Out of the Darkness

“I don’t,” Ikhshid replied at once. “I just wondered if you had the nerve to try and get away with that. We’ll be in a ton of trouble if the Unkerlanters find out about it.”

He wasn’t joking. If anything, he was understating what might happen. Even so, Hajjaj answered, “We’re still a free kingdom-after a fashion. Let me take this to the king. As I said, he’ll have the final decision.” Shazli seldom overruled him. This once, he might.

“Good luck,” Ikhshid said.

“Thanks. I fear I’ll need it.” Hajjaj hoped he could talk Shazli around. No matter what the circumstances, he had trouble with the idea of giving anyone over to the Unkerlanters.

Krasta adjusted the wig on her head. As far as she was concerned, the hair in the wig wasn’t nearly so fine or so golden as her own. The miserable thing was also cursedly hot. But she wore it from the moment she got up in the morning till she went to bed. It hid the shame of the shearing Merkela had given her, and let her go out into Priekule without reminding the world she’d bedded an Algarvian during the occupation. Being able to hold her head up counted for more than comfort.

Her son-her sandy-haired son, her bastard son, the proof of exactly what she’d been doing-started yowling in the room next to her bedchamber. She’d hired a wet nurse and a governess to look after the little brat, whom she’d named Gainibu in the hope that the King of Valmiera would hear of it and understand it as an apology of sorts. As a matter of fact, thus far she’d hired two governesses and three wet nurses. For some reason, they had trouble getting along with her.

After a little while, the racket stopped. Krasta didn’t go in to check on the baby. She supposed the wet nurse was giving him her breast. But she was doing her best to pretend, even to herself, that she’d never had him. His wails didn’t make that easy, but she’d always been good at deceiving herself.

She had money in her pockets. She had a new driver, one who didn’t drink. She could escape the mansion, escape the baby she didn’t want to acknowledge, go into Priekule, and come back with things. What they were hardly mattered. While she was buying them, she didn’t have to think about anything else.

But, just as she left the bedchamber and headed for the stairs, the butler- the new butler-came up them toward her. (She was offended that so many of her servants had chosen to go south with Skarnu and his peasant slut of a new wife, but she’d never dwelt on why they might have decided to leave her service.)

“Milady, Viscount Valnu is here to see you,” the new butler said.

“I certainly am,” Valnu himself agreed from the hallway below. “Come down here, sweetheart, so I can see you.”

Krasta hurried past the butler. Valnu seemed to be the only person in all of Priekule who didn’t blame her for the way she’d lived during the occupation. Of course, he’d slept with a lot more Algarvian officers than she had; she was sure of that. But he’d done it in the line of duty, so to speak. And he didn’t run the risk of proving it to the world nine months after the fact.

He swept her into his arms and gave her a kiss. “How have you been?” he asked.

“Tired,” Krasta answered. Up in his bedroom, little Gainibu started to cry again. Krasta could hardly ignore him then, however much she wanted to. She jerked a thumb at the stairway down which the noise was wafting. “That’s why.”

“Ah, too bad,” Valnu said with sympathy that at least sounded sincere. “Have you got anything to drink, darling? I’m dry as the Zuwayzi desert.”

It was early in the day, but that worried Krasta no more than it did Valnu. “Come along with me,” she purred. “We’ll find something that suits you-and me, too.”

Something turned out to be apricot brandy. Valnu knocked back a shot of it. So did Krasta. The sweet warmth in her mouth, and in her belly, felt good. Valnu poured his glass full again, then raised a questioning eyebrow at her. She nodded eagerly. He poured for her, too. “What shall we drink to?” he asked. “That first time, we were just drinking to drinking.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Krasta said. She let more brandy slide down her throat. This time, she gave herself a refill, and, a moment later, Valnu as well. “Curse me if I know why I don’t stay drunk all the time. Then I wouldn’t have to think about. things.”

“Cheer up, my dear,” Valnu told her. “However bad it looks, it could be worse.”

“How?” Krasta demanded. As far as she could see, nothing could be worse than her being unhappy.

But Valnu answered, “Well, you could be an Algarvian, for instance: say, somebody inside Trapani. The fighting there can’t last much longer, or so the news sheets say. And the Unkerlanters don’t like redheads at all.”