Through the Darkness

Skarnu gaped. He wanted to dig a finger into one ear to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Are you feeling well?” he asked. At first, he meant it for a joke, but after a moment he realized she hadn’t quite been herself lately.

She walked on for another few paces, head down, hands in her trouser pockets. “I hadn’t meant to tell you so soon,” she said, still looking at the sidewalk and not at him, “but I think I’d better.”

“Tell me what?” Skarnu asked.

Now she did lift her head and face him. He had trouble reading her smile. Was she pleased? Rueful? Something of each, perhaps? And then all his thoughtful analysis crashed to the ground, because she answered, “I’m going to have a baby. Not much doubt of it now.”

“A baby?” Skarnu wondered what his own face was showing. Astonishment again, most likely, which was foolish--they’d been lovers a good while. He did his best to rally. “That’s--wonderful, sweetheart.” After a moment, he nodded; saying it helped make him believe it.

And Merkela nodded, too. “It is, isn’t it? For me especially, I mean--when I didn’t quicken with Gedominu, I wondered if I was barren. When I didn’t quicken with you, I thought I must be. But I was wrong.” Now nothing but joy blazed from her smile.

Gedominu had been an old man. If anyone was to blame for Merkela’s not getting pregnant, Skarnu would have bet on him, not her. As for himself. . . He shrugged. He’d never fathered a bastard before, but who could say what that meant about his own seed? Nothing, evidently, or Merkela wouldn’t be with child now.

He also wondered if he should let the child stay a bastard. In the normal course of events, he never would have met Merkela; if he had met her and bedded her, it would have been a night’s amusement, nothing more. Now... Thanks to the war, nothing was what it had been. Who would call him a madman if he took a farmer’s widow to wife?

Krasta would.

That occurred to him almost at once. He shrugged again. Once upon a time, he would have cared what his sister thought. No more. Having let an Algarvian lie in her bed, Krasta could hardly complain about whose bed he lay in.

He took Merkela’s hand. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “I promise.” He didn’t know how he would keep that promise, but he’d find some way.

And Merkela nodded. “I know it,” she told him. “And . . . the child will grow up free. By the powers above, it will.” Skarnu nodded, too, though he wasn’t sure how that vow would come true, either.

Holding hands, they walked into the market square. Farmers displayed eggs and cheeses and hams and preserved fruit and gherkins and any number of other good things. The eye Skarnu and Merkela turned on those was more competitive than acquisitive. Their own farm--which seemed much more real to Skarnu than the mansion he hadn’t seen for so long--supplied all they needed along those lines, and they sometimes sold their surplus here in the square, too.

But Pavilosta’s cloth merchant and potter--aye, and the ironmonger, too--had stalls of their own in the market square. Merkela admired some fine green linen, though she didn’t admire the price the cloth merchant wanted for the bolt. “You might get that from a marchioness,” she said, “but how many noblewomen will you see here?”

“If I sell it for less than what I paid for it, I won’t do myself any good,” the merchant said.

“You won’t do yourself any good if you don’t sell it at all, either,” Merkela retorted. “I think the moths will get fat on it before you move it.” Off she went, nose in the air as if she were a marchioness herself--indeed, Krasta could hardly have done it better. Skarnu followed in her wake.

Pavilosta’s townsfolk sneered at the goods the farmers had brought to market. The farmers who’d come to shop and not to sell disparaged everything the local merchants displayed. Some of them were much louder and ruder than Merkela.

Algarvians prowled through the square, too: more of them than Skarnu was used to seeing in Pavilosta. Put together with the cordwainer’s disappearance, that worried him. Weren’t the redheads supposed to be throwing everything they had into the fight in Unkerlant? If tliey were, why bring so many soldiers to a little country town where nothing ever happened?

But Pavilosta wasn’t quite a little country town where nothing ever happened. Count Enkuru, who’d been hand in glove with Mezentio’s men, had been assassinated here. A riot had broken out at the accession of his son Simanu, another noble who’d been too cozy with the Algarvians. And Simanu was dead, too; Skarnu had blazed him. So maybe the redheads had their reasons after all.

One of their officers practically paraded through the square, his uniform kilt flapping around his legs as he hurried this way and that. Merkela noticed him, too. “He’s trouble,” she whispered to Skarnu.