Darkness Descending

“Nice talking with you,” Traku said. “Close the door after you go out.”

They haggled for the best part of an hour. Traku ended up getting what struck Talsu as a good price; despite noisy histrionics, the Algarvian yielded ground more readily than the tailor. The redhead was muttering to himself when he did leave.

“Forest green,” Traku said. “I think I can get that. I ought to short him on the goods, though, just on account of that crack.”

He did get the cloth in the right color and the proper weight, then set to work. The tunic was straightforward: it had a higher, tighter collar than Jelgavan fashion favored, but presented no new problems. For the kilt, Traku worked much more carefully. After he’d made the waistband and hemmed the garment, he sewed two pleats by hand. Then, sweating with concentration, he set thread along the kilt where the other pleats would go and used a tailoring spell based on the law of similarity. Talsu watched in fascination as the rest of the pleats formed, duplicating the first two in spacing and stitchery.

Traku held up the finished kilt with a somber sort of pride. “Ready-to-wear can’t come close to a good tailor’s work,” he said. “The big makers use cheap originals and they stretch the spells too thin, so the clothes they make aren’t even properly similar to the originals.” He sighed. “But they’re cheap, so what can you do?”

When the Algarvian captain came in to try on his outfit, he kissed his fingertips, he blew a kiss at Ausra, and for a horrid moment Talsu thought he and Traku were going to get kissed, too. But the redhead restrained himself, at least from that. He paid the second half of the price and left the shop a happy man.

“Good thing he liked it,” Traku said after he’d gone. “If he didn’t, what in blazes would I do with a cursed kilt?”

“Sell it to another Algarvian,” Talsu said at once.

His father blinked; maybe that hadn’t occurred to him. “Aye, I suppose so,” he said. “I wouldn’t get as much for it, though.”

Talsu rang coins on the counter. The music was sweet. “You don’t need to worry. We don’t need to worry.” He checked himself. “We don’t need to worry for a little while, anyhow.”

Vanai was glad to be out of the house she shared with her grandfather and even gladder to be out of Oyngestun. With so many Kaunians shipped off to the west to labor for the redheads in the war against Unkerlant, the village felt as if it had a hole in it, like a jaw with a newly pulled tooth. She and Brivibas might have been among those taken for labor. Remembering what a few days of work on the roads had done to her grandfather, Vanai knew she was lucky to escape.

She also remembered, all too well, the price she’d paid to get Brivibas back from the labor gang. She had no great love for the Unkerlanters--they struck her as being even more barbarous than their Forthwegian cousins--but she hoped with all her heart that they gave Major Spinello a thin time of it.

Meanwhile, she had mushrooms to find. With rain coming a little early this year, she thought the crop would be fine. And, at last, she’d persuaded her grandfather to let her search by herself. That had proved easier than she’d thought it would. He didn’t cling to her as he had before she gave Spinello what he wanted.

And so, while Brivibas went south, Vanai headed east, in the direction of Gromheort. When they separated, her grandfather coughed a couple of times, as if to say he knew why she was going in that direction. She almost walloped him with the mushroom basket she was carrying. Before she swung it, though, she noticed it was the one that belonged to Ealstan, the Forthwegian from Gromheort. Brivibas would surely have noticed, too, and would have taken a certain satisfaction in being proved right in his suspicions.

“But he’s not right,” Vanai said--most emphatically, as if someone were about to contradict her. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He never knows what he’s talking about.”

A troop of Algarvians on unicorns came trotting up the road from Gromheort toward Oyngestun. The redheaded riders leered at Vanai. They whooped as they passed her and called out lewd suggestions, some of which she understood because of Spinello. She breathed a silent sigh of relief when they kept on riding. Had they decided to ravish her one after another and then cut her throat, who could have stopped them? She knew the answer to that: no one. They were the occupiers, the conquerors. They did as they pleased.

Along with sighing in relief, Vanai cut across fields instead of staying close by the road. The going was harder that way, and her shoes soon got wet and muddy. She didn’t care. The next Algarvians who came along the highway--three crews mounted on their behemoths--could have seen her as nothing more than a blond-headed speck in the distance. Not one of them waved or called out to her. That suited her fine.