Darkness Descending

Devil, begone from my bed, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud--she wanted to scream it. But the charm said, Follow exactly what is written, and thou shalt surely gain thy desire: and this hath been proved in our time. She would not deviate, not yet. If the charm failed her (which she knew to be only too likely), she would think about what to do next.

For now, she took the image out of the bowl of infused water and dried it on a rag. Some of the red ink had smeared, which made the straw man look badly wounded. Vanai’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predatory grin. She didn’t mind that. No, she didn’t mind that at all.

Once the image was dry enough to suit her, she laid the beryl on its ink-stained chest. “Beryl is the stone that driveth away enemies,” she intoned. “Beryl is the stone that maketh them meek and mild and obedient to the operator’s will.” And my will is that he go away and never trouble me again, or any other Kaunian either.

When she was done, she threw the image and the rag on which she’d dried it into the cookfire. For one thing, she hoped that would hurt Spinello, too. For another, it got rid of the evidence. Like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men took a dim view of those they had defeated practicing sorcery against them. After the image had gone up in smoke, she poured down the privy the daffodil root and the water in which she had boiled it. The earring went back into the case from which it had come, the book of charms onto its shelf.

As she set about peeling and slicing parsnips to add to the pot of bean soup simmering above the fire, she wondered if she’d just wasted her time. Also like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men were warded against their enemies’ magecraft. And she didn’t know whether she’d truly practiced magecraft or simply tried to use one of her ancestors’ outworn, mistaken beliefs.

But she hoped. Oh, how she hoped.

Brivibas, as usual these days, was taciturn over supper. He’d given up lecturing her and reproving her, and had no idea how to talk to her in any more nearly normal, more nearly equal way. Or maybe, she thought as she watched him spoon up the soup, he had so many nasty things he wanted to tell her, he simply couldn’t decide which one to shout out first and so swallowed all of them. However that worked, his silence suited her.

Major Spinello did not visit her the next day. She hadn’t expected that he would; she’d come to know the rhythms of his lust better than she wanted to. Knowing them at all, for that matter, was knowing them better than she wanted to. When he stayed away the day after that, she began to hope. When he stayed away the day after that, too, her heart sang a hymn of freedom inside her.

That made the peremptory, unmistakably Algarvian knock on the door the following morning all the more devastating. Brivibas, who had been examining one of the antiquities in the parlor, let out a disdainful sniff and retreated across the courtyard to his study. He slammed the door behind him as if taking refuge in a besieged fortress.

He would be long since dead, were I not doing this, Vanai reminded herself. But her steps dragged even more than usual as she made her way to the door. “Took you long enough,” Spinello said. “You don’t want to keep me waiting, you know, not if you want to keep your grandfather breathing.”

“I am here,” Vanai said dully. “Do what you will.”

He took her back to her bedchamber and did exactly that. And then, because he hadn’t done it for longer than usual, he wanted to do it again. When he didn’t rise to the occasion quite so promptly as he’d hoped he would, Vanai had to help him. Of all the things he made her do, she despised that most of all. If I bite down hard, she thought, not for the first time--for far from the first time--the redheads will slay me and my grandfather, and the powers above only know what they’ll do to the rest of the Kaunians in Oyngestun. And so she refrained, though the temptation got stronger every time.

At last, after what seemed like forever, Spinello gasped his way to a second completion. He preened and strutted as he got back into his kilt and tunic. “I know I’m spoiling you for every other man,” he said, meaning it as a boast.

Vanai cast down her eyes. If Spinello wanted to think that maidenly modesty and not disgust, she would let him. “Aye, I think you are,” she murmured. If he wanted to think that agreement rather than disgust. . . again, she would let him.