temperate parts of Kuusamo and Lagoas complained about the weather. They couldn’t do anything about it-what mage could?-but that didn’t stop them from complaining.
“Me, I’ve come to like it better this time of year,” Fernao said. “You can go outside without the mosquitoes’ eating you alive.”
“It’s only weather,” Pekka said, ignoring snowstorms in mid-autumn with the ease of someone who took hard winters for granted. “What I have to complain about isn’t the snow. It’sthose!’
She pointed first to one of the heavy sticks now emplaced around the hostel and the blockhouse, then to another and another. When she looked up to the sky, she caught a glimpse of a patrolling dragon through a break in the clouds overhead. The dragon was painted in a pattern of sky blue and sea green, the colors of Kuusamo.
“We have a saying in Lagoas.” Fernao paused, probably translating it into Kuusaman from his own language. “Trying to make soup after the dog has stolen the bone.”
“Exactly,” Pekka said. “How are the Algarvians going to reach us now? They’ve left most of Valmiera. Their dragons can’t possibly fly here from the lands they still hold. And none of these things were in place when that cursed dragondid attack us.”
Fernao took her hand. She squeezed his. When Leino came home, she would have a lot of things to worry about, a lot of choices to make. She knew as much. Meanwhile, she enjoyed each day-and each night-as if tomorrow would never come. Later? What was later?
Slowly, Fernao said, “Saying what the Algarvians can’t possibly do worries me a little. They’ve already done too many things nobody thought they could do.”
“Too many things nobody thought theywould do,” Pekka said, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “Too many things nobody thought anyone would do.”
Now Fernao squeezed her hand. “What we’ve done here has gone a long way toward keeping people from doing things like that again. That’s mostly thanks to you, you know, to you and your experiments.”
Pekka shook her head. “MasterSiuntiois the one who really deserves the credit. AndMasterIlmarinen. I just did the work. They were the ones who saw I’d stumbled onto something important and figured out what it meant.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Fernao said. “You never have.”
“Nonsense,” Pekka said, and then, “I got a letter from my sister this morning.”
She’d wanted to change the subject, and she succeeded. Fernao walked along in silence for a little while, kicking up snow at every step. At last, he asked, “And what does she have to say?”
“Nothing too much,” Pekka answered. “Olavin’s solicitors paid a call on her. She wasn’t very happy about that.”
“I believe it.” In Fernao’s long, pale Lagoan face, his slanted eyes were usually a reminder that he had a little Kuusaman blood in him, too. Now, though, they just made his expression harder to read. After a few more silent paces, he said, “Are we going to have to worry about that one of these days?”
Pekka had forced the future out of her purview. Now Fernao brought it back. She wished he hadn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.” She kicked up some snow of her own-kicked it at Fernao, in fact. “Let’s go back to the hostel.” She turned and started off without waiting to see whether he followed.
He did, and went up the steps only a pace behind her. “Whatever happens, we’ll see it through,” he said.
“What else can we do?” she said, wishing he would keep quiet. Weren’t men supposed to be the ones who didn’t want to commit themselves? That didn’t fit Fernao. He wanted to run away with her. She was the one full of doubts, full of complications. She sighed. Why couldn’t things be simpler?
Going into the hostel certainly made things no simpler. There stood Ilmarinen, just inside the front entrance. He had been talking with a couple of the workmen still busy repairing the hostel after the Algarvian attack. But when he saw Pekka and Fernao together, he broke off and came over to them. “And what were the two of you doing out there?” he purred.
By the way he said it, the question could have only one possible answer. But Pekka replied, “Don’t be silly. It’s much too cold outside forthat.”
Ilmarinen looked disappointed. Fernao asked him, “And what have you been doing in here?”
“Aye, whathave you been doing?” Pekka echoed. “Have you finished the calculations I asked you for the other day?”
To her surprise, Ilmarinen nodded. “They’re finished, all right.”
“And?” Pekka asked when he said no more.
“And it’s just what we thought it was,” the master mage answered grimly. “Did you think the calculations would show it wouldn’t work? Not bloody likely, not after we’ve spent all this time tearing up the landscape around here.”
“You don’t sound happy,” Fernao observed.
Though much the shorter of the two, Ilmarinen contrived to look down his nose at Fernao. “Should I? What the Algarvians visited on Yliharma, now we can visit on Trapani. Shall I throw my hat in the air? Shall I shout huzzah? Now we can match the barbarians in barbarism. Huzzah indeed!”
“Better that we be able to match them than that wenot be able to match them,” Pekka said. “That’s the assumption we’ve been working on.”
“No.” Ilmarinen shook his head. “The assumption we’ve been working on is that they had better not be able to match our new sorcery. And they bloody well can’t, not so far as we can tell. But that we use what we have for the same purposes as they use what they have…” He shook his head again. “No, by the powers above.”
“We can do many more things with ours,” Fernao said. “Once the war is over, it will turn the world upside down. But for now…” He shrugged. “For now, we do what needs doing, and that means beating Algarve.”
“They’re using it the right way up in Jelgava, throwing the Algarvians’ spells back in their faces,” Ilmarinen said. “Mezentio’s mages deserve that, and so do his soldiers. But the other? No.” He sounded very certain.
“How is it any different from sending dragons over their cities to drop eggs on them?” Pekka asked.
“That’s just war,” Ilmarinen said. “Everybody does it. The other-you wouldn’t, we wouldn’t, just be hurting a city if that ever happened, and you know it.”
Pekka grimaced. He wasn’t wrong, however much she wished he were. But she didn’t think she was wrong, either, as she answered, “We have to do what needs doing.”
“Do we?” Ilmarinen said. “Don’t you suppose the Algarvian mages say the same old thing-the same old lie- just before their soldiers start blazing Kaunians, or however they go about killing them to get their life energy?”
“That’s not fair,” Pekka said. “We’re not killing anyone to get the energy for our magecraft.”
“No, that’s true-we’re not. And so what?” Ilmarinen said. “If we use it the way you have in mind, we’ll be killing plenty on the other end.”
“That’s different,” Fernao said. “If you can’t get a man to listen to you, you hit him. If he hits you, you get a club. If he hits you with a club, you get a sword. If he hits you with a sword, you get a stick. If he blazes at you with a stick, you go after him with a behemoth, and so on.”
“I don’t like thinking of myself as a murderer,” Ilmarinen said. “I’ll do it, mind you, but I don’t like it.”
“Think of the Algarvians as murderers, then,” Pekka said. “They are, you know. EvenMasterSiuntio thought this fight was worth making-and Mezentio’s mages killed him, remember.”
“I’m not likely to forget, not when they came so bloody close to killing me, too,” Ilmarinen replied. “But I’m sick of war. I’m sick of killing. Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Pekka said. “But the fastest way to win it is the way Fernao said: to knock the Algarvians down till they can’t get up any more. Do you truly think anything else would do the job?”
“I’m not surprised you agree with him,” Ilmarinen said, and then laughed. “Ah, there-I’ve gone and made you angry. I wonder why.”
“You’ve made me angry, all right,” Pekka said tightly. “And I’ll tell you why: because you didn’t try to answer my question, that’s why. You just took a cheap blaze at me. Now answer, if you’d be so kind. Do you think anything else would do the job, or not?”
This time, Ilmarinen hesitated before speaking. Even so, he didn’t quite answer her question. What he said was, “There’s more to you than meets the eye. Do you know that?”
“I don’t much care,” Pekka said. “I’m going to ask you a third time, and I expect a straight answer. Can we
