“He sent me,” Ilmarinen answered. “He said I was better at being rude than he was. Bugger me if I know what he meant.” His chuckle displayed uneven yellow teeth.
“Why would you want to be rude to me?” Fernao asked.
“That’s just it--I don’t need a reason, and Siuntio would.” Ilmarinen’s eyes lit up. “And here’s supper.” For a while, he and Fernao paid attention to little else.
Fernao’s salmon steak was moist and pink and flavorful. He did not enjoy it so much as he might have, though, for he’d become convinced he wasn’t going to learn anything on this journey. He’d also become convinced there were things he badly needed to learn.
“More ale?” he asked Ilmarinen, hefting the pitcher.
“Oh, aye,” the Kuusaman mage answered, “though you’ll not get me drunk.” Fernao’s ears burned, but he poured anyway.
“What would happen if I ignored you and did go to see Siuntio?” he asked.
Ilmarinen shrugged. “You’d end up buying him supper, too. You’d be even less likely to make him drunk than you are me--I enjoy it every now and again, but he’s an old sobersides. And you still wouldn’t find out anything. He’d tell you there’s nothing to find out, the same as I’m telling you now.”
“Curse you both for lying,” Fernao flared.
“If Pinhiero’s curses won’t stick to me--and they won’t--I’m not going to worry about yours, lad,” Ilmarinen answered. “And I say I am not lying. Your own research will prove the truth of it, as the exception proves the rule.”
“What sort of research?” Fernao asked.
Ilmarinen only smiled again, and said not a word.
These days, Vanai feared every knock at the door. Most Kaunians in Forthweg did, and had reason to. She had more reasons, far more than most. Major Spinello had kept his part of the bargain: her grandfather no longer went out to labor on the roads. And she had to keep her part of the bargain, too, whenever the Algarvian officer chose. For Brivibas’ sake, she did.
It no longer hurt, as it had the first time. Spinello was not cruel that particular way. In fact, he kept trying to please her. He would caress her for what seemed like forever before doing what he wanted. She never kindled. She never came close to kindling. She despised him far too much for that. Even resignation wasn’t easy, though at last she managed it.
Instead of by wounding her in the bedchamber, Spinello took his nasty pleasure by ostentatiously leading her to that chamber and closing the door in Brivibas’ face. He didn’t bother barring it. Once, in a transport of impotent fury, Brivibas had burst in. “Come to watch, have you?” Spinello asked coolly, not missing a stroke. Vanai’s grandfather reeled away as if blazed through the heart.
It was after Major Spinello left that the fights would start. “Better you should have let me die than to do such a thing!” Brivibas would shout. Vanai knew he meant it, too, which was twisting the knife.
She always answered the same way: “In a while, this will be over. If you died, my grandfather, that would be forever, and I could not bear it.”
“But how does this make me look?” Brivibas cried one day. “Preserved alive because my granddaughter gives herself to an Algarvian barbarian? How am I to hold my head up in the village?”
He spoke in terms of himself, not in terms of Vanai. His selfishness infuriated her. She said, “I have not been able to hold my head up in Oyngestun since you first grew friendly toward the Algarvian barbarian--which is not what you called him when he began meeting with you--
Brivibas stared at her. For a moment, she thought she’d made him see things through her eyes. But then he said, “How, after this, will I be able to make a proper marriage alliance for you?”
“How, after this, do you think I would ever want another man to touch me?” Vanai retorted, at which her grandfather flinched and retreated to the safety of his study. Vanai glared after him. He hadn’t thought about how she might feel about being married, only about the difficulties her behavior might cause him. A poisonous thought sprouted in her mind, tempting and lethal as a death-cap mushroom:
She shook her head violently. If she blamed him for thinking only of himself, how could she let herself do the same? By all the logic Brivibas had so carefully taught her, she couldn’t. And once
