“All right, you can have that one, but that’s all,” Conberge said. “If you think you’ll get away with any more,
Ealstan laughed then. Perhaps drawn by his amusement and his sister’s, Sidroc came in from the door that opened on the courtyard. Seeing Ealstan with a plum in his hand, he grabbed one himself. Conberge couldn’t do anything about it, not with Ealstan eating one. As she turned back to the bread dough, Sidroc asked, “What’s so funny?” His voice came blurry around a big mouthful of plum. He looked a good deal like Ealstan, save that his nose bore a closer resemblance to a turnip than to a sickle blade.
“Getting stuck with bookkeeping problems,” Ealstan answered.
“Men,” Conberge added.
Sidroc looked from one of them to the other. Then, suspiciously, he looked at the plum. “Has this thing turned into brandy while I wasn’t looking?” he asked. Ealstan and Conberge both shrugged, so solemnly that they started laughing again. Sidroc snorted. “I think the two of you have gone daft, is what I think.”
“You’re probably right,” Ealstan told him. “They do say that too many bookkeeping problems--”
“Compounded quarterly,” his sister broke in.
“Compounded quarterly, aye,” Ealstan agreed. “Bookkeeping problems compounded quarterly cause calcification of the brain.”
“Even you don’t know what that means,” Sidroc said.
“It means my brain is turning into a rock, like yours was to start with,” Ealstan said. “If the Algarvians had let you take stonelore, you would have found out for yourself.”
“Think you’re so smart.” Sidroc kept smiling, but his voice held an edge. “Well, maybe you are. But so what? So what?--that’s what I want to know. What’s it gotten you?” Without waiting for an answer, he pitched his plum pit into the trash basket and stalked out of the kitchen.
Ealstan wished he could ignore the question. It was too much to the point. Since Sidroc hadn’t stayed around, he turned back to Conberge. “What
“Would you rather be stupid? That won’t get you anything, either,” Conberge said. After a moment’s thought, she went on, “If you’re smart, when you grow up you turn into someone like Father. That’s not so bad.”
“No.” But Ealstan remained unhappy. “Even Father, though--what is he? A bookkeeper in a conquered kingdom where the Algarvians don’t want us to know enough to be bookkeepers.”
“But he’s teaching you anyhow, and he taught me, too,” Conberge reminded him. “If that isn’t fighting back against the redheads, what is?”
“You’re right.” Ealstan glanced toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hestan were still arguing. Then he looked at Conberge, as surprised as he’d been when he discovered she knew how to cast accounts. “Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all.”
“Maybe I should have gone on seeming stupid.” His sister shook her head. “Then I’d sound like Sidroc.”
“He isn’t really stupid, not when he doesn’t want to be,” Ealstan said. “I’ve seen that.”
“No, he’s not,” Conberge agreed. “But he doesn’t care about the way things are right now. He’s happy enough to let the Algarvians run Forthweg. So is Uncle Hengist. All they want to do is get along. I want to fight back, if I can.”
“Me, too,” Ealstan said, realizing his father might have been teaching him more than bookkeeping after all.
“Milady, he is waiting for you downstairs,” Bauska said as Marchioness Krasta dithered between two fur wraps.
“Well, of course he is,” Krasta answered, finally choosing the red fox over the marten.
“But you should have gone down there some little while ago,” the maidservant said. “He is an Algarvian. What will he do to you?”
“He won’t do a thing,” Krasta said with rather more confidence than she felt. Standing straighter and brushing back a stray lock of pale gold hair, she added, “I have him wrapped around my little finger.” That was a lie, and she knew it. With a younger suitor, a more foolish suitor, it might well have been true. Colonel Lurcanio, though, to her sometimes intense annoyance, did not yield himself so readily.
