Ausra stuck out her tongue at him. “Would you rather have us run your life behind your back?” she asked.
“I’d rather you didn’t try to run it at all,” Talsu said. “I had enough of that and to spare in the army, even if the food is better here.”
“The food wasn’t much better here till a little while ago,” Ausra said, not about to give in. “And why is it now? Gailisa, that’s why.”
If they’d teased him about Gailisa anymore, he thought he might start hating the grocer’s pretty daughter. Such irks always lasted till Gailisa came into the tailor’s shop, at which point they blew away like fog in the Bratanu Mountains. So it was again the next morning, when she walked in while he was cutting the pieces for an Algarvian officer’s cloak.
“Hello,” she said, and then, “How are you feeling today?”
Waggling the palm of his hand back and forth, he answered, “Not bad. I am getting better.” If he said that often enough, maybe he’d believe it was true.
“That’s good,” she said, nodding, hanging on his every word. “I’m glad to hear it. Those Algarvians have never been back since .. . since the day you had trouble.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Talsu said. “Here’s hoping they get sent to Unkerlant, or maybe to the land of the Ice People.”
His father made a sour face. “They’re winning both places, if you believe the news sheets. Even if you only believe a quarter of what’s in the news sheets, they’re still winning.” Traku opened a drawer, rattled through it, and slammed it shut, then did the same with another. Shaking his head, he muttered, “Must have left the fool thing upstairs. I’ll be back when I find it.” Off he went, leaving his son alone with Gailisa.
Talsu was convinced his father had done that on purpose. By the way she smiled, so was Gailisa. “Your father is a nice man,” she said, which, to Talsu, only proved she didn’t know Traku all that well.
He laughed. Gailisa raised an eyebrow and waited to hear what he had to say. After a moment’s thought, he said it: “I don’t know but what we had more fun when you were snippy all the time. You keep treating me like I’m one of the powers above and I’m liable to start believing it, and then where would we be?”
“Here in Skrunda, probably,” Gailisa answered. “It’s hard to be snippy with you after you did what you did, you know what I mean? I liked you before, and then--” She stopped and turned red.
Before Talsu could say anything to that, his side twinged. He grabbed it and grunted. Sound and movement were altogether involuntary. After it eased a little, he said, “I’m glad it made you like me better, but I’m not so glad as all that, if you hear what I’m telling you.”
“Of course I do,” Gailisa said. “I thought you were going to die, right there on the floor.”
“So did I,” Talsu said. “Thanks for getting help so fast.”
“You’re welcome,” she answered. Then she walked over to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him. “I like this better than being snippy. What do you think of that?”
“I think I like it, too,” Talsu told her. “Kiss me again, so I can find out for sure.” She did. When Traku came downstairs, neither one of them noticed him. He went back up again, chuckling under his breath.
After the narrow valley in which Kunhegyes lay, the vast expanse of western Unkerlant seemed all the more enormous to Istvan. And the forest of pine and spruce and fir ahead looked big enough to cover half the world.
Staring, Istvan said, “We spent more than half a year fighting our way through the mountains and down onto the flatlands, and now we have to go through
“It’s not so bad as that, Sergeant.” Captain Tivadar took a map out of a leather map case and pointed at the red lines snaking through the green on the paper. “Here, do you see? Plenty of roads going through.”
“Aye, sir,” Istvan said. He could hardly disagree, not when he was a sergeant, a cobbler’s son, talking to an officer with a fancy pedigree. He did add, “What do you want to bet, though, that King Swemmel’s men fight at every crossroads?”
“If it were going to be easy, we would already have done it,” Tivadar answered. He pointed ahead, then to the map again, and nodded in satisfaction. “See? There’s the highway we’ve been following.”
