Authors: Harry Turtledove
Ealstan shook his head. “No, you won’t. There’s still plenty left at home. I didn’t throw it away—I thought you’d be back.”
I
hoped you’d be back
was closer to the truth, but he said it the way he wanted to.
Vanai kissed him for it. That made it worthwhile, and more than worthwhile. She took his hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Eggs were still bursting all over Eoforwic. Ealstan said, “Now that I’ve got you back, I want the Unkerlanters to go away and leave us alone. Before, all I wanted them to do was knock Eoforwic topsy-turvy.”
“So did I,” Vanai said as they went out onto the street once more. She grinned at him. “I wanted to get back to the flat by myself and be there waiting when you walked in. You spoiled my surprise.” The grin disappeared. “You almost frightened me to death, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Ealstan said. “I’m so sorry. But looking like one of the redheads was the only way I could find to get into the Kaunian district.” He drew himself up. “It worked, too.”
Vanai couldn’t argue with that, and she didn’t try. The Unkerlanter dragons did fly away. After the eggs stopped falling, people started coming back out onto the streets. No one looked twice at Ealstan and Vanai; the only thing in the least out of the ordinary about them was her pregnancy.
They stopped in a tavern for a glass of wine to celebrate, though they didn’t say why they were celebrating. When Vanai asked if she could use the pot, the fellow behind the bar just nodded and pointed to the right door. “My wife was always running back and forth when she was expecting, too,” he said.
“Thank you.” Vanai closed the door behind her. When she came out, she nodded to Ealstan. The spell would last a while longer.
It lasted long enough for them to climb the stairs to the flat. Ealstan made Vanai hold the splintery bannister with one hand and his own hand with the other. “I’m not made of glass, you know,” she said tartly.
“We’ve come this far,” he said. “I don’t want anything—
anything
—to go wrong now. Is that all right?” Vanai made a face at him, but she didn’t say anything more, so he supposed he’d won his point.
He opened the door to the flat. He stood aside to let Vanai go in ahead of him. He closed the door. He barred it. He turned back to Vanai. “I love you,” he said.
They held each other for a long time. Then Vanai said, “Thank you,” and squeezed him harder than ever. “There were … times when I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”
Ealstan knew what that had to mean. Vanai trembled against him. He felt like trembling, too. He stroked her hair. “You’re safe here,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” she answered. “I’m a Kaunian. I’m not safe anywhere. How are you going to bring a midwife here when the baby comes? I’m liable to start looking like what I am right in the middle of labor.”
He hadn’t thought of that. “Somehow or other, we’ll manage,” he said.
“We’ll manage without a midwife, is what we’ll do,” Vanai said.
“I suppose so.” Ealstan kept his reservations to himself. If anything looked as if it was going wrong, he vowed he would get a midwife and think about everything else later. He had a good deal of silver. He could bribe her, enough to keep her quiet for a little while, and then move before she brought the redheads down on Vanai and him and the baby.
Vanai said, “We can worry about that when the time comes.” She smiled at him. “I know what you’re thinking now.”
That wasn’t thought. That was automatic bodily response to holding the woman he loved in his arms. “Should you, so close to your time?” he asked.
“Once won’t hurt,” she answered. “And if you think I haven’t missed you, too, you’d better think again.” She pulled the tunic off over her head.
Her body startled him. Because she’d been locked away in the Kaunian quarter, he hadn’t been able to watch it change day by day. He hadn’t realized just how much her belly bulged. And … “Is your navel supposed to stick out like that?” Ealstan reach out a gentle, cautious finger to touch it.
“I don’t know,” Vanai answered. “All I know is that it does.” When Ealstan pulled off his own tunic and drawers, she laughed. “I’m not the only one sticking out, either.”
“I know I’m supposed to,” Ealstan said, an odd mix of dignity and eagerness in his voice. He led her back to the bedchamber.
Because of her bulging belly, they fumbled a bit before finding a way that suited them both. She lay on her back, a pillow under her bottom. He poised himself on his knees between her legs. “Oh,” she said softly as he went into her.
“I love you,” he said, which meant about the same thing. Slowly and carefully, he began to move. The posture made it easy for him to tease her with a fingertip at the same time. His pleasure built. By her sighs, Vanai’s did, too. Then, all at once, he laughed in surprise and lost his rhythm. Vanai made a noise wordless but indignant. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “Your magic just wore off. I didn’t expect it to.”
“Oh,” she said, this time thoughtfully. “All right.” They resumed.
Not much later, it was a great deal better than all right. When Vanai gasped and quivered, her belly went tight and hard for a little while.
Ealstan laughed again when her flesh rippled from the inside out. “I can really see the baby move now,” he said.
“I can really feel it,” Vanai said. “We made things crowded in there for a little while.”
“It will be all right. Everything will be all right.” For the first time since coming home to an empty flat, Ealstan dared believe that, too.
“How are you feeling this morning, my sweet?” Colonel Lurcanio asked at the breakfast table.
Krasta found his solicitude cloying.
He’s worried because he thinks it’s his brat in there,
she thought. She thought it was Lurcanio’s, too, but she knew she had reason to be uncertain, where the Algarvian officer had only a nasty, suspicious mind making him doubt. But she had to answer him. Straight-out defiance didn’t work; she’d found that out a good many times, always to her dismay. “I’m … fairly well,” she said.
“Good,” Lurcanio said briskly. “Food staying down better?” His manner declared that he’d been through this business a good many times, and was somewhere between amused and annoyed at having to go through it again.
“So far,” Krasta said. “So far today, anyhow.” Her voice turned petulant as she went on, “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It can happen any time, and it’s always disgusting when it does.” Her stomach quivered nervously at the mere thought of being sick again.
Colonel Lurcanio laughed.
Of course he’s laughing,
Krasta thought.
He’s a man. He never has to worry about things like this. The only thing he’s got to do with babies is having fun while they start.
Oblivious—or at least indifferent— to what was going through her mind, Lurcanio said, “I’m afraid I must tell you good-bye for some little while. I have business to attend to down in the south.”
“Oh?” That made Krasta forget her belly, at least for a while. She hoped she didn’t sound too alarmed. One of the reasons Lurcanio had left Priekule for the south was to go after her brother. The Algarvians called the Valmier-ans who fought against them bandits. Krasta had thought of them the same way till she found out Skarnu was among them.
“Aye. Trouble brewing down there.” Lurcanio didn’t sound happy. For once, he didn’t sound as if he were trying to pry information out of her, either. His long face seeming even longer than usual, he continued, “Something nasty is going on across the Strait of Valmiera—the Lagoans and Kuusamans are gathering ships and men in their north-facing ports.”
Even Krasta, unschooled in every military art, saw what that meant. “An invasion!” she exclaimed.
“Maybe,” Lurcanio said. “On the other hand, maybe not, too. It may just be a bluff, to make us shift men around. I happen to know Kuusamo is also fitting out a big fleet in Kihlanki—”
“In where?” Krasta broke in.
“In Kihlanki,” he repeated. “It’s their easternmost port, so that’s surely bound against Gyongyos. Can the islanders do two big things at once? I doubt it.”
“If… if they do invade, can you beat them?” Krasta asked. Most of what she’d done since the Algarvians marched into Priekule, she’d done on the assumption that they would win the war. If that assumption turned out to be wrong …
But Lurcanio just smiled and said, “That’s why I’m going down there, my dear: to help make sure we do exactly that. I promise you, they shall have a very hard time of it indeed if they try to cross the Strait and land in Valmiera.”
He got up from the table, kissed her, and reached down to fondle her breasts through the silk of her pyjama tunic. She yelped. She couldn’t help herself. “Be careful,” she said. “They’re sore. They’re always sore these days.”
“I’m sorry,” Lurcanio said. She judged he meant it. He was always sorry when he hurt her without intending to. Those occasional other times … He’d burned those into her memory forever.
Off he went, as if he owned the mansion. He’d been here close to four years; Krasta had grown very used to having him around. She’d grown fond of him, too, most of the time. Of itself, her hand flattened on her belly. If she hadn’t grown fond of him, she … might not have been carrying a child there. Of course, she might have been, too. She sipped at a mug of apple cider. As she set the mug down, she glowered at it. Apple cider didn’t come close to matching tea as a way to start the morning. But tea refused to taste the way it was supposed to these days. As long as it tasted nasty to her, she had to stay away from it.
Shouting for Bauska, she went upstairs to change. The maidservant hurried into her bedchamber. “How may I help you, milady?” she asked.
Something in her tone of voice rubbed Krasta the wrong way. It had been there ever since Bauska found out she was pregnant. It was as if, without words, the serving woman was saying,
I
had a baby by a redhead, and now you’re doing the same thing. How are we different, then?
But Krasta couldn’t punish her for a tone of voice. She said, “Help me find something to wear. I’m going into Priekule.”
“Aye, milady,” Bauska said—and, sensibly, no more than that.
Every time Krasta did go into Priekule, the city looked sadder and shabbier than it had the time before. Maybe that was because her prewar memories—her standard of comparison—receded ever further into the past and seemed ever rosier. But maybe, too, it was because Priekule, after going on four years of Algarvian occupation,
did
grow sadder and shabbier every day. The redheads took whatever they wanted, whatever they needed. Whatever chanced to be left after that—if anything chanced to be left—they grudgingly let the Valmierans keep.
Even the Boulevard of Horsemen wasn’t what it had been. Priekule’s chief avenue of splendid shops still showed more wealth than the rest of the city, but it had also fallen further from what it was. Some shops had been shuttered for years. Others were still selling goods from long ago, unable to get more. And others—the ones that did the best business—catered to the Algarvians and to the Valmierans, male and female, who had adhered to their cause.
Redheaded soldiers on leave strolled the Boulevard of Horsemen, staring at the clothes and jewelry and furniture on display, and staring in a different way at the Valmieran women who’d come to the Boulevard to shop. Once upon a time, Krasta had come to the Boulevard of Horsemen to display herself as well as to see what was new and expensive and chic. Now she wished the men in kilts would take no notice of her.
Whenever one of them tried to do more than look, she said, “Colonel Lurcanio is my protector.” Not all of them spoke Valmieran, but they did understand the rank and—mostly—kept their hands to themselves afterwards.
But one of them spoke to her in classical Kaunian: “If he is an occupation soldier, he is not a real man. Do you want a real man?”
Her own classical Kaunian was sketchy, but she got the gist of that. And she managed to say, “He is a real colonel,” in the old language. The Algarvian looked disgusted, but he went away.
After that, she discovered she had little trouble telling redheads on occupation duty in Priekule from those who’d come to the city for surcease from the grinding war in the west. The latter were younger, rougher-looking, and wore tunics and kilts whose light brown was sometimes faded almost to white. The soldiers actually garrisoned in the city wore smarter uniforms and were better fed, but they put her in mind of dogs set next to wolves.
And then, from behind her, someone called, “Hello, sweetheart!” in a voice purely Valmieran. She turned. Sure enough, there was Viscount Valnu hurrying toward her. He squeezed her and kissed her on the cheek. “You look good enough to eat,” he said.
“Promises, promises,” she answered, which made him laugh. But she had trouble caring about badinage today. More wearily and more angrily than she’d thought she would be, she added, “Half the Algarvian army seems to think the same thing.”
“Well, I do understand why, I do indeed.” Valnu’s eyes sparkled.
“If you wear your kilt any shorter, some of the redheads will think the same thing about you,” Krasta said, acid in her voice.
“Oh, some of them do,” Valnu replied blithely. “And some of them think I make a proper ally, and some of them want to beat me senseless for presuming to wear their clothes. Life is never dull.”
“No.” Krasta, for once in her life, rather wished it were. She took him by the arm. “Buy me a brandy, will you?”
“I’m putty—or something—in your hands.” Valnu pointed in the direction from which they’d both come. “The tavern back there isn’t too bad. It’s only a block or so.” Krasta nodded; she remembered walking past it. As Valnu steered her toward the place, he asked, “Is it really true? Have you got a loaf in the oven?”
With a yawn, Krasta said, “Aye.” She hated being sleepy all the time.
He gave her an arch grin. “Is papa anyone I know?”
“You may know him very well,” she answered.
“Really?” he said, and Krasta nodded again. One of his pale eyebrows rose. “Well, well. Isn’t that interesting? Shall we elope? Or shall I be angry at you because I may
not
know papa as well as all that?”