No one seemed quite sure how to take that, either. Pekka said, “Nothing too serious: only a visit fromPrinceJuhainen.”
“Ah.” Fernao nodded. “Let me guess. Is he trying to make us hurry?”
Ilmarinen gave him a suspicious look. “How do you know that?”
“It’s what princes do,” Fernao answered. He frowned in thought, but evidently couldn’t come up with the words he needed in Kuusaman, for he switched to classical Kaunian to continue, “Princes do not bother to come when everything is fine. They come only to try to make changes. That is what they are for.”
“That is what Juhainen did, sure enough.” Pekka kept on speaking her own language. “I think it means we will invade the mainland soon.”
Ilmarinen raised an eyebrow. “Invade the mainland, eh?” He glanced over at Fernao. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
For a moment, Pekka had no idea what he was talking about, even though he’d spoken Kuusaman, too. Then she also turned toward Fernao, and watched him turn red-with his fair Lagoan skin, the flush was easy to trace. Raahe and Alkio must also have figured out what Ilmarinen meant, for they were busy looking at the ceiling or out the window or anywhere but at her and Fernao.
Her own ears felt hot. “That will be quite enough of that,” she told Ilmarinen in her frostiest tones. He laughed at her. She glared at him, which only made him laugh harder. Then she looked at Fernao again, and caught him looking at her. Their eyes jerked away at the contact, as if they’d been caught at something. We haven’t, Pekka insisted to herself. We really haven’t.
Six
Spring came early to Bishah and the surrounding hills. Hajjaj cherished it while it lasted, not least because it wouldn’t last long. Zuwayza was the kingdom of summer. Soon, all too soon, the sun would bake everything yellow and brown. The foreign minister savored the brief, brave show of greenery and bright flowers as much for its impermanence as for its beauty.
“You Algarvians are spoiled,” he remarked to Marquis Balastro at a gathering at the Algarvian ministry one evening. “You get to enjoy your gardens and woods through most of the year.”
“Well, so we do, your Excellency,” Balastro agreed. “Tell me, did you think we were spoiled when you went through your first winter at the University of Trapani?” His smile showed sharp teeth.
“Spoiled? No, your Excellency.” Hajjaj shook his head. “How could you possibly spoil when you froze solid for a couple of months every year?”
Balastro threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Oh, you are a funny fellow when you choose. I could wish you chose to be more often.”
“I could wish I had more things to laugh about,” Hajjaj replied, and Balastro’s own mirth cut off as abruptly as if sliced by a knife. The war news from Unkerlant wasn’t good, and not all of the Algarvian minister’s verbal gymnastics could make it good. It wasn’t dreadfully bad, not lately, not with the spring thaw miring Mezentio’s men and Swemmel’s alike, but it wasn’t good. What little movement there was had the Unkerlanters pushing forward and the Algarvians falling back.
Over in one corner of the reception hall, a couple of stocky, swarthy men in Unkerlanter tunics were busily drinking themselves blind. If you asked them, they would insist they weren’t Unkerlanters: they were Grelzers, from the free and independent (and Algarvian-backed) Kingdom of Grelz. Of course, withKingRaniero horribly dead, their insistence mattered very little. The quondam Kingdom of Grelz mattered very little, too. Hajjaj sighed. Typical of the Algarvians to bring them up to Zuwayza and try to make something of them after the collapse and not before.
Doing his best to recover from the awkward moment, Marquis Balastro said, “I am glad our dragons have helped keep the Unkerlanter air pirates from troubling Bishah.”
“They have done that, and I do thank you for it.” Hajjaj bowed. The waistband of his kilt dug into his flesh as he moved. Nudity was far more comfortable. He went on: “Our own dragons, flying south into Unkerlant, have noted what looks to be something of a buildup of Unkerlanter soldiers in the northern regions ofKingSwemmel ’s realm.”
“We have noted the same thing.” Balastro didn’t sound very concerned. “I assure you it is nothing we can’t handle.”
“I am glad to hear that,” Hajjaj said, and hoped the Algarvian minister was right.
“We do keep an eye on things,” Marquis Balastro said, as if Hajjaj had denied it. “We also do our best to keep enemy air pirates from ravaging Algarve itself.”
“Aye, of course,” Hajjaj said. If you hadn’t lost Sibiu, you’d have an easier time of it, too. He didn’t say that; it would have been most undiplomatic. But that didn’t make it untrue.
Balastro bowed again; Algarvians were a punctiliously polite folk, even if they didn’t spend so much time on it as Zuwayzin did. “KingMezentio has ordered me to express his thanks toKingShazli through you,” he said.
“I shall be happy to do so.” Hajjaj bowed in return. “Ahh… his thanks for what?”
“Why, for his help in keeping Kaunian bandits here and, more to the point, keeping them out of Forthweg, of course,” Balastro answered.
“Oh.” After a moment, Hajjaj nodded. “He is very welcome. I speak for myself at the moment, you understand. But I shall convey your sovereign’s words to mine, and I am certain I speak inKingShazli ’s name here.”
He also wished he weren’t sayingKingMezentio was welcome. As far as he was concerned, the Kaunians who’d managed to flee from Forthweg had every right in the world to try to hit back at the Algarvians. But when they hit back, they unquestionably hurt the Algarvians’ war against Unkerlant. That, in turn, hurt Zuwayza. As foreign minister, Hajjaj found himself forced to condemn what he personally condoned.
Marquis Balastro smiled. “Believe me, your Excellency, I do understand your difficulty.”
And he probably did. He was a civilized man, in the best traditions of civilization in eastern Derlavai. Had Hajjaj not admired those traditions, he never would have chosen to finish his education at the University of Trapani. That didn’t keep him from wondering how such an eminently civilized man as Balastro could approve of the way his kingdom slaughtered Kaunians. He did, though-Hajjaj had no doubt of it.
His certainty oppressed him. He bowed his way away from Balastro and went over to the bar, where an Algarvian servitor who was almost surely also an Algarvian spy gave him a goblet of date wine. He was almost the only one in the room drinking the sweet, thick stuff. Even the Zuwayzi officers the Algarvian military attache had invited to the reception preferred vintages pressed from grapes. Hajjaj enjoyed those, too, but the taste of date wine took him back to his youth. For a man with white hair, few things could work such magic.
Sipping the date wine, the Zuwayzi foreign minister looked around the hall. There stoodHorthy, the Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza, in earnest conversation with Iskakis, his Yaninan counterpart. They were both speaking classical Kaunian, a language that had never been used in either of their kingdoms but the only one they had in common. Hajjaj took another pull at his goblet, savoring the irony of that.
After a moment, Iskakis, a short, bald man with a mustache that looked like a black-winged moth perched between his nose and upper lip, sidled away from the large, leonineHorthy and started chatting up an Algarvian captain, one of the men on the military attache’s staff. The captain, a stalwart, handsome young man, beamed at the Yaninan. Iskakis was partial to stalwart, handsome young men. He was even more partial to boys.
His wife, meanwhile, was talking to Marquis Balastro. She was about half Iskakis’ age, and extraordinarily beautiful. Such a waste, that marriage, Hajjaj thought, not for the first time. Balastro, now, Balastro had the sleek look of a cat who’d fallen into a pitcher of cream. What Hajjaj saw as a waste, he saw as an opportunity. However civilized Balastro was, no Algarvian born had ever reckoned philandering anything but a pleasant diversion-unless, of course, he found himself wearing horns rather than giving them.