“Dowe?” Sabrino said, and the youngster nodded. “Ten? Really?” Sabrino asked. The crystallomancer nodded again.
“That’s about half the strength we’ve got here now,” Orosio said.
“Aye, and it brings the wing up to something close to half-strength,” Sabrino added. Though at the start of the war he’d never imagined it would be, that was something to celebrate. He went back into the hut, poured a mug full of spirits, and thrust it at the crystallomancer. “Here,” he said. “Have a drink.”
“I’m off to the Boulevard of Horsemen,” Krasta said with as much gaiety as she could muster.
ColonelLurcaniolooked up from his paperwork, but not for long. “Try not to buy more than the carriage can carry back here,” he told her: even for one of the Algarvian occupiers, he was notably cynical.
“I was hoping one of the lingerie shops might finally have something new,” she said.
“Were you?” That got Lurcanio’s notice, as Krasta had thought it would. If it hadn’t, she would have been offended, and she would have let him know about it, too. He ran his eyes up and down her, as if imagining her in a new negligee, or perhaps being peeled out of a new negligee. “Here’s hoping they do.”
“If you come to my bedchamber tonight, maybe you’ll find out,” Krasta purred. “Maybe. If I decide to open the door and let you in.” Giggling, she hurried out of his office. “Enjoy your papers,” she called from the empty antechamber. No new adjutant had replacedCaptainGradasso, who was off somewhere in the barbarous wilds of Unkerlant.
Krasta’s driver greeted the news that he was to take her into Priekule with something less than unrestrained enthusiasm. “Oh, very well, milady,” he said. “It’ll be a bit, though: I have to get the horses ready.” When Krasta went out to the stables, she discovered, not for the first time, that getting the horses ready also involved getting his trusty flask ready.
But he still handled the carriage well enough. So long as that remained true, Krasta didn’t care if he drank. He was a commoner, after all, and what were commoners but a pack of drunks?
The lingerie shop had the same wares it had displayed the last time she’d shopped there, a few weeks before-and on her visit before that, too. She’d sneered then. Today she bought a gown of filmy blue silk that would play up her eyes-as well as some other assets. She’d seen it before, aye, butColonelLurcanio wouldn’t have.
She didn’t even harass the shopgirl while making the purchase, which proved she had something on her mind. Carrying the parcel in her hand-the silk folded up into next to nothing-she hurried out of the shop. On the sidewalk, she paused and looked around. Everything looked as normal, and as dreary, as could be.
Shoes clicking on the slates, she hurried off the Boulevard of Horsemen and onto a side street. The blocks of flats there had a look of good breeding even wartime poverty and neglect couldn’t mar. People who lived in them were people to be reckoned with. Krasta looked around again. She didn’t see any of the people who’d been on the Boulevard when she left the lingerie shop. Satisfied, she ducked into one of the blocks of flats and went up to the third floor.
It’ll be the one farthest from the stairs, she reminded herself. The hallway had carpeting thicker and softer than her mansion boasted. She knocked on the door.
ViscountValnuopened it. “Well, come in, sweetheart,” he said, smiling his bright, predatory, skeletally handsome smile. “No one followed you here, I hope?”
“I don’t think so,” Krasta said, before remembering that trusting him was liable to be even more dangerous than trusting Lurcanio. Hastily she added, “If I don’t come back, I’ve left enough behind in writing to make sure you get what you deserve.”
Smiling still, Valnu said, “I don’t believe you.” Alarm blazed through Krasta, for she was bluffing. Before she could say anything, before she could do anything, Valnu went on: “Before the war, though, you never would have had the wit to come up with the lie-so maybe it isn’t a lie. Invasions are so educational, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about,” Krasta snapped.
Valnu laughed. “Well, that sounds more like you. But the question isn’t what you don’t know. The question is what you do know, and what you intend to do about it.”
“I know…” Krasta paused and took a deep breath. “I know you’re part of the underground, because if you weren’t, CountAmatu wouldn’t be dead.”
“And so?” Valnu asked. “What do you propose to do about that? That Algarvian colonel’s been in your bed ever since the redheads marched into Priekule. I don’t care to have my name come up in pillow talk, you know.”
The parcel Krasta was holding crinkled a little. That reminded her of what was inside the paper. Her cheeks heated. Even so, she said, “If you didn’t care to have that happen, you shouldn’t have tried molesting me at one party or another-at one partyand another, I should say.”
“Molesting you?” Valnu threw back his head and laughed. “My dear, you didn’t seem molested. And who, if I may ask, was doing just what to whom?”
Krasta needed a moment to sort through that, too. Once she did, she put the parcel down on a table and walked right up to Valnu. “The last time we got caught,” she said, putting her arms around him, “I was doing something like this.” She kissed him.
He didn’t respond for a moment. Then, his mouth still joined to hers, he started to laugh, and he kissed her back.
“That’s better,” she said after a while. “I was starting to wonder if those handsome Algarvian officers were the only ones who mattered to you any more.”
“I already said you have a handsome Algarvian officer in your bed,” Valnu replied. “Why shouldn’t I have some in mine?” He was, as usual, altogether flagrant and altogether unabashed.
“Why?” Krasta said. “I’ll show you why.” She kissed him again, this time so hard that she tasted blood-hers or his she neither knew nor cared. Whatever his interest in Algarvian officers, she knew she’d excited him in the past. By the bulge in his trousers, she was exciting him again, too. Now she laughed in the middle of a kiss, laughed and ground her hips against him.
“I asked you once, who was molesting whom?” Valnu panted. His left hand cupped her right buttock; his right squeezed her left breast.
“Oh, shut up,” she told him, and rubbed him with her hand.
Deft and sure, his right hand undid the wooden toggles that held her tunic closed. He bent to her and teased her nipples with his tongue. Whatever his interest in Algarvian officers, he remembered how to excite her, too.
She fumbled with his belt. Once she got it unbuckled, she yanked his trousers down. She fell to her knees in front of him. But as she began, as one of his hands went to the back of her head to guide her, he said, “The last time you put your mouth there, you threw me out of your carriage when you found out a pretty little shopgirl had done that before you.”
“And so?” Krasta rocked forward and back a couple of times. Valnu’s breath sighed out of him. Krasta paused and said, “She was just a commoner.” She returned to what she’d been doing. His fingers tangled in her hair. His hand urged her forward again, urged her on. In spite of it, she paused again and looked up at him. “I presume all your handsome Algarvians were of noble blood?”
He gaped. Then he laughed. He laughed so hard, he lost the most obvious evidence of his excitement. “There’s no one like you, is there?” he said.
“I should hope not,” Krasta replied indignantly, and set about repairing the damage. It didn’t take long. She hadn’t thought it would.
After a bit, Valnu pulled away. “Shall we go back to the bedchamber?” he asked.
Krasta considered. “No,” she said, and pulled him down onto the floor with her.
She regretted that in short order: thrashing about on the carpet wasn’t so comfortable as it would have been on a soft, resilient mattress. But that regret was only a small thing, especially after Valnu poised himself above her, her thighs clasping his lean flanks. He had stamina and to spare, and also had the courtesy to help her along with a finger so that she gasped and shuddered and stiffened at the same instant he drove himself deepest into her.
Afterwards, he didn’t have the courtesy to keep all his weight on his elbows and knees. That mattered more on a hard floor than it would have in bed, too. “Let me up,” Krasta said, and bit him on the shoulder to make sure she got the point across.
“So much for romance,” Valnu said, but he did as she asked.
“Romance hasn’t got anything to do with getting squashed.” Krasta spoke with great conviction. She rubbed her backside. She hadn’t noticed the carpet burn while she and Valnu were making love, but she did now.
