Through the Darkness

Everyone at the table looked to Skarnu. Raunu could read and write, but he probably hadn’t been able to before he joined the army during the Six Years’ War. Merkela too had only a nodding acquaintance with letters. And Pernavai, like her husband, was hardly at home in modern Valmieran. Time to see whether all my schooling really taught me anything, Skarnu thought. He knew he couldn’t delay, and so said, “I’ll do the best I can.”

Doing that meant putting together the story of how and why the Algarvians were tormenting and killing the Kaunians from Forthweg. Skarnu understood the redheads’ strategy, but a story that was nothing but strategy turned out to be anything but interesting. He talked with Pernavai and Vatsyunas about what had happened to them and what had happened to people they’d known, people they’d seen. By the time he finished taking notes, he and the ex-dentist and his wife were all in tears.

Skarnu rewrote the story. When he had it the way he liked it, he read it to Merkela and Raunu. They both suggested changes. Skarnu bristled. Merkela flared up at him. He stomped off, the picture of an offended artist. The next day, after he’d cooled down, he put in some of the changes. Even he had to admit they improved the piece.

Then, being without a press, he had to write it out as neatly as he could. When he was done, it didn’t look like a proper news sheet, but no one who could read at all would have any trouble making out what it said. He took it to Vatsyunas in the barn. “All yours. Go ahead. Work your magic.” He made a fist, ashamed of his own sarcasm.

Luckily, Vatsyunas didn’t notice. He inclined his head to Skarnu. “That shall I undertake to do.” His preparations seemed simple, almost primitive. They involved the yolks of half a dozen eggs and a cut-glass bauble of Merkela’s that broke sunlight up into rainbows. Seeing Skarnu’s curious stare, he condescended to explain: “The yellow of the egg symbolizeth the generacy--nay, the birth, you would say--of the new, whilst, as this pendant here spreadeth the one light into many, so shall my magecraft spread your fair copy here to all these blank leaves.” He patted the ream of paper Raunu had brought back from Pavilosta.

“You know your business best,” Raunu said, wondering whether Vatsyunas knew it at all.

Then the Kaunian from Forthweg began to chant. He was, Skarnu realized ruefully, more at home in the classical tongue than any Valmieran Kaunian, no matter how scholarly, could ever hope to be. For him, it was birthspeech, not a second language drilled in with a schoolmaster’s switch. He could make classical Kaunian do things Skarnu would never have imagined, because it was his.

And when he cried out, when he laid the palm of his left hand on the ream of blank sheets, Skarnu could feel the power flowing through him. A moment later, the ex-dentist lifted his hand, and the sheets were blank no longer. Skarnu saw his story set forth on the topmost one, line for line, word for word, letter for letter as he had written it. Vatsyunas riffled through the ream. Every sheet was identical to the first, identical to the copy Skarnu had given him.

Skarnu saluted him, as if he were a superior officer. “You did better than I thought you could,” he said frankly. “Now we have to get these out where people can see them, and be sneaky enough while we’re doing it so they can’t be traced back to us.”

“This I leave to you.” Vatsyunas staggered, yawned, and caught himself by main force of will. “You will, I pray, forgive me. I am spent, fordone.” He lay down on the straw and went to sleep, just like that. As he snored, Skarnu saluted him again. The sheets he’d made would hurt the redheads far more than ambushing a nighttime patrol. Skarnu hoped so, anyhow.

All things considered, Fernao would as soon have died down in the land of the Ice People. His comrades had saved him--for what? For more torment was the only answer that came to him in the intervals when he was both awake and undrugged.

He’d never been interested in medical magecraft, which meant he knew less about the various distillations of the poppy than he might have. Some left him more or less clear-headed, but did less than they might have against the pain of his broken bones and other wounds. Others took the pain away, but took him away with it, so that he seemed to be standing outside himself, perceiving his battered body as if it belonged to someone else. Sometimes, he felt ashamed to need such drugs. More often, he welcomed them and even began to crave them.

He got them less often as his body began to mend. He understood the reasons for that and resented them at the same time. “Would you rather stay in so much pain, you need the poppy juice to take you out of it?” a nurse asked him.