Into the Darkness (75 page)

She let out a small, mortified squeak and fled the dining hall.

Back in the part of the mansion still hers, servitors gaped at her. Not till she passed a mirror did she understand why. Printed on her cheek was the mark of Colonel Lurcanio’s hand. She examined her image with a fascination different from the one it usually held for her. She’d marked the servants often enough. Why not? They had no recourse against her. Now she was marked herself. And what recourse had she against Lurcanio, against Algarve.

None. None whatever. Lurcanio had made that plain with a scorn all the more chilling for being so polite. If he decided to ravish her and have all his aides line up behind him, the only person to whom he would answer was Grand Duke Ivone, his Algarvian superior. Nothing any Valmieran said or did would affect his fate in the least.

She shivered and brought her left hand up to touch the scarlet imprint of Lurcanio’s palm and fingers. The flesh on that part of her cheek was hot, and tingled under the pressure of her fingers. She’d never been one to mix pain—not her own pain, anyhow—with lubricious pleasure. She still wasn’t. She felt sure of that. What she felt now was …

Angrily, she shook her head. She didn’t even have a word for it.
Respect
might have come close, but she was used to requiring that from others, not to granting it herself.
Awe
probably hit nearer still to the center of the target. Awe, after all, was what one gave to forces incomparably more powerful than oneself. Having dared lay a hand on her and having demonstrated he could do so with impunity, Colonel Lurcanio had proved himself just such a force.

Still shaking her head, Krasta went upstairs. Bauska awaited her at the top of the stairway. Servant and marchioness stared at the marks on each other’s faces. In a voice empty of all feeling, Bauska said, “Milady, I have set out a daytime tunic and trousers for you. They await your pleasure.”

“Very well,” Krasta said. But instead of going in to change, she continued, “Have the butler convey to the Algarvians that from now on they are welcome to use every part of the mansion, not only the wing they have taken for themselves.”

Bauska’s eyes went even wider than they had when she saw her mistress with a mark on her cheek. “Milady?” she said, as if wondering whether she could possibly have heard right. “Why, milady?”

“Why?” Krasta’s temper remained volatile. It would always remain volatile. Her voice rose to a shout not far from a scream: “Curse you, I’ll tell you why, you stupid little twat!
Because they won the war, that’s why!”
Bauska gaped, gulped, and incontinently fled.

Mushroom season again. Vanai relished the chance to escape Oyngestun from sunup to sundown. For one thing, most of the Kaunians and many of the Forthwegians in her village still thought her and Brivibas traitors to their people—or traitors to the Kingdom of Forthweg, depending—for their association with Major Spinello, even though that association had broken up in acrimony. For another, because that association had broken up in acrimony, she and Brivibas were once more as hungry as anyone else in Oyngestun. The mushrooms they gathered would help feed them through the winter.

Tramping with a basket under her arm through the stubbled fields, through groves of almonds and olives, through thickets of oak, took Vanai back to the happier days before the war. She found herself whistling a tune that had been all the rage the autumn before fighting broke out.

In fact, she didn’t find herself doing it. She didn’t consciously notice she was doing it till Brivibas said, “My granddaughter, I am compelled to tell you that your taste in music leaves a great deal to be desired.”

“My —?” Vanai discovered her lips were puckering to whistle some more. Feeling foolish, she forced them to relax. “Oh. I’m sorry, my grandfather.”

“No great harm done,” Brivibas said, magnanimous in his dusty way. “I do not disapprove of high spirits, mind you, merely of the monotonous and irksome expression of same.”

You think I’m monotonous and irksome, do you?
went through Vanai’s mind.
Have you seen yourself in a glass lately?
She did not say it. She saw no point to saying it. She had to live with Brivibas. If she made an armed camp of the house they shared, she would regret it as much as he.

What she did say was, “Why don’t we split up for a while? We’ll find more and different mushrooms separately than we would sticking together.”

Brivibas frowned. “You must understand, I have a certain amount of concern about letting you wander the woods by yourself. Had I not been there to protect you from that Forthwegian lout last year—”

“He was not a lout, my grandfather,” Vanai said with an exasperated sniff. “All we did was trade a few mushrooms back and forth.” Had the Forthwegian—Ealstan; aye, that was his name—tried to do anything from which she needed protecting, she did not think Brivibas would have been much help. She also remembered her humiliation when Ealstan had seen her with her grandfather and Major Spinello. That made her defend him: “He spoke Kaunian very well, if you’ll recall.”

“He did no such thing,” Brivibas said. “A typically barbarous accent.”

Vanai shrugged. “I thought he spoke quite well.” Out came her claws: “Maybe not so well as the redhead you reckoned such a splendid scholar for so long, but quite well even so.”

“The Algarvian deceived me, deceitfully deceived me,” Brivibas said, and then suffered a coughing fit. Once he recovered, he stopped arguing against their going separate ways. If anything, he looked glad to escape Vanai.

She knew she was glad to escape him. Thanks to Major Spinello, he had the taint of Algarve on him, too—and, even were that not so, she didn’t care to be lectured while looking for mushrooms. She’d got to the point where she didn’t care to be lectured at all: unfortunate, when the lecture was Brivibas’s usual form of address.

Every so often, Vanai would see Forthwegians and Kaunians, sometimes in small groups, more frequently alone, plucking or digging up mushrooms or slicing them from tree trunks. She spied no Algarvians; the redheads did not care for mushrooms and could not understand why anyone else would. Not seeing Algarvians also helped give her the illusion of freedom. She would have enjoyed it even more had she not known it was an illusion.

As she walked farther east from Oyngestun, some of the mushroom hunters waved when she went by. She knew what that meant: they weren’t from her home village and didn’t know of Brivibas’s cozying up to Spinello. That also gave her a feeling of freedom, and one rather less illusory than the other. Among strangers, she didn’t have to be ashamed of what her grandfather had done.

She found some garlic mushrooms and then, not far away, a fairy ring in the grass. Like anyone with a modern education, she knew fairies had nothing to do with fairy rings, no matter what people—even scholars—might have thought back in the days of the Kaunian Empire. That didn’t mean the mushrooms weren’t good. She gathered a handful before going on.

When she got to an oak thicket on the other side of the field, she nodded to herself. This was where she’d met Ealstan the year before. No matter what her grandfather said about him, she found him pleasant enough—and how she wished he hadn’t found her with Brivibas and Spinello!

The other thing she remembered about the grove was the oyster mushrooms she’d taken from him. Sure enough, more of them waited on the trunks of the trees. She cut them away with a paring knife and put them into her basket one after another. Some of them, older than the rest, were getting tough, but they’d do fine in slow-cooked stews.

She nibbled at a fresh young one. She’d never had real oysters; Oyngestun was too small a village to make any sort of market for such fancy, faraway foods. If they were as good as these mushrooms, though, she could understand why people thought so highly of them.

Her feet scuffed through fallen leaves while she went looking for more mushrooms. Abruptly, she realized hers weren’t the only feet she heard scuffing through leaves. Her hand tightened on the handle of the paring knife. Most people, even strangers met gathering mushrooms, were harmless enough. In case she ran into one who wasn’t …

But the Forthwegian who stepped out from between a couple of trees not far away wasn’t a stranger, or not quite a stranger. “Vanai,” he said, and then stopped, as if wondering where to go from there.

“Hello, Ealstan.” Rather to Vanai’s surprise, she answered in Kaunian. Was she putting him in his place? Or was she simply reminding him of who and what she was?

“I wondered if I would see you here,” he said, also in Kaunian. “I thought of you when I came here to hunt mushrooms.” His mouth tightened. “I did not know if I would see you here with an Algarvian.”

Vanai winced. “No! Powers above, no! He wanted to persuade my grandfather to do something to serve Algarve’s purposes. When my grandfather would not, he stopped bothering us.”

“Ah?” It was a noncommittal noise, one almost altogether devoid of color. After a short pause, Ealstan went on, “He did not look as if he were bothering you or your grandfather.” He used the subjunctive correctly. “He looked very friendly, in fact.”

“He was very friendly,” Vanai said. “He almost fooled my grandfather into being friendly in return. But he did not, and I am glad he did not.”

“Ah,” Ealstan said again. “And was he friendly to you, too?”

Vanai did not care for the emphasis he gave that word. “He might have liked to be friendly to me, but I was not friendly to him.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize Ealstan really had no business asking such an intimate question. She was relieved it didn’t have an intimate answer.

Ealstan certainly seemed glad of the answer he’d got. He said, “Some Forthwegians are hand in glove with the redheads. I suppose some Kaunians could be, too, but I will say I was surprised at the time.”

”
I
was surprised when Major Spinello knocked on our door,” Vanai said. “I wish he’d never done it.” That was true, no matter how well she and Brivibas had eaten for a while. Then she recognized that Ealstan had admitted some of his own blood collaborated with the occupiers. That was more generous than he’d had to be.

He scratched his chin. The down there was darker than it had been the year before, closer to real whiskers. Slowly, he said, “Your grandfather must be a man of some importance, if the Algarvians wanted him to do something for them even though he is a Kaunian.”

“He is a scholar,” Vanai answered. “They thought his word had weight because of that.”

Ealstan studied her: more nearly a grown man’s sober consideration than the way he’d looked at her the last time they met. Then, of course, all he’d been trying to decide was whether he thought she was pretty or not. Now he was figuring out whether to believe her, which was rather more important. He evidently thought it was more important, too. That earned him a point in her book. If he didn’t believe her, though, whether he earned a point in her book wouldn’t matter.

She discovered that his believing her mattered quite a lot to her. If he didn’t, then odds were he’d spoken her fair the autumn before for no better reason than that he’d thought she was a pretty girl—which would, in essence, prove her grandfather right about him. Brivibas was sometimes able to admit he’d made a mistake. When he turned out to be right, though, she found him insufferable.

Slowly, Ealstan said, “All right. That makes sense. I suppose the redheads are out to make themselves look good any way they can.”

“They certainly are!” Vanai exclaimed. Ealstan never found out how close his comment came to getting him kissed; Vanai, just then, found anything like approval so seldom, she was doubly delighted when she did. But the moment never quite came to fruition. After a deep breath, all she ended up saying was, “Do you want to swap some mushrooms, the way we did last year?” That would let her score points off her grandfather, too.

His smile almost made her sorry she hadn’t kissed him. “I was hoping you’d ask,” he said. “Trading them can be about as much fun as finding them yourself.” He handed her his basket. She gave him hers.

They stood close by each other, heads bent over the mushrooms, fingers sometimes brushing as they traded. It was at the same time innocent and anything but. Vanai didn’t know about Ealstan, but she was noticing the
anything but
more and more when someone called out in Forthwegian from not far away: “Ealstan? Where in blazes have you gotten to, cousin?”

By the way Ealstan jumped back from Vanai, maybe he’d been noticing
anything but,
too. “I’m here, Sidroc,” he called back, and then, in a lower voice, explained, “My cousin,” as if Vanai couldn’t figure that out for herself.

Sidroc came crunching through the dry leaves. He did share a family look with Ealstan. When he saw Vanai, his eyes widened. She didn’t care for the gleam that came into them. “Hello!” he said. “I thought you were hunting mushrooms, cousin, not Kaunian popsies.”

“She’s not a popsy, so keep a civil tongue in your head,” Ealstan snapped. “She’s—a friend.”

“Some friend.” Sidroc’s eyes traveled the length of Vanai, imagining her shape under her tunic and trousers. But then he checked himself and turned to Ealstan. “Bad enough to have Kaunian friends any old time, you ask me. Worse to have Kaunian friends now, with the redheads running things here.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ealstan said wearily; it sounded like an argument they’d had before.

“I’d better go,” Vanai said, and did.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” Ealstan called after her. She didn’t answer.

The worst of it, by far the worst of it, was that his cousin—Sidroc—was so likely to be right. Vanai was out of the oak grove and halfway across the field before she realized she still had Ealstan’s mushroom basket. She didn’t turn back, but kept on walking west toward Oyngestun.

“I ought to pop you one,” Ealstan growled as he and Sidroc tramped east toward Gromheort.

“Why?” His cousin leered. “Because I broke things up before you got her trousers down? I’m
so
sorry.” He pressed his hands over his heart.