Through the Darkness

“Your Majesty,” Krasta and Lurcanio murmured together. Krasta sounded respectful, as a subject should. Lurcanio sounded aggrieved: the king hadn’t bothered remembering his name.

He got some of his own back by chatting in Algarvian with the redheads who really ran Valmiera. Since he was ignoring her, Krasta ignored him, too. She turned back to Gainibu and said, “There will be better days, your Majesty.”

“Will there?” The king--the king who didn’t even rule in his own palace any more--knocked back his brandy and signaled for another one. It arrived almost at once. He knocked it back, too. For a moment, his features went blank and slack, as if he’d forgotten everything but the sweet fire in his throat. But then he came at least partway back to himself. “The powers above grant that you be right, milady. But I would not hold my breath waiting for them.” As he had a moment before, he waved for a fresh glass.

Krasta left Lurcanio and made a beeline for the bar. Tears stung her eyes. She tossed her head so no one would see them. The servitor asked, “How may I serve you, milady?”

He didn’t know she was a noblewoman. Plenty of Algarvians had brought commoners into the palace; with them, flesh counted for more than blood. But he took no chances, either. Krasta said, “Brandy with wormwood.”

“Aye, milady.” The barman gave her what she wanted. That was what he was for.

Lurcanio came up behind Krasta and asked for red wine. When he saw the greenish spirit in her glass, he said, “Try not to drink yourself into a stupor this evening, if you would be so kind. You do not show your loyalty to your king by imitating him.”

“I’ll do as I please,” Krasta said. Since she was a child, she’d done exactly that--till Lurcanio forced his way into her life.

“You may do as you please,” he said now, “so long as you also please me. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

She turned her back. “I shall do as I please,” she repeated. “If that doesn’t suit you, go away.”

She thought he would tell her to enjoy her walk home, or something of the sort. Instead, he spoke in tones so reasonable, they startled her: “Because your king has become a sorry sot, do you have to as well?”

“You made him into a sorry sot.” Krasta pointed at Lurcanio, as if to say he’d done it personally. “He wasn’t like that before the war.”

“Losing is harder than winning. I would be the last to deny it,” Lurcanio said. “But you can yield, or you can endure.”

Krasta thought of her brother again. He was doing more than enduring: he still resisted the Algarvians. And she . . . she’d yielded. Every time she let Lurcanio into her bed--indeed, every time she let him take her to a reception like this one--she yielded again. But, having yielded once, she didn’t know what else she could do now. If she’d been wrong about Algarve when she yielded in the first place, how could she make amends now? Admit to herself she’d been selling herself and living a lie for the past two years? She couldn’t and wouldn’t imagine such a retreat.

“If I want to get drunk, I will get drunk,” she told Lurcanio. That measured the defiance she had in her: so much, but no more.

The Algarvian officer studied her, then shrugged one of his kingdom’s expressive shrugs. “Have it your way,” he said. “If you will not see you are behaving like a fool and a child, I cannot show you.” Krasta strode back to the bar and demanded a fresh glass of spiked brandy. She’d won her tiny victory, which was more than Valmiera could say against Algarve.

Pekka and Fernao rode a cab to Siuntio’s home together. One of Fernao’s crutches fell over and bumped her knee. She handed it back to him. “Here you are,” she said--her spoken classical Kaunian was getting better by the day, because she had to use it so much with the mage from Lagoas.

“My apologies,” he said: he also used the tongue more freely than he had when he first came to Yliharma. “I am a nuisance, a crowd all by myself.”

“You are a man who was badly hurt,” she said patiently. “You ought to thank the powers above that you have regained so much of your health.”

“I do,” he said, and then corrected himself: “Now I do. At the time, and for some time afterwards, I would have thanked them more had they let me die.”

“I can understand that,” Pekka said. “Your wounds were very painful.”

Fernao’s grin had a skeletal quality to it. “You might say so,” he replied. “In saying so, you would discover that words are not always adequate to describe the world around us.”

In classical Kaunian, the sentiment sounded noble and philosophic. Pekka wondered how much torment it concealed. A good deal, surely: Femao did not strike her as the sort of man who would exaggerate suffering for sympathy. If anything, he used a dry wit to hold sympathy at bay most of the time.

“That is true not only of things pertaining to the body,” Pekka observed. “It is also why we have the mathematics of magecraft.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Fernao said. “You are right, though--I was not thinking in mathematical terms.”