“I knew we didn’t want them here, but I didn’t think they’d do--that,” his wife said.
“Neither did I,” Garivald answered. “Now we don’t have to listen to the tales people older than we are to tell of the Twinkings War. Now we know, too.”
Another song began to form in his mind, a song of how the two Unkerlanter irregulars had met their deaths without a word. Even more than most of the songs he shaped, he would have to be careful where he sang that one. But those two men had had friends in the woods, friends the Algarvians hadn’t caught. They would want to hear such songs--the dead men were their comrades. And thinking of rhymes and rhythms distracted him from his hangover.
Later that day, when he had to go out, he found more details to add to the song. Having hanged their captives, the Algarvian troop of combat soldiers had pulled out of Zossen. They’d left the gibbet behind. The bodies on it still swayed in the breeze. No one had dared cut them down.
Each corpse had a new placard tied round its neck. The characters were those of the Unkerlanter language. Garivald knew that much, even if he couldn’t read them. They probably told about the dead men, and said what fools they were to fight the Algarvians. He couldn’t think what else Mezentio’s soldiers would have had to say.
He hurried back to his hut, words spinning in his head. Once inside, he barred the door and started drinking again. By her slack features, Annore had hardly stopped. Staying indoors through the winter shielded people from the worst the weather could do, just as staying in the village had shielded them from knowing the worst war could do. But the war had come home to them now. The Algarvians had brought it home.
“Curse them,” he muttered.
His wife didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “Aye, curse them,” she said. “Powers below eat them.”
“Curse!” Leuba said cheerfully. She didn’t know what the word meant, only that her parents stressed it when they spoke.
Tears--the easy tears of drunkenness--sprang out in Garivald’s eyes. He seized his daughter and fiercely hugged her to him. She squealed, then wiggled to get free. Such shows of affection didn’t come her way very often. But Garivald had looked death in the face, and knew how afraid he was.
More than half of Pekka wished she could have performed this experiment down in Kajaani, her hometown, rather than coming to Yliharma. Failure in the capital of Kuusamo, failure with all the Seven Princes hoping for success, would be far more humiliating than all the failures she’d known back home.
Both the senior mages who’d invited--for all practical purposes, ordered--her to Yliharma met her at the caravan depot. They laughed when she spoke of her fears. “Nonsense, my dear,” Siuntio said. His smile lit up his wide, high-cheek-boned face. With his hair graying toward white, he looked far more like a kindly grandfather than the leading theoretical sorcerer of his generation. “I’m sure everything will go splendidly.”
Pekka brushed back a few strands of straight black hair that the frigid breeze kept blowing into her eyes. Yliharma had a milder climate than Kajaani, but no one would ever mistake it for the nearly tropical beaches of northern Jelgava. She said, “This is the first time we’ll have tried a divergent series. Too many things can go wrong.”
That set Ilmarinen laughing. Where Siuntio looked like a kindly grandfather, he put Pekka in mind of a disreputable great uncle. But his record was second only to Siuntio’s, and a fair number of people--himself emphatically included--would have argued about that.
Leering at Pekka, he asked, “Which are you more afraid of, having nothing happen, or having too much?”
He had a knack for unpleasantly pointed questions. “Having nothing happen would mortify me,” Pekka said after a little thought. “If too much happens, it’s liable to kill me.”
“Don’t think small,” Ilmarinen said cheerfully. “If too much happens, you’re liable to take out half of Yliharma--maybe even all of it, if you get lucky.” Pekka didn’t think she would call that luck, but contradicting Ilmarinen only encouraged him.
Siuntio gave his longtime colleague a severe look. “That is most unlikely, as you know full well. We do have some notion of the parameters involved. It’s not as if we were back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, when mages were ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of their craft.”
“We’re ignorant of these underpinnings,” Ilmarinen said with unfortunate accuracy. “If we weren’t, we’d be using them; we wouldn’t be experimenting.”
Pekka thought he was right and hoped he was wrong. Siuntio simply declined to be drawn into the argument, saying, “Let’s get Mistress Pekka settled at the Principality--you needn’t fret, my dear: the Seven Princes are footing the bill--and make her as comfortable as we can, so she’ll be well rested for tomorrow’s conjurations.”
