Out of the Darkness

The weariness Krasta knew then had nothing to do with the ordeal she’d just been through. She’d spent so much time and effort trying to convince everyone, including herself, that the child she was carrying was indeed Valnu’s. She’d-- mostly--made herself believe it. She’d made everyone else wonder. And now, to be betrayed by something as trivial as a few strands of hair on the baby’s oddly cone-shaped head (she presumed that would change, even if the brat’s wretched hair color never did) ... It all seemed most unfair, as did anything that didn’t go just the way she wished it would have.

“I--” she began.

“Shut up.” Merkela’s voice was flat and hard and vicious, the voice of a wildcat seeing prey it had long stalked at last helpless before it. She gave the baby to Kudirka, then grabbed the scissors she’d used to cut the cord. “I’ve waited too cursed long for this, by the powers above, but now you get what’s coming to you.” She grabbed a shock of Krasta’s hair and hacked it off not a finger’s breadth from her scalp.

“Powers below eat you, you can’t--” Krasta said.

Merkela slapped her in the face. Only Lurcanio had ever dared do that to her before. “Shut up, I told you,” Merkela snapped. She closed the shears and aimed them at one of Krasta’s eyes. “What I’m doing is the least of what you deserve-- the least, do you hear me? You can take it, or I’ll give you plenty more. I’d love to, do you hear me? You don’t know how much I’d love to.” The shears jerked closer.

Krasta closed her eyes and flinched. She couldn’t help herself. At any other time, she would have fought, regardless of whether she had a weapon of her own. Exhausted as she’d never been exhausted, sick in spirit as well, she kept her eyes closed and let Merkela do as she would. At last, though, the hateful snip-snip of the shears made her exclaim, “Futter you!”

“A Valmieran futters me,” Merkela retorted. Snip-snip. “I didn’t have a stinking redhead leave silver on the dresser every time he stuck it in.” Snip-snip.

It wasn’t like that. But Krasta didn’t say it. What point? Merkela wouldn’t have believed her, and wouldn’t have cared even if she had believed her. At last, it was over. Kudirka set the baby--the half-Algarvian bastard, just like Bauska’s-- on Krasta’s breast. It rooted and began to suck. Krasta didn’t burst into tears. She was too worn for that. But, one after another, they trickled down her cheeks.

No one had ever formally released Skarnu from his service in the Valmieran army. And, unlike most of his countrymen, he’d never given up the fight against the Algarvians. And so, when he proposed to Merkela that he wed her while wearing a captain’s uniform, she nodded. “That’s how I first saw you, you know, coming toward the farmhouse with Raunu at your side,” she said.

Remembering what he’d gone through during his kingdom’s inglorious collapse almost five years before, he answered, “I hope I’ll be cleaner at the ceremony than I was then.”

Merkela laughed. Laughter came easy for her now that she’d finally proved right about Krasta. It was as if she’d won a brand-new victory against the Algarvians long after they’d left Priekule. And so, in a way, she had. Skarnu could have felt victorious about his own sister, too. He didn’t. All he felt was sad. Krasta had made the wrong choice, and now she was paying for it. Hundreds, thousands, of women across Valmiera and Jelgava had paid as much. A good many men who’d collaborated with the redheads had paid or would pay far more.

“Tomorrow,” Merkela murmured. She laid a fond hand on Skarnu’s arm. “It still hardly feels real. It feels like something out of one of the fairy tales my grandmother would tell me when I was a little girl.”

“You had better get used to it, milady,” Skarnu said solemnly, “for it’s the truth.” That he was marrying at all still struck him as surprising. That he was marrying a commoner would have seemed treason to his class before the war.

Little Gedominu, who was toddling around the bedchamber they shared, fell down. The damage, obviously, was anywhere from minimal to imaginary, but he wailed, “Mama!” and started to cry anyway.

Merkela scooped him up. “It’s all right,” she said. After a moment or two in her arms, it was all right, too. Skarnu wished his own hurts were so easily fixed. That thought had hardly crossed his mind when Merkela flicked one of those hurts. She ruffled Gedominu’s fine, golden hair and murmured, “You look the way you’re supposed to. That’s more than anybody can say about your nasty little cousin.”

Skarnu sighed. He wished Krasta’s baby had looked like a proper Valmieran. That would have taken the taint of scandal off the whole family. As things were, he sighed and said, “It’s not the baby’s fault.”