He would know more about landlords and their habits than she might have guessed.
He went on, “I don’t know if we’ll be able to get you to any more of Ethelhelm’s performances, or anything like that.”
When he said he didn’t know if she’d be able to go out, he meant he knew perfectly well she wouldn’t. Vanai could see that. Even so, she was grateful for the way he phrased it. It left her hope, and she had little else. She looked around at the imperfectly plastered walls of the dingy flat. Aye, they might have been the bars of a cage in the zoological garden.
“You’ll have to bring me more books,” she said. “A lot more books.” Brivibas had given her one thing for which to remember him kindly, at any rate: as long as her eyes were going back and forth across a printed page, she could forget where she was. That was not the smallest of sorceries, not when this was the place she had to try to forget.
“I will,” Ealstan said. “I’d already thought of that. I’ll scour the secondhand stores. I can get more for the same money in places like that.”
She nodded and looked around again. Aye, this would be a cage, sure enough. She wouldn’t even dare look out on the street so much as she had been doing, lest someone looking up spy her golden hair. “Get me some cookbooks,” she said. “If I’m going to spend all my time cooped up in here, cooking will help make the days go by.” She pointed at Ealstan. “You’ll get fat, you wait and see.”
“I don’t mind trying,” he said. “Fattening me up won’t be easy, though, not on what passes for rations these days.”
Something unspoken hung in the air between them.
There was one other thing she could think of to make time go by here in this little flat. She went over to Ealstan and put her arms around him. “Come on,” she said, doing her best to recapture the excitement that had been growing in her before the redheads ran up their broadsheets. “Let’s go back to the bedchamber. . . .”
Trasone tramped through the battered streets of Aspang. The burly Algarvian soldier looked on the devastation around him with a certain amount of satisfaction. The Unkerlanters had done everything they could to throw his comrades and him out of the place, but they’d failed. Algarve’s banner of red and green and white still flew from flagpoles all over Aspang.
So did another flag, the gold and green of the revived Kingdom of Grelz. Trasone rumbled laughter deep in his chest when he saw a Grelzer flag. He knew the kingdom was a joke. Every Algarvian soldier in Aspang knew the same thing. And if the Grelzers didn’t, they were even stupider than he thought.
He snorted. As far as he was concerned, Grelzers were just another bunch of stinking Unkerlanters. If you turned your back on them, they’d stab you. Every couple of paces, he looked around. No, you couldn’t trust these whoresons, not even in a town full of Algarvian soldiers.
He strode out into the market square. Along with the rest of Aspang, it had taken a beating. Still, merchants from the town and peasants in from the countryside had set up tables on which to display their wares. If they didn’t sell, they’d starve. And, no doubt, some of them took word of what they saw back to the Unkerlanter raiders who never stopped harassing the Algarvians behind their lines.
“Sausage?” a woman called to Trasone, holding up several grayish brown links. “Good sausage!” He would have bet every copper he owned that she hadn’t known a word of Algarvian before the war.
“How much?” he asked. Algarvian soldiers were under orders not to plunder in the market square, though the rest of Aspang was fair game. The links looked better than what he was likely to get back at the barracks.
“One silver, four links,” the sausage seller answered.
“Thief,” Trasone growled, to start the haggling off on the right note. He got his four links of sausage, and paid less than half what the Grelzer peasant woman had first demanded. He strolled away happy. That the woman hadn’t dared dicker hard against an occupying soldier with a stick slung on his back didn’t cross his mind. Had it, he wouldn’t have cared. The bargain was all that mattered.
He hadn’t gone far before he saw Major Spinello heading his way. As best he could with sausages in his free hand, he came to attention and saluted. “As you were,” Spinello said. The battalion commander eyed his purchase. “You’re supposed to give these Unkerlanter wenches your sausage, soldier. You’re not supposed to take theirs.”
“Heh,” Trasone said, and nodded. “That’s funny, sir.” Even if the officer did go on and on about the Kaunian girl he’d been screwing before he got sent west, he’d done a good job with the battalion.
Now he took off his hat, waved it around
