Darkness Descending

“Of course I remember,” Ealstan said. “If I think of anything he might do, I’ll ask him.” He suddenly looked very fierce. “But don’t you dare say anything to him till I do--if I ever do. Do you hear me?”

Leofsig had used that tone with Ealstan any number of times. Up till now, Ealstan had never used it with him. He started to bristle. The set look on his brother’s face warned that bristling would do no good and might do a lot of harm. When he did speak, his voice was still rough, but not in the way it would have been a moment before: “Just don’t go and do anything stupid, do you hear me?”

“Oh, aye, I hear you,” Ealstan answered. “The way things are going, though, who knows whether I’ll be able to listen to you?”

“I wish I could argue with that.” Leofsig got up and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “I hope it turns out as well as it can for you.”

“Thanks.” Now Ealstan sounded like the younger brother he’d always been. As he looked up at Leofsig, his smile seemed familiar, too--for a couple of heartbeats. But then his face hardened into that of a near-stranger again. “About as much as anybody can hope for these days, isn’t it?”

“Seems that way.” Leofsig thought about adding the hope that things would get better soon. He held his tongue. As far as he could see, that hope would just rouse Ealstan to bitter laughter. Contemplating it almost roused him to bitter laughter. Instead of laughing, he yawned. “I’m going to bed. Shoving rocks around takes more work than Algarvian irregular verbs.”

“Good night,” Ealstan said, and then used an Algarvian irregular verb that startled Leofsig.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked. “The guards in the captives’ camp used to yell it at us.”

“From the constables,” his brother answered. “They call people that all the time. They usually laugh when they say it, though. They’re whoresons, aye, but they aren’t as mean as the soldiers were.”

“Maybe not--some of them don’t seem to be bad fellows, anyhow,” Leofsig allowed. “But they’re still redheads.” Having said that, he thought he’d given them all the condemnation necessary. Then, discovering he was wrong, he added, “And they’re the ones who loaded the Kaunians into the caravans cars.”

“So they are.” Ealstan grimaced. “I’d forgotten that. I wonder how they sleep at night.”

“I don’t know.” Leofsig yawned again. “But I can tell you how I’m going to sleep tonight: like a brick.” He soon proved himself right, too.

A couple of evenings later, while Ealstan was wrestling with Algarvian irregular verbs or his father’s bookkeeping problems, Hestan took Leofsig out into the courtyard and quietly said, “Something is troubling your brother. Do you know what it is?”

“Aye,” Leofsig answered. He shivered a little; the weather had got no warmer.

When he said no more than that, his father clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Is it anything where I could help him?”

“Maybe,” Leofsig said.

Hestan waited to see if anything more was forthcoming. When he found it wasn’t, he chuckled under his breath. “In a gamesome mood tonight, are you? All right, I’ll come out and ask: what is it?”

“I don’t think I ought to tell you,” Leofsig said. “He asked me not to.”

“Ah.” Hestan exhaled. A lamp inside the kitchen and another in a bedroom showed the puff of fog that came from his mouth and nose. “Whatever it is, it has to do with those letters he’s been getting from Oyngestun, doesn’t it?”

Too late, Leofsig realized Ealstan would have wanted him to say something like, What letters? When he didn’t say that right away, his father slowly nodded. Leofsig’s sigh brought forth mist, too. “I don’t think I’d better say anything at all, Father.”

“Why not?” Hestan was still quiet--he almost always was--but now he was quietly angry. “I did you some good, you know. I might be able to do the same for your brother.”

“If I thought you could, I’d tell you fast as a blaze,” Leofsig said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. Have you got the pull to keep the redheads from shipping Kaunians west?”

Hestan stood silent. Just for a moment, his eyes widened, glittering in the dim lamplight. “So,” he said, a word that stood for a sentence, or maybe two or three. “No, I don’t have that kind of pull. No one has that kind of pull, no one I know of.” Ever so slightly, his shoulders sagged.

“I was afraid of that,” Leofsig said. Without another word, he and his father went back inside.

Skarnu gave the sky a warning glance, as if telling the powers above what they might and might not do. In case they weren’t listening, he spoke to his comrades, too: “If it snows, we’ve got trouble.”

“Aye.” Raunu’s gaze also flicked up toward those ugly gray clouds. “Snow can make hiding your tracks a lot harder.”

Standing behind a bare-branched chestnut, Merkela clung to the hunting stick that had been Gedominu’s. “We’ll try it anyway--we’ve come too far not to,” she said. “And if it snows hard enough, it’ll cover our tracks as fast as we make them.”