his nose in the air. His permanent limp and the stick he used prevented that. He did the best he could, given his physical limitations. It was good enough to make Ilmarinen laugh at his retreating back.
And he got his nose high enough in the air to keep him from paying much attention to where he was going. He almost ran over Pekka before he realized she was there. “What did I do to you?” she asked.
“You?” he replied. “Nothing, sweetheart.” Her expression warned him not to say such things. It always had, ever since he’d fled his own bedchamber after they’d made love. But this time, he was able to go on. “Ilmarinen, on the other hand…”
Pekka’s face cleared. She was always ready to be annoyed at the elderly theoretical sorcerer, even if he was her own countryman. “What now?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing new,” Fernao said. “But he still thinks he’s right in spite of the evidence, and-” He broke off again.
“And what?” Pekka asked. When Fernao didn’t answer right away, she drew her own-accurate-conclusion. “He’s teasing you about what we did, is he?” Fernao nodded. Pekka wagged a finger at him. “You see? Going to bed didn’t stop the gossip. It didn’t slow it down. It didn’t solve anything.”
“But it was wonderful,” Fernao said.
That didn’t solve anything, either; it just brought the annoyed look back to Pekka’s face. “It made things more complicated,” she said. “We don’t need things to be more complicated right now. The most important thing we can do is work on this magecraft. Anything that gets in the way-anything at all-we have to push aside.”
She didn’t deny that they’d had a good time in bed. She’d never denied it. But she did keep on behaving as if it hadn’t happened. That might not have been calculated to drive Fernao out of his mind, but it certainly had that effect.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
“When I get the chance, I’m going back to my husband and my son,” Pekka answered. “As for you, I hope you find a wonderful Lagoan woman-or even a wonderful Kuusaman woman, if you find your tastes running that way.”
“I already have,” Fernao told her.
“One without encumbrances,” Pekka told him. When she saw he didn’t understand the word in Kuusaman, she translated it into classical Kaunian. He could have done without such thoughtfulness. She added, “And I’m not feeling any too wonderful right now, either.”
Fernao looked around. By some accident, nobody was staring at them as they stood just outside the refectory. That wouldn’t last long, though. It couldn’t, by the very nature of things. While he had the chance, Fernao kicked at the boards of the floor-after carefully positioning his stick so he didn’t fall on his face. “What’s the use?” he muttered. “What’s the cursed use?”
“You see?” Pekka set a hand on his arm. It was a sympathetic gesture, not an affectionate one-or not an affectionate one of the sort he craved. “It complicated your life, too, even without encumbrances.” Now she used the Kuusaman word without explanation.
“It wouldn’t have, if…” he said.
“If I’d decided to keep doing what we did once,” Pekka said, and he nodded. She shook her head. “The complications would just have taken longer to get here and been worse when they finally did. I’m sorry, Fernao; by the powers above, I’m very sorry. But I can’t imagine anything that would make me change my mind now.”
“All right,” he said. But it wasn’t all right, nor anywhere close. He limped off toward his room. Pekka didn’t come after him or try to call him back. He hadn’t really expected her to. He’d hoped-but expectation had the encumbrance of truth, while hope lived its own life, wild and free.
Once he got back to his chamber, he wondered why he’d come. All he had here was the chance to be alone with his misery. He sat down on the bed, then wished he hadn’t. Sitting there made him think of those frantic few minutes when he’d got everything he wanted… only to discover that, once he’d got it, he couldn’t keep it. That felt worse than not getting it, for now he could look back on what he’d had, know it was real, and know-or at least be certain enough for all practical purposes-it wouldn’t happen again.
Muttering something pungent under his breath, he got up and left his room. He did, at least, know where he was going: to the crystallomancers’ chamber, where the mages and their crystals kept the hostel in the Naantali district connected to the outside world throughout the year. As spring gave way to summer, getting here was easy enough, but that didn’t hold in fall or early spring or through the seemingly endless winter blizzards.
“I want a crystal for private communication with my Grandmaster,” he told the Kuusaman mage in charge of the chamber.
“Of course,” she said. It hadn’t always beenof course; he’d had to make a nuisance of himself to gain the privilege. Only by pointedly asking whether Lagoas was truly an equal ally to Kuusamo had he prevailed. The chief crystallomancer took him to a crystal in the corner. The couple of Kuusamans closest to that crystal moved away so they couldn’t listen to him. “Here you are,” the chief said. “Do remember that the Algarvians are always trying to spy on our emanations.”
“I will,” Fernao said. Looking discontented, the Kuusaman mage went back to her desk. Fernao murmured the charm that would link this crystal to the one in Grandmaster Pinhiero’s office back in Setubal. As the crystal activated, light flared inside it. A moment later, Pinhiero’s image filled the glass globe.
“Who’s that?” the Grandmaster said, peering into his own crystal. Then he recognized Fernao. “Ah, it’s you. What do you want? What sort of trouble are you in?”
So far as Fernao knew, Pinhiero hadn’t heard about his entanglement with Pekka. Fernao hadn’t told him, anyway, which might not have been the same thing. Pinhiero could learn things from all sorts of unlikely places. Fernao said, “When will the first contingent of Lagoan mages come here for training? We really need our own wizards familiar with the new magecraft now that we’re fighting on the Derlavaian mainland.” Speaking his own tongue with Pinhiero felt odd after using classical Kaunian and Kuusaman for so long.
“They’ll be leaving Setubal day after tomorrow,” Pinhiero said, scratching at one end of his graying, sandy mustache. “The demon of getting them ready, of course, was making sure none of them would start whispering in Mezentio’s ear. Would you believe it, we found one mage the Algarvians planted on us twenty-five years ago? He’d had a past made up that was perfect rill you looked really hard, and he speaks Lagoan better than I do.”
“I’m glad you found him,” Fernao said. “Now-can you find someone to take over for me here? I think I’ve done about as much in Kuusamo as I can do.”
Pinhiero shook his head. “In a word, no. In two words, definitely no. I don’t care if your affair with that Kuusaman mage didn’t work out the way you hoped. This is more important than you, my boy. This is for the Guild and the kingdom. You stay right where you are.”
Fernao scowled. He might have known Pinhiero had a peephole of some sort into the gossip here. “Aye, Grandmaster,” he said, and broke the etheric connection with no more of a good-bye than that.
KingSwemmel glared out of the crystal atMarshalRathar. Rathar stolidly stared back; he much preferred dealing with the King of Unkerlant at a distance to trying to deal with him face-to-face. “We are not amused, and we are not pleased,” Swemmel said in his harsh, high-pitched voice.
“I’m sorry to hear that, your Majesty,” Rathar replied. That, on the whole, was true; when Swemmel felt aggrieved, he was even more hair-raisingly erratic than in his calmer moods.
“They mocked us,” the king snarled. “They mocked us most unforgivably-CountGusmao and in especialLordMoisio. Were they not ministers of kingdoms also at war against Algarve”-he couldn’t bring himself to say, friendly kingdoms -”their heads should answer for it. We do not tolerate insolence.”
Rathar wondered when anyone had last dared be insolent to Swemmel. Not for a good many years; the marshal was sure of that. But the ministers from Lagoas and Kuusamo had the advantage of not being Unkerlanter subjects. Swemmel risked real wrath if he abused them. Of course, even that might not stop him if he reckoned himself provoked enough.
“They have the gall to say, ‘I told you so,’ to us. Tousl” Swemmel snapped, still fuming.
Gusmao and Moisiohad told Swemmel what was going to happen. And they’d told him the truth. He hadn’t seemed much interested in hearing it at the time-he’d actively resisted believing it at the time-but it had turned out to be true. And… “Your Majesty, now that the Lagoans and the Kuusamans finally are on the Derlavaian mainland, that can only help us,” Rathar said. “The redheads can’t concentrate all their strength against Unkerlant alone.”
“That is so.” Swemmel sounded unhappy about admitting even that much. But Rathar had distracted him.
