He saw Vanai, who’d survived the roundup, and resolutely didn’t see all the people who hadn’t. She couldn’t think like that.
When she went back up to her flat, she found that the Algarvians had turned it inside out. She wasn’t upset; she’d expected nothing less. She had little that could be broken, and even less that she minded losing. Before long, she had the flat set to rights again.
And, before long, just as if the roundup hadn’t happened, bells clanged in the Kaunian quarter, summoning the blonds who’d come through uncaught to get their food so they could stay strong and healthy till the Algarvians needed more of them. Vanai didn’t go, in case it turned out to be another trap, another betrayal. The Algarvians who’d gone through the flat had been after her person, not the couple of small chunks of stale bread and dried fruit she’d secreted there. She didn’t have a lot to eat, but she had some.
As she nibbled a dried apricot, she looked out the window and down onto the street below. Not many Kaunians could have escaped in this neighborhood, but she saw a fair number of people heading for the feeding stations the Algarvians had set up. She grimaced. If they’re that stupid, they deserve to be caught. Then she grimaced again, this time at herself. Why do they deserve to get caught for having empty stomachs?
And then she spotted the Algarvian constable who came down the street chatting up every young woman who passed. She muttered the foulest curses she knew, and wished she knew worse ones. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she could guess what he’d be saying. Come with me, sweetheart. Give me what I want, and you won’t go west, the same sort of vicious bargainMajorSpinello had struck with her back in Oyngestun. The redheads were great ones for deals like that. Vanai shrank back from the window, lest he see her. When she peeked out again, a few minutes later, he was gone. She let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.
Five
Night in the Strait of Valmiera: a nasty night, with rain and even a little sleet beating down. Wind-whipped waves slapped against theHabakkuk’s port side as she slid north along a ley line toward the Derlavaian mainland. Secure in the bowels of the great, sorcerously enhanced iceberg, Leino hardly noticed the motion.
When the Kuusaman mage remarked on that, Xavega raised a scornful, elegant eyebrow. “Ina proper ley-line ship, we would not feel the waves at all,” she said, using classical Kaunian as he had. “We would glide above the water, and not be subject to it.” She didn’t add, You ignorant Kuusaman oaf, but she might as well have.
Leino sighed and didn’t answer. Why did my fancy fix on someone who despises me and all my people? He wondered. One of his own eyebrows quirked, in wry amusement. Because I’ve been away from Pekka too long, that’s why. And because Xavega packs her bile in such a nicely shaped container.
Ramalho was every bit as Lagoan as Xavega, but he shook his head. “In aproper ley-line ship, those waves might capsize us or push us off the ley line and then sink us,” he said. “Plenty of hulks on the bottom of the sea hereabouts, and not all of them from the days when ships went by sail.”
Xavega glared at him. She didn’t just disagree with Leino; she was ready to take on the whole world. “What do you know about it?” she demanded of Ramalho.
“Before the war, I was a ship’s mage,” he said calmly. “My father spent some time as a ship’s mage, and so did his father before him. I might ask you the same question.”
He might ask it, but Xavega didn’t answer it. She just tossed her head, sending wavy, copper-colored locks flying back from her face, and went over to the tea kettle to pour herself a fresh cup. She slammed the kettle back onto its iron stand almost hard enough to shatter it.
“Rain is a worse nuisance forHabakkuk than for ordinary ships,” Leino said, trying to find something the mages could talk about without quarreling. “We always have to work to keep the sea from melting us, but worrying about the air, too, makes the sorcery twice as complicated.”
“Well, that is true enough,” Ramalho said. Xavega just sniffed and sipped at her tea. She couldn’t very well argue with what Leino had said, but she didn’t care to agree with it, either. Ramalho went on: “If we sailedHabakkuk into Setubal harbor back in the days of the Six Years’ War, all the mages in Lagoas would be going mad trying to figure out how we have done all this.”
“Now, there is a picture,” Leino said, rather liking it. “The same would have been true in Kuusamo a generation ago-or, for that matter, any time before the Derlavaian War started.”
“A picture of nonsense,” Xavega said. “A daft conceit.” Ramalho had offered the conceit, but she sounded as if she blamed Leino for it.
With another sigh Leino said, “I hope the dragonfliers will be able to leave the ship in this weather.” How would Xavega take exception to that?
“The storm will help shield them from the Algarvians,” she said, whichwas disagreement, but of a relatively tepid sort. She continued, “Dowsers start tearing their hair when they have to find moving dragons in the midst of millions of moving raindrops.”
“True,” Leino said.
“Also less true than it would have been in the days of the Six Years’ War, though,” Ramalho said. “Our motion-selectivity spells are much better than they used to be.”
Leino waited for Xavega to start squabbling about that, too. Instead, to his astonishment, she burst into tears. “No one ever lets me say anything without arguing!” she wailed, and fled the chamber in which they’d been sitting.
“What on earth-?” Leino said to Ramalho.
“I was hoping you might explain it to me,” the Lagoan mage answered. “You are the married man, after all. Does that not mean you understand more of women than we bachelors do?”
“I understand my wife fairly well, I think,” Leino said. “Understanding one woman, though, does not mean I understand all women, any more than understanding one man means I understand all men.”
“Too bad,” Ramalho said. “I was hoping it would be simpler than that.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Of course, asking anyone to understand Xavega is probably asking too much.”
“Ah?” Leino said, his voice as neutral as he could make it. “I wondered if it was just me.”
“Oh, no,” Ramalho assured him. “She can be difficult. In fact, there are times when I wonder if she can be anything else. I knew her in Setubal, and she was the same way there.”
“Was she?” Leino asked. Ramalho nodded solemnly. Leino said, “How interesting,” and left the icy chamber.
Interesting, he jeered at himself as he walked down an equally icy corridor. Is that really the word you want to use? The woman is trouble, nothing else but. Even if you got her into bed, she’d be nothing but trouble. She’d be more trouble then, most likely. The only reason you care about her is the way she looks.
And isn’t that reason enough? a different, rather deeper, part of his mind asked in return.
He shook his head, as if he were arguing with someone else and not with himself. No, it isn’t, he insisted. Pekka would laugh at you if she knew you were mooning over a bad-tempered Lagoan, just because she has long, shapely legs and fills out her tunic nicely.
That deeper part of his mind didn’t answer. Maybe that meant he’d convinced it. Somehow, he didn’t think so. Those legs and the way Xavega filled out her tunic stayed with him no matter how bad-tempered she was. Aye, Pekka would laugh at him, but Pekka wasn’t a man.
And a good thing, too, he thought. There, at least, both parts of his mind agreed completely.
He headed toward one of the chambers where the mages worked to keepHabakkuk going-as opposed to the chambers where they gathered when they weren’t working. He wasn’t due back on duty for another couple of hours, but he had the feeling they would welcome him if he came in early. Rain really did put a lot of extra strain onHabakkuk ’s structural integrity, and he’d done a lot of work while the ship was building to find out how best to foil the raindrops.
He’d almost got there when the iceberg-turned-dragon-hauler jerked and shuddered under his feet, as if it had run into a wall. The next thing he knew, he was on his backside in the hallway and all the lights had gone out. Somewhere in the distance, an urgent bell began clanging.
“What in blazes-?” Leino exclaimed as he scrambled to his feet, his spiked shoes biting into the ice. He laughed at himself once upright again. He was a true mage, all right: even then, he’d spoken in classical Kaunian.
