But he nodded. “Aye, it would, or I think it would, could we but find a way to do it. Believe me, I was quite as surprised as you.”
“You old fox,” Ilmarinen repeated. “This is why you’re the best in the business. Nobody pays attention to the details the way you do--nobody. If I had a hat on, I’d take it off to you.”
Pekka worked her way down to the bottom of the sheet. “This is amazing,” she said. “It’s elegant, too, which argues that it ought to be true. I find no flaws in the logic, none whatever. But that I don’t find them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Experiment is an even better test of truth than elegance.”
She hoped she hadn’t offended the master mage, and breathed a sigh of relief when Siuntio grinned. “Truly you will go far in your craft,” he told her, and she inclined her head in thanks. He went on, “Some of the required experiments may--will--be difficult to formulate.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Pekka said. “Why--” She explained an idea that had come to her while she was nearing the end of Siuntio’s work.
Now Siuntio dipped his head to her. To her surprise, so did Ilmarinen, who said, “Well, well. I wouldn’t have come up with that.”
“Nor I,” Siuntio agreed. “You deserve to be the one to try it, Mistress Pekka. In the meanwhile--for I can see that it will take some preparation--Ilmarinen and I will acquaint Raahe and Alkio and Piilis with our progress, for the three of us seem to have drawn somewhat ahead of them. Is that agreeable to you?”
“Aye.” Pekka knew she sounded dazed. The two finest theoretical sorcerers in Kuusamo had just let her know they thought she belonged in their company. All things considered, she decided she’d earned the right to sound a little dazed.
Back in his study, Brivibas labored over yet another article on the bygone days of the Kaunian Empire. By immersing himself in the past, Vanai’s grandfather did what he could to ignore the unpleasant present. Vanai wished she could find such an escape for herself.
She longed for escapes of all sorts, escape from Major Spinello chief among them. She glanced back toward the study. Brivibas would not come out till suppertime and would do his best to ignore her while they ate. She had hours in which to try her spell, the casting of which would take only a few minutes. Her grandfather would be none the wiser, and what he did not know he could not tell.
As Vanai opened the book of classical Kaunian sorcerous lore, she laughed without much humor and bowed in the direction of the study. “You have not trained me in vain, my grandfather,” she murmured, “even if I use my knowledge to ends different from yours.”
Though she was no trained mage, the spell before her looked simple enough. She’d had no trouble getting daffodil root from Tamulis the druggist; to this day, the boiled root was a simple preventive against bladder pains, and Brivibas had reached an age where it was easy to imagine him suffering from such. And Vanai’s mother had owned a set of silver earrings, necklace, and bracelet set with sea-green beryls. Taking an earring from the dusty jewelry case without her grandfather noticing had been simplicity itself.
“Now,” she said, gathering herself, “to hope this proves a true spell.” There lay the rub, as she knew only too well. However loath Brivibas was to admit it, the ancient Kaunians had been a superstitious lot, believing in all manner of demons modern thaumaturgy proved nonexistent. Some of what they’d reckoned magic, too, was nothing but imagination run wild. Too many of their spells gave no results when worked by--or against--skeptical moderns.
Vanai shrugged. One way or another, she’d learn something. I can write a paper afterwards, she thought. But she did not want to write a paper. She only wanted Major Spinello gone.
As the classical text recommended, she’d made a crude straw image of her Algarvian tormentor. Soaking the top of the image’s head in red ink showed its model came from Mezentio’s kingdom. Now that the ink had dried, Vanai held the image in her left hand. With her right, she stirred a bowl of water in which she’d boiled the daffodil root. As she cast the image into the bowl, she called out the classical Kaunian invocation from the text: “Devil, begone from my house! Devil, begone from my door!”
Devil, begone from my bed, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud--she wanted to scream it. But the charm said, Follow exactly what is written, and thou shalt surely gain thy desire: and this hath been proved in our time. She would not deviate, not yet. If the charm failed her (which she knew to be only too likely), she would think about what to do next.
For now, she took the image out of the bowl of infused water and dried it on a rag. Some of the red ink had smeared, which made the straw man look badly wounded. Vanai’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predatory grin. She didn’t mind that. No, she didn’t mind that at all.
Once the image was dry enough to suit her, she laid the beryl on its ink-stained chest. “Beryl is the stone that driveth away enemies,” she intoned. “Beryl is the stone that maketh them meek and mild and obedient to the operator’s will.” And my will is that he go away and never trouble me again, or any other Kaunian either.
When she was done, she threw the image and the rag on which she’d dried it into the cookfire. For one thing, she hoped that would hurt Spinello, too. For another, it got rid of the evidence. Like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men took a dim view of those they had defeated practicing sorcery against them. After the image had gone up in smoke, she poured down the privy the daffodil root and the water in which she had boiled it. The earring went back into the case from which it had come, the book of charms onto its shelf.
As she set about peeling and slicing parsnips to add to the pot of bean soup simmering above the fire, she wondered if she’d just wasted her time. Also like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men were warded against their enemies’ magecraft. And she didn’t know whether she’d truly practiced magecraft or simply tried to use one of her ancestors’ outworn, mistaken beliefs.
But she hoped. Oh, how she hoped.
Brivibas, as usual these days, was taciturn over supper. He’d given up lecturing her and reproving her, and had no idea how to talk to her in any more nearly normal, more nearly equal way. Or maybe, she thought as she watched him spoon up the soup, he had so many nasty things he wanted to tell her, he simply couldn’t decide which one to shout out first and so swallowed all of them. However that worked, his silence suited her.
Major Spinello did not visit her the next day. She hadn’t expected that he would; she’d come to know the rhythms of his lust better than she wanted to. Knowing them at all, for that matter, was knowing them better than she wanted to. When he stayed away the day after that, she began to hope. When he stayed away the day after that, too, her heart sang a hymn of freedom inside her.
That made the peremptory, unmistakably Algarvian knock on the door the following morning all the more devastating. Brivibas, who had been examining one of the antiquities in the parlor, let out a disdainful sniff and retreated across the courtyard to his study. He slammed the door behind him as if taking refuge in a besieged fortress.
He would be long since dead, were I not doing this, Vanai reminded herself. But her steps dragged even more than usual as she made her way to the door. “Took you long enough,” Spinello said. “You don’t want to keep me waiting, you know, not if you want to keep your grandfather breathing.”
“I am here,” Vanai said dully. “Do what you will.”
He took her back to her bedchamber and did exactly that. And then, because he hadn’t done it for longer than usual, he wanted to do it again. When he didn’t rise to the occasion quite so promptly as he’d hoped he would, Vanai had to help him. Of all the things he made her do, she despised that most of all. If I bite down hard, she thought, not for the first time--for far from the first time--the redheads will slay me and my grandfather, and the powers above only know what they’ll do to the rest of the Kaunians in Oyngestun. And so she refrained, though the temptation got stronger every time.