Out of the Darkness

“Not bad at all,” Ealstan said, and gave her another kiss. As she smiled, he went on, “I like the way you look just fine, regardless of whether you seem like a Forthwegian or a Kaunian. You know that.”

Vanai nodded, but her smile slipped instead of getting bigger as he’d hoped. “Not many do,” she said. “Most Forthwegians have no use for me, and the Algarvians would cut my throat to use my life energy against Unkerlant if they saw me the way I really am. I suppose there are other Kaunians here, but how would I know? If they want to stay alive, they have to stay hidden, the same as I do.”

Ealstan remembered the golden roots he’d seen. “You should dye your hair again, too. It’s growing out.”

“Aye, I know. I’ll take care of it,” Vanai promised. One way the Algarvians checked to see whether someone was a sorcerously disguised Kaunian was by pulling out a few hairs and seeing if they turned yellow when removed from the suspect’s scalp. Ordinary hair dye countered that. The Algarvians being who and what they were, thoroughness in such matters paid off; Vanai kept the hair between her legs dark, too.

Carrying his meager lunch, Ealstan went downstairs and out onto the street. The two blocks of flats across from his own were only piles of rubble these days. The Algarvians had smashed both of them during the Forthwegian uprising. Ealstan thanked the powers above that his own building had survived. It was, he knew, only luck.

A Forthwegian man in a threadbare knee-length tunic scrabbled through the wreckage across the street, looking for wood or whatever else he could find. He stared up in alarm at Ealstan, his mouth a wide circle of fright in the midst of his shaggy gray beard and mustache. Ealstan waved; like everyone else in Eoforwic, he’d spent his share of time guddling through ruins, too. The shaggy man relaxed and waved back.

Not a lot of people were on the streets: only a handful, compared to the days before the uprising and before the latest Unkerlanter advance stalled--or was allowed to stall?--in Eoforwic’s suburbs on the west bank of the Twegen River. Ealstan cocked his head to one side. He didn’t hear many eggs bursting. King Swemmel’s soldiers, there on the far bank of the Twegen, were taking it easy on Eoforwic today.

His boots squelched in mud. Fall and winter were the rainy season in Eoforwic, as in the rest of Forthweg. At least I won’t have to worry much about snow, the way the Unkerlanters would if they were back home, Ealstan thought.

He spotted a mushroom, pale against the dark dirt of another muddy patch, and stooped to pick it. Like all Forthwegians, like all the Kaunians in Forthweg-- and emphatically unlike the Algarvian occupiers--he was wild for mushrooms of all sorts. He suddenly shook his head and straightened up. He was wild for mushrooms of almost all sorts. This one, though, could stay where it was. He knew a destroying power when he saw one. His father Hestan, back in Gromheort, had used direct and often painful methods to make sure he could tell a good mushroom from a poisonous one.

I wish the redheads liked mushrooms, he thought. Maybe one of them would pick that one and kill himself.

Algarvians directed Forthwegians hauling rubble to shore up the defenses against the Unkerlanter attack everyone in the city knew was coming. Forthwegian women in armbands of blue and white--Hilde’s Helpers, they called themselves-- brought food to the redheads, but not to their countrymen, who were working harder. Ealstan scowled at the women. They were the female equivalent of the men of Plegmund’s Brigade: Forthwegians who fought for King Mezentio of Algarve. His cousin Sidroc fought in Plegmund’s Brigade if he hadn’t been killed yet. Ealstan hoped he had.

Instead of joining the Forthwegian laborers as he often did, Ealstan turned away toward the center of town. He hadn’t been there for a while: not since he and a couple of other Forthwegians teamed up to assassinate an Algarvian official. They’d worn Algarvian uniforms to do it, and they’d been otherwise disguised, too.

Back then, the redheads had held only a slender corridor into the heart of Eoforwic--but enough, curse them, to use to bring in reinforcements. Now the whole city was theirs again ... at least, until such time as the Unkerlanters chose to try to run them out. Ealstan had a demon of a time finding the particular abandoned building he was looking for. “It has to be around here somewhere,” he muttered. But where? Eoforwic had taken quite a pounding since he’d last come to these parts.