She didn’t know what she would have done had Brivibas knocked on her door then or come in without knocking. Luckily, she didn’t have to find out. Her tears--tears of fury rather than sorrow--quickly dried. She sat up and did a better job of smoothing the letter from Ealstan.
“At least someone cares about me,” she murmured as she began to read it. It was, as her grandfather had sneeringly shown, filled with endearments, as were the ones she sent to him. But it was also filled with his doings, and those of his father and mother and sister and his cousin and uncle. She wondered if he knew how lucky he was to have a good-sized family where everyone--except, she gathered, Sidroc and Hengist--got along. Probably not. To him, that would be like water to a fish.
I honor you for choosing to stay with your grandfather, even though it means we must be apart, Ealstan wrote. Please believe me when I say that. Please also believe me when I say I wish we could be together.
“Oh, I wish we could, too,” Vanai whispered. For the first time, she really thought of leaving the house where she’d lived almost all her life and traveling to Gromheort. She had no idea of what she would do there, or how she would keep from starving, but the idea of being away from Brivibas glowed in her thoughts like a fire catching hold in dry grass.
She shook her head, then wondered why she pushed the idea aside. When she was a child, she and Brivibas had fit together well enough. He did not fit her now, any more than one of the small tunics she’d worn then would. Why not go her own way, then, and leave him behind to go his?
Because if I leave him behind, he’ll die in short order. Because if I wanted him to die in short order, I never would have let Spinello have me. Because, since I did let Spinello have me, I’ve given up too much to let him die in short order. But oh!--how I wish I hadn’t!
After a little while, grimacing, she got up and opened the door. She couldn’t even stay and sulk, not if she wanted to--or felt she should, which came closer to the actual state of affairs--nurse her grandfather back to health. She had to go fix his supper and fetch it to him. It wouldn’t be much--vegetable soup and a chunk of bread--but she didn’t trust him to be able to do it for himself.
She’d known all along that he underestimated her. Now she discovered she’d underestimated him, too. Her nose told her as much as soon as she came out of the bedchamber: she smelled cooking soup. When she came into the kitchen, she found the pot over a low fire and a note on the table nearby.
Brivibas’ spidery hand was as familiar to her as her own: far more familiar than Ealstan’s. My granddaughter, he wrote in a Kaunian straight out of the glory days of the empire, judging it wiser that we not impinge on each other for some little while, I have prepared my own repast, leaving enough behind to satisfy, I hope, those bodily wants of yours susceptible to satisfaction through food.
Vanai stared in the direction of his study, where he was probably spooning up soup even now. She had to look at the note twice before she noticed the sting in its tail. “Bodily wants susceptible to food, eh?” she muttered, and the stare turned into a glare. “Why didn’t you come right out and call me a whore?”
In the end, though, she ate the soup Brivibas had heated. She was unhappy doing it, just as, no doubt, her grandfather had been unhappy eating a great many meals she’d made. When she was finished, she washed and dried her bowl and spoon and the ladle she’d used. She went to her bedchamber and started a letter to Ealstan. That made her feel better.
Felgilde squeezed Leofsig’s hand as they walked along the street together. “Oh, this will be fun!” she exclaimed.
“I hope so,” he answered, and then smiled and said, “You look very pretty tonight.”
She squeezed his hand again, perhaps--he hoped--a little less archly than she was in the habit of doing. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s a handsome cloak you have on.”
“Thank you,” Leofsig said. He’d borrowed it from his father, but Felgilde didn’t need to know that.
She said, “Ethelhelm’s band is one of the two or three best in Forthweg. I’m so excited! This is the first time since the war they’ve come here from Eoforwic. They’re supposed to have all sorts of new tunes, too--that’s what everybody says, anyway. You were so lucky to be able to get tickets.”
“I know,” Leofsig said. His father had helped there, too; Hestan cast accounts for the hall where Ethelhelm’s band was going to perform. But that was also nothing Felgilde needed to know.
He slid his arm around her waist. She snuggled closer to him. He brought his hand up a bit, so that the top of his thumb and wrist brushed against the bottom of her breast. Most of the time, she slapped his hand away when he tried that. Tonight, she let it stay. His hopes, among other things, began to rise. Maybe he wouldn’t have to keep on being jealous of his younger brother for so long as he’d thought.
The hall was in a part of town that had housed a good many Kaunians. Some of them still remained, looking shabby and frightened. An old man with fair hair stood on the street not far from the entrance to the hall, begging from the people who were coming to hear Ethelhelm’s famous band.
Leofsig let go of Felgilde to rummage in his belt pouch and take out a couple of coins. He dropped them into the bowl at the scrawny old man’s feet. “Powers above bless you, sir,” the Kaunian said in Forthwegian. He’d had little luck till Leofsig came by; only a few other coins, most of them small coppers, lay in the bowl.
“That was a waste of money,” Felgilde said as they walked on. She didn’t bother to keep her voice down, though the old Kaunian had already shown he could speak Forthweg’s majority tongue.
“I don’t think so,” Leofsig answered. “My father always says Kaunians are people, too. That fellow looked like he could use a hand.”
“My father says that if we hadn’t listened to the Kaunians in Forthweg, we wouldn’t have gone to war against Algarve when the blond kingdoms in the east did,” Felgilde said. “He says we’d be better off if we hadn’t, too.”
Even the Kaunians in Forthweg would have been better off if King Penda hadn’t gone to war against Algarve--better off for a little while, anyhow. Leofsig said, “How long do you think it would have been before King Mezentio went to war with us if we didn’t stand by our allies?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Felgilde said with a toss of her head, “and I’m just as sure you don’t know, either.”
Since that was true, Leofsig could hardly argue with it. He didn’t feel like arguing, anyhow. He knew what he felt like, and hoped Felgilde felt like it, too. To try to put her back in the mood, he slipped his arm around her waist again. She let him do that, but brushed his hand away when he tried to bring it up again. He gave her a resentful look. Hers in response might have said, So there.
She did get friendlier when he took out the tickets and gave them to the tough-looking fellow standing in the doorway. The bruiser nodded, smiled a surprisingly warm smile, and stepped aside to let them pass. They both held out their hands to a woman with a stamp and an ink pad. She marked them with the word PAID, then she too stood aside and waved them into the hall.
Ethelhelm’s band occupied a raised platform in the middle. The men on viol and double viol, lute and mandolin, were tuning their instruments. The trumpeter and flute-player made runs up and down the scale. So did the piper, with results that set Leofsig’s teeth on edge. Ethelhelm himself manned the drums. He was taller and slimmer than most Forthwegians, enough to make Leofsig wonder if he had a quarter part of Kaunian blood. If he did, he didn’t advertise it, for which prudent silence Leofsig could hardly blame him.