Into The Darkness

She covered the sheet of slate with symbols and numbers a couple of times before the lecture ended, pausing to use an old wool rag to wipe it clean before cluttering it once more. When she dismissed the students, one of them came up to her, bowed, and asked, "Mistress Pekka, could you not have cleansed the slate by magecraft instead of bothering with that rag?"

"A mage with a stronger practical bent than mine would have had an easier time of it, but yes, I could have done that." Pekka hid most of her amusement; she got this sort of question about every other term. She could see the followup gleaming in the young man's eyes, and forestalled it: "I use the rag instead of magic because using the rag is easier than any magic I could make. One thing a mage must learn is, that he can do some thing does not necessarily mean he should do it."

He stared at her, his eyes as wide as a Kuusaman's could be, nothing but incomprehension on his face. "What's the point of magic, if not doing things'," he asked.

"Knowing what things to do?" Pekka suggested gently. No, the student did not understand; she could see as much. Perhaps he would begin to by the end of the term. Perhaps not, too, He was very young.

And, being a man, he was likelier to think of limits as things to be overcome than to be respected.

He went off shaking his head. Pekka permitted herself a small smile.

She dealt with a couple of other questions of smaller import, though ones more immediately urgent to the students asking them: matters of text and examinations. And then, as a new group of chattering young men and women began coming into the auditorium for the lecture on crystallography that followed hers, Pekka neatly tucked her notes into a small leather valise and left the hall.

The sun had come out while she was speaking, and puddles from the previous night's rain sparkled, sometimes dazzlingly. Even in summer, though, the sunlight had a watery quality to it. Kuusamo was a land of mists and fogs and drizzles, a land where the sky went from gray to gray ish blue and back again, a land where the rich and brilliant greens of forest and meadow and hillside had to make up for the drabness overhead.

And they did. So everyone in Kuusamo proudly boasted. Pekka was no different from her countrymen in that. But, four or five years before – no, it had to be five, because the war with Gyongyos hadn't started - she'd taken a holiday on the famous golden beaches of northern Jelgava.

Her skin, not far from golden itself, withstood the fierce sun better than the pale hides of the Jelgavans who toasted themselves on the sand. That was one of the memories she'd brought home to Kajaani. Another - and she could still call it up whenever she chose, as if she lay naked on the beach again - was the astonishing color of the sky. Passages of Kaunian poetry that had been obscure suddenly took on new meaning for her.

Here, though, such colors, such heat, were only memories. Kajaani, on the southern coast of Kuusamo, looked out across the Narrow Sea southeast toward the land of the Ice People and straight south toward the endless ice floes at the bottom of the world. Pekka straightened her slim shoulders. She enjoyed remembering Jelgava. She would not have wanted to live there. Kaaani was home.

That mattered very much to a Kuusaman. Picking her way around the puddles, Pekka really noticed the buildings that more often just formed the backdrop before which she played out her life. Most of them were wooden: Kuusamo was a land of wide forests. Some of the timber was stained, some pale with weathering. Very little was painted, not on the outside; gaudy display was alien to her people. The handful of bn'ck buildings harmonized with the rest. They were brown or yellow-brown or tan - no reds or oranges to jar the eyes.

"No," she said softly, but with no less pride than that, "we are no branch from the Algarvic stem, nor the Kaunian, either. Let them swagger and preen. We endure."

She hardly knew when she left the college grounds and went into Kajaam itself. The people on the streets here were a little older, a little more sober looking. The Lagoans and men from the Kaunian countries who leavened the mix were more apt to be sailors than students. Shops showed their wares, but the shopkeepers didn't rush out, grab her by the arm, and try to drag her inside, as happened in Jelgava. That would have been gaudy display, too.

A public caravan hummed by her, the wind of its passage ruffling the rainwater in the gutters. The two coaches were also of wood, with their roofs overhanging the windows to either side to ward against the weather. In Lagoas or Sibiu, they would have been metal. In Valmiera or Jelgava, they would have been painted to look like marble, whatever they were made of.

Pekka paid a couple of coppers for a news sheet and walked along reading it. She made a clucking noise of dismay when she saw that the