“I believe you,” Ealstan said, and looked at Vanai in a way that made her turn redder than she had before.
His father smiled that slow smile. “That isn’t what I meant, or not all of what I meant, though I expect you’ll have a hard time believing me when I say so. But the truth is, I like moving numbers around. Maybe, if I’d had a chance, I’d be moving them around in different ways from those a bookkeeper uses. But if I tried to tell you I’m pining for a scholarly career I never had, that would be a lie.”
Elfryth ducked her head into the dining room. “I just looked in on Saxburh. She’s so sweet, lying there asleep.”
“Sure she is,” Ealstan said. “She’s not making any noise.”
His mother sniffed indignantly. His father chuckled and said, “Spoken like the proper sort of parent: a tired one.”
“Stop that, Hestan,” Elfryth said. “What were you saying there about telling lies?”
“I was telling them about running off and joining a traveling carnival when I was young,” Hestan answered, deadpan. “Everything went fine till the elephant stepped on me. I used to be a much taller man, you know.”
“Pity the beast didn’t squash the silliness out of you, too,” Elfryth observed.
Vanai looked from Ealstan’s father to his mother and back again. “Is that where we’ll be in twenty years?” she asked.
Ealstan didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Elfryth said, “Either something like this or you’ll shout at each other all the time. This is better.”
“I think so, too,” Vanai said.
Hestan asked, “Are you still interested in going on to the university, Ealstan? We could probably afford it if you are.”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I never even graduated from the academy.”
“You can always find ways around things like that.” His father spoke with great assurance.
“Maybe,” Ealstan said. “The other thing, though. . Well, you said it yourself. I’ve got a family to worry about now-and I think I’ve been pretty lucky there, too.” Having a wife and child would make his life as a student more complicated. Having a Kaunian wife and half-Kaunian child might make his life as a student much more complicated. That wasn’t anything he could say to Vanai.
“It does make a difference, doesn’t it?” Hestan said, and Ealstan nodded.
As Ealstan and Vanai lay down together that night, she said, “If you want to be a scholar, we could make it work, I think.”
He shrugged. “Things aren’t the way they were before the war. They’re never going to be the same as they were before the war. I’m sorry.” He took her hand. “I wish they could be, but it’s not going to happen.”
“I know,” Vanai answered. “There are some things that, once you break them, you can’t put them back together again.”
That held nothing but truth. The ancient Kaunian population of Forthweg- more ancient here than the Forthwegians themselves-would never be the same again. Ealstan caught Vanai to him. “One thing, though,” he said. “Because we met, I’m the luckiest fellow in the world.”
She kissed him. “You’re sweet. I wonder if we would have met anyhow. We might have. I came to Gromheort every now and then. And we-”
“We both knew about that oak grove where we found each other in mushroom season,” Ealstan broke in. “We really might have.”
“My grandfather wouldn’t have approved. He didn’t approve,” Vanai said. “In peacetime, that might have mattered more.”
“I hope not,” Ealstan said.
“So do I,” Vanai said. “But we don’t know. We can’t know. A lot of dreadful things have happened the past six years. I’m just glad we’ve got each other.”
This time, Ealstan kissed her and hugged her to him. “I am, too.”
Vanai let out a small laugh. “You’re very glad, aren’t you?” she said, and reached between them to show how she knew.
“And getting gladder every second, too,” Ealstan told her. She laughed again. He started undoing her tunic. As often as not, that seemed to wake up the baby. Not tonight, though. He teased her nipple with his tongue. Her breath sighed out. In a bit, Ealstan poised himself above her. Not too long after that, he was as glad as he could possibly be that they had each other.
Count Sabrino, former and forcibly retired colonel of dragonfliers, had a roof over his head and, for the most part, enough to eat. In occupied, devastated Trapani, that made him a lucky man indeed. As lucky as an aging cripple can be, anyhow, he thought sourly. Day by day, his crutches seemed more a part of him.
Some men who’d lost a leg preferred a wheeled chair to crutches. Sabrino might have, too, in the Trapani he’d known before the war: a city of paved boulevards and smooth sidewalks. On the rubble-strewn, cratered streets of the Algarvian capital these days, such chairs got stuck too easily to seem practical to him.
He saw enough mutilated men, of all ages from barely bearded to older than he was, to have plenty of standards of comparison. Each one was an emblem of what Algarve had gone through. Taken together, they made a searing indictment of the darkness through which his kingdom had passed.
He stopped into a tavern not far from his home and ordered a glass of wine. The tapman’s right arm stopped just below his shoulder: no possible hope of fitting him with a hook. But he handled the glass and the wine bottle with his remaining hand as well as anyone possibly could.
When Sabrino praised him, he let out a short, bitter burst of laughter. “It’s not quite what you think, friend,” he said. “I’m well off, if you want to call it that-you see, I’ve always been left-handed.”
“If what you kept is more useful to you than what you lost, that is good fortune,” Sabrino agreed. “Plenty of people have it worse.”
“If a whole man said something like that to me, I’d punch the son of a whore in the nose-with my left hand, of course,” the tapman said. “But you, buddy, you went through it, too. I’ll take it from you. Where’d you get hurt?”
“Not far west of here, not long before the war ended,” Sabrino answered. “I was on a dragon, and it got flamed out of the sky. Some of the flame got my leg, too, and so.. .” He shrugged, then politely added, “You?”
“On the way to Cottbus, the first winter of the war in the west,” the other cripple told him. “A flying chunk of eggshell tore the arm almost all the way off, and the healers finished the job. The same burst killed two of my pals.”
Sabrino shoved a silver coin across the bar to him. “Have a glass of whatever you care for, on me.”
“I usually don’t, not when I’m working.” But the tapman dropped the coin into the cash box. “Powers below eat it, once won’t hurt. Thank you kindly, friend. You’re a gentleman.” He poured himself a shot of spirits, then took a shiny new copper coin from the box and gave it to Sabrino. “I wouldn’t cheat you-here’s your change.”
Sabrino looked at the coin. It showed the profile of a plump man with a receding chin, not the strong, beaky image that had been stamped onto Algarve’s currency for so many years. “So this is the new king, is it?” he said.
“If you believe the Unkerlanters, he is,” the tapman answered. “Me, I don’t know why they don’t just put King Swemmel’s face on the money and have done with it.”
That would have been my face there, if I’d told Vatran aye, Sabrino thought as he put the copper in his beltpouch. It was a strange notion, and not one he’d had in the sanatorium bed when the Unkerlanter general came to call on him. He finished his wine, picked up his crutches (which he’d leaned against the side of the bar while he perched on a stool and drank), left the tavern, and made his slow way home.
When he got there, he found his wife more excited than he’d seen her in years. “Powers above, Gismonda, what’s going on?” he asked, wondering what sort of calamity could have upset her so.
But it turned out to be a different kind of excitement. “You may be able to get your leg back,” she said dramatically.
“What?” He shook his head. “Don’t be silly. I’m an abridged edition these days, and I’ll stay that way as long as I last.”