"Ha!" Kun pounced. "But it's not how things are in the cities, or not so much. If you move away from most of the people in your clan, you move away from most of the old squabbles, too. You get to know a man for what he is himself, not for whether his grandfather's great-uncle stole three hens from your cousin's great-grandma. Do you see what I'm saying?"
"What it sounds like is the army, except without the discipline in the army," Istvan said. "Here, I do what I do because the officers tell me to, and you do what you do because I tell you to, and the troopers do what they do because you tell them to. Back in my valley, my place in the clan tells me what to do. I always know what's expected, if you understand what I'm saying." He waited for Kun to nod, then went on, "But if you're living in the city away from your clan, how do you know what to do or how to act? Who tells you?"
"I tell myself," Kun answered. "That's what cities are all about: making your own choices, I mean. They're changing the face of Gyongyos, too."
Istvan disapproved of change on general principles. In that, he reckoned himself a typical Gyongyosian. His eyes slid over to Kun, who smiled as if knowing what he was thinking. As far as Istvan was concerned, Kun was no typical Gyongyosian- and a good thing, too, he thought. What Kun might be thinking of him never entered his mind.
They slid through Gyorvar the next morning, heading down to the docks. All the chief rivers watering the Gyongyosian plain came together at Gyorvar and went down as one to the not far distant sea. Istvan didn't think about that. He craned his neck to get a glimpse of Ekrekek Arpad's palace. Before his first trip through the capital, he'd imagined it as a tower taller than any mountains, a tower from which the Ekrekek could reach out and touch the sacred stars if he so desired. It was nothing of the sort, being pavilions of gleaming marble scattered across parkland, but lovely nonetheless. He'd remembered that.
And then, after Istvan got his glimpse, the ley-line caravan stopped at the docks, which were anything but lovely. He'd remembered that, too. The battered transports waiting to take his comrades and him across the sea were even more unlovely than the ones he remembered from his last trip through Gyorvar. He didn't know what that meant. Nothing good, probably.
Little by little, Cornelu was learning to read Lagoan. He'd never thought he would do that, but he turned out to have a powerful incentive: the better he read, the more readily he could learn of Unkerlant's advances in the west. Anything that told him of Algarve's troubles was worth investigating in detail. He might not have liked Lagoas' language, but he liked what was being said in it.
When he took Janira out to a band concert, though, he stuck to Sibian, saying, "Mezentio's men are finally starting to pay for their folly."
"Good," she answered in the same language. She had an odd accent- part lower-class, part Lagoan. Her father, Balio, was a Sibian fisherman who'd settled in Setubal after the Six Years' War, married a local woman, and started an eatery. Janira was in fact more fluent in Lagoan. That she spoke Sibian at all helped endear her to Cornelu.
"Aye," he said fiercely, and squeezed her hand. "May they be driven back on every front. May they be driven from Sibiu."
"May they stop dropping eggs on Setubal," Janira said. "Father's only just starting to get back on his feet." An Algarvian egg had wrecked the eatery where Balio had cooked and Janira served. She went on, "Everything is more expensive in the new place."
"I'm sorry," Cornelu said. And he was: that meant she had to work even more than she had before, which meant she had fewer chances to see him. Since his own duties often kept him from seeing her, their romance, if that was the name for it, had advanced only by fits and starts.
Of course, Cornelu was also a married man, at least technically. He hoped his little daughter Brindza was doing well back in Tirgoviste town. He hoped no such thing for his wife, not after Costache had taken up with at least one of the Algarvian officers who'd been billeted on her.
Standing in line with Janira, Cornelu tried to put all that out of his mind. The line snaked forward in the darkness. He passed through a couple of black curtains before emerging into light and paying the fee for himself and Janira. They both held out their hands. One of the fee-takers stamped them with red ink to show they'd paid. Then they hurried into the concert hall.
It was filling fast. Cornelu spotted a couple of seats. He went for them as ferociously as if charging on leviathanback. "There!" he said in something like triumph as he and Janira reached them just ahead of a Lagoan couple.
Janira smiled. "I can see why all your enemies must fear you," she said, sitting down beside him.
Cornelu smiled, too. "The main reason my enemies fear me is that they do not know my leviathan and I are there till too late. Sometimes they never find out what happened to them. Sometimes they do realize, and it is the last thing they ever know."
"You sound so… happy about it," Janira said with a small shiver.
"I am happy about it," he replied. "They are Algarvians. They are the enemies, the occupiers, of my kingdom. They are the enemies of this kingdom, too."
"I know. I understand all that." She hesitated, then went on, "It's only that… I haven't heard you sound really happy very often. It's… strange when you sound that way and it has to do with killing."
"Oh." Cornelu contemplated that for a moment. "I should probably be ashamed. But, aside from that, I have not had much to be happy about lately." Just before he turned the evening into a disaster even as it began, he redeemed himself with a handful of words: "Present company excepted, of course." Janira, who had started to cloud up, relaxed and leaned her head on his shoulder.
They both applauded when the musicians came out on stage. Lagoan music was on the whole delicate, like that of the other Algarvic kingdoms. It didn't thump and harangue, the way Kaunian music did. A couple of things set it apart, though. For one, it was generally more cheerful than anything Cornelu would have been likely to hear in Sibiu. Of course, the Lagoans had more reason to be cheerful- they lived farther away from Algarve. And, for another, they'd borrowed triangles and bells from their Kuusaman neighbors, which gave their pieces an almost fantastical feel to Cornelu's ears.
Janira enjoyed the music; that was plain. Cornelu applauded a little more than dutifully when the concert ended. Seeing his companion having a good time let him have a good time at one remove. That was almost as good as the real thing.
Even in the darkness imposed on it to keep from offering targets to Algarvian dragons, Setubal remained a busy place after dark. The Lagoans seemed to think they could use noise to make up for the lack of light. Everybody shouted at the top of his lungs. Carriages carried little bells to warn other carriages they were there. Ley-line caravan cars moved slowly and clanged big, deep-toned bells, as ships would during thick fog. From what the news sheets said, people walked in front of them every so often anyhow. Walking in front of even a slow-moving caravan car usually produced a funeral. But the alternative to going out in pitch darkness was staying at home, and the folk of Setubal didn't fancy that.
As far as Cornelu was concerned, the cacophony of shouts and most unmusical bells of all sizes and tones might as well have canceled the concert. "Powers above," he muttered. "I wouldn't be surprised if Algarvian dragon-fliers could hear Setubal, even if they can't see it."
Janira had a Sibian father, aye. She spoke the language of the island kingdom, aye. But she proved herself a true Lagoan by the way she navigated the dark streets back to the flat she shared with Balio. "Here we are," she said at last.
"If you say so," Cornelu answered. "For all that I can tell by looking, we might be going into King Vitor's palace."
Janira laughed. "No," she said. "That's down the street. And it's not half so fine a place as this." She laughed again. "Why, you can see for yourself."
To Cornelu, a sober, literal-minded man not much given to whimsy, that meant nothing for a moment. Then he got the joke and laughed, too. He took her in his arms. Their lips had no trouble finding each other in the darkness. His hands slid along the length of her. She let him lift her kilt and stroke her there, but then she twisted away. "Janira-" he said hoarsely. They could have done anything at all right there, and no one but the two of them would ever have known.
"Not now," she said. "Not yet. I'm not ready, Cornelu. Good night." He heard her footsteps on the stairs. The door to her block of flats opened. Then it closed.
He kicked at the slates of the sidewalk. She wasn't teasing him, leading him on. He was sure of that. One of these days, when she was ready, they would go further. "But why not tonight?" he muttered, kicking at the sidewalk again. In the blackness, he could have reached under his own kilt and relieved some of his agitation, too, but he didn't. Instead, he set out for his dockside barracks.
Not being a native of Setubal, he didn't unerringly find his way to them. He did manage to get aboard one of the many ley-line caravans gliding through the streets of the city. It wasn't any of those that went down to the harbor district, but it took him to a stop where he could catch a caravan that would carry him where he needed to go. He felt pretty good about that.
He didn't feel so good when reveille pried him out of his cot the next morning. Yawning, he staggered to the galley and gulped cup after cup of strong tea. One of his fellow exiles teased him: "You'll be pissing all day long."
"I probably will," Cornelu agreed, yawning again. "At least all the running to the jakes and back will keep me awake."
"Must have been quite a night last night." His countryman sounded jealous.
"Not so bad," Cornelu said. Janira, had she heard that, would have been irate; it implied he'd had his way with her, which he hadn't. But she wasn't there and the other Sibian was, and so Cornelu boasted a little.
He was going back for yet another mug of tea when a Lagoan officer he'd never seen before strode briskly into the mess hall. Suspicion flamed in Cornelu; an unfamiliar Lagoan with something on his mind was the last thing he wanted to see early in the morning- or any other time of day, either.
Sure enough, the Lagoan spoke up in his own language: "How many of you understand me?" About half the Sibians raised their hands. Cornelu followed well enough, but kept his down. The Lagoan switched to Algarvian: "How many of you understand me now?"
This time, Cornelu raised his hand. So did most of his countrymen. One of them called out in his own language: "Why don't you speak Sibian, if you want to talk to us?"
The Lagoan ignored that. Lagoans were generally good at ignoring anything they didn't want to hear. In Algarvian, the fellow continued, "You will all report to the Admiralty offices after breakfast for an important briefing."
"What's it about?" Cornelu called.
He got no answer. He hadn't really expected one. Having delivered his message, the Lagoan officer turned on his heel and marched away. Muffled curses followed him- and some that weren't so muffled. "High-handed son of a whore," one of the exiles said, and everybody else nodded. Lagoans were like that.
But the Sibians all tramped over to the Admiralty offices at the required time, too. Cornelu wondered what sort of orders- or lies- they would hear from the Lagoan officers in charge of getting the most out of them. Cornelu sometimes thought the Lagoans were as intent on using up the Sibians as they were on using them. He shrugged. He couldn't do anything about that.
At the Admiralty, a grizzled Lagoan petty officer whose ribbons and medals declared that he'd fought bravely during the Six Years' War spoke to the Sibians: "Down the hallway to the conference room." Unlike a lot of his countrymen- including plenty with fancier ranks and fancier educations- he spoke Sibian, not Algarvian. He even had a Facaceni accent.
"Where did you learn my language?" Cornelu asked him.
"Always a bit of dealing going on," the Lagoan answered, and said no more. Smuggler, Cornelu guessed. Whether he was right or wrong, he couldn't do anything about it now.
Gold letters over the entrance to the conference room proclaimed that it was named for Admiral Velho, one of Lagoas' heroes in the last naval war against Sibiu a couple of hundred years before. Assembling Sibians here to listen to whatever the Lagoans had to say struck Cornelu as less than tactful, but the Lagoans had been less than tactful ever since the Sibian exiles arrived.
Cornelu turned to complain to one of his countrymen as he started into the conference room, but stopped with the words unuttered. One look at the map on the far wall swept them out of his head. The other Sibians were pointing and staring, too. Their talk rose to an excited buzz.
A Lagoan officer in tunic and kilt darker than the Sibian sea-green stood beside the map. "Have we got your attention?" he asked the exiles- in Algarvian. For once, Cornelu didn't care. With that map in front of him, he would listen to anything.