatural than any Lurcanio enjoyed in the bedchamber. Probably even more unnatural than anything Valnu enjoys in the bedchamber, Krasta thought. That was enough to set her giggling again. She never had found out what all Valnu enjoyed in the bedchamber. One of these days, she told herself. Aye, one of these days when Lurcanio infuriates me again. That shouldn‘t be too long.

She’d just reached the upper floor when Malya started howling. Krasta set her teeth. Bauska’s bastard brat wasn’t quite so annoying these days as she had been right after she was born, when she’d screeched all the time. She didn’t look so ugly, either; when she smiled, even Krasta found herself smiling back. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a nuisance.

And now Krasta smiled, too, though she couldn’t see the baby. “Bauska! Bauska, what are you doing? Come here at once,” she called, as if she couldn’t hear Malya crying, either. Her servant might had had the little squalling pest, but Krasta was cursed if she would let that inconvenience her. “Bauska!”

“I’ll be with you in a moment, milady.” Bauska sounded as if she were forcing the words out through clenched