“Powers above help our kingdoms!” he exploded.
“I hope they will. I hope they do,” she answered, and he found nothing to say to that. Then she added, “They must be looking out for me. Otherwise, how would I have met you?”
Fernao’s annoyance evaporated. His ears heated. That must have been visible from the outside as well as palpable from within, for Pekka giggled. Fernao bowed. “You do me too much credit, I think.”
Pekka shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “If I did, would you make me so happy?” Before his head swelled to the point where her chamber couldn’t hold it, she added, “If I didn’t think so, would I have let my life get so complicated when I didn’t intend to?”
He found nothing to say to that, either. His life wasn’t complicated. His life had been complicated before they found themselves together, because he’d wanted to be with her when she hadn’t wanted to be with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, everything was fine. Of course, he wasn’t torn in two directions at once. However much he wished Pekka weren’t, he knew she was.
They lay close together on her narrow bed after making love that night when she suddenly said, “It’s snowing.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“The way the air feels-all still and quiet,” she said, and turned on the bedside lamp. “There-you see?” Sure enough, the light showed snowflakes softly striking the double-glass window that helped hold cold at bay.
“It doesn’t have to be still and quiet for snow,” Fernao said. “Down in the land of the Ice People, it blows like this.” He held his forearm parallel to the mattress. Then he added, “And I’d sooner look at you than at snow any day.” Pekka kissed him. He gathered her in. Before too long, he sighed. “Ten years ago, I could have promised you twice in a row. Now I have to be lucky for that-not that I’m not lucky, you understand.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “The holding is fine, too, all by itself.” She reached out to turn off the lamp. They fell asleep in each other’s arms-and woke up a couple of hours later, Fernao with an arm asleep, Pekka with a leg that seemed dead below the knee. As they untangled themselves and Fernao got into his clothes to go back to his own room, he yawned and thought, So much for romance.
Something closer to romance came the next day, when they rode out to the blockhouse under furs in a sleigh, as they’d done when they first began experimenting down in the Naantali district. He’d been conscious of Pekka as an attractive woman even then. Now… If his hands wandered a bit, and if hers did, the furs kept the driver from noticing.
But when they and the other theoretical sorcerers got down from the sleighs and went into the blockhouse, Pekka was all business. “You know what we’re going to try today,” she said. “We’re going to use the energy from the sorcery we’ve developed to touch off a landslide and close off a pass in the Bratanu Mountains, to make the Algarvians have a harder time moving men and supplies from their kingdom east into Jelgava. I don’t think anyone has ever projected so much sorcerous power so far and so precisely in the history of the world.”
That’s bound to be true, Fernao thought. It’s a demon of a long way from here to the border between Jelgava and Algarve. Some of the excitement of what they’d been doing came back to him. Making everything cut and dried so people with no spark, no flair, of their own could use it had drained away a lot of that excitement. He was glad to feel it return; he’d wondered if it would.
“I begin,” Pekka said, and chanted the ritual phrases Kuusamans used before every conjuration. Fernao had snickered behind his hand when he first heard them. He’d heard them so many times by now, magecraft undertaken without them would have felt strange, unnatural.
He’d only half understood them when he first heard them. He’d understood hardly anything of the Kuusaman cantrips that followed. He did these days. He wouldn’t have wanted to try drafting an original spell in Kuusaman, but he had no trouble following one now. If anything went wrong, he knew much more than he had about how to repair it.
Ilmarinen and Piilis joined the incantation. So did Raahe and Alkio. Fernao felt the power build. Part of it was his, flowing from him through Pekka, whose hand he held. It put him in mind of pleasure building when they made love. But when his eyes flicked her way, her face was serious, intent, nothing at all like the way she looked when the two of them were alone. She didn’t glance at him. She kept on chanting, doing what she had to do. That’s all any of us are doing, he thought. What else is there?
If not for the world’s energy grid more commonly used in traveling along ley lines, they never could have located the mountain pass so precisely. An alert Algarvian mage somewhere between the Naantali district and the pass might have detected the sorcery when at last it burst forth. He might have detected it, but that would have done him no good. By the time he knew it was there, he would have been far too late to stop it.
Fernao felt the spell seize the stones and the already-drifted snow along the sides of the pass, felt it seize them and jerk them and send them crashing down onto the road and the ley line at the bottom. Mezentio’s mages might have achieved the same effect by killing a camp full of Kaunians, but never from this range: never, probably, from a quarter of this range. And this spell was clean-no murder attached to it.
Afterwards, all the mages sighed. Now Fernao could squeeze Pekka’s hand without distracting her. She smiled and nodded. “We did it,” she said. “I could feel that we did it.”
“Aye.” Fernao nodded, too. “The Algarvians will have harder work now in Jelgava.”And it’s likelier your husband will come through safe. Should I be happy about that? Aye, curse it, I should. Leino’s not my enemy. He’s fighting my enemies. He kept his face straight. Hedidn’t want Pekka to know what he was thinking there. We do have to be civilized about these things… curse it.
Ever since she’d spied Spinello stalking through the wreckage of Eoforwic, Vanai had known she would try to kill him if she ever saw even the slightest chance. She hadn’t known how badly she needed to go looking for that chance till the day before Pybba’s rebels surrendered to the Algarvians, the day the redheads agreed to treat the Forthwegians as proper war captives instead of butchering them for bandits.
Ealstan had slipped out of the pocket Pybba’s men still held. He’d slipped into and out of that pocket a good many times before then. Vanai had always hated it, but she couldn’t deny he knew what he was doing. And, when he’d come home full of gloom, she’d thought she understood. However foolish she reckoned Forthwegian patriotism, Ealstan felt it in his heart, in his belly, just as she felt her own Kaunianity.
But she hadn’t understood, or hadn’t understood everything, even if she’d thought she had. She’d found that out a couple of hours later, after putting Saxburh down for a nap. Ealstan, by then, had gone through a good deal of the wine in the flat. She hadn’t even worried about that, though Kaunians often sneered at Forthwegians for drunkenness. She’d long since seen Ealstan didn’t let wine and spirits rule him, and that day he’d had more sorrows to drown than usual.
He’d also had more sorrows to drown than she knew. He’d looked up from the mug when she walked into the kitchen, looked up from it and- voice not blurry in the least, he’d asked, “Did you ever run across a redhead named Spinello?”
The question had crashed into her like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. Her face must have given her away, for she’d seen his mouth tighten. After that, what point to lying? “Aye,” she’d answered quietly. “Back in Oyngestun. How did you know?”
Maybe that hadn’t been the perfect question, for it had made him gulp down all the wine left in his mug. “I heard him… mention your name talking to his men. How could he know I speak Algarvian?”
Mentioning her name undoubtedly meant going into obscene detail over all the things he’d made her do back there in her home village. With a sigh, Vanai had said, “He wanted to get my grandfather to collaborate with the redheads. That would have meant something in scholarly circles. You saw him once, when he was out looking at an imperial Kaunian site with my grandfather and me.”
“I remember,” Ealstan had said. He’d hesitated then; Vanai gave him credit for it. But he’d gone on: “He wanted something else from you.”
Vanai had nodded. What else could I have done? she wondered. Nothing. Nothing at all. “My grandfather said no,” she’d told Ealstan. “He kept saying no. You met him. You have some small idea what a stubborn man he was. And so Spinello threw him into a labor gang. He wasn’t young. He’d never done work like that in his life. It was killing him. I watched it happen for a little while. I couldn’t stand it. Whatever else he was, he was the only kin I had left in the world. And so I…” Up till then, she’d managed to sound as cool, as detached, as if she were talking about building a fence. But the last few words came out in a ragged gulp as tears spilled down her cheeks: “I made a bargain with Spinello.”
She’d stood there waiting once she got it out. What would Ealstan do? Slowly, he’d climbed to his feet. Is he
