Krasta threw open her window and cried, "No! No blazing! I know this man." Then, in a lower voice, she went on, "This is most unseemly, Viscount Valnu. What in blazes are you doing here at whatever hour this is?"
"Marchioness, I am here to save my life, if I can," Valnu answered. "If I don't do it here, I won't do it anywhere."
"I can't imagine what you're talking about," Krasta said.
"Let me in and I'll tell you." Valnu's voice rose with urgency once more: "Oh, by the powers above, let me in!"
"Shutting up, noisy maniac," one of the sentries said. "Waking everyone inside, making everyone to hating you."
"I don't hate him," Krasta said sharply, which was, most of the time, true. As if to prove it, she added, "I'll be right down."
Her night tunic and trousers were thin and filmy; she threw on a cloak over them. By the time she got downstairs, several servants had gathered in the front hall. Krasta sent them back to bed with angry gestures and opened the front door herself. Valnu darted in and fell at her feet, as if prostrating himself before the king of Unkerlant. "Save me!" he cried, as melodramatically as an Algarvian.
"Oh, get up." Krasta's voice turned irritable. "I let you into my house. If this is some mad scheme to get me to let you into my bed, you're wasting your time." Anything she said here would get back to Lurcanio, as she was uneasily aware. She hated having to be uneasy about anything.
But Valnu answered, "I did not come here for that. I did not come here to see you at all, milady, though I bless you for letting me in. I came here to see your protector, the eminent Count and Colonel Lurcanio. He can truly save me, where you cannot."
"And why should I save you, Viscount Valnu?" Lurcanio strode into the front hall from the west wing. "Why should I not order you blazed for disturbing my rest, if not for any of a large number of other good reasons?"
"Because, except in this particular instance, perhaps, you would be blazing an innocent man," Valnu said.
"My dear fellow, you have not been an innocent for a great many years," Lurcanio said with sardonic glee. "Not even in your left ear."
Valnu bowed very low. "That you pick the left rather than the right proves how closely you listen to your fellow officers who know me well- know me intimately, one might even say. But I am an innocent in matters concerning your bold Algarvian hounds. By the powers above, your Excellency, I am!"
"And what matters are those?" Sure enough, Lurcanio had a purr in his voice, almost as if he were talking to Krasta after bedding her.
"They think I am playing some sort of stupid- some sort of idiotic- double game, looking to tear down everything Algarve's done," Valnu answered. "It's a lie! By the powers above, a lie!" He did not draw attention to the kilt he was wearing. At first, Krasta thought that might be a mistake. Then she decided Valnu was making Lurcanio notice it for himself- not a bad ploy.
She saw the Algarvian eyeing Valnu's bare, knobby knees. But her lover was first and foremost an officer of his kingdom. "You've called on the powers above twice now, Viscount," he said. "By the powers above, sir, why should I believe you and not my kingdom's hounds? Their task, after all, is to sniff out treason and rebellion wherever they find them. If they turn their noses your way…"
"If they turn them my way, they turn them in the wrong direction," Valnu insisted. "Ask your lady, if you doubt me."
That made Colonel Lurcanio laugh out loud. "Considering the embrace the two of you were enjoying when I was so inconsiderate as to interrupt you, I might be inclined to doubt her objectivity." But his eyes swung toward Krasta nonetheless. "Well, milady? What say you?"
Krasta could have said a good deal. Valnu must have known she could have said a good deal. He was betting his life that she didn't want him dead, no matter how much he'd irked her in days gone by- and he'd irked her a great deal indeed.
If she spoke against him, he was dead. If she spoke for him too fulsomely, Lurcanio wouldn't believe her. What she did say was, "Whatever his problem may be, I wish he wouldn't bring it here at this ridiculous hour of the morning. And that, Colonel, is nothing but the truth."
"I wish the same thing." Lurcanio fixed Valnu with a hard stare. "To a certain degree, I admire your nerve- but only to a certain degree. Go back to your home. If the hounds come for you, then they come- but I will have them explain themselves to me before they do anything too drastic. That is the most I intend to give you."
Valnu bowed low again. "I thank you, your Excellency. It is more than I deserve."
"I am afraid you may be right," Lurcanio answered. "Now get out."
"Aye, get out," Krasta said. "Let decent people sleep, if you'd be so kind." For reasons she absolutely could not fathom, both Valnu and Lurcanio started laughing at her.
Pekka wished things were as they had been before the Algarvians struck at her comrades and her. Without Siuntio, though, they would never be the same. First and foremost, she missed the master mage more with every passing day. She hadn't realized how much she'd relied on his good sense, his resolute optimism, and his capacity for moral outrage till they were gone.
Second, and as important in a less personal, less intimate way, Siuntio had been the one mage who could keep Ilmarinen under something vaguely resembling control. Ilmarinen was wild for revenge against Algarve, aye, but he was also wild for experimenting with the nature of time and wild for one of the serving women at the hostel (a passion apparently not returned, which somehow didn't seem to bother him in the least) and wild for the birds flocking into the area with the return of spring and wild for…
"Anything! Everything!" Pekka complained to Fernao in the dining room one morning. "He is supposed to be in charge. He is supposed to be leading us in our work against Mezentio's men. And what is he doing? Running around in all directions at once, like a puppy in a park full of interesting smells."
The Lagoan mage quirked up a gingery eyebrow. "If you can make similes like that in classical Kaunian, maybe you ought to try writing along with magecraft."
"I do not want to try writing," Pekka said. "I want to get on with the work we are supposed to be doing. Have we done that under Ilmarinen? He is not the leader I hoped he would be. I hate to say that, but it is the truth."
"Some people are not made to be either leaders or followers," Fernao observed. "Some people listen only to themselves."
"That may be so," Pekka replied, reflecting that with Ilmarinen it certainly seemed so. "But leading is the job he has been given."
Fernao sipped from his mug of tea and looked at her over the top of it with his disconcertingly Kuusaman eyes. "If he is not doing it, maybe you should have it instead."
"Me?" Pekka's voice rose to a startled squeak, one that made Raahe and Alkio, sitting a couple of tables away, turn and stare at her. She fought for quiet, fought and won it. "How could I take it? By what right? Without Siuntio and Ilmarinen, this project would not exist. The Seven Princes would not have supported it."
"As may be." Fernao shrugged. "But now that they are supporting it, do you not think they expect success to follow from that support?"
"I couldn't," Pekka muttered in Kuusaman, more to herself than to him. "It would be like throwing my father out onto the street."
But the Lagoan mage's grasp of her language got better day by day. "Not to do with family," he said in Kuusaman, and then returned to classical Kaunian: "This is not even the business of the kingdom. This is the business of the world."
"I couldn't," Pekka repeated.
Now Fernao eyed her with the first open disapproval she'd seen from him. "Why not?" he asked pointedly. "If not you, who? I am an ignorant foreigner. The newcomers?" He lowered his voice a little further. "They are all a step below you and two steps behind you. If it is not to be Ilmarinen…"
He had confidence in her where she had none in herself. Pekka had never known that from anyone but her husband before. She wished Leino were here now. He would know how to gauge things. In the aftermath of the Algarvians' sorcerous assault, she'd lost her feel.
And then, when she was hoping Fernao would leave her alone, he found one more question: "How long do you suppose it will be before Mezentio's mages strike us again? If they do, can we withstand them?"
"Why should they strike us again?" Pekka asked. "Since they hit us the last time, what have we done that would draw their notice?" She rose from the table and left in a hurry. If she hadn't just made Fernao's point for him, what had she done? He called after her, but she kept walking.
Going up to her room didn't help. She looked out and saw mud and rock where snow had lain, mud and rock with grass and bushes growing furiously. Here, almost as in the land of the Ice People, everything had to grow furiously, for winter came early and left late, giving life little time to burgeon.
Buntings and pipits chirped. Insects buzzed. Before long, Pekka knew, there was liable to be a plague of gnats and mosquitoes, again as happened on the austral continent. The bog the countryside became after the snow melted made a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of bugs.
But the signs of spring did nothing to cheer Pekka. Instead, they reminded her how time was running out, slipping away through her fingers. Experiments should have resumed. They should have been strengthened. They hadn't. The landscape by the blockhouse should have had new craters. It didn't.
"Curse me if Fernao isn't right," Pekka exclaimed, though no one was there to hear her. "If I don't do something, who will?"
She left her room and walked down the hall to Ilmarinen's. Her knock was sharp and peremptory. Ilmarinen opened the door. When he saw her, he smiled in something that looked like relief and said, "Oh, good. I thought you were Linna." That was the serving woman with whom he was infatuated. "If she knocked like that, she'd want to knock my block off next thing."
"I want to knock your block off," Pekka said. "Why aren't we working more? When Mezentio's mages attacked us, you promised vengeance for Siuntio. Where is it? How far away is it? How long does his shade have to wait?"
"Well, well," Ilmarinen said, and then again: "Well, well. Who's been feeding you raw meat, my dear?"
"I am not your dear," Pekka snapped, "not when you sit there and twiddle your thumbs instead of doing what needs doing. If you don't move this project forward, Master Ilmarinen, who will?"