Talsu had no baggage to reclaim. He counted himself lucky that his captors had given him back the clothes he was wearing when they'd seized him. He hurried out of the depot and onto the streets of the town where he'd lived all his life till conscripted into King Donalitu's army. That hadn't turned out well, not for him and not for Jelgava, either. Next to months in a dungeon, though…
He went through the market square at close to a trot. Part of him said the bread and onions and olives and almonds and olive oil on display there were shadows of what had been for sale before the war. The rest, the part that had thought hard about eating cockroaches, wanted to stop right there and stuff himself till he couldn't walk anymore.
He did stop when someone called his name. "Talsu!" his friend repeated, coming up to pump his hand. "I thought you were… you know."
"Hello, Stikliu," Talsu said. "I was, as a matter of fact. But they finally let me go."
"Did they?" Something in Stikliu's face changed. It wasn't a pleasant sort of change, either. "How… lucky for you. I'll see you later. I have some other things to do. So long." He left as fast as he'd come forward.
What was that all about? Talsu wondered. But he didn't need to wonder for long. Stikliu thought he'd sold his soul to the Algarvians. Talsu scowled. A lot of people were liable to think that. For what other reason would he have come out of the dungeon? What would he have thought if someone imprisoned were suddenly freed? Nothing good. Stikliu hadn't thought anything good, either.
A couple of other people who knew Talsu saw him on the way to the tailor's shop and the dwelling over it. They didn't come rushing over to find out how he was. They did their best to pretend they'd never set eyes on him. His scowl got deeper. Maybe the gaolers hadn't done him such an enormous favor by turning him loose.
He walked into the tailor's shop. There behind the counter sat his father, doing the necessary hand stitching on an Algarvian kilt before chanting the spell that would use the laws of similarity and contagion to bind the whole garment together. Traku looked up from his work. "Good morn-" he began, and then threw down the kilt and ran out to take Talsu in his arms. "Talsu!" he said, and his voice broke. He rumpled his son's hair, as he had when Talsu was a little boy. "Powers above be praised, you've come home!" He didn't care how that might have happened; he just rejoiced that it had.
"Aye, Father." Tears ran down Talsu's face, too. "I'm home."
Traku all but squeezed the breath out of Talsu. Then Talsu's father hurried to the stairway and called, "Laitsina! Ausra! Come quick!"
"What on earth?" Talsu's mother said. But she and his sister Ausra both hurried downstairs. They both squealed- shrieked, actually- when they saw Talsu standing there, and then smothered him in hugs and kisses. After a couple of minutes, coherent speech and coherent thought returned. Laitsina asked, "Does Gailisa know you're free?"
"No, Mother." Talsu shook his head. "I came here first."
"All right." Laitsina took charge, as she had a way of doing. "Ausra, go to the grocer's and bring her back. Don't name any names, not out loud." She rounded on her husband. "Don't just stand there, Traku. Run upstairs and bring down the wine."
"Aye." Ausra and Traku said the same thing at the same time, as if to their commander. Ausra dashed out the door. Traku dashed up the stairs. In his army days, Talsu had had only one officer who'd got that instant obedience from his men. Poor Colonel Adomu hadn't lasted long; the Algarvians had killed him.
Traku came down with the wine. He poured cups for himself, his wife, and Talsu, and set the jar on the counter to wait for Ausra and Gailisa. Then he raised his own cup high. "To freedom!" he said, and drank.
"To freedom!" Talsu echoed. But when he sipped, the red wine- made tangy in the usual Jelgavan style with the juices of limes and oranges and lemons- put him in mind of the prison and of the Jelgavan constabulary captain who'd given him all the wine he wanted to get him to denounce his friends and neighbors.
"What finally made them let you go, son?" Traku asked.
"You must know how they took Gailisa away," Talsu said, and his father and mother both nodded. He went on, "They brought her to my prison and made her write out a list of names. Then they told me she'd done it, and that my names had better match hers. I knew she'd never denounce anyone who really hated Algarvians, so I wrote down people who liked them but weren't real showy about it- you know the kind I mean. And I must have been thinking along with her, because they turned me loose."
"Clever lad!" Traku burst out, and hit him in the shoulder. "You can say a lot of things about my line, but we don't raise fools." Laitsina contented herself with kissing Talsu, which probably amounted to the same thing.
His parents were pleased with him. They thought him a clever fellow. But what would other people in Skrunda think of him? He'd already had a taste of the answer: they'd think he'd sold himself to the redheads. Would they have anything to do with him now that he'd been released? The only ones likely to were men and women of the sort he'd named as anti-Algarvian activists. That was funny, if you looked at it the right way. It would have been even funnier if he'd wanted to have anything to do with those people.
The problem seemed urgent… for a moment. Then the bell rang as the door opened again. There was Ausra, with Gailisa right behind her. Talsu's wife gaped at him, then let out exactly the squeal a seven-year-old might have used at getting a new doll. She threw herself into Traku's arms. "I don't believe it," she said, over and over again. "I can't believe it."
Talsu had trouble believing the feel of a woman pressed against him. He'd thought his imagination and memory had held onto what that feeling was like, but he'd been wrong, wrong. "I saw you once," he said, in between kisses.
"Did you?" Gailisa answered. "When they took me to that horrible prison? I wondered if you would, if that was why. I didn't see you."
"No, they wouldn't let you," Talsu said. "But I was looking out through a peephole when they took you down the hallway. And when they told me you'd written a denunciation, I had to figure out what kind of names you'd put in it so mine would match. I guess I did it right, on account of they let me go."
"I named all the fat, smug whoresons I could think of, is what I did," Gailisa said.
"Me, too," Talsu said. "And it worked."
Somebody- he didn't notice who- had brought down and filled another pair of cups. His mother gave one to Ausra; his father gave the other to Gailisa. They both drank. Gailisa turned an accusing stare on his sister. "You didn't tell me why I had to come back here," she said. "You just told me it was important."
"Well, was I right or was I wrong?" Ausra asked.
"You were wrong, because you didn't come close to saying enough," Gailisa answered. "You didn't come close." She seized Talsu's arm and stared up into his face in such a marked manner that at any other time he would have been embarrassed. Not now. Now he drank in the warmth of her affection like a plant long in darkness drinking in the sun.
Not very much later, still holding him by the arm, she took him upstairs. Ausra started to follow them. Traku contrived to get in her way. In a low voice- but not quite low enough to keep Talsu from overhearing- he said, "No. Wait. Whatever you want up there, it will keep for a while."
Talsu's ears got hot. His parents and his sister had to know what he and Gailisa would be doing in the little bedchamber that had been his alone before he got married. Then he shrugged. If it didn't bother them- and it didn't seem to- he wasn't about to let it bother him, either.
Gailisa closed and barred the door to the bedchamber. Then she undid the toggles on Talsu's tunic. "How skinny you've got!" she said, running the palm of her hand along his ribs. "Didn't they feed you anything?"