Through the Darkness

“Curse you, you infuriating man!” she snarled.

Colonel Lurcanio bowed in his seat, infuriating her still more. “You are welcome to try,” he said. “I doubt you will have much luck. And now, please leave. I will talk to you more later, but that can keep. My work cannot.”

“Curse you!” Krasta said again--this time, in fact, she shrieked it. She spun on her heel and stomped out, slamming the door behind her as she went. Captain Gradasso stared at her. She made a suggestion she couldn’t possibly have translated into classical Kaunian. Gradasso might not have understood it, but he did realize it was no compliment. That sufficed.

Krasta stalked through the Algarvian functionaries. She made similar incandescent suggestions to the ones who presumed to look at her. Some of them did speak Valmieran, and some of those made suggestions of their own. By the time Krasta got back to her own wing of the mansion, she was in a perfect transport of temper.

She thought about tormenting Bauska, but that was too easy to give her much satisfaction. She thought about going out to the Avenue of Equestrians to wander from shop to shop, but that would make her rage go away. She didn’t want it to go away. She wanted to savor it, as she would have savored a fine ale.

And she wanted to do something with it. She wanted to hit back at Lurcanio, who had provoked it in the first place. With that in mind, she paused somewhere she didn’t usually stop: in front of the large bookcase downstairs. Most of the volumes there had gone unexamined--certainly by her--since the days when her mother and father were still alive.

She pulled one off the shelf. When she blew on it, she raised a puff of dust. She made a mental note to berate the cleaning women, but that could wait. What she had in mind couldn’t. Smiling a predatory smile, she carried the book up to her bedchamber and barred the door behind her.

“Dare me, will he?” she muttered. “Well, I’ll teach him, powers below eat me if I don’t.”

Her heart sank when she opened the volume. All the curses were in classical Kaunian, which meant Krasta didn’t understand at first glance what they would do to an indifferent lover. And, in fact, she had trouble finding one aimed at an indifferent lover. Plenty cursed faithless lovers, but that wasn’t Lurcanio’s flaw--or Krasta didn’t think it was, anyhow.

Even the headings above the spells were written in an annoyingly antique style, halfway back toward the classical language. She considered A conjuring that induceth love between a man and a woman, if it be used in their meats, but then shook her head. She didn’t want to restore Lurcanio’s ardor through magecraft. She wanted to punish him for not having enough.

That a man may be always as a gelded man seemed more promising, and also seemed easy enough to manage. All she needed to do was give Lurcanio a glowworm in his drink. Plenty of them sparked on and off in the garden during mild summer evenings. “That will teach him,” she said, and slammed the book shut.

She hadn’t tried to catch glowworms since she was a little girl, but it didn’t turn out to be hard. Since Lurcanio was too busy with his precious work to bother coming to her bedchamber that evening, he had no way of knowing she went out into the garden and gathered half a dozen in five minutes. She carried them back into the mansion in a little marble box that had once held face powder.

When she got up the next morning, she used the handle of a brush to mash the glowworms into a revolting paste. She reasoned that would be easier to mix into a cup of wine or a mug of ale than would whole bugs. Having a pretty good notion of when the cook would be fixing Lurcanio’s breakfast, she went down to the kitchens just then.

“Aye, milady, it is ready,” the cook said, bowing; Krasta seldom stuck her nose into his domain. “I was setting things on his tray, as a matter of fact.”

“I shall carry it to him,” Krasta said. “We quarreled yesterday, and I want to show him all is forgiven.” The cook bowed again, in acquiescence. If the idea of Krasta forgiving anyone startled him, he gave no outward sign. He simply handed her the tray when it was ready, then held the door open for her so she could take it into the west wing.

Before she got there, she stirred some of the glowworm paste into Lurcanio’s ale. Watching him drink it would be revenge in and of itself, even if the spell didn’t work. But Krasta wanted it to work. Lurcanio enjoyed mocking her. If she left him impotent, she could do the mocking, and could also enjoy acting as seductive as she could, making him pant for what he couldn’t have.

Seeing her with the breakfast tray, Gradasso didn’t try to keep her out of Lurcanio’s office. “What’s this?” Lurcanio said when she came in. “Have we got a new maid?”