which she’d slept--leaving them on the carpet for Bauska to pick up--and got into the more substantial daywear. That done, she let her maidservant brush out her shining blond locks. After studying her reflection in a gilt-edged mirror, she nodded. She was ready to face the morning.
Bauska hurried downstairs ahead of her to let the cook know she would want a cheese-and-mushroom omelette with which to break her fast. She wasn’t wild about mushrooms. She wanted them as much to annoy Lurcanio as for any other reason; like most Algarvians, he had no use for them at all. She intended to dwell lovingly on them when she saw him, almost as if she were a mushroom-mad Forthwegian.
After the omelette and a slice of sweet roll stuffed with apples and a cup of tea, she went into the west wing of the mansion. She might as well have entered another world. Kilted Algarvians dominated--messengers bringing word of doings all over Priekule, clerks making sure those words went to the right official or file, and soldiers and military police who turned words into action.
The redheads eyed her as she went by--she would have been disappointed, or more likely insulted, if they hadn’t--but kept their hands to themselves. Unlike those Algarvian louts on the Avenue of Horsemen, they knew without having to be told whose woman she was.
But when she got to the antechamber in front of Colonel Lurcanio s office, the officer there was not Captain Mosco but a stranger. “You are the marchioness, is it not so?” he said in slow, careful classical Kaunian, and rose from his seat to bow. “I do not speak Valmieran, I am sorry to say. Do you understand me?”
“Aye,” Krasta answered, though her own command of the classical tongue was considerably worse than this redhead’s. “Where are, uh,
The Algarvian bowed again. “He is not here.” Krasta could see that for herself; her temper kindled. Before she could say anything, though, the officer added, “I am replacing him. He is not returning.”
“What?” Krasta exclaimed--in Valmieran, for she was startled out of classical Kaunian.
With yet another bow, the Algarvian said, “Colonel Lurcanio will be making it plain to you. I am to tell you you are to go in to him.” He waved her through the antechamber, bowing one last time as he did so.
Even before Lurcanio looked up from the memorandum he was drafting, Krasta demanded, “Where’s Captain Mosco?”
Lurcanio set down his pen. As the stranger in Mosco’s place had before him, he got to his feet and bowed. “Come in, my dear, and sit down. You are here, and I am here, and that is more than we can say for the unfortunate captain.”
“What do you mean?” Krasta asked as she sat in the chair in front of his desk. “Has something happened to him? Is he dead? Is that what that fellow out there meant?”
“Ah, good--you made some sense of Captain Gradasso’s Kaunian,” Lurcanio said. “I wasn’t sure how much you would be able to follow. No, Mosco is not dead, but aye, something has happened to him. He won’t be here again, I fear, not unless he is luckier than seems likely.”
“Did he have an accident? Did footpads set on him?” Krasta scowled. “I hate it when you beat around the bush.”
“And, if it suits you, you hate it when I don’t,” Lurcanio replied. “Still, I will answer your questions: no and no, respectively. Although I suppose you might call what happened to him an accident, a most unfortunate accident. He has been ordered to the west, you see, to Unkerlant.”
“What will he do about the baby when it comes?” Krasta asked: as always, what affected her sprang most readily to her mind.
One of Lurcanio’s eyebrows twitched sardonically. “I doubt that is the first thing on his mind right now,” the Algarvian colonel said. “I only guess, mind you, but I would say he is most worried about not getting killed and next most worried about not freezing to death. In all the time he has left over from that, he may possibly give a thought to the little bastard yet to come. On the other hand, he may not, too.”
“He promised to support that baby, or we would let his wife know about the games he was playing,” Krasta snapped. “If you think we won’t do that.. .”
Lurcanio’s shrug was a masterpiece of its kind. “He will do as he will do, and you and your wench will do as you will do,” he answered. “I don’t know what else to say--except that, should you find yourself with child, do not seek to play these games with me.”
Krasta’s head came up. “Are you saying you have no honor? Honest of you to admit it.”
Lurcanio got to his feet and set his hands on the desk, leaning across it toward her. He wasn’t much taller than she, but somehow made it seem as if she were looking up at him from out of a valley. In
