Darkness Descending

Several people--not all women, by any means--had fainted in the snow. Garivald and Annore didn’t wait to see them revived. They fled back to their own hut as fast as they could. “What was it?” Syrivald asked. “What did they do?” Fear and curiosity warred on his face.

“Nothing,” Garivald mumbled. “They didn’t do anything.” His son would find out it was a lie as soon as he went outside; the Algarvians had been wrapping the ropes around and around the top beam of the gibbet, to keep the corpses hanging on display. But Garivald couldn’t bring himself to talk about what had happened, not yet.

Syrivald turned to his mother. “What did they do? You can tell me!”

“They killed two men,” Annore answered bleakly. “Now don’t ask me any more questions, do you hear?” Her voice warned what would happen if Syrivald did. He nodded. He understood that tone.

Annore found the jar of spirits and took a long pull at it. “Leave some for me,” Garivald warned. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, too. After another swig, Annore passed him the jar. They kept passing it back and forth till they fell asleep side by side.

When Garivald woke, he almost wished the Algarvians had hanged him. His head pounded like a hammer on the smith’s anvil. His mouth tasted the way it would have if the livestock had fouled it. When he took a sip from the jar, his stomach loudly told him what a bad idea that was.

And, as soon as he was conscious, visions of the dead irregulars came flooding back. He couldn’t find a better reason for drinking himself blind again. He wanted to stay blind drunk till spring came, and maybe after that, too.

Annore looked no happier than he felt when she opened her eyes. She reached for the jar. He handed it to her. She drank as desperately as he had. With a grimace, she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her tunic. “It really happened,” she said.

“Aye, it did.” Garivald didn’t care for the sound of his own voice. He didn’t care for the answer he had to give her, either.

“I knew we didn’t want them here, but I didn’t think they’d do--that,” his wife said.

“Neither did I,” Garivald answered. “Now we don’t have to listen to the tales people older than we are to tell of the Twinkings War. Now we know, too.”

Another song began to form in his mind, a song of how the two Unkerlanter irregulars had met their deaths without a word. Even more than most of the songs he shaped, he would have to be careful where he sang that one. But those two men had had friends in the woods, friends the Algarvians hadn’t caught. They would want to hear such songs--the dead men were their comrades. And thinking of rhymes and rhythms distracted him from his hangover.

Later that day, when he had to go out, he found more details to add to the song. Having hanged their captives, the Algarvian troop of combat soldiers had pulled out of Zossen. They’d left the gibbet behind. The bodies on it still swayed in the breeze. No one had dared cut them down.

Each corpse had a new placard tied round its neck. The characters were those of the Unkerlanter language. Garivald knew that much, even if he couldn’t read them. They probably told about the dead men, and said what fools they were to fight the Algarvians. He couldn’t think what else Mezentio’s soldiers would have had to say.

He hurried back to his hut, words spinning in his head. Once inside, he barred the door and started drinking again. By her slack features, Annore had hardly stopped. Staying indoors through the winter shielded people from the worst the weather could do, just as staying in the village had shielded them from knowing the worst war could do. But the war had come home to them now. The Algarvians had brought it home.

“Curse them,” he muttered.

His wife didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “Aye, curse them,” she said. “Powers below eat them.”

“Curse!” Leuba said cheerfully. She didn’t know what the word meant, only that her parents stressed it when they spoke.

Tears--the easy tears of drunkenness--sprang out in Garivald’s eyes. He seized his daughter and fiercely hugged her to him. She squealed, then wiggled to get free. Such shows of affection didn’t come her way very often. But Garivald had looked death in the face, and knew how afraid he was.

More than half of Pekka wished she could have performed this experiment down in Kajaani, her hometown, rather than coming to Yliharma. Failure in the capital of Kuusamo, failure with all the Seven Princes hoping for success, would be far more humiliating than all the failures she’d known back home.

Both the senior mages who’d invited--for all practical purposes, ordered--her to Yliharma met her at the caravan depot. They laughed when she spoke of her fears. “Nonsense, my dear,” Siuntio said. His smile lit up his wide, high-cheek-boned face. With his hair graying toward white, he looked far more like a kindly grandfather than the leading theoretical sorcerer of his generation. “I’m sure everything will go splendidly.”