they leave his body there, and his family dead with him?”
“I don’t know the answer to either of those.” Skarnu felt as unhappy as Raunu looked. “I’d like to, especially the first.”
“If people get killed, everyone knows how it happened,” Merkela said. “If they just disappear, everybody wonders. Did the redheads take them away and murder them somewhere else? Or are they still alive and suffering because the Algarvians don’t want to let them die?”
“There’s a pleasant thought,” Skarnu said. After a bit of thought, he admitted, “It makes better sense than anything I came up with on the way back here.”
“Aye.” Raunu nodded. “It’d be like the Algarvians to try and put us in fear.”
“If they are torturing Dauktu and his kin, they’ve put me in fear,” Skarnu said. “Who knows what a man’s liable to blab when they’re pulling out his toenails or working over his daughter in front of him?”
“They won’t take me alive,” Merkela declared. Like any farm woman, she wore a knife on her belt. She caressed its hilt as she might have caressed Skarnu. “Powers below eat me if I’ll give them any sport or let them squeeze anything out of me.”
“We’d all be smart to go armed some way or another for a while,” Raunu said. Skarnu nodded, wondering if he’d be able to find the courage to slay himself. To save himself from Algarvian torment, he thought he might.
He slept close by his stick that night. But the Algarvians did not come, as they--or perhaps Simanu’s henchmen, acting with their leave--had come to Dauktu’s farm. The next morning, Raunu went into Pavilosta to buy salt and nails and, with luck, sugar: things the farm couldn’t make for itself. The veteran under-officer took along a blade of his own, long enough to reach his heart.
After he’d vanished around a bend in the road, Skarnu and Merkela, without a word spoken, set aside their chores, hurried upstairs to her bedchamber, and made love. This time, he was as desperately urgent as she usually was; he wondered if it might be the last, and did his best to give himself something to savor for however long he had. When pleasure drowned him, he groaned as he might have under an Algarvian torturer’s whip.
Drained, emptied, numb, he and Merkela went back out to the endless farm-work. He did it at about half speed, waiting for Raunu or King Mezentio’s men: whoever chanced to come to the farm first.
It was Raunu, a little bent under the weight of the pack on his back but his face glowing with news. “There must be a dozen of those ‘Simanu’s vengeance--night and fog’ signs in town,” he said as he set down his burden. “Not a one that I could tell was on the door of anybody who’s fighting the redheads. They just picked people, powers above knows how, and now nobody knows what’s become of’em.”
“That’s good to hear,” Skarnu said. “Good for anybody except the folk who had it happen to them, I mean.”
“Night and fog,” Merkela repeated musingly. “They want people to wonder what’s happened to whoever they took, all right. Are they dead? Are they under torture, like we said before? Or are the redheads doing . . . what the stories we hear talk about?”
Skarnu’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a horrid grimace. “One more thing I hadn’t thought of. One more thing I wish you hadn’t thought of, either.”
“There may not be any Kaunians left alive in the world if the Algarvians have their way,” Merkela said.
“They haven’t taken anyone from Valmiera or Jelgava,” Skarnu said. “We’d have heard if they started doing anything like that.”
“Would we?” That was Raunu, not Merkela. He added three words: “Night and fog.”
“We’re still fighting,” Skarnu said. “I don’t know what else we can do. They won’t get anything cheap, not from this county they won’t.”
“Aye.” Merkela’s angry nod sent a lock of her pale hair flipping down over her eyes. Brushing it back with a hand, she went on, “They say Simanu’s had his revenge. We haven’t even started taking ours yet.”
“Keeping ourselves alive, staying in the fight--that’s a kind of victory all by itself,” Skarnu said. He wouldn’t have thought so, not when the war was new and his noble blood entitled him to don shiny captain’s badges. He knew better now.
Bembo lifted a glass of wine in salute to Sergeant Pesaro. “Here’s to some time well spent in Gromheort,” the constable said.
