His own respite didn’t last so long as Eoforwic’s. He woke in the middle of the night with belly pains and an urgent need to squat. “A pox!” he grumbled. “I’ve come down with a flux.” But squatting didn’t help, and the pain only got worse.
When morning came, his men exclaimed in horror. “Powers above, Colonel, get to a healer,” one of them said. “You’re yellow as a lemon!”
“Yellow?” Spinello stared down at himself. “What’s wrong with me?” He scratched his head. He didn’t argue about going to a healer; he felt as bad as he looked, maybe worse. “I wonder if it was those mushrooms. Plenty of reasons we don’t eat them, I bet.”
He got a powerful emetic from the healers. That just gave him one more misery, and did nothing to make him feel better. Nothing the healers did could make him feel better, or even ease his torment. It ended for good three days later, with him still wondering about those mushrooms.
Vanai splashed hot water, very hot water, water as hot as she could stand it, onto her face again and again, especially around her mouth. Then she rubbed and rubbed and rubbed at her lips with the roughest, scratchiest towel she had. Finally, when she’d rubbed her mouth bloody, she gave up. She could still feel Spinello’s lips on hers even after all that.
But then she snatched Saxburh out of her cradle and danced around the flat with the baby in her arms. Saxburh liked that; she squealed with glee. “It was worth it. By the powers above, it was worth it!” Her little daughter wouldn’t have argued for the world. She was having the time of her life. She squealed again.
“Do you know what I did?” Vanai said. “Do you have any idea what I did?” Saxburh had no idea. She chortled anyhow. Still dancing, ignoring the sandpapered state of her lips, Vanai went on, “I put four death caps in his stew. Not one, not two, not three. Four. Four death caps could kill a troop of behemoths, let alone one fornicating Algarvian.” She kept right on dancing. Saxburh kept right on laughing.
Fornicating Algarvian is right, Vanai thought savagely. Her mouth was sore, but she didn’t care. I’d’ve put my lips on his prong to get him to take that bowl of stew. Powers below eat him, why not? It’s not as if he didn’t make me do it before. Teach me tricks, will you? See how you ‘II like the one I just taught you!
Spinello, without a doubt, felt fine right now. That was one of the things that made death caps and their close cousins, the destroying powers, so deadly. People who ate them didn’t feel anything wrong for several hours, sometimes even for a couple of days. By then it was far too late for them to puke up what they’d eaten. The poison stayed inside them, working, and no healer or mage had ever found a cure for it. Soon enough, Spinello would know what she’d done.
“Isn’t that fine?” Vanai asked Saxburh. “Isn’t that just the most splendid thing you ever heard in all your days?” The baby didn’t have many days, but, by the way she gurgled and wriggled with glee, it might have been.
All Forthwegians hunted mushrooms whenever they got the chance. In that, if in few other things, the Kaunians in Forthweg agreed with their neighbors. No one-not even Algarvian soldiers, not any more-paid much attention to people walking with their heads down, eyes on the ground. And who was likely to notice what sort of mushrooms went into a basket? One thing Vanai’s grandfather had taught her was how to tell the poisonous from the safe. Everyone in Forthweg learned those lessons. This once, Vanai had chosen to stand them on their head.
“And so you too have some measure of revenge, my grandfather,” she whispered in classical Kaunian. Brivibas would never have approved of her saying any such thing to him in mere Forthwegian.
Saxburh’s eyes-they would be dark like Ealstan’s, for they were already darkening from the blue of almost all newborns’ eyes-widened. She could hear that the sounds of this language were different from those of the Forthwegian Vanai and Ealstan usually spoke.
“I will teach you this tongue, too,” Vanai told her daughter, still in classical Kaunian. “I do not know if you will thank me for it. This is a tongue whose speakers have more than their share of trouble, more than their share of woe. But it is as much yours as Forthwegian, and you should learn it. What do you think of that?”
“Dada!” Saxburh said.
Vanai laughed. “No, you silly thing, I’m your mama,” she said, falling back into Forthwegian without noticing she’d done it till after the words passed her lips. Saxburh babbled more cheerful nonsense, none of which sounded like either Forthwegian or classical Kaunian. Then she screwed up her face and grunted.
Knowing what that meant even before she caught the smell, Vanai squatted down, laid Saxburh on the floor, and cleaned her bottom. Saxburh even thought that was funny, where she often fussed over it. Vanai laughed, too, but she had to work to keep the corners of her mouth turned up. She wouldn’t have used Forthwegian so much before she started disguising herself. It really was as if Thelberge, the Forthwegian semblance she had to wear, were gaining at the expense of Vanai, the Kaunian reality within.
Even if the Algarvians lose the war, even if the Unkerlanters drive them out of Forthweg, what will it be like for the blonds left alive here? Will they-will we-go on wearing sorcerous disguises and speaking Forthwegian because it’s easier, because the Forthwegians-the real Forthwegians-won’t hate us so much then? If we do, what happens to the Kaunianity, the sense of ourselves as something special and apart, that we’ve kept alive ever since the Empire fell?
She cursed softly. She had no answer for that. She wondered if anyone else did, if anyone else could. If not, even if the Algarvians lost the Derlavaian War, wouldn’t they have won a great battle in their endless struggle against the Kaunians who’d been civilized while they still painted themselves strange colors and ran naked through their native forests throwing spears?
The familiar coded knock Ealstan used interrupted her gloomy reverie. She snatched up Saxburh and hurried to unbar the door. Ealstan gave her a kiss. Then he wrinkled his nose. “I know what you’ve been doing,” he said. He kissed Saxburh. “And I know what you’ve been doing, too.” He took her from Vanai and rocked her in his arms. “Aye, I do. You can’t fool me. I know just what you’ve been doing.”
“She can’t help it,” Vanai said. “And it’s something everybody else does, too.”
“I should hope so,” Ealstan answered. “Otherwise, we’d all burst like eggs, and who would clean up after us then?” Vanai hadn’t thought of it like that. When she did, she giggled. Ealstan went on, “And what did you do with your morning?”
Before Vanai realized she would, she answered, “While Saxburh was taking a nap, I put on a blue-and-white armband and went out and pretended I was one of Hilde’s Helpers.”
“Powers above, you’re joking!” Ealstan exclaimed. “Don’t say things like that, or you’ll make me drop the baby.” He mimed doing just that, which made Vanai start and made Saxburh laugh.
Vanai said, “I really did. And do you want to know why?”
Ealstan studied her to make sure she wasn’t kidding him. What he saw on her face must have satisfied him, for he replied, “I’d love to know why. The only reason that occurs to me right now is that you’ve gone crazy, and I don’t think that’s right.”
“No.” Vanai said that in Forthwegian, but then switched to classical Kaunian. “I wore the armband because I wanted to give a certain officer of the redheaded barbarians a special dish-and I did it.”
“A special dish?” Ealstan echoed in his own slow, thoughtful classical Kaunian. “What kind of-? Oh!” He didn’t need long to figure out what she meant. His eyes glowed. “How special was it?”