Out of the Darkness

Krasta didn’t buy anything there: the only revenge she could take. She did get what she needed, and she hunted down her driver, who stowed away his flask when he saw her coming. “Home,” she said, and escaped Threadneedle Street with nothing but relief.

Back at the mansion, though, Merkela happened to be walking outside when Krasta came up the drive. The farm woman’s son toddled beside her, holding her hand for balance. “What have you got in the sacks?” Merkela snapped, as if suspecting Krasta of smuggling secrets to the Algarvians.

“Clothes,” Krasta answered shortly. She had as little to do with Merkela as she could. It was either that or claw her, and Merkela would delight in clawing back.

She clawed now, with words instead of nails: “Oh, aye, for your bulging belly. At least I know who my son’s father is. Don’t you wish you could say the same?” Krasta snarled an unpleasantry at her and stalked--as well as a pregnant woman could stalk--into the mansion.

Fernao’s head ached. Like a lot of the mages at the hostel in the Naantali district, he’d had too much to drink bidding Ilmarinen farewell the night before. He looked at the mirror above the sink in his room--looked at it and winced. “Powers above,” he muttered. “My eyes are as red as my hair.”

Pekka came up beside him. The bed they’d shared was narrow for two to sleep in, but they’d both poured down enough spirits to keep them from moving much. Pekka also winced. She said, “My eyes are red, too, and I haven’t even got red hair.”

He draped an arm around her shoulder. “I like what you have,” he said. “I like everything you have.”

“Including red eyes?” She made a face at him. “I don’t like that, and I don’t care what you think. I need strong tea, maybe with just a splash of spirits in it, to take the edge off.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Fernao limped over to the closet and chose a tunic and kilt. He would limp for the rest of his life, and one shoulder wasn’t everything it might have been, either. He’d almost died down in the land of the Ice People, when an Algarvian egg burst much too close to him. For quite a while, he wished he had. No more. Time--and falling in love--had changed that.

Pekka kept a couple of outfits in his closet these days, as he had a couple in hers. That helped them spend nights together and maintain the polite fiction that they were doing no such thing. She changed her clothes while he got his cane. He wasn’t an old man--far from it. Not so long before, he would have shaken his head in sorrow at the sight of someone his age who needed a cane to get around. Now, he counted himself lucky. For a long time, he’d been on crutches. Compared to that, a single stick didn’t seem so bad.

After running a brush through her hair, Pekka looked in the mirror again. “It will have to do,” she said sadly.

“You always look good to me,” Fernao said.

“I hope you have better taste than that,” Pekka said. “My one consolation is, everybody who was at the farewell will be feeling the same way we do.”

“I have trouble believing Ilmarinen is really gone,” Fernao said as he went to the door. “The project won’t be the same without him.”

“That’s why he left--he said the project already wasn’t the same,” Pekka answered. “It won’t be the same for me now, I’ll tell you that. With Master Siuntio dead, with Master Ilmarinen gone . ..” She sighed. “It’s as if the adults had all left, and now things are in the children’s hands.” She walked out into the hallway. Fernao followed and closed the door behind them.

As they headed for the stairs that would take them to the refectory, he said, “We aren’t children, you know.”

“Not for everyday things,” Pekka agreed. “In this, next to Siuntio and Ilmarinen--what else are we?”

“Colleagues,” Fernao answered.

Pekka squeezed his hand. “You do sound like a Lagoan,” she said fondly. “Your people have their share of Algarvic arrogance.”

“I wasn’t thinking about me so much,” Fernao said. “I was thinking about you. You were the one who made the key experiments. Siuntio knew it. Ilmarinen knew it. They tried to give you credit. I honor them for that--a lot of mages would have tried to steal it instead.” Several of his own countrymen sprang to mind, starting with Grandmaster Pinhiero of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. He doggedly plowed ahead: “But you don’t seem to want to take it. What’s the opposite of arrogance? Self-abnegation?” The last word, necessarily, was in classical Kaunian; he had no idea how to say it in Kuusaman.

Pekka started to get angry. Then she shrugged and laughed instead. “Kuusamans see Lagoans as one thing. I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that you should see us as the opposite. To a mirror, the real world must look backwards.”

Irked in turn, Fernao started to growl, but checked himself and wagged a finger at her. “Ah, but who is the mirror--Lagoans or Kuusamans?”