Darkness Descending

Vanai threw the bottle of willow-bark decoction at his head. Rage lent her strength, but not aim. The bottle flew past and shattered against the wall behind him. “If you think I was slaking my lust with the cursed Algarvian, you’re even blinder than I thought,” she snarled. “The only reason I sucked his prong was to keep you alive, and now--” And now I’m sorry I did it was in her mind, but she burst into tears before she could say it.

Brivibas took her words in a different direction: “And now this Forthwegian barbarian satisfies you better still, is that it?” he demanded.

When Vanai found herself looking toward the cutlery to see which knife was longest and sharpest, she spun away with a groan and fled to her bedchamber. It was less a refuge than she might have wanted, less a refuge than it would have been a year before. Lying on the bed alone, she couldn’t help thinking of the times when she’d had to lie there with Spinello. If her grandfather thought she’d wanted to lie with the Algarvian . . . If he thought that, he had even less notion of what went on around him than she’d imagined.

She didn’t know what she would have done had Brivibas knocked on her door then or come in without knocking. Luckily, she didn’t have to find out. Her tears--tears of fury rather than sorrow--quickly dried. She sat up and did a better job of smoothing the letter from Ealstan.

“At least someone cares about me,” she murmured as she began to read it. It was, as her grandfather had sneeringly shown, filled with endearments, as were the ones she sent to him. But it was also filled with his doings, and those of his father and mother and sister and his cousin and uncle. She wondered if he knew how lucky he was to have a good-sized family where everyone--except, she gathered, Sidroc and Hengist--got along. Probably not. To him, that would be like water to a fish.

I honor you for choosing to stay with your grandfather, even though it means we must be apart, Ealstan wrote. Please believe me when I say that. Please also believe me when I say I wish we could be together.

“Oh, I wish we could, too,” Vanai whispered. For the first time, she really thought of leaving the house where she’d lived almost all her life and traveling to Gromheort. She had no idea of what she would do there, or how she would keep from starving, but the idea of being away from Brivibas glowed in her thoughts like a fire catching hold in dry grass.

She shook her head, then wondered why she pushed the idea aside. When she was a child, she and Brivibas had fit together well enough. He did not fit her now, any more than one of the small tunics she’d worn then would. Why not go her own way, then, and leave him behind to go his?

Because if I leave him behind, he’ll die in short order. Because if I wanted him to die in short order, I never would have let Spinello have me. Because, since I did let Spinello have me, I’ve given up too much to let him die in short order. But oh!--how I wish I hadn’t!

After a little while, grimacing, she got up and opened the door. She couldn’t even stay and sulk, not if she wanted to--or felt she should, which came closer to the actual state of affairs--nurse her grandfather back to health. She had to go fix his supper and fetch it to him. It wouldn’t be much--vegetable soup and a chunk of bread--but she didn’t trust him to be able to do it for himself.

She’d known all along that he underestimated her. Now she discovered she’d underestimated him, too. Her nose told her as much as soon as she came out of the bedchamber: she smelled cooking soup. When she came into the kitchen, she found the pot over a low fire and a note on the table nearby.

Brivibas’ spidery hand was as familiar to her as her own: far more familiar than Ealstan’s. My granddaughter, he wrote in a Kaunian straight out of the glory days of the empire, judging it wiser that we not impinge on each other for some little while, I have prepared my own repast, leaving enough behind to satisfy, I hope, those bodily wants of yours susceptible to satisfaction through food.