Out of the Darkness

“It certainly isn’t,” Merkela agreed. “It’s her fault.” She still didn’t want to call Krasta Skarnu’s sister. Ever since they’d first learned Krasta was keeping company with a redhead, they--and Merkela especially--had denied Skarnu even had a sister. That was harder now that they were living in the same house with Krasta, but Merkela managed. She went on, “She was going to name the baby Valnu.”

“Too bad she couldn’t,” Skarnu said. “Sooner or later, these things have to come to an end.”

“Not yet, by the powers above,” Merkela declared. “When she had Lurcanio’s bastard, I told her she should name it for him.”

Skarnu sighed. “That doesn’t help, you know. Krasta’s going to be your sister-in-law whether you like it or not.” He held up a hand. “You don’t. You’ve told me. You don’t need to tell me again. Just remember, Valnu put in a good word for her. He’d be dead if she’d opened her mouth at the wrong time. Then there wouldn’t have been any doubt who the baby’s father was.”

“She opened her mouth at plenty of the wrong times,” Merkela said. While Skarnu was still spluttering over that, his fiancée added, “If she’d done it once more, she wouldn’t have had the little bastard in the first place.” That only made Skarnu splutter again.

In the end, he decided not to push the argument. He wasn’t going to change Merkela’s mind. Part of him--not half, but close to it--agreed with her, anyhow. What he most wanted now was to get through the wedding ceremony without any fresh scandal. Enlisting Merkela in that effort was bound to be futile. Trying to enlist Krasta in it was bound to be worse than futile. Skarnu had spent a lot of time away from home, but not so much that he didn’t know what to do in such cases.

He approached Valmiru, who nodded wisely. “You are holding the ceremony out of doors, is it not so?” the butler said. When Skarnu agreed that he was--he could hardly deny it, not with the pavilion already up behind the mansion-- Valmiru nodded again. “Very well. I shall make a point of allowing no physical disruption. I cannot necessarily promise there will be no commotion from within the house, however.”

“I understand that. Believe me, Valmiru, I’ll be grateful for anything you can do--and I’ll make it worth your while, too,” Skarnu said. The butler’s expression didn’t change in any way Skarnu could have defined, but he contrived to look pleased nonetheless. They were indoors. Skarnu looked up at the sky even so. “It had better not rain, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

To his vast relief, it didn’t. The wedding day dawned fine and mild. It might have come from the end of springtime, not the beginning. The ceremony was set for noon. Guests started arriving a couple of hours early. Servants steered them around the mansion to the pavilion in back of it. Giving the temporary structure that name could not disguise its origins: it was, in fact, an outsized tent borrowed from the Valmieran army. Being an officer who’d never been formally discharged had certain advantages when it came to laying one’s hands on such things.

Every now and then, an alert listener--Skarnu, for instance--might have heard a newborn baby wailing inside the mansion. Most of the guests knew by then that the baby had hair of not quite the right color. A couple of people clapped Skarnu on the back in sympathy. Valnu gave him a comic shrug almost exaggerated enough to have come from an Algarvian, as if to say, Well, it could have been mine.

At one point, not long before the ceremony was to begin, a listener would not have needed to be alert in the least to hear Krasta trying to come outside and expressing her detailed opinions of the people who kept her from doing so. She waxed eloquent, in a vulgar way. Several people shrugged at Skarnu now.

White-mustached old Marstalu, the Duke of Klaipeda, conducted the ceremony. As far as Skarnu was concerned, conducting a wedding was about what he was good for. He’d commanded the Valmieran troops opposing Algarve in the early days of the war, and had had not a clue about beating back Mezentio’s men. His nephew had been a collaborator, but that brush didn’t tar him.

“He’s splendid looking,” Merkela whispered as she and Skarnu approached him. Skarnu thought she looked quite splendid herself, in tunic and trousers of glowing green silk, the color of fertility in Valmiera since the days of the Kaunian Empire. That it went well with his own darker green captain’s uniform was a happy coincidence.