The serving girl ignored the byplay. She just nodded and went off to the kitchen. Fernao patted himself on the back. He didn’t win skirmishes with Ilmarinen all that often. Neither did anyone else.
Pekka walked into the refectory at the same time as Fernao’s breakfast arrived. Seeing him, she smiled and waved and came on over. He spoke quietly to Ilmarinen: “Could you let the two of us be for once? Life’s hard enough as is.”
“I could,” Ilmarinen said, but Fernao’s relief was short-lived, for he added, “That doesn’t necessarily mean I will.”
Pekka sat down by Fernao. The serving girl-Fernao was just as glad it wasn’t Linna-walked over and raised a questioning eyebrow. Pointing to Fernao, Pekka said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Without so much as looking at Ilmarinen, Fernao shoved his plate and teacup over to Pekka. “Here,” he said, deadpan, and nodded to the serving girl. “You can bring me more of the same.”
“All right.” Off she went again. The vagaries of mages fazed her not in the least.
“Something is going on here, and I don’t know what,” Pekka said darkly. She cast Ilmarinen a suspicious glance.
“I’m just sitting here,” he told her. “Why are you picking on me? If something is going on and you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t complain, anyhow. You should experiment to find out what it is.” His eyes flicked from her to Fernao and back again. “All sorts of interesting experiments you might try.”
Fernao kicked him under the table. Pekka couldn’t reach him to kick him, but looked as if she wanted to. Fernao had imagined some of those experiments. He didn’t dare say so. He wished he hadn’t given her his breakfast. Now he had nothing with which to busy himself.
Ilmarinen laughed, which only irked Fernao further-he knew he shouldn’t have asked the Kuusaman mage to go easy. “Why are you getting upset?” Ilmarinen asked. “I can’t be saying anything the two of you haven’t thought of for yourselves.”
“There is a difference between what I think and what I do.” Fernao switched from Kuusaman to classical Kaunian for the sake of greater precision: “If there were not, I would be wringing your neck right now instead of quietly sitting here.”
He’d hoped that might alarm Ilmarinen. Instead, it amused the elderly theoretical sorcerer, who laughed raucously. Fernao made himself stay in his chair, so that Ilmarinen never found out how close he did come to getting strangled. Ilmarinen finished his breakfast just as the serving girl brought Fernao more food. Getting to his feet, the master mage nodded to Fernao and Pekka in turn. “Well, I’m off,” he said cheerily. “I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about, so you won’t want me around anyhow.” Away he went, whistling a tune that sounded bawdy.
At least Fernao did have something to do now, and he did it: he concentrated on his breakfast. He concentrated so fiercely, in fact, that when Pekka said something he didn’t notice what it was, and hardly noticed she’d spoken at all. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking up from his smoked salmon and blinking. “I’m afraid I missed that.”
“Isaid, what are we going to do about Ilmarinen?” Pekka’s voice was brittle. She was looking past Fernao’s shoulder rather than at him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The more I think about it, the better the idea of wringing his neck looks.”
“We do need him for the work,” Pekka said grudgingly. “Since it’s hard to go out to the blockhouse and experiment with everything all over mud, I was hoping to use the quiet time to start standardizing our spells so practical mages can use them. That will makePrinceJuhainen happy.”
“So it will.” Fernao sipped tea. He nodded, he hoped, judiciously. “It does need doing.”
“So many things need doing, and we have so little time to do them,” Pekka said. “Anything that distracts us from them is a nuisance. Anything at all.” Now she did look straight into Fernao’s eyes.
“Have I ever argued with that?” he asked. No matter what he’d been thinking, he’d always pulled his weight in the sorcerous research. He wasn’t so brilliant as Ilmarinen, and knew he wasn’t, but he didn’t go around making people want to throttle him, either.
“No.” Pekka shook her head. “You’ve always done everything I could have wanted, except… I mean…” Now she wouldn’t look at him anymore.
He finished his tea at a gulp, wishing it were something stronger. When he set down the mug, he said, “Come to my chamber with me.” Pekka’s eyebrows leaped upwards. As he had with Ilmarinen, he went back to classical Kaunian to explain exactly what he meant: “People have been gossiping about us for a long time now, even though we have given them nothing about which to gossip. If we make it seem as though something really has happened between us, perhaps they will take it for granted and leave us be so we can go on about our business.”
“Perhaps,” Pekka echoed, also in classical Kaunian. She sat beside him for half a minute or so, her face closed in thought. Then, abruptly, she nodded. “Worth a try.” She got to her feet. So did Fernao. She slipped her hand into his. “It should look convincing,” she murmured in a low, serious voice. He nodded and smiled and squeezed her hand a little. She squeezed back.
Mages and servers in the refectory eyed them as they walked toward the stairway hand in hand. Either we’ll stop the gossip about us, Fernao thought, or else we’ll start a lot more.
When they got to his chamber, he was glad he’d set the bed to rights and hadn’t left anything but sorcerous tomes strewn about on the table and the stool and the chest of drawers that were the spare little room’s only other furniture. “I don’t want to disturb your work,” Pekka said, and sat down on the bed while Fernao paused to bar the door.
“It wouldn’t have mattered much,” he answered as he sat beside her. “Now we just have to wait long enough so all the other people are sure they know what’s going on in here.”
“Aye.” Pekka nodded. They sat close together, not touching at all, not even looking at each other, for a couple of minutes. What happened next seemed likelier to have sprung from a three-hundred-year-old Valmieran comedy of manners than real life. Fernao slipped his arm around Pekka at exactly the same moment she leaned toward him. An instant after that, they weren’t sitting on the bed any more. They were lying on it, clinging to each other as if they were lodestone and iron.
When at last their lips separated, Fernao whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.” He trailed kisses across her cheek and down the side of her neck.
She shivered a little and sighed when he nibbled the lobe of her ear. She wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at anything; her eyes were shut tight. In a tiny voice, she said, “Please tell me you didn’t have this in mind when you asked me to come up here with you.”
“By the powers above, I didn’t!” Fernao exclaimed, more truthfully than not. “It just-happened.”
“It just-happened,” Pekka echoed. Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded once more and reached for him. If anything, her kiss was even more desperate than his.
She shivered again when he unbuttoned her tunic, and once more when his mouth descended on her left breast. He teased her nipple with lips and tongue. She pressed his head to her. Then, panting and laughing, she reached under his kilt.
When all her clothes lay scattered on the floor, Fernao wondered how he could ever have thought her scrawny. She was what she was-a Kuusaman woman, made as Kuusamans were. And… Not much later, he stopped thinking at all, but leaned on one elbow above her for a moment while he guided himself in. She let out a low, breathy moan and clasped him with arms and legs. She still kept her eyes shut tight.
He had to fight not to explode in the first instant. Once he managed that, once he found a rhythm that suited them both, he thought for a while that he could go on forever. But Pekka’s mounting excitement spurred him toward the end, too. She called out a name and gave a short, sharp cry of joy. Her nails scored his back. He gasped and shuddered and spent himself. Only afterwards did he notice the name she’d called wasn’t his.