any normal day, the clerks and spies and military constables who labored there would have leered and muttered among themselves as she walked past. They were redheads. Leering at good-looking women was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was her being Lurcanio’s mistress. The count and colonel could punish anyone who go to gay with his hands.
Today, though, the Algarvians scarcely seemed to notice her, though she was wearing a pair of green velvet trousers cut like a second skin. Mezentio’s men talked in low voices, but not about her. The looks on their faces put her in mind of those the servants had worn after her parents died. They’d had a shock, and they were wondering what would come next.
When she strode into the anteroom where Captain Mosco worked, she demanded, “Nothing’s gone and happened to your precious king, has it?”
Colonel Lurcanio’s aide looked up from his paperwork. “To Mezentio?” he said. “No indeed, milady--as far as I know, he’s hale as can be.” But his face had that pinched, pained expression on it, too, and his voice was full of things he wasn’t saying. Setting his pen in the inkwell, he rose from his desk. “I’ll tell the colonel you’re here.” He returned a moment later. “Aye, he’ll see you.”
Krasta went into Lurcanio’s office. The Algarvian was, as always, courteous as a cat. He got to his feet, bowed over Krasta’s hand, and gallantly raised it to his lips. He handed her into the chair across from his desk. But it all struck Krasta as a performance, and not a very good one at that. “What
“Have you not heard?” Lurcanio asked. Even his accent seemed thicker than usual, as if he wasn’t trying so hard to shape the sounds that went into Valmieran.
“If I’d heard--whatever there is to hear--would I be asking you?” Krasta said. “By all the long faces out there, I thought something was wrong with your king. Mosco said that wasn’t it, but he didn’t say what was.”
“No, Mezentio is hale,” Lurcanio said, echoing his aide. “But, against all expectations, we have been thrown back before Cottbus, which naturally pains us.”
“Oh,” Krasta said. “Is that all?”
Lurcanio stared at her from under gingery eyebrows going gray. “You may not think it so much of a much, milady, but there are those who will tell you it is no small thing. Indeed, I fear I am one of them.”
“But why?” Krasta asked in genuine perplexity. “By the powers above, Lurcanio, it’s on the other side of the world.” Few things outside Priekule, and next to none outside Valmiera, carried much weight with her.
Lurcanio perplexed her by rising and giving her another bow. “Ah, milady, I almost envy you: you are invincibly provincial,” he said. By his tone, it was a compliment, even if Krasta didn’t quite understand it.
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said with a sniff, “King Swemmel is welcome to Cottbus. A nasty place for a nasty man.”
“He is a nasty man. It is a nasty place,” Lurcanio agreed with a sniff of his own. “But Unkerlant has a great many nasty places, and none of them so strong or so strongly held as Cottbus. It should have fallen. That it did not fall will mean . . . complications in the war ahead.”
To Krasta, tomorrow was a mystery, a week hence the far side of the moon. “You will beat the Unkerlanters,” she said. “After all, if you beat us, you can beat anyone.”
For a moment, what looked uncommonly like a smirk lit Lurcanio’s face. It vanished before Krasta could be sure she’d seen it. He said, “Actually, the Unkerlanter army has given us a rather better fight than Valmiera’s did.”
“I can’t imagine how that could be,” Krasta said.
“I know you can’t. I almost envy you that, too,” Lurcanio said; he might have been speaking Gyongyosian for all the sense he made to her. “But whether you can imagine it or not, the thing is there, and we have to see what comes of it.”
Krasta tossed her head. “I know what will come of it. No one will be having any parties worth going to until you people decide you can be happy again, and powers above only know how long that will take.” Before Lurcanio could answer, she spun on her heel and stalked out of his office.
She swung her hips more than usual when she headed back toward the part of the mansion that still belonged to her. Even so, hardly any of the Algarvians looked up from their work as she went by. That only made her unhappier. If no one was watching her, she hardly felt she was
