Through the Darkness

“Oh, a pox,” Skarnu said softly.

“Aye, curse the Algarvians for taking him off and-” Merkela paused. She glanced over to Skarnu. “It’s worse than that, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “He was one of us, all right. If they made him disappear, that’s one thing. If they squeezed him first, that’s something else-something worse.”

“Will they come after us next, do you think?” Merkela asked.

“I don’t know,” Skarnu answered. “I can’t know. But we’d better be ready to disappear or fight before long.” He’d been striking blows at the Algarvian occupiers for a couple of years, ever since he’d sneaked through their lines instead of surrendering. But they could strike back, too. The day he forgot that would be the day of his ruination.

“I want to fight,” Merkela said, ferocity filling her voice.

“I want to fight, too-if we have some chance of winning,” Skarnu said. “If they land on us in the middle of the night, though, and paint NIGHT AND FOG on the front door-that’s not fighting. We wouldn’t have a chance.”

Merkela walked along for a while, kicking at the slates of the sidewalk. She muttered a curse under her breath. Skarnu muttered one even more quietly under his. When she got into one of these moods, sometimes he had everything he could do to keep her from trying to murder the first Algarvian soldier she saw. He understood why, but knew she needed the restraint if she wanted to go on fighting the redheads.

But then, to his surprise-indeed, to his astonishment-she spoke in much milder tones than she’d used before: “You’re right, of course.”

Skarnu gaped. He wanted to dig a finger into one ear to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Are you feeling well?” he asked. At first, he meant it for a joke, but after a moment he realized she hadn’t quite been herself lately.

She walked on for another few paces, head down, hands in her trouser pockets. “I hadn’t meant to tell you so soon,” she said, still looking at the sidewalk and not at him, “but I think I’d better.”

“Tell me what?” Skarnu asked.

Now she did lift her head and face him. He had trouble reading her smile. Was she pleased? Rueful? Something of each, perhaps? And then all his thoughtful analysis crashed to the ground, because she answered, “I’m going to have a baby. Not much doubt of it now.”

“A baby?” Skarnu wondered what his own face was showing. Astonishment again, most likely, which was foolish-they’d been lovers a good while. He did his best to rally. “That’s-wonderful, sweetheart.” After a moment, he nodded; saying it helped make him believe it.

And Merkela nodded, too. “It is, isn’t it? For me especially, I mean-when I didn’t quicken with Gedominu, I wondered if I was barren. When I didn’t quicken with you, I thought I must be. But I was wrong.” Now nothing but joy blazed from her smile.

Gedominu had been an old man. If anyone was to blame for Merkela’s not getting pregnant, Skarnu would have bet on him, not her. As for himself. . He shrugged. He’d never fathered a bastard before, but who could say what that meant about his own seed? Nothing, evidently, or Merkela wouldn’t be with child now.

He also wondered if he should let the child stay a bastard. In the normal course of events, he never would have met Merkela; if he had met her and bedded her, it would have been a night’s amusement, nothing more. Now… Thanks to the war, nothing was what it had been. Who would call him a madman if he took a farmer’s widow to wife?

Krasta would. That occurred to him almost at once. He shrugged again. Once upon a time, he would have cared what his sister thought. No more. Having let an Algarvian lie in her bed, Krasta could hardly complain about whose bed he lay in.

He took Merkela’s hand. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “I promise.” He didn’t know how he would keep that promise, but he’d find some way.

And Merkela nodded. “I know it,” she told him. “And. . the child will grow up free. By the powers above, it will.” Skarnu nodded, too, though he wasn’t sure how that vow would come true, either.

Holding hands, they walked into the market square. Farmers displayed eggs and cheeses and hams and preserved fruit and gherkins and any number of other good things. The eye Skarnu and Merkela turned on those was more competitive than acquisitive. Their own farm-which seemed much more real to Skarnu than the mansion he hadn’t seen for so long-supplied all they needed along those lines, and they sometimes sold their surplus here in the square, too.

But Pavilosta’s cloth merchant and potter-aye, and the ironmonger, too-had stalls of their own in the market square. Merkela admired some fine green linen, though she didn’t admire the price the cloth merchant wanted for the bolt. “You might get that from a marchioness,” she said, “but how many noblewomen will you see here?”

“If I sell it for less than what I paid for it, I won’t do myself any good,” the merchant said.

“You won’t do yourself any good if you don’t sell it at all, either,” Merkela retorted. “I think the moths will get fat on it before you move it.” Off she went, nose in the air as if she were a marchioness herself-indeed, Krasta could hardly have done it better. Skarnu followed in her wake.

Pavilosta’s townsfolk sneered at the goods the farmers had brought to market. The farmers who’d come to shop and not to sell disparaged everything the local merchants displayed. Some of them were much louder and ruder than Merkela.

Algarvians prowled through the square, too: more of them than Skarnu was used to seeing in Pavilosta. Put together with the cordwainer’s disappearance, that worried him. Weren’t the redheads supposed to be throwing everything they had into the fight in Unkerlant? If tliey were, why bring so many soldiers to a little country town where nothing ever happened?

But Pavilosta wasn’t quite a little country town where nothing ever happened. Count Enkuru, who’d been hand in glove with Mezentio’s men, had been assassinated here. A riot had broken out at the accession of his son Simanu, another noble who’d been too cozy with the Algarvians. And Simanu was dead, too; Skarnu had blazed him. So maybe the redheads had their reasons after all.

One of their officers practically paraded through the square, his uniform kilt flapping around his legs as he hurried this way and that. Merkela noticed him, too. “He’s trouble,” she whispered to Skarnu.

“Any time a colonel starts poking his nose into things, he’s always trouble,” Skarnu whispered back. An overage lieutenant headed up the little garrison in Pavilosta; he trotted along after the graying colonel, hands waving as he explained this or that.

Whatever he was saying, he failed to impress the senior Algarvian officer. At one point, the colonel said something that had to be downright cruel, for the lieutenant recoiled as if a beam had wounded him. Striking a dramatic pose, he cried, “Do please be reasonable, Colonel Lurcanio!”

Whatever the colonel answered, the lieutenant got no satisfaction from it. Whatever it was, Skarnu couldn’t hear it. He wasn’t quite sure if the Algarvian word he had heard meant reasonable or fair, his command of Algarvian, never great, was badly rusty these days. But that didn’t matter, either.

As soon as he could, he took Merkela aside and murmured, “I had better make myself scarce. If they’re not after me in particular, I’d be amazed.”

“Why do you say that?” Merkela asked.

He didn’t point. He didn’t want to do anything to draw the Algarvian officer’s notice. Quietly still, he answered, “Because that fellow over there is my dear sister’s lover.”

Merkela needed a moment to realize what that meant. When she did, her eyes flashed fire, almost as if she were a dragon. “The whore didn’t just sell her body to the Algarvians-she sold you, too!”

Skarnu didn’t want to believe that of Krasta. Of course, he didn’t want to believe his sister gave herself to the redhead, either, but he had no choice there. He said, “Whether she sold me or not, this Lurcanio’s not likely to be here by accident.”

“No, not likely at all.” Merkela frowned, then grew brisk. “You’re right- you’d better disappear. Vatsyunas and Pernavai have to go with you, too. They can’t sound like proper Valmierans. Raunu can stay-if the redheads come to the farm, I’ll be a widow making ends meet with a hired man.”

She marshaled the people in her life as if she were a general marshaling armies. “That may serve,” Skarnu said, “but it may not, too. Plenty of people in these parts can tell the Algarvians I’ve been living with you.”

She pondered, but not for long. “I’ll say we quarreled, and I cursed well threw you out.” Then she raised her