to. If you don’t, we’ll live somewhere else. But first we have some business to finish.” He heard his own grimness.
He hitched the carriage in front of the house and handed Merkela down. Then he strode to the door. She followed, little Gedominu in her arms. He hammered at the door with the knocker.
A maidservant opened. She looked half nervous, half haughty. Haughty won. “What do you want?” she demanded, almost as sharply as Krasta might have.
Skarnu knew what she saw: a weatherbeaten man in the clothes of a farmer, with a peasant woman and a brat in tow. What she didn’t see washim. “Hello, Bauska,” he answered, making his voice milder than he’d first intended. “I want to see my sister.” He said the words once more, even if they felt like a lie in his heart.
Bauska’s eyes kept widening till they seemed to fill her whole face. “My lord Marquis,” she whispered, and dropped a curtsy of the sort Skarnu hadn’t seen since the Algarvians overran Valmiera. “Come with me sir, and-?” She looked a question toward his companions.
“Merkela, my fiancee,” Skarnu said. “Gedominu, my son and heir.”
Bauska’s eyes got wider still. Skarnu hadn’t thought they could. The servant led him inside. He’d forgotten how big the place was. What had he done with all this space? Merkela’s eyes were almost as wide as the maidservant’s.
A pretty little girl, perhaps three years old, ran by with a doll under her arm. Pretty, aye-but with hair closer to bronze than to gold, and with cat-green eyes. Merkela hissed something under her breath. Harshly, Skarnu asked, “Is she Krasta’s, too?”
“No, my lord,” Bauska answered quietly. She went pale first, then red. “She’s mine. Her name is Brindza.”
Merkela started to snarl something. Skarnu shook his head. “Later,” he said. “First things first.” A little to his surprise, she nodded. They followed Bauska into a drawing room. There sat Krasta and, to Skarnu’s surprise, ViscountValnu. The man from the patrol had known whereof he spoke after all. And Valnuwas a big blaze among the underground leaders in Priekule, playing the most dangerous of double games with the redheads.
“Skarnu!” Krasta exclaimed, springing to her feet. She knew him, at any rate. Her belly bulged, just a little. “Welcome home!” She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she pointed to Merkela. “Who is your… friend?”
“My fiancee,” Skarnu corrected, and gave Merkela’s name again, and Gedominu’s. His voice like iron, he went on, “I stayed with my own kind, you see.”
Krasta glared at him. He looked back stonily, expecting a tantrum from her and not about to put up with one. But she surprised him. One hand went to that bulging belly; the forefinger of the other pointed at Valnu. “Nothing wrong with the blood of my child, not with him as the father.”
“Him?”Skarnu’s eyes swung to Valnu in astonishment. The fellow with the stick had said friendly, butthat friendly? “You?”
“So I have been given to understand,” Valnu said-the exact same words Lurcanio had used. Where Lurcanio had sounded bedeviled, though, he merely seemed amused.
“But… But…” Merkela seemed about to burst from the outrage trapped inside her that now, against all expectations, couldn’t escape.
“I will add that there have been times when the marchioness proved most useful to those opposing Algarve,” Valnu said.
Which means there were also times when she wasn‘t, Skarnu thought. But, plainly, he couldn’t just throw Krasta out of the mansion into the cold, perhaps with her head shaved, as he’d intended doing. She saw as much, too, and looked as smug as a mouse with a hole too deep for the cat’s paw. That made him want to slap her all over again. We’ll find out, he thought, but couldn’t help sighing. We won’t find out for quite a while, curse it.
If Ealstan could have blazed the Algarvian major with his eyes, the man would have fallen over dead. The redhead ignored him and all the lesser Forthwegian rebels who stood behind Pybba. He bowed to Pybba, as he might have bowed to a fellow noble in Trapani. “My superiors have agreed to the terms you propose, sir,” he said in good Forthwegian.
“All right,” Pybba answered heavily. “All right, powers below eat you. We give over the fight, and you treat the men who surrender as proper captives.”
“Better than you deserve, in my opinion,” the Algarvian said. “My superiors feel otherwise, however, and so…” He shrugged one of his people’s theatrical shrugs. “The truce will hold till tomorrow noon. At that time, you shall come forth from your holes-those you have left. Anyone who does not yield himself up to us at noon tomorrow shall be reckoned a bandit, and we shall treat him as one when we catch him.” He sliced a thumb across his neck.
They’d been doing that all along. Maybe they’d decided it made the rebels fight harder. If treating the Forthwegians as war captives let Mezentio’s men regain their grip on Eoforwic, that must have seemed a worthwhile bargain to them.
“Curse you,” Pybba said. The Algarvian only bowed again. Then he turned his back and marched away through the wreckage of the Forthwegian capital.
“It’s over,” somebody said in a dull voice. “Everything’s over.”
Pybba shook his head. “It’s not over till noon tomorrow, when I get to hand myself to the Algarvian general and thank him kindly for not murdering all of us-only most of us. The rest of you”-he looked from one shabby, filthy, disgruntled Forthwegian to the next-”you can surrender, or you can try and disappear. Of course, the redheads will kill you if you try and disappear and don’t quite make it.”
“Odds are they’ll kill us anyhow,” Ealstan said. “The ordinary fighters will probably do all right, but us? Why would the Algarvians want to let us live?”
“I’m not telling anybody what to do, not anymore,” Pybba said. “Look what that already got us. Maybe I’ll see some of you here tomorrow, and maybe I won’t.” Broad shoulders slumped, he strode off.
“I’ll be here with you, if they don’t blaze me first,” Ealstan called after him. Then, stick in hand, he too left the square where the arrogant Algarvian major-as if there were any other kind-had delivered the surrender terms his kingdom would deign to accept.
As soon as he was out of sight of his comrades, he gently set the stick on some rubble, then took off his armband and tossed it down on top of the stick. He didn’t like lying to Pybba, but a lie here might help cover his trail. If he failed to come in to surrender after saying he would, people might think he’d been killed between now and then. Who wanted to search for a dead man?
Of course, if he wasn’t careful, people might be right. The block of flats he shared with Vanai and Saxburh lay in a district the redheads had already reconquered. He still had to get there without drawing their notice. They couldn’t cover every inch of Eoforwic… could they?
He began to wonder in earnest before he’d gone very far. Like cockroaches and lice and fleas, Algarvian soldiers seemed to be everywhere, and seemed intent on making sure none of the Forthwegian fighters got out of the small part of Eoforwic they still held. The Algarvians had mages and ferociously barking dogs to try to keep their foes penned up.
Mages or no mages, dogs or no dogs, Ealstan wouldn’t have worried back in Gromheort. He’d known the town his whole life, and felt sure he could have gone anywhere there without having foreigners notice. But he was a relative stranger in Eoforwic himself. Some of Mezentio’s men might have been here as long as he had. He didn’t know the secret ways a local would.
And even had he known those ways, how much good would it have done him? Not much was left standing in Eoforwic, and most of what might have been secret was now buried. He didn’t want to climb over rubble, so he had to skirt it as best he could.
Somewhere close by, a dog growled a warning. Ealstan froze. He wished he hadn’t left his stick behind. Without it, though, he could hope to pass himself as somebody who’d never been a fighter. Then a Forthwegian cried out in fright. The dog snarled and barked. An Algarvian shouted, “Halting!” in accented Forthwegian. “Halting or blazing!”
By the sound of thudding feet, the other Forthwegian didn’t halt. By the Algarvian’s curses, he missed his blaze. “To me! To me! After the whoreson!” he yelled in his own language. More thudding feet told of other redheads rushing to his aid.
Ealstan huddled against the wreckage of what had been a butcher’s shop.
