Through the Darkness

Her back creaked when she got up at sunrise the next morning. Ealstan, she discovered, had scarcely moved. She didn’t have the heart to wake him. She didn’t think he would be very happy with the world when he did wake up, and not only because he would have to remember his brother had died. She’d seen plenty of drunken Forthwegians--and, more to the point, hung-over Forthwegians--in Oyngestun. She knew what to expect.

She poured out a cup of wine. It wouldn’t stop the pain, but might ease it a little. Presently, she heard a groan from the bedchamber. Treading as softly as she could, she carried the wine in to Ealstan.

Walking through Skrunda, Talsu felt like a man who’d been interrupted in the middle of something important. The whole town had been interrupted in the middle of something important. The townsfolk had been on the point of a major uprising against the Algarvian occupiers when dragons from Lagoan or Kuusaman ships dropped enough eggs on Skrunda to confuse a lot of people about who the true enemy was.

Talsu wasn’t confused. With that big scar on his flank, he would never be confused. Were the Algarvians not occupying Jelgava, their enemies wouldn’t have needed to drop eggs on Skrunda. That seemed plain enough to him. He couldn’t understand why some of the townsfolk had trouble seeing it.

Jelgavans cleared debris from ruined houses and shops. The Algarvians made the news sheets trumpet their labors. If Talsu heard one more hawker shouting about air pirates, he thought he would deck the luckless fellow.

He wanted to shout himself: shout that the news sheets were full of tricks when they weren’t full of lies. But he didn’t, and he didn’t deck any of the vendors, either. Back when he’d fought in the Jelgavan army--and back before that, too, back to the days when he was a child--he’d feared King Donalitu’s dungeons, as had any of his countrymen who presumed to criticize the king and the upper nobility. Had the Algarvians opened all the dungeons, freed all the captives, and taken no more, King Mainardo might have won a good-sized following, redhead though he was.

They had freed some of King Donalitu’s captives. But, in Mainardo’s name, they’d taken many more. And Algarvian torturers enjoyed a reputation about as black as that of the men who’d served Donalitu before he fled. Silence, then, remained the safest course.

Going back into the family tailor’s shop made Talsu sigh in relief. Here if anywhere he could breathe free. His father looked up from a cloak he was sewing--for once, for a Jelgavan customer, not for one of the occupiers. “Did you get those hinges I wanted?” Traku asked.

Talsu shook his head. “I went to all three ironmongers in town, and they all say they’re not to be had for love nor money, not in iron and not in brass, either. The Algarvians are taking all the metal they can out of the kingdom. Before long, we’re liable to have trouble getting needles.”

Traku looked unhappy. “Your mother’s been after me to fix those cabinets for weeks. Now I’m finally getting around to doing it, and I can’t get what I need for the job? She won’t be very happy to hear that.”

“You can’t very well put the hinges on if you can’t get them, now can you?” Talsu gave his father a conspiratorial wink.

“Well, that’s true.” Traku brightened, but not for long. “She’ll say I could have gotten ‘em if I’d gone out and done it right away instead of sitting around on my rump all day long.” He managed to sound a lot like his wife--enough so to land him in trouble if she’d heard him.

“They’re talking about tin, or maybe pewter,” Talsu said.

His father made a face. “Not very strong, either one of ‘em. And who says the Algarvians won’t start stealing tin, too, and leave us with nothing but lead?”

“Nobody,” Talsu answered. “I wouldn’t put anything past ‘em. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

“And now they’re stealing the nails, too,” Traku said. He laughed. Talsu grimaced, annoyed he hadn’t thought of the joke himself.

Before he had the chance to try to top it, the door swung open and the bell above it jangled. In came an Algarvian officer, swaggering as Mezentio’s subjects had a way of doing. Talsu had practice changing his tone on the spur of the moment. “Good day, sir,” he said to the redhead. “How may we serve you today?” That was what the occupiers wanted: to have the people they’d conquered serve them.

When the Algarvian answered, it was in classical Kaunian. Talsu and his father exchanged looks of alarm. Talsu remembered scant bits of the old language from his school days, not that he’d had many of those. Traku, further removed and with even less formal schooling, knew only a handful of words. “Do you speak Jelgavan at all, sir?” Talsu asked.

“No,” the redhead answered--in the classical tongue.

Talsu flogged his memory and essayed a few words of classical Kaunian himself: “Talk slow, then.”