Out of the Darkness

“We’re no such thing!” Pekka exclaimed. Then, a little sheepishly, she asked, “Is that how Lagoans see us?”

“A lot of the time, aye,” he said. “You . . . often take such things too seriously.”

“Do we?” Pekka suddenly remembered fleeing his bedchamber in tears after the first time they’d made love. “Well, maybe we do. But I don’t think Ilmarinen will talk too much to Leino. He’s not an ordinary Kuusaman, you know.”

“Really?” Fernao’s voice was dry. “I never would have noticed. What did you do, tell him you’d put a lifetime itching spell on his drawers if he ever opened his mouth?”

Pekka giggled. “It’s a pretty good idea, but no. If I’d threatened him, he would blab to Leino if he ever saw him. He may not see him, of course. He probably won’t, in fact--Jelgava is a good-sized kingdom. But when he teased me about it, I told him to do whatever he wanted, so he won’t feel he has to run off at the mouth.”

“Good thinking.” Fernao quirked up an eyebrow. “And what do you want to do?”

“It’s more fun than paperwork,” Pekka said. Realizing a heartbeat too late how imperfect that was as praise, she did her best to show him--and herself-- exactly how much more fun than paperwork it really was.

A new broadsheet went up all over the Jelgavan town of Skrunda. Talsu read a copy pasted to the front wall of the crowded block of flats where he and his family had moved, exchange of currency, the headline read. Below it, in almost equally large characters, it declared, All coins bearing the impress of the false king, usurper, and vicious tyrant, Mainardo the cursed Algarvian, must be exchanged for those minted under the auspices of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, Donalitu III, by--the date named was less than two weeks away. The broadsheet continued, Any attempt to pass the monies of the false king and vicious tyrant after the date aforesaid shall be punished with the greatest possible severity. By order of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, long may he reign.

Talsu, his wife Gailisa, his younger sister, and his mother and father shared one room, none too large, and a tiny, cramped, kitchen. Bathroom and toilet were at the end of the hall. That was, Talsu supposed, better than sharing a tent, as they’d done after a Lagoan or Kuusaman dragon raid burned down Traku’s tailor’s shop and the rooms above it where the family had lived. Still, it did produce its share of friction.

When Talsu climbed the stairs to the flat, he found his father doing some hand stitching on a pair of trousers before using a spell to extend the stitchery down along the entire length of the hem. Traku set the work down when Talsu came in.

“Hello, son,” he said in his gravelly voice: he looked--and sounded--more like a bruiser than a tailor. “What’s new in the outside world? I don’t get to see it much.”

“A new broadsheet went up,” Talsu answered, and explained what was on it.

From the kitchen, his mother called, “That’s good. That’s very good, by the powers above. If I never see Mainardo’s cursed pointy nose on another piece of silver, I’ll stand up and cheer. The faster we forget the redheads ever conquered us, the happier I’ll be.”

“I don’t know, Laitsina,” Traku said. “Did you hear what Talsu said they’ll do to you if you make a mistake? We’ll have to sift through all our silver. I don’t want to spend a stretch in the dungeons just because I was careless.”

“King Donalitu is still King Donalitu,” Talsu said, and he didn’t mean it as praise. “If the redheads had picked one of our nobles instead of Mezentio’s brother, they would have had an easier time getting people to put up with them.”

“They didn’t care a fart whether we put up with ‘em or not,” Traku said. “They thought they had the world by the short hairs, and that what we thought didn’t matter. What were we? Just a pack of Kaunians. That’s why the arch on the far side of the square isn’t standing any more, even though it had been there since the days of the Kaunian Empire.”

“That’s right,” Talsu said. “I was taking some clothes across town when the redheads wrecked the old arch. They said it insulted them, because it talked about how the Kaunians of long ago beat the old-time Algarvians.”

“They did things like that all over Jelgava--all over Valmiera, too.” Traku lowered his voice. “And they did a lot worse to the Kaunians of Forthweg, by what everybody says.”

Talsu’s sister Ausra came out of the kitchen wearing an apron over her tunic and trousers and said, “What do you want to bet they find some way to cheat us when we turn in the money the Algarvians issued?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Talsu said.