Darkness Descending

better.

Felgilde squeezed Leofsig’s hand as they walked along the street together. “Oh, this will be fun!” she exclaimed.

“I hope so,” he answered, and then smiled and said, “You look very pretty tonight.”

She squeezed his hand again, perhaps--he hoped--a little less archly than she was in the habit of doing. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s a handsome cloak you have on.”

“Thank you,” Leofsig said. He’d borrowed it from his father, but Felgilde didn’t need to know that.

She said, “Ethelhelm’s band is one of the two or three best in Forthweg. I’m so excited! This is the first time since the war they’ve come here from Eoforwic. They’re supposed to have all sorts of new tunes, too--that’s what everybody says, anyway. You were so lucky to be able to get tickets.”

“I know,” Leofsig said. His father had helped there, too; Hestan cast accounts for the hall where Ethelhelm’s band was going to perform. But that was also nothing Felgilde needed to know.

He slid his arm around her waist. She snuggled closer to him. He brought his hand up a bit, so that the top of his thumb and wrist brushed against the bottom of her breast. Most of the time, she slapped his hand away when he tried that. Tonight, she let it stay. His hopes, among other things, began to rise. Maybe he wouldn’t have to keep on being jealous of his younger brother for so long as he’d thought.

The hall was in a part of town that had housed a good many Kaunians. Some of them still remained, looking shabby and frightened. An old man with fair hair stood on the street not far from the entrance to the hall, begging from the people who were coming to hear Ethelhelm’s famous band.

Leofsig let go of Felgilde to rummage in his belt pouch and take out a couple of coins. He dropped them into the bowl at the scrawny old man’s feet. “Powers above bless you, sir,” the Kaunian said in Forthwegian. He’d had little luck till Leofsig came by; only a few other coins, most of them small coppers, lay in the bowl.

“That was a waste of money,” Felgilde said as they walked on. She didn’t bother to keep her voice down, though the old Kaunian had already shown he could speak Forthweg’s majority tongue.

“I don’t think so,” Leofsig answered. “My father always says Kaunians are people, too. That fellow looked like he could use a hand.”

“My father says that if we hadn’t listened to the Kaunians in Forthweg, we wouldn’t have gone to war against Algarve when the blond kingdoms in the east did,” Felgilde said. “He says we’d be better off if we hadn’t, too.”

Even the Kaunians in Forthweg would have been better off if King Penda hadn’t gone to war against Algarve--better off for a little while, anyhow. Leofsig said, “How long do you think it would have been before King Mezentio went to war with us if we didn’t stand by our allies?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Felgilde said with a toss of her head, “and I’m just as sure you don’t know, either.”

Since that was true, Leofsig could hardly argue with it. He didn’t feel like arguing, anyhow. He knew what he felt like, and hoped Felgilde felt like it, too. To try to put her back in the mood, he slipped his arm around her waist again. She let him do that, but brushed his hand away when he tried to bring it up again. He gave her a resentful look. Hers in response might have said, So there.

She did get friendlier when he took out the tickets and gave them to the tough-looking fellow standing in the doorway. The bruiser nodded, smiled a surprisingly warm smile, and stepped aside to let them pass. They both held out their hands to a woman with a stamp and an ink pad. She marked them with the word PAID, then she too stood aside and waved them into the hall.

Ethelhelm’s band occupied a raised platform in the middle. The men on viol and double viol, lute and mandolin, were tuning their instruments. The trumpeter and flute-player made runs up and down the scale. So did the piper, with results that set Leofsig’s teeth on edge. Ethelhelm himself manned the drums. He was taller and slimmer than most Forthwegians, enough to make Leofsig wonder if he had a quarter part of Kaunian blood. If he did, he didn’t advertise it, for which prudent silence Leofsig could hardly blame him.

Felgilde pointed. “Look--there are a couple in the first row that haven’t been taken. Come on! Hurry!”

She and Leofsig got to the seats before anyone else could, and sat down with no small feeling of triumph. Rows of chairs had been placed around the whole inner perimeter of the hall, all facing inward toward the platform on which the band would perform. There was considerable space between the front row and the platform, though: room for people to dance as the mood took them.

The hall filled rapidly. Before the war, Leofsig wouldn’t have seen many blonds at one of Ethelhelm’s appearances;