Out of the Darkness Read online

  “Supper’s ready!” his mother called, and that gave him something happier to think about.

  Three

  Bauska!” Marchioness Krasta shouted from her bedchamber. “Powers below eat you, Bauska, where have you gone and hidden?”

  “Coming, milady,” the maidservant said, hurrying in--and panting a little, to show how much she was hurrying. She dropped Krasta a curtsy. “What can I do for you, milady?”

  “At least you sound properly respectful,” Krasta said. “Some of the servants these days...” She made a horrible face. The servants didn’t come close to giving her the respect she deserved. They all took their lead from her brother and that hateful cow of a farm girl he’d brought home with him. There were times when Krasta almost wished the Algarvians had managed to hunt Skarnu down. Then he wouldn’t have had the chance to rub his virtue in her face.

  Bauska’s answering smile was bleak. “Well, milady, we’re in the same boat, you and I, aren’t we?”

  “I should say not,” Krasta answered indignantly. “Your snot-nosed little brat has an Algarvian papa, sure as sure. One look at her would tell that to anybody. Viscount Valnu is father to my child.” She firmly believed it these days.

  “Of course, milady,” Bauska said. The words were right. The tone called Krasta a liar--oh, not quite blatantly enough to let her bound up and slap Bauska’s face, but it did, it did. The maidservant went on, “And even if that’s so . . .” She broke off, not quite in the nick of time. Even if that’s so, she didn’t say, everybody knows you opened your legs for Colonel Lurcanio for years and years.

  Krasta tossed her head. “So what?” she said, as if Bauska had made the accusation out loud. But the rest of her impassioned defense was silent, too. What if I did? The Algarvians looked like winning the war. Everybody thought so. I was better off with a redhead in my bed than I would have been without. I wasn‘t the only one. I wasn’t even close to the only one. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  It had been a good idea at the time. Krasta remained convinced of that. Once she got an idea--which didn’t happen all that often--she clung to it through thick and thin. But she’d never expected times to change so drastically. Taking an Algarvian lover didn’t look like a good idea any more. What it looked like these days, in a Valmiera no longer occupied, was something very much like treason.

  With her own sandy-headed little bastard, Bauska couldn’t very well say that. She had to count herself lucky that she hadn’t had her head shaved and her scalp daubed with red paint, as had happened to so many Valmieran women who’d given themselves to Mezentio’s soldiers. With a sigh, the maidservant repeated, “What can I do for you, milady?”

  “My trousers don’t fit me anymore,” Krasta said peevishly. “Hardly any of them even come close to fitting any more. Look at me! I’m still in these summery silk pyjamas with the elastic waist, and I’m about to freeze my tits off. Maybe I ought to get a great big long loose tunic to cover all of me, the kind Unkerlanter women wear.” She shuddered at the mere idea.

  But Bauska’s voice was serious as she answered, “Maybe you should, milady. The Unkerlanters have done so much to fight the Algarvians, everything about them is stylish these days. One of their tunics might be just the thing for a woman with child to wear.”

  “Do you think so?” Krasta asked, intrigued. She considered, then shook her head. “No, I don’t want to. I don’t care whether their clothes are stylish or not. They’re too ugly to stand. I want trousers, but I want some that fit me properly.”

  “Aye, milady.” Bauska sighed. But that sigh wasn’t aimed at Krasta, for she went on, more to herself than to the marchioness, “Maybe you’re right. When I think about Captain Mosco, I don’t suppose I want to see Unkerlanter-style clothes catch on here in Valmiera.”

  Mosco had been Colonel Lurcanio’s aide--and was father to Bauska’s bastard daughter. He’d never seen his child by her, though. Before Brindza was born, he’d gone off to fight in Unkerlant. He was one of the first Algarvians pulled west by the ever more desperate battle against King Swemmel’s men, but far from the last. He’d never sent so much as a line back once ordered away from Priekule. Maybe that meant he’d been a heartbreaker from the start. Maybe, on the other hand, it meant he’d died almost as soon as he made the acquaintance of warfare so much more savage than any that had washed over Valmiera.

  With a sniff, Krasta said, “Remember, you silly goose, he had a wife somewhere back in Algarve.”

  “I know.” Bauska sighed again. What that meant was, she didn’t care. Had Mosco walked into the mansion right then--assuming he could have come anywhere close to it without getting blazed by vengeful Valmierans--she would have greeted him with open arms and, no doubt, open legs. Fool, Krasta thought. Little fool.

  Lurcanio had a wife somewhere back in Algarve, too. He’d never denied it or worried about it. Krasta hadn’t cared. Men, in her considerable experience, got what they could where they could. She’d never imagined herself in love with Lurcanio, as Bauska had with Mosco. He’d given her skill in bed and protection from other redheads, and she hadn’t really looked for anything more.

  Now that Lurcanio was gone from her bed, gone from Priekule, gone--she thought--from Valmiera (though he could have been one of the Algarvians hanging on in the rugged country of the northwest), there were times when Krasta missed him. Now that he was gone, she remembered with a warm glow what he’d been able to do for her . . . and she conveniently forgot how he’d frightened and intimidated her. He being the only man who’d ever managed to do that, forgetting came all the easier.

  But she couldn’t forget how even these pyjama bottoms were starting to grow cruelly tight. “Where in blazes do I go to find clothes I can wear?” she demanded. “As far as I know, there was only one shop on the whole Boulevard of Horsemen that catered to pregnant women, and it’s been closed up with night and fog scrawled across the window for two years now.”

  The Boulevard of Horsemen was, far and away, the toniest street of shops in Priekule. That meant it was the only one Krasta cared about. Going anywhere else would have been stepping down in class, and she would sooner have been buried alive. But if the Boulevard didn’t have what she needed, she could look elsewhere without social penalty.

  Bauska said, “I found the clothes I needed on Threadneedle Street, milady. Plenty of such shops there, some cheap, some not so.”

  “Threadneedle Street,” Krasta echoed. She remembered Bauska’s clothes as being ugly. She could do better, though. She was sure of it. She had more taste and more money. How could she go wrong? Musingly, she said, “I’ve never been down to Threadneedle Street.”

  “Never, milady?” Bauska looked astonished. “But everybody buys clothes there.”

  “I don’t do what everybody else does,” Krasta said in lofty tones. And if I hadn’t taken an Algarvian lover when so many other women did. . . But it was much too late to worry about that.

  After some rummaging, Bauska found her a pair of trousers she could at least wear. Her tunics were getting tight, too, both at what was left of her waist and at the chest. She reckoned only part of that a drawback; the rest was an asset, especially when dealing with men.

  Her driver gave her a bleary look when she told him she wanted to go out. He was drinking much too much these days. Krasta couldn’t even yell at him, the way she wanted to. Who could guess what would happen if she antagonized the servants? They were liable to go to her brother, and she had enough trouble with Skarnu as things were.

  The day was clear and cold and crisp as the carriage rattled into the heart of Priekule. People on the streets looked shabby, but they looked happy, lively, in a way they hadn’t when the Algarvians held the city. Krasta still wasn’t used to not seeing redheads strolling along and taking in the sights. When Algarvian soldiers in Unkerlant got leave, they often came east to rest and relax in the capital of a kingdom that had, at least for a while, truly yielded to them.

  No Valmieran wore kilts these d
ays, either. They’d grown moderately popular among those who wanted to curry favor with the occupiers or just wanted to show off shapely legs. No more, though. Now, if the Algarvian-style garments weren’t thrown out, they lay at the bottom of clothes chests and in the back of closets. For a Valmieran to put on a kilt today might well be to risk a life.

  “Threadneedle Street, milady,” Krasta’s driver said glumly. “Best you get out now, so I can find a place to put the carriage.”

  “Oh, very well,” Krasta said. The street was crowded, not only with carriages but also with goods wagons and with a swarm of foot traffic. Tradesmen and shopgirls and riffraff like that, Krasta thought scornfully. If these are the people Bauska thinks of as everybody, powers above be praised that I have some idea of what true quality is worth.

  But her maidservant had been right: plenty of the cramped little shops along Threadneedle Street sported names like for a mother and clothes for you both and even--dismayingly, as far as Krasta was concerned--maybe it’s twins. She rolled her eyes. She didn’t particularly want one baby. If she were to have two . . . She wondered if Valnu could have sired one and Lurcanio the other. Wouldn’t that be a scandal? She had no idea if it were possible, and even less idea of whom to ask. Not asking anyone struck her as a pretty good plan.

  Shopping here, she rapidly discovered, was different from shopping on the Boulevard of Horsemen. No fawning shopgirls guided her from one elegant creation to the next. Instead, clothes were crammed onto racks. In shops with sale! painted on their windows, getting anything took harder fighting than most of what the Valmieran army had done. Commoner women much more extravagantly pregnant than Krasta elbowed her aside to get at a pair of loose-fitting trousers or a baggy tunic they wanted. She didn’t need many lessons along those lines. Before long, she gave as good as she got, if not better. After all, wasn’t elbowing commoners aside a proper sport for a noblewoman?

  The clothes were cheaper than she’d expected. They were also none too sturdily made. When she complained about that to a shopkeeper, he said, “Lady, use your head. You think you’re gonna be in ‘em long enough to wear ‘em out?”

  What he said made good sense, but his tone infuriated her. “Do you know who I am?” she demanded.

  “Somebody trying to waste my time, and I ain’t got it to waste,” he answered, and turned to a woman holding out some trousers to him. “You like these, darling? That’s two and a half in silver. . . . Thank you very much.”

  Krasta didn’t buy anything there: the only revenge she could take. She did get what she needed, and she hunted down her driver, who stowed away his flask when he saw her coming. “Home,” she said, and escaped Threadneedle Street with nothing but relief.

  Back at the mansion, though, Merkela happened to be walking outside when Krasta came up the drive. The farm woman’s son toddled beside her, holding her hand for balance. “What have you got in the sacks?” Merkela snapped, as if suspecting Krasta of smuggling secrets to the Algarvians.

  “Clothes,” Krasta answered shortly. She had as little to do with Merkela as she could. It was either that or claw her, and Merkela would delight in clawing back.

  She clawed now, with words instead of nails: “Oh, aye, for your bulging belly. At least I know who my son’s father is. Don’t you wish you could say the same?” Krasta snarled an unpleasantry at her and stalked--as well as a pregnant woman could stalk--into the mansion.

  Fernao’s head ached. Like a lot of the mages at the hostel in the Naantali district, he’d had too much to drink bidding Ilmarinen farewell the night before. He looked at the mirror above the sink in his room--looked at it and winced. “Powers above,” he muttered. “My eyes are as red as my hair.”

  Pekka came up beside him. The bed they’d shared was narrow for two to sleep in, but they’d both poured down enough spirits to keep them from moving much. Pekka also winced. She said, “My eyes are red, too, and I haven’t even got red hair.”

  He draped an arm around her shoulder. “I like what you have,” he said. “I like everything you have.”

  “Including red eyes?” She made a face at him. “I don’t like that, and I don’t care what you think. I need strong tea, maybe with just a splash of spirits in it, to take the edge off.”

  “That sounds wonderful.” Fernao limped over to the closet and chose a tunic and kilt. He would limp for the rest of his life, and one shoulder wasn’t everything it might have been, either. He’d almost died down in the land of the Ice People, when an Algarvian egg burst much too close to him. For quite a while, he wished he had. No more. Time--and falling in love--had changed that.

  Pekka kept a couple of outfits in his closet these days, as he had a couple in hers. That helped them spend nights together and maintain the polite fiction that they were doing no such thing. She changed her clothes while he got his cane. He wasn’t an old man--far from it. Not so long before, he would have shaken his head in sorrow at the sight of someone his age who needed a cane to get around. Now, he counted himself lucky. For a long time, he’d been on crutches. Compared to that, a single stick didn’t seem so bad.

  After running a brush through her hair, Pekka looked in the mirror again. “It will have to do,” she said sadly.

  “You always look good to me,” Fernao said.

  “I hope you have better taste than that,” Pekka said. “My one consolation is, everybody who was at the farewell will be feeling the same way we do.”

  “I have trouble believing Ilmarinen is really gone,” Fernao said as he went to the door. “The project won’t be the same without him.”

  “That’s why he left--he said the project already wasn’t the same,” Pekka answered. “It won’t be the same for me now, I’ll tell you that. With Master Siuntio dead, with Master Ilmarinen gone . ..” She sighed. “It’s as if the adults had all left, and now things are in the children’s hands.” She walked out into the hallway. Fernao followed and closed the door behind them.

  As they headed for the stairs that would take them to the refectory, he said, “We aren’t children, you know.”

  “Not for everyday things,” Pekka agreed. “In this, next to Siuntio and Ilmarinen--what else are we?”

  “Colleagues,” Fernao answered.

  Pekka squeezed his hand. “You do sound like a Lagoan,” she said fondly. “Your people have their share of Algarvic arrogance.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about me so much,” Fernao said. “I was thinking about you. You were the one who made the key experiments. Siuntio knew it. Ilmarinen knew it. They tried to give you credit. I honor them for that--a lot of mages would have tried to steal it instead.” Several of his own countrymen sprang to mind, starting with Grandmaster Pinhiero of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. He doggedly plowed ahead: “But you don’t seem to want to take it. What’s the opposite of arrogance? Self-abnegation?” The last word, necessarily, was in classical Kaunian; he had no idea how to say it in Kuusaman.

  Pekka started to get angry. Then she shrugged and laughed instead. “Kuusamans see Lagoans as one thing. I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that you should see us as the opposite. To a mirror, the real world must look backwards.”

  Irked in turn, Fernao started to growl, but checked himself and wagged a finger at her. “Ah, but who is the mirror--Lagoans or Kuusamans?”

  “Both, of course,” Pekka answered at once. That made Fernao laugh. He’d never known a woman who made him laugh so easily. Must be love, he thought. One more sign of it, anyhow.

  When they walked into the refectory, he saw right away that Pekka had known whereof she spoke. All the mages already there looked subdued. Some of them looked a good deal worse for wear than merely subdued. No one moved very fast or made loud noises of any sort. When a mug slipped off a serving girl’s overloaded tray and shattered, everybody flinched.

  Fernao pulled out a chair for Pekka. She smiled at him as she sat. “I could get used to these fancy Lagoan manners,” she said. “They make me feel. . . pampered, I think, is the word I wan
t.”

  “That’s what they’re for,” Fernao agreed. His leg and hip yelped as he too went from standing to sitting. Little by little, he was getting used to the idea that they would probably do that as long as he lived.

  After a quick nod, Pekka frowned. “Maybe you have them and we don’t because we have an easier time with the idea that women and men can mostly do the same jobs than you Lagoans do. Do the fancy manners and the deference men show your women help keep them from thinking about things they can’t have?”

  “I don’t know,” Fernao confessed. “I haven’t the faintest idea, to tell you the truth. I never would have thought of connecting manners and anything else. Manners are just manners, aren’t they?” But were they just manners? Now that Pekka had raised the question, her remark made a disturbing amount of sense.

  Before he could say so, one of the serving girls came up and asked, “What would you like this morning?”

  “Oh, hello, Linna,” Fernao said. “How are you today?”

  “My head hurts,” she answered matter-of-factly. She’d been at Ilmarinen’s farewell celebration. For all Fernao knew, she’d given the master mage a special farewell of her own once the celebration wound down. Fernao wondered just what Ilmarinen had seen in her: to him, she wasn’t especially pretty or especially bright. But Ilmarinen had bristled like a young buck whenever anyone else so much as gave her a good day. Now she sighed and went on, “I’ll miss the old so-and-so, powers below eat me if I won’t.”

  “He’ll miss you, too,” Pekka said.

  “I doubt it,” Linna replied with casually devastating cynicism. “Oh, maybe a little, till he finds somebody else to sleep with him up in Jelgava, but after that?” She shook her head. “Not likely. But I will miss him. I’ve never known anybody like him, and I don’t suppose I ever will.”