sense back.
“And you, Skarnu, you are a brave man,” she exclaimed, suddenly seeming to remember he was there even though she’d been lying mostly on top of him, her naked, sweaty flesh pressed tightly against his. “When they took him, you tried to go in his place.”
Skarnu shrugged. She’d been watching them. He could think of no other reason why he’d offered himself to the Algarvians instead of Gedominu. Had they taken him, had they blazed him, would Merkela now be mourning him, naked in this bed with her old lame husband? Skarnu shrugged and shivered, both at the same time. No one could know such a thing--and just as well, too.
He reached for her, to hold away what might have been. She was reaching for him, too, perhaps to hold away what had been. Only noblewomen in Valmiera were said to know what she knew and used to get him ready quickly. He’d learned before that what people said and what was so often had no connection to each other. Soon, she arched her hips to receive him. “Hurry,” she whispered, there in the darkness.
When her pleasure came this time, she groaned as if it were pain. A moment later, Skarnu groaned, too, and spent himself. Merkela wept again, but only for a little while. Her breathing grew deep and slow. She drifted off to sleep without bothering to put on the loose tunic and trousers she wore at night.
Getting into his own clothes was a matter of a moment for Skarnu. Merkela let him share her bed when they joined on it, but she would not let him sleep with her in the literal meaning of the words. He slipped down the stairs and out of the farmhouse, closing the door behind him. He’d grown very used to sleeping on straw in the barn. A mattress, by now, would probably feel too soft to be comfortable.
“Hello, sir,” Raunu said quietly. Straw rustled under the veteran--Raunu had fought in the Six Years’ War--as he sat up.
“Oh, hello, Sergeant,” Skarnu said in dull embarrassment. Raunu had kept him afloat when, thanks to his being a marquis, he’d taken command of a company in Valmiera’s failed war against Algarve. They’d stayed together after the formal fighting ended, too. Now, since he hadn’t been here, Raunu could hardly help knowing where he had been and what he’d been doing. “I didn’t mean to wake you.
“You didn’t,” Raunu answered. “I was wakeful anyhow.” He didn’t say anything else for a little while after that. Skarnu could see his face but not make out its expression; the inside of the barn was darker even than Merkela’s bedchamber had been. At last, Raunu resumed: “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, sir?”
“Sure?” Skarnu shook his head. “No, of course not. Only fools are sure they know what they’re doing, and they’re commonly wrong.”
Raunu grunted. Skarnu needed a moment to realize that was intended for laughter. Raunu said, “All right, sir, fair enough. If she’d chosen to look at me, I don’t suppose I’d have looked away either.”
“Ah.” Skarnu didn’t want to talk about it. He pulled off his boots. He’d also got used to sleeping in tunic and trousers, to keep the straw from poking him so badly. His yawn might have been a bit theatrical, but he thought it would serve.
Here on the farm, though, sergeant and captain, commoner and noble, were far closer to equals than they had been in the tightly structured world of the army. Raunu did not back off. He said, “Did you know, sir, that Gedominu knew she’d started looking your way before the redheads hauled him off and blazed him?”
That had to be answered. “No, I didn’t know,” Skarnu said slowly. “Nothing happened between us before then.” It was true. How long it would have kept on being true, he didn’t know. He’d started looking Merkela’s way, too. He’d started looking her way from the moment he met her.
He wondered if she mourned Gedominu so extravagantly because she felt guilty about having turned her eye elsewhere before the Algarvians seized her husband. He doubted he would ever know. He could hardly come right out and ask.
Raunu’s thoughts had traveled along their own ley line. “Aye, he knew,” the sergeant said. “It was always one thing after another, he said to me once--that was how he looked at the world. He was sure Algarve would go after Unkerlant next.
With Forthweg and Sibiu and us and the Jelgavans down, Unkerlant was the next duck in a row.”
Skarnu didn’t care about Gedominu’s theories. He yawned again, louder and more stagily than before, and lay down in the straw, which rustled as it compressed under his weight. He felt around till he found his blanket, then wrapped it around himself.
“I hope everything turns out all right, sir, that’s all,” Raunu said, apparently resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t
