Through the Darkness

“Never mind.” Chuckling a little, Lurcanio gave her backside an indulgent pat. “Go and see your friend. If the two of you hadn’t been out talking together, who knows what might have happened when that egg burst at the reception the Duke of Klaipeda’s nephew was putting on?”

Krasta didn’t like to think about that. She was much happier thinking about cuckolding Lurcanio with Valnu. Her Algarvian lover--and keeper-- thought Valnu liked boys. Valnu, as a matter of fact, probably did like boys, but he liked women, too. Of that Krasta had no doubt whatever.

He gave her a dazzling smile as she came up to him; it made him look like a suave, affable skull. “Hello, darling!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Hello yourself,” Krasta said coolly. She let Valnu introduce her to his friends, most of them young Algarvian officers at least as pretty as he was. They were polite, but none of them seemed interested in Krasta for her own sake. A couple of them gave Valnu sidelong glances, as if wondering how he could possibly find a woman appealing.

As if to explain himself, he said, “We were having a drink together, the marchioness and I, outside that mansion when the saboteur’s egg burst inside it. If we’d stayed there, we might both have been killed.”

“Ah,” the Algarvian officers said, almost in one breath. They could accept a twist of fate as an explanation, where mere animal attraction would have offended them. Krasta had to work not to laugh in their faces. As she’d known more about Valnu than Lurcanio did, so she also knew more about him than did these fellows.

He took her by the arm. “Let’s get something to drink, and you can tell me how you’ve been since.” The pretty Algarvian officers rolled their eyes; again, Krasta had to hold in a laugh.

As Valnu steered her toward the bar, she stroked his cheek and archly murmured, “Are you going to sneak me out of here a minute before this place goes up in flames, too?”

He stopped, which rather surprised her. “I hadn’t planned on it, no,” he replied in unwontedly serious tones. Then he grinned and added, “If that happens tonight, it’ll catch both of us by surprise--and a lot of other people, too.” He waved to one of the tapmen. “Ale for me.”

“Aye, sir--ale,” the fellow said. “And for you, milady?”

“Brandy with wormwood,” Krasta told him. After a couple of shots of that, she would have an excuse for any sort of outrageous behavior. She’d been pretty outrageous the last time she drank it with Valnu, back in the days when Valmiera was still a kingdom in its own right and not an Algarvian appanage.

Having at last been eased from the receiving line, King Gainibu had made a beeline for the bar. He waved to the man behind it. “The same for me as the lady here is having,” he said. Only the slow precision of his diction marked how much he’d already poured down. As the bartender handed him the glass of blue-green spirits., he remarked, “Soon I will find a chair and go to sleep. Then the Algarvians will be happy, and so will I.”

Valnu steered Krasta away from the sodden king, as he’d steered her away from the Algarvian officers. “That’s not the way a sovereign should talk,” he said. “That’s not the way a sovereign should have to talk.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” Krasta said. “He’s a laughingstock for the redheads. The worst part is, he knows it.” Sensitive to slights herself--or at least to being on the receiving end of them--she had some notion of how poor drunken Gainibu had to feel.

“Every now and then, my dear, you do succeed in surprising me,” Valnu said. “This makes twice in one night.”

“Really?” Krasta laughed; sure enough, the spiked brandy was mounting straight to her head. “Lurcanio said the same thing, though I think I only surprised him once.”

“Well, he is bound to be harder to surprise than I am,” Valnu said. “Practically everything surprises me, including my being here at this doleful gathering. It’s like the bloodied ghost of what one of these affairs should be.”

Krasta thought about that. She wasn’t used to figures of speech--those that hadn’t ossified into clichés, at any rate--but she had no trouble figuring out what this one meant. “Hard times,” she agreed, nodding. “But what can we do? The Algarvians are stronger than we are. The Algarvians, as far as I can see, are stronger than everybody else is.”

“So they want you to think,” Valnu said. “So they want everybody to think. It’s part of their magic: thinking them stronger than everybody else helps make them stronger than everybody else. But there are some faces I’ve seen before in these crows that aren’t here tonight.”

“So?” Krasta said vaguely. Sure enough, the brandy was making her thoughts spin. Before long, she might be looking for a chair just like her sovereign.