Vanai’s voice went shrill with alarm: “You know why they’re doing that.”
“Of course I do,” Ealstan replied. “With all the Kaunians in one place, the redheads won’t have to work so hard to round your people up and ship you west whenever they need some more.”
“Some more to kill,” Vanai said, and Ealstan nodded. She turned away from him. “What am I going to do?” She wasn’t asking Ealstan. She was asking the world at large, and the world had long since shown that it didn’t care.
Whether she’d asked him or not, Ealstan answered: “Well, you’re not going into the Kaunian quarter and that’s flat. Out here, you’ve got a chance. In there? Forget it.”
“A price on my head,” Vanai said wonderingly. She giggled, though it wasn’t funny--perhaps because it wasn’t funny. “What am I, a famous highwayman?”
“You’re an enemy of the Kingdom of Forthweg,” Ealstan told her. “That’s what the broadsheet says, anyhow.”
Vanai laughed louder, because that was even less funny than the other. “I’m an enemy of the kingdom?” she exclaimed. “I am? Who beat the Forthwegian army? Last I looked, it was the Algarvians, not us Kaunians.”
“A lot of Forthwegians will forget all about that, though,” Ealstan said bleakly. “Cousin Sidroc would, I think; maybe Uncle Hengist, too. Kaunians have always been easy to blame.”
“Of course we are.” Vanai didn’t try to hide her bitterness. She might almost have been speaking to another Kaunian as she went on, “There are ten times as many Forthwegians as there are of us. That makes us pretty easy to blame all by itself.”
“Aye, it does, though not all of us”--Ealstan didn’t forget he was a Forthwegian--”feel that way about Kaunians.”
Slowly, Vanai nodded. She knew how Ealstan felt about her. But from everything he’d said, his father and brother would never have done anything to harm Kaunians--and neither of them had fallen in love with one. Following that thought along its ley line brought fresh alarm to Vanai. “What will the redheads do to anyone who helps hide Kaunians outside the quarter?”
Ealstan looked unhappy. Maybe he’d hoped that wouldn’t occur to her. The hope was foolish; the Algarvian edict would surely be plastered all over the news sheets, too. Reluctantly, he answered, “There is a penalty for harboring fugitives--that’s what they call it. The broadsheet doesn’t say what it is.”
“Whatever the Algarvians want it to be, that’s what,” Vanai predicted, and Ealstan had to nod. She pointed at him, as if the broadsheet were his fault. “And now you’re going to be in danger on account of me.” That seemed even worse than her being in danger herself.
Ealstan shrugged. “Not many people know you’re here. I’m not sure the landlord does, and that’s a good thing--landlords are a pack of conniving, double-dealing whoresons, and they’d do anything to put another three coppers in their belt pouches.”
In their pockets, Vanai would have said, but the long tunics Forthwegians wore didn’t come with pockets. She wondered how he spoke with such assurance about landlords, having lived at home all his life till fleeing after the fight with his cousin. She was about to twit him on that when she remembered he was a bookkeeper, and the son of a bookkeeper for good measure. He would know more about landlords and their habits than she might have guessed.
He went on, “I don’t know if we’ll be able to get you to any more of Ethelhelm’s performances, or anything like that.”
When he said he didn’t know if she’d be able to go out, he meant he knew perfectly well she wouldn’t. Vanai could see that. Even so, she was grateful for the way he phrased it. It left her hope, and she had little else. She looked around at the imperfectly plastered walls of the dingy flat. Aye, they might have been the bars of a cage in the zoological garden.
“You’ll have to bring me more books,” she said. “A lot more books.” Brivibas had given her one thing for which to remember him kindly, at any rate: as long as her eyes were going back and forth across a printed page, she could forget where she was. That was not the smallest of sorceries, not when this was the place she had to try to forget.
“I will,” Ealstan said. “I’d already thought of that. I’ll scour the secondhand stores. I can get more for the same money in places like that.”
She nodded and looked around again. Aye, this would be a cage, sure enough. She wouldn’t even dare look out on the street so much as she had been doing, lest someone looking up spy her golden hair. “Get me some cookbooks,” she said. “If I’m going to spend all my time cooped up in here, cooking will help make the days go by.” She pointed at Ealstan. “You’ll get fat, you wait and see.”
“I don’t mind trying,” he said. “Fattening me up won’t be easy, though, not on what passes for rations these days.”
Something unspoken hung in the air between them. IfAlgarve wins the war, none of this matters. Mezentio’s men wouldn’t need their savage sorceries anymore after that, but by then they would have got into the habit of killing Kaunians. And that, as the history of her people in Forthweg attested, was a habit easier to acquire than to break.
There was one other thing she could think of to make time go by here in this little flat. She went over to Ealstan and put her arms around him. “Come on,” she said, doing her best to recapture the excitement that had been growing in her before the redheads ran up their broadsheets. “Let’s go back to the bedchamber. . . .”
Trasone tramped through the battered streets of Aspang. The burly Algarvian soldier looked on the devastation around him with a certain amount of satisfaction. The Unkerlanters had done everything they could to throw his comrades and him out of the place, but they’d failed. Algarve’s banner of red and green and white still flew from flagpoles all over Aspang.
So did another flag, the gold and green of the revived Kingdom of Grelz. Trasone rumbled laughter deep in his chest when he saw a Grelzer flag. He knew the kingdom was a joke. Every Algarvian soldier in Aspang knew the same thing. And if the Grelzers didn’t, they were even stupider than he thought.
He snorted. As far as he was concerned, Grelzers were just another bunch of stinking Unkerlanters. If you turned your back on them, they’d stab you. Every couple of paces, he looked around. No, you couldn’t trust these whoresons, not even in a town full of Algarvian soldiers.
He strode out into the market square. Along with the rest of Aspang, it had taken a beating. Still, merchants from the town and peasants in from the countryside had set up tables on which to display their wares. If they didn’t sell, they’d starve. And, no doubt, some of them took word of what they saw back to the Unkerlanter raiders who never stopped harassing the Algarvians behind their lines.
“Sausage?” a woman called to Trasone, holding up several grayish brown links. “Good sausage!” He would have bet every copper he owned that she hadn’t known a word of Algarvian before the war.
“How much?” he asked. Algarvian soldiers were under orders not to plunder in the market square, though the rest of Aspang was fair game. The links looked better than what he was likely to get back at the barracks.
“One silver, four links,” the sausage seller answered.
“Thief,” Trasone growled, to start the haggling off on the right note. He got his four links of sausage, and paid less than half what the Grelzer peasant woman had first demanded. He strolled away happy. That the woman hadn’t dared dicker hard against an occupying soldier with a stick slung on his back didn’t cross his mind. Had it, he wouldn’t have cared. The bargain was all that mattered.
He hadn’t gone far before he saw Major Spinello heading his way. As best he could with sausages in his free hand, he came to attention and saluted. “As you were,” Spinello said. The battalion commander eyed his purchase. “You’re supposed to give these Unkerlanter wenches your sausage, soldier. You’re not supposed to take theirs.”