more like a civilized man than a shrieking mountain ape.
Pekka nodded. 'And have some tea, Master, have some bergamot tea. It will help soothe you.' She nodded to Linna to make sure the serving girl added the tea to Ilmarinen's order. Linna hurried off and brought the tea before anything else. The look she gave Pekka wasn't quite conspiratorial, but it came close.
As the fragrant leaves steeped, Ilmarinen muttered something under his breath. 'What was that?' Fernao asked, though Pekka wished he would have let it ride.
Ilmarinen repeated himself, a little louder: 'Seven Princes and a Princess- Pekka of Naantali.'
'Nonsense,' Pekka said, 'nonsense or maybe treason, depending on whether Prince Renavall, whose district this is, finds himself in a merciful mood.'
Ilmarinen took a couple of somber sips of tea and shook his head. 'I have no trouble disobeying princes. I enjoy disobeying princes, by the powers above. But I obeyed you. Why do you suppose that is?' He sounded puzzled, almost bewildered.
'Because you know you were making an idiot of yourself?' Pekka suggested.
'That seldom stops me,' Ilmarinen answered.
'Aye, we have seen as much,' Fernao said.
Ilmarinen turned a baleful eye his way. 'I'm not the only one at this table who's doing it,' he snapped. 'I'm just the only one who's not ashamed to admit it.' Fernao turned very red. With his fair skin, the flush was easy to see.
Something close to desperation in her voice, Pekka said, 'Enough!' She hoped she wasn't flushing, too. If she was, she hoped it didn't show. She went on, 'Master Ilmarinen, you came in and said we were wasting our time. You said it at the top of your lungs. Suppose you either explain yourself or apologize.'
'Suppose I do neither one.' Ilmarinen sounded as if he was enjoying himself again.
Pekka shrugged. She kept on speaking classical Kaunian: 'If you would sooner disrupt the work than join it, you may leave, sir. We have snow on the ground again. Sending you by sleigh to the nearest ley-line caravan depot would be easy- nothing easier, in fact. You could be in Yliharma day after tomorrow. You would not be wasting your time, or ours, there.'
'I am Ilmarinen,' he said. 'Have you forgotten?' What he meant was, Do you think you can accomplish anything without my brilliance?
'I remember all too well. You make me remember all too well with your disruptions,' Pekka answered. 'I am the mage who leads this project. Have you forgotten? If your disruptions cost more than you give, we are better off without you, no matter who you are.'
'Aye,' Fernao growled.
But Pekka waved him to silence. 'This is between Master Ilmarinen and me. How now, Master Ilmarinen? Do you follow where I lead here, or do you go your own carefree way somewhere else?'
She wondered if she'd pushed it too hard, if Ilmarinen would leave in a huff. If he did, could they go forward? He was, unquestionably, the most brilliant living mage in Kuusamo. He was also, as unquestionably, the most difficult. She waited. Ilmarinen said, 'I would like a third choice.'
'I know. But those are the two you have,' Pekka said.
'Then I obey,' Ilmarinen said. 'I even apologize, which is not something you will hear from me every day.' In token of obedience, he slipped out of his seat and went to one knee before Pekka, as if she were truly one of the Seven Princes… and he were a woman.
She snorted. 'You overact,' she said, now in quick Kuusaman, rather hoping Fernao couldn't follow. 'And you know what that posture means.'
'Of course I do,' he answered in the same tongue as he sat in the chair again. 'But so what? It's fun no matter who's doing it to whom.'
Now Pekka knew she was blushing. Very much to her relief, she saw Fernao hadn't caught all of the byplay. She returned to classical Kaunian: 'Enough of that, too. More than enough, Master Ilmarinen. I ask you again: why do you say we are wasting our time here? I expect an answer.'
'You know why. Both of you know why.' Ilmarinen pointed to her and to Fernao in turn. 'Our experiment brought fresh green grass here in dead of winter. If we can do that, we can go the other way as well.'
'We are not grass,' Pekka said. 'And we have no notion from which summer the grass came hither.'
Ilmarinen waved his hand. 'That is a detail. One reason we don't know is because we haven't tried to find out. That's why I say we're wasting time.'
Fernao spoke up: 'You were the one who showed similarity and contagion have an inverse relationship, not a direct one. If the relationship is not direct, what works in one direction will fail in the other. Calculations to that effect are very plain, would you not agree?'
'Without experiment, I agree to nothing,' Ilmarinen said. 'Calculation springs from experiment, not the other way round. Without the experiment of Mistress Pekka here, the landscape would have a good many fewer holes in it, Master Siuntio would still be alive, and you would be back in Lagoas where you belong.'
'That will be quite enough of that,' Pekka snapped. To her surprise, Ilmarinen inclined his head in- another apology? She had trouble believing that, but she didn't know what else it could be. Then Fernao started to say something. He and Pekka got on very well- sometimes, she feared, almost too well- most of the time, but now she pointed her index finger at him as if it were a stick, since she was sure he was about to aim a barb at Ilmarinen. 'Do not even start,' she said sternly. 'We have had too much quarreling among ourselves as is. Do you understand me?'
'Aye.' After a moment's hesitation, Fernao added, 'Mistress Pekka.' He looked as apologetic as Ilmarinen had.
For a heartbeat or two, Pekka simply accepted that and was glad of it. Then she stared down at her own hands in something very much like wonder. By the powers above, she thought, a little- more than a little- dazed. I'm leading them. I really am.
Grelz boiled and bubbled like a pot of cabbage soup too long on the fire. Grelzer soldiers trudged west, to try to help Algarve and keep the land a kingdom. Unkerlanter soldiers battled their way east, to try to make it into a duchy once more. And the peasants who made up the bulk of the population were caught in the middle, as peasants all too often were during wartime.
Some of them, those who would soon have lived under puppet King Raniero than fierce King Swemmel, fled east ahead of the oncoming Unkerlanter army and the retreating Algarvians and Grelzers. In the mud time, the roads would have been bad without them. With them clogging those roads, the redheads and their Grelzer hounds had an even harder time getting men and beasts and supplies to the front.
With so many strangers on the move, Garivald's band of irregulars could operate far more freely than they had before. Most of the time, a stranger's appearance in a peasant village brought gossip and speculation. Having lived his whole life up till the war in Zossen, a village much like any other, Garivald understood that in his bones. But things were different now. With strangers everywhere, what difference did one more make?
'Our army's still moving,' Garivald told Tantris as reports from the outside world trickled into the woods where the irregulars denned. 'Not easy to press forward in the mud time. I ought to know.'
'Marshal Rathar's no ordinary soldier,' the Unkerlanter regular replied. 'He can make men do things they couldn't manage most of the time.'
'The ground's starting to freeze every now and then,' Garivald said. 'That'll make things easier- at least till the first big blizzard.'
'Easier for both sides,' Tantris said. 'When it's mud, we've got the edge on the redheads.'
'Oh, aye, no doubt,' Garivald agreed. 'We can move a little, and the stinking Algarvians can hardly move at all.'
He'd intended that for sarcasm, but Tantris took him literally and nodded. 'If you can get any kind of advantage, no matter how small, you grab it with both hands,' he said. 'That's how you win.'
For once, Obilot agreed with him. 'We have the best chance to hurt the Algarvians now,' she told Garivald inside the tent the two of them had started sharing. 'The real army is getting close. Mezentio's whoresons will be careless of us. They'll have bigger things, worse things, on their minds.'
