“And with whom have you been doing it?” he asked. Her letters hadn’t said much about her friends. Did that mean she didn’t get out much, or that she knew when and what to keep quiet?
“Some of my set,” she answered, her voice light and amused. “I don’t think there’s anyone you know.” Sabrino had more practice than she might have thought at reading between the lines. That couldn’t mean anything but,
Was she doing more than going to feasts and parties with her set? Was she being unfaithful to him? If he found out she was, if she made him notice she was, he’d have to turn her out of this fancy flat or at least make her find someone else to pay for it. He was glad he hadn’t had to pay anything for the emerald ring but the cost of repair. The Unkerlanter noble from whose house he’d taken it wouldn’t worry about rings--or anything else--ever again.
Fronesia turned it this way and that, admiring the emerald. Suddenly, she threw her arms around his neck. “You are the most generous man!” she exclaimed. Maybe she hadn’t thought he might be bringing back loot rather than spending money on her. He didn’t bother pointing that out. Instead, though his back groaned a little, he picked her up and carried her to the bedchamber. He’d come to Trapani to enjoy himself, after all, and enjoy himself he did. If Fronesia didn’t, she was an artist at concealing it.
She made him breakfast the next morning. Fortified by sweet rolls and tea with milk, he went off to greet his wife. The countess would know where he’d spent the night, but she wouldn’t let on. That was how the nobility played the game. The new day was bright, but very chilly. That didn’t keep vendors on the street from shouting about a special announcement due at any time. They were still shouting it when Sabrino took his wife to dinner that night, and the next morning, and the day after that.
Pekka had helped bring Kuusamo into the Derlavaian War, but the war had not yet come home to Kajaani. Oh, not much shipping was down at the harbor, but not much shipping would have been down at the harbor in the middle of any year’s winter. The sea hadn’t frozen--that didn’t happen every winter--but enough icebergs rode the ocean to the south to make travel by water risky.
And few additional men had yet been called into the service of the Seven Princes. That would happen; she knew it would. It would have to. So far, though, the war remained as theoretical as applications of the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity.
War was its own experiment and gave its own results. It asked questions and answered them. Her experiment with the acorns had asked new questions of the sorcerous relationship. Ilmarinen’s brilliant insight had suggested the direction in which the answer might lie. Now she needed more experiments to see how far she could push magecraft in that direction.
Examining her latest set of notes, she thought she knew what needed trying. She smiled as she rose from her squeaky office chair and headed for the laboratory. Professor Heikki would not come complaining about her spending too much time and too much of the department’s budget there, not any more she wouldn’t. Professor Heikki, these days, left Pekka severely alone.
“Which suits me fine,” Pekka murmured as she went into the laboratory. Theoretical sorcery was most often a lonely business. Here, when it was linked so closely to Kuusaman defense, it grew lonelier still. She couldn’t even talk about her work with Leino, though her husband was a talented mage in his own right. That did hurt.
Several cages of rats sat on tables by one wall of the laboratory. All the animals--some young and vigorous, others slower, creakier, their fur streaked with gray--crowded forward when the door opened. They knew that was a sign they might be fed.
Pekka did feed them, a little. Then she took out two of the old, gray-muzzled rats and ran them, one after the other, through the maze a college carpenter had knocked together out of scrap lumber. They both found the grain at the end of it with no trouble at all. She’d spent weeks training all the old rats to the maze. They knew it well.
She let the second one clean out the grain set in the little tin cup once he’d got to it. Then she gave him a honey drop as an extra reward. He was a happy old rat indeed when she put him back in his cage and carried it over to a table on which, once upon a time, an acorn had rested.
She made careful note of which rat he was, then searched among the cages housing young rodents. Finding his grandson didn’t take long. The law of similarity strongly bound kin. The younger rat went on the other table that had once held an acorn.
Again, Pekka noted the rat she had chosen. When this experiment was over, she would either have ensured her fame (which she didn’t care about) and learned something important (which she cared about very much) or ... She laughed. “Or else I’ll have to start over again and try something else,” she said. “Powers above know I’ve had to do that before.”
Despite laughter, she remained nervous. She took a deep breath and recited the ritual words her people had long used: “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”
