Rulers of the Darkness

As long as he was doing what Pinhiero wanted, the Grandmaster took care of him. Whatever he wanted in the way of food and drink came up from the kitchens in the blink of an eye. Mages fetched sorcerous tomes from the guildhall library whenever he needed to check a point. If he felt like soaking for an hour in a tub full of steaming water, he could. And once, even though he hadn't made any such request, a very friendly young woman visited the room.

She shook her head when he tried to give her something. "It's all arranged," she said. "The Grandmaster told me he'd turn me into a vole if I took even a copper from you." By the melodramatic way she shivered as she put her kilt back on, she believed Pinhiero would do just as he'd said.

"Pinhiero would never waste an important natural resource like that," Fernao said, which made the girl smile as she left. Fernao went to sleep that night with a smile on his face, too. But in the morning, after breakfast, he had to go back to writing. He started to look forward to returning to the Naantali district. He hadn't had to work nearly so hard there.

***

Sooner or later, Talsu knew, he would run into Kugu the silversmith again. Skrunda wasn't a big city, where they might easily have avoided each other. And, sure enough, one day in the market square Talsu came face-to-face with the man who'd betrayed him to the Algarvians.

Talsu was haggling with a farmer selling salted olives, and paid little attention to the man buying raisins at the next stall till the fellow turned around. He and Kugu recognized each other at the same instant.

Kugu might have been a treacherous whoreson and an Algarvian puppet, but he had his share of nerve and more. "Good morning," he said to Talsu, as coolly as if he hadn't had him flung into a dungeon. "It's good to see you here again."

"It's good to be here again," Talsu answered, all the while thinking, I can't wring his neck here in the middle of the market square. People would talk. He couldn't even glare so fiercely as he wanted to. If he roused Kugu's suspicions, the Algarvians would seize him again.

"I'm glad you've seen the light of day in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense of the words," Kugu said.

Before studying classical Kaunian with Kugu, Talsu would have had no idea what a metaphor was. But he'd learned more than metaphors from the small, precise silversmith. He just nodded now. If Kugu wanted to think him a traitor to Jelgava, too- well, so what? A lot of people thought that. What difference could one more make?

Kugu nodded, too, as if he'd passed a test. Maybe he had. The silversmith said, "One of these days, we'll have to have a talk."

"I'd like that," Talsu said. "I'd like to learn some more of the old language, too."

"Would you?" Kugu said. "Well, perhaps it can be arranged. But now, if you will excuse me…" He went back to looking at raisins.

I know what he'll want. He'll want me to help him trap other people who don't think Jelgava ought to have an Algarvian king. Talsu wondered how many of the people who'd been studying classical Kaunian with Kugu remained outside of Algarvian dungeons. Some still would; he was sure of that. If people Kugu taught started disappearing every week or so, the ones who remained at large wouldn't take long to realize what was going wrong.

"You going to buy those olives, pal, or are you just going to gawk at them?" asked the farmer by whose cart Talsu stood.

Talsu did end up buying the olives. Running into Kugu left him too distracted to haggle as hard as he should have. The farmer didn't bother hiding a self-satisfied smirk as Talsu gave him silver. When Talsu's wife and mother found out what he'd paid, they would have something sharp to say to him. He was mournfully certain of that.

And he proved right in short order, too. Laitsina said, "Do you think your father mints the coins himself?"

"No. He wouldn't put Mainardo's face on them," Talsu answered, giving his mother a better comeback than he'd had for the farmer.

"You could have got a better price than that at my father's shop," Gailisa said reproachfully after she came back from working there.

"I have an excuse, anyhow," Talsu said. His wife raised an eyebrow. By her expression, no excuse for spending too much on food could possibly be good enough. But then Talsu explained: "I ran into Kugu in the market square."

"Oh," Gailisa said. A moment later, she repeated the word in an altogether different tone of voice: "Oh." Kugu wouldn't have wanted to hear the way it sounded the second time. Gailisa went on, "Did you leave him dead and bleeding there?"

Regretfully, Talsu shook his head. "I had to be polite. If I'd done what I wanted to do, I'd be back in the dungeons now, not here."

"I suppose so." His wife sighed. "I wish you could have. I'm surprised he didn't try to talk you into trapping people along with him- he must think you're safe."