Darkness Descending

“Aye, it is,” Pekka said. “You didn’t keep your word. How can we trust you if you don’t keep your word?”

Uto was paying no attention to her or to anything but his catastrophic loss. “I can’t sleep without my tiny leviathan under my chin!” he cried. “How can I go to sleep without my leviathan?” He stamped his foot.

“You’ll have to find out, won’t you?” Pekka said evenly. She dreaded putting him to bed without his special toy, too, but she didn’t want him to see that. “Maybe next time you’ll think a little more before you do something we’ve told you not to.”

“I’ll be good!” Uto sounded as desperate as a bureaucrat caught with his hand in the till. Leino’s footsteps coming up the hall announced the imminence of the tragedy ahead. Uto ran off to try to tackle him. “My leviathan!”

Following her son, Pekka wished her sister’s husband had never bought Uto the stuffed toy. But if Olavin hadn’t given him that one, he would have grown attached to some other stuffed animal: he had a good many. “It’s over. It’s done,” Leino told him. “Go back to your room till you can go around without snot and tears dribbling down your face.”

“I won’t ever stop crying! Not ever!” Uto shouted, but off he went. A silence, as of a battlefield after the fighting has moved on, filled the front room.

“Whew!” Leino said, and made as if to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I’m going to get myself a thimble of brandy. I’ve earned it. That could have been him crashing down as easily as the shelf, you know.”

“I certainly do,” Pekka said. “As long as you’re heading back toward the kitchen, pour me one, too, will you? Sooner or later, I’ll think about putting the pantry to rights, but not just yet.”

Noisy grief still came from Uto’s room. Some of it was real, some sent forth at the top of the little boy’s lungs to make his parents as unhappy as he was. Leino and Pekka both ignored him. Her sister and brother-in-law lived next door; if they heard Uto making a horrible racket, they would figure he had it coming, not that his parents were thrashing him to within an inch of his life.

Leino came back with two shots of pear brandy. He handed one to Pekka, then raised the other high. “Here’s to all of us living through another one.”

“I’ll gladly drink to that,” Pekka said. The pear brandy ran down her throat like sweet fire. She glanced over toward the stuffed leviathan, now lying dejected above the hearth, and started to laugh. But the laughter didn’t want to come: she was thinking not only of Uto’s outburst but also of the disaster the Algarvians had visited upon Yliharma. She’d come through that, and so had her sorcerous colleagues, but far too many in the capital hadn’t.

Something of what was going through her mind must have shown on her face, for Leino said, “I’m glad you lived through that one,” and gave her a hug.

“You’re not the only one,” she said fervently. She held Leino for a moment, just doing that, not thinking about anything else. But then, even with his arms around her, she shook her head. “So much work wasted. If only they’d chosen to wait another day. But they didn’t, and so ...” She shrugged.

Leino squeezed her again, then let her go. He still didn’t know exactly what she was working on but had no trouble figuring out that it was something important. He did his best to reassure her, saying, “I still don’t believe the Algarvians know or care what you’re about.”

“Why?” she demanded. “How can you know, any more than I can?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he admitted, “but I still don’t believe it. And I’ll tell you why: look how many talented mages they must be using to forge the spells that use the life energy they release when they kill Kaunians. And their very best mages must be busy devising those spells. How could they have anything much left to try to travel along other ley lines?”

Pekka pondered that. Slowly, she nodded. “It makes sense,” she said, but then checked herself. “It makes sense to me. Whether it makes sense in Trapani, I couldn’t begin to say.”

“If the Algarvians cared about what makes sense, they never would have started slaughtering Kaunians in the first place,” her husband said. Pekka nodded again. But Leino, like a lot of Kuusamans, had the knack of seeing the other fellow’s point of view. “I suppose they thought they’d only have to do it a couple of times, and then the war would be as good as won. But it didn’t work out that way.”

“No. Things too often don’t work out the way you think they will.” Pekka pointed down the hall. “That’s what Uto found out just now.”

“He’s quieted down some,” Leino said in no small relief.

“He couldn’t stay that loud for very long, not even for his leviathan,” Pekka said. “A good thing, too, or he’d drive us all mad.” She cocked her head to one side, listening. “He’s very quiet. I wonder if he’s fallen asleep in there.”