Through the Darkness

“Aye, should do,” Raunu answered. Grunting, he picked up the egg and lowered it into the hole. “It had better have the proper spell on it, so it’ll burst when a caravan goes over it,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d be doing just as much good hiding a rock down here.”

“They said it did,” Skarnu reminded him. “Of course, they’ve probably been wrong before.”

“Huh,” Raunu said: a sound of reproach. “Your lady wouldn’t care to hear you talk like that, and you can’t tell me different.”

What would Merkela have to say? Probably something on the order of, Shut up and dig. It was good advice, even if it came from Skarnu’s own mind. He shut up and dug. When he and Raunu had filled in the hold and tamped down the dirt, he said, “Now let’s get out of here. We don’t want the Algarvians to find us toting spades back to the farm.”

“That’d take a bit of explaining, wouldn’t it?” Raunu yawned, there in the darkness. “Getting late for explanations, too.” He shouldered his shovel as if it were a stick and started off toward Merkela’s farm. Skarnu followed.

They hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before Skarnu heard the soft whoosh of a caravan sliding down the ley line. He turned to Raunu in surprise. “Must be a special. They haven’t got anything scheduled for this time of night.” Had the Algarvians had anything scheduled, he and Raunu would have picked a different time to visit the ley line.

Before Raunu could answer, the caravan passed over the egg Skarnu and he had buried. The egg released its energy in a short, sharp roar. The rattles and bangs that followed were caravan cars crashing to the ground. Shouts and screams pierced the nighttime quiet.

Skarnu turned to Raunu. Solemnly, the two Valmieran soldiers who hadn’t given up the fight against Algarve clasped hands. Then they hurried away, moving faster than they had before. King Mezentio’s men would surely flood the area around the ley line with soldiers, both to help the injured on the caravan and to search for the folk who’d planted the egg beneath it.

When they got back to Merkela’s farm, Raunu went off to sleep in the barn, as he always did. Skarnu went into the farmhouse, barred the door behind him, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber he shared these days with Merkela. She’d been lying in bed, but she hadn’t been asleep. “Did I hear the egg burst?” she asked, sitting up. “I thought I did.”

“You were right,” Skarnu said. “It was a special caravan, too--had to be. That means it was probably packed full of Algarvian soldiers. We might have struck them an even better blow than we’d hoped.”

“Whatever you did to them, it’s less than they deserve.” Merkela’s voice held a purr. She flipped back the blankets that covered her. Beneath them, she was bare. “And so--would you sooner celebrate or sleep?”

Skarnu had swallowed a yawn as he went up the stairs. Now, around another one, he said, “My sweet, I mean no disrespect when I say I’d sooner sleep. We’ll have to get up with the sun, and there’s always too much work to do.”

“This is what life is on a farm,” Merkela said. Skarnu didn’t answer. He knew she knew how ignorant he’d been when he first came to the farm. She also knew he’d been an officer, which meant he was a nobleman--which, she would doubtless think, meant he’d never done any work to speak of before he came to the farm. She wasn’t so far wrong, but he didn’t care to be reminded of it.

He took off his boots, stripped to his drawers, and lay down beside her. The next thing he knew, sure enough, the sun was shining through the window. He dressed again, feeling as if he’d gone to bed only moments before. Bread and honey and a mug of ale sent him out of the house still trying to rub sleep from his eyes. I’ll stumble through the day, he thought, and sleep like a stone tonight.

Raunu looked worn, too. Seeing that salved Skarnu’s pride. The sergeant wasn’t far from twice his age, but had the endurance of granite. If he showed the strain of the night’s work, Skarnu didn’t need to be ashamed of his own exhaustion.

“My day to go weeding, too,” Raunu said mournfully.

“You can tend the livestock, if you’d rather,” Skarnu told him. Minding the cattle and sheep was easier work--or was most days, anyhow.

But Raunu shook his head. He had a stubborn pride of his own. “I won’t fall over,” he said. With that, he went back to the barn and came out with a hoe. As he had with the shovel, he carried it with a military precision he would have used with a stick. By the determined look on his face, he would have taken argument as insult. Raunu waved him out to the fields and went to get a long staff with a crook for himself.