Krasta turned and looked back toward the Kaunian Column of Victory. It still stood in its ancient park, pale and proud and tall in the moonlight. Unlike during the Six Years’ War, no damage had come to it in this fight. Even so, the imperial victories it commemorated had never seemed so distant to her.
“Well,” Lurcanio said, “let us go in, then, and pay our respects to your illustrious sovereign.” He spoke without discernible irony. In the wink of an eye, he’d pulled the cloak of polished noble courtier over whatever lay beneath.
In the palace, King Gainibu’s servitors bowed to Lurcanio as they might have to a count of Valmieran blood or perhaps even as they might have to a duke of Valmieran blood. They fawned on Krasta as if she were duchess rather than marchioness, too. That went a long way toward improving her mood.
At the door to the reception hall--the Grand Hall, Krasta realized, the hall in which Gainibu had declared his ill-fated war--a uniformed Algarvian soldier checked Lurcanio’s name and hers against a list. After affirming they had the right to go past him, he stood aside. He and Lurcanio spoke briefly in their own language.
“What was that about?” Krasta asked irritably.
“Making sure neither of us is an assassin in disguise,” Lurcanio answered. “Still a few malcontents loose in the provinces. They’ve murdered some nobles who cooperate with us, and some of our men, too. If they managed to sneak a murderer in here, they could do us some harm.”
He thought of harm to his kingdom. Krasta thought of harm to herself. When she looked around the room, she found it odd to realize Algarvians were more likely to keep her safe than her own countrymen. She made a beeline for the bar and got herself a brandy laced with wormwood. She tossed it back as if it were ale. The sooner the world got blurry, the better she’d like it.
Lurcanio took a glass of white wine for himself. He drank. He enjoyed drinking. Krasta had seen that. But she’d never seen him fuddled. She doubted she ever would. Foolishness, she thought. Anything worth doing was worth doing to excess.
“Shall we go over and greet his Majesty?” Lurcanio asked, glancing toward the receiving line at whose head Gainibu stood. His mouth tightened. “Perhaps we should do it now, while he will still remember who we are--and who he is.”
Gainibu held a large tumbler half full of amber spirits. By the way he stood, by the vague expression on his face, he’d already emptied it a good many times. Krasta remembered Lurcanio’s sardonic comment outside the palace. The Algarvian commissioner must not have given the king any trouble about refills.
Krasta and Lurcanio worked their way up the receiving line. It was shorter than it would have been before the war. Not all the guests bothered presenting themselves to Gainibu. He was not the most important man in the room, not any more. Several of Lurcanio’s superiors possessed more authority than he. Again, Krasta had the sense of ground shifting under her feet.
Gainibu’s decorations, honorary and earned, glittered on his chest. Lurcanio saluted him as junior officer to senior. Krasta bowed low. “Your Majesty,” she murmured.
“Ah, the marchioness,” Gainibu replied, though Krasta was not sure he knew which marchioness she was. “And with a friend, I see. Aye, with a friend.” He took another sip from the tumbler. His eyes followed it as he lowered it from his mouth. Before the war, his eyes had followed beautiful women that way. They’d followed Krasta that way, more than once. What was she now? Just another noblewoman on a conqueror’s arm, less interesting than the spirits that swirled in his glass.
Lurcanio touched Krastas elbow. She let him lead her away. Behind her, King Gainibu mumbled something courteous to someone else. “He is not the man he was,” Lurcanio said, hardly caring whether Gainibu heard or not. In a different tone, it might have been pity. It was scorn.
To her surprise, sudden tears filled Krasta’s eyes. She looked back toward the king. There he stood, impressive, amiable, drunk. His kingdom was a prisoner of Algarve. And he, she thought with a burst of insight that surely came from the wormwood, was a prisoner within himself.
“Now we have done our duty,” Lurcanio said. “We can enjoy ourselves the rest of the evening.”
“Aye,” Krasta said, though she had seldom felt less like enjoying herself. “Excuse me for a moment.” She hurried over to the bar. An expressionless servitor gave her another glass of the wormwood-flavored brandy. She gulped it down with reckless speed.
“Have a care, there,” Lurcanio said from behind her. “Will I need to carry you up the stairs to your bedchamber tonight?” An eyebrow quirked. “I do not think I need to make you pass out drunk to have my way with you.”
“No.” Melancholy and insight were not natural to Krasta. Ingenious lubricity was. She ran her tongue over her lips, tilted a hip and gazed saucily up at the Algar-vian officer. “But would you enjoy it that way?”
He considered. Slowly, he smiled. “Once, perhaps. Everything is interesting once.” Krasta needed to hear no more. She turned back to the bar and began to drink in earnest.
Three
Pekka was beginning to hate knocks on her office door. They always seemed to come in the middle of important calculations. And the last thing she wanted was to discover Ilmarinen, or even some other theoretical sorcerer, standing on his head in the hallway, as she had once before. Maybe it would be a Kajaani City College student. She could, she hoped, get rid of a student in a hurry.
She got up and opened the door. That done, she had to fight back a gasp of dismay. The smile that appeared on her face was an excellent job of conjuring. “Professor Heikki!” she exclaimed, for all the world as if she were delighted to have her department chairman visit her at that moment. “Won’t you come in?”
Maybe Heikki would say no. Maybe knowing Pekka was here and working would satisfy her. But she said, “Aye, I thank you,” and strolled in as if it were her office and Pekka the visitor. Pekka, in fact, waited for her to sit down behind the desk. But Heikki planted her rather broad bottom in the chair in front of it.
Retreating--and it felt like a retreat--to her own chair, Pekka brushed a strand of coarse black hair away from her narrow eyes and asked, “What can I do for you this afternoon?”
Whatever Heikki wanted, Pekka was sure it had nothing to do with the project that had engrossed her for so long. Heikki had got to be the chairman of the Department of Sorcery more for her bureaucratic talents than for her magecraft. Her specialty was veterinary sorcery. In unkind moments, Pekka thought she’d chosen it to make sure she knew more than her patients.
“I am disturbed,” Heikki said now.
“In what way?” Pekka asked. By the chairman’s expression, it might have been dyspepsia. Pekka knew she would get herself in trouble if she suggested stomach bitters. Knowing just made the temptation harder to resist.
“I am disturbed,” Heikki repeated. “I am disturbed at the amount of time you are spending in the laboratory of late and at the expense of your recent experiments. Surely theoretical sorcery, being, uh, theoretical, requires less experimentation than other forms of the art.”
In lieu of picking up a vase and smashing it over the department chairman’s head, Pekka replied, “Professor, sometimes theory and experiment have to go hand in hand. Sometimes theory proceeds from experiment.”
“I am more concerned about our budget,” Heikki said primly. “Suppose you tell me what the nature of your experiments are, so that I may judge whether they are worth the time and money you are expending on them.”