Out of the Darkness

From the crenelated battlements of his castle, Skarnu looked out over his new marquisate. The castle, on high ground, was admirably sited for defense; the traitorous Simanu and Enkuru’s ancestors had known what they were doing when they built here. Not till egg-tossers came along would anyone have had much chance of taking this place.

Merkela came up beside him and pointed to where fields ended and forest began, a mile or two away. “That was where we settled Simanu,” she said. “Good riddance to him, too.”

“Aye.” Skarnu put his arm around her. “It’s over now. We’ve won. Nobody’s at war with anybody, anywhere in the world.” He shook his head, half in sorrow, half in wonder. “And how long has it been since the last time that was so?”

His wife shrugged. She didn’t worry much about the world at large. Her worries, as usual, lay closer to home. “There are still collaborators loose. We have to smoke them out.”

“Aye,” Skarnu repeated. It did need doing, but fewer people, these days, still shared Merkela’s zeal. A lot of them wanted nothing more than to go back to living their lives as if the Derlavaian War had never happened. As day followed day, Skarnu found it harder and harder to blame them.

Merkela said, “Did you see the news sheet that came yesterday? They put that woman in the witness box against Lurcanio.” She still refused to call Krasta Skarnu’s sister. When she hated, she did a thorough job.

“I saw it,” Skarnu answered with a sigh. “At least the news of peace pushed it to the back pages. Every time I think we’ve had all the embarrassment we’re going to get from that, I turn out to be wrong.”

“It doesn’t look like they’ll summon you,” Merkela said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Skarnu agreed. “I’m not really surprised. The only dealings I ever had with the redhead were the kind the people on opposite sides in a war usually have. He played by the rules then.”

“I hope they call Vatsyunas and Pernavai,” his wife said. “They can tell the judges what the Algarvians did to Kaunians in Forthweg.”

The married couple had been aboard the ley-line caravan Skarnu and Merkela helped sabotage as it went past her farm. If that caravan hadn’t been sabotaged, all the captives aboard it would have been sacrificed for their life energy. As things were, a good many of them had scattered over the Valmieran countryside. Vatsyunas and Pernavai had worked on Merkela’s farm for a while, and had both worked with the underground, too.

“What I remember about Vatsyunas is the way he spoke Valmieran,” Skarnu said. That got a smile and a nod from Merkela. Stern as she was, she couldn’t deny Vatsyunas had sounded pretty funny. His birthspeech, of course, was classical Kaunian. He’d known not a word of Valmieran, one of the old tongue’s daughters, when he found himself here. In learning, he’d seemed like a man stuck in time halfway between the days of the Kaunian Empire and the modern world.

“He’d make himself understood,” Merkela said, “and he would be able to testify from the other side about what the redheads did to folk of Kaunian blood.”

“Aye, but would he be able to testify that Lurcanio had anything to do with the caravan he was on?” Skarnu asked.

“I don’t know,” Merkela replied, “and I don’t much care, either. All I care about is that all the redheads get what’s coming to them. I hope the soldiers in Algarve are taking plenty of hostages, and I hope they’re blazing them, too.”

She’d lost her first husband when Mezentio’s men took him hostage and blazed him. If they hadn’t seized Gedominu (after whom she’d named her son), she wouldn’t be wed to Skarnu now, and wouldn’t be a marchioness. Skarnu wondered if she ever thought about that. After a moment, he also wondered if it was true. He and Merkela had been drawn to each other before the redheads took Gedominu. What would have happened if they hadn’t?

No way to know. Would they have kept on holding back? Or would they have lain together even with Gedominu still there? What would he have done if they had? Looked the other way? Maybe--he’d been twice Merkela’s age. But maybe not, too. He might have come after both of them with a hatchet... or with a stick.

Skarnu shrugged. It hadn’t happened. It belonged in the vague, ghostly forest of might-have-beens, along with such things as Valmiera holding her own against Algarve and magic being impossible. They might be interesting to think about, but they weren’t real and never would be.

Merkela said, “I’m going down to tend to the herb garden.”

“All right,” Skarnu answered, “but don’t you think the cook’s helper could handle the job well enough?”

“Maybe, but maybe not, too,” his wife said. “I’m sure I know at least as much about it as she does, and I don’t care to sit around twiddling my thumbs all day. I was taking care of an herb garden as soon as I was big enough to know how. Why should I stop doing it now?”