"Not much," Talsu answered. The ease with which his trousers came down proved that.
"Don't you worry," Gailisa said. "I'll take care of things. Aye, I will." She let her hand linger for a moment, then planted it in the middle of his chest. He went over on his back onto the bed. "Stay there," she told him, busy with the fastenings of her own clothes. Once she was out of them, Talsu stared and stared. No, memory and imagination were only shadows when set beside reality.
She lay down beside him. Their lips met. Their hands wandered. Before long, Gailisa straddled him and impaled herself upon him. "Ohhh," he said- one long exhalation. How could he have misremembered so much?
"You hush," Gailisa said. "Just let me…" And she did, slowly, carefully, lovingly. Having gone without so long, Talsu didn't think he'd be able to last now, but she took care of that, too. When he finally did groan and shudder, it was as if he were making up for all the lost time at once. Gailisa leaned forward and brushed his lips with hers. "There," she murmured, almost as if to a child. "Is that better?"
"Better, aye," he said. But he was still a young man, even if poorly fed, and his spear retained its temper. This time, he began to move, slowly at first but then with more insistence. Gailisa threw her head back. Her breath came short. So did his. She clenched him, as with a hand. He groaned again. This time, so did she.
Sweat made their skins slide against each other as they separated. Talsu hoped for a third round, but not urgently. He caressed Gailisa, marveling all over again at how soft she was.
A heavily laden wagon rattled by outside, turning his mind away from lovemaking and toward less delightful things. "People are going to think I sold out to the redheads," he said.
"They already think I did," Gailisa answered. "Powers below eat them."
"Aye." Talsu's hand closed on her bare left breast. Somehow, talking of such things while they sprawled naked and sated was an exorcism of sorts, even if modern thaumaturgy had proved precious few demons really existed. He went on, "Do you know who betrayed me?" He waited for her to shake her head, then spoke three more words: "Kugu the silversmith."
"The classical Kaunian master?" Gailisa exclaimed in horror.
"The very same fellow," Talsu said.
"Something ought to happen to him." His wife spoke with great conviction.
"Maybe something will," Talsu said. "But if anything does, it won't be something anybody can blame me for." Gailisa accepted that as naturally as if he'd said the sun rose in the east.
Pekka lay beside Leino in the big bed where they'd spent so much happy time together. He'd be ready again pretty soon, she judged, and then they would start another round of what they'd both been too long without. "So good to be here," her husband murmured.
"So good to be here with you," Pekka said.
Leino laughed. "So good to be here at all. Compared to the land of the Ice People…" His voice trailed off. "I've said too much."
"Habakkuk," Pekka said.
Her husband nodded. "Aye, Habakkuk. I never should have said anything about that, either. And if I did say something about it, the censor never should have passed it. But I did and he did, and now we've got to live with it."
"Fer… one of the other mages who's working with me said the name sounded as if it came from the land of the Ice People." Pekka didn't want to- very strongly didn't want to- mention Fernao's name while she was in bed with her husband. She'd worry about what that meant, and if it meant anything, another time.
"He was right." If Leino noticed her hesitation, he didn't make a big thing of it. Forbearance was one of the reasons she loved him. He sighed and went on, "I think you've got the more interesting job, working with people like Ilmarinen and Siuntio… What's the matter now?"
"Siuntio's dead." Pekka knew she shouldn't have been so startled, but she couldn't help it. Her husband couldn't have known. She hadn't written about it to him; even if she had, one of the censors probably would have kept the news from getting out. The harder the time Mezentio's men had of learning what they'd done, the better.
"Is he?" Leino clicked his tongue between his teeth. "That's a pity, but he wasn't a young man to begin with."
"No, not dead like that." Pekka would have staked her life that the redheads couldn't possibly be listening to what went on in her bedchamber. "Dead in an Algarvian attack. If he hadn't fought it off, or at least fought part of it off, the whole team might have died with him."
"By the powers above," Leino said. "You never told me anything about this before. You couldn't, could you?" Pekka shook her head. With a sigh, Leino went on, "I think I'm working on a sideshow. You're doing what really matters."
"Am I? I hope so." Pekka clung to him. She didn't want to have to think about the work she'd finally escaped. She was more interested in thinking about the two of them, what they had been doing, and what they'd soon do again.
But Leino couldn't do it again quite yet. Had he been able to, he would have been stirring against her thigh. Because he couldn't quite yet, he was interested in what Pekka had been up to. "The Algarvians must think so," he said. "If they didn't, they wouldn't have bothered attacking you. How did they do it? Dragons?"
Pekka shook her head. She didn't want to think about that, either, but the question gave her no choice. "No. Another Kaunian sacrifice. I don't know whether they just grabbed the first however many Valmierans they saw, or if they brought Kaunians east out of Forthweg. Whichever, it was very bad." She shuddered, recalling just how bad it had been.
Leino held her and stroked her. She could tell he was bursting with curiosity. She'd known him a good many years now; if she couldn't tell such things, who could? But he did his best not to let any of it show, because he knew that would bother her. And if a mage's suppressing his curiosity wasn't love, what was it? As much in gratitude as for any other reason, she slid down and took him in her mouth, trying to hurry things along. That wasn't magic, but it worked as if it were. Before long, they both stopped worrying about what Habakkuk was or why Mezentio's mages chose to assail Pekka and her colleagues.
But lovemaking never resolved things; it only put them off for a while. After they'd gasped their way to completion, Pekka knew Leino wouldn't be trying yet another round any time soon. That meant his thought would turn elsewhere. And sure enough, he said, "You must be working on something truly big, if the Algarvians used that spell against you."
"Something, aye." Pekka still didn't want to talk about it.
Leino said, "They tried to use that same spell to drive us off the austral continent, you know." Pekka nodded; she'd heard something about that. Her husband continued, "It went wrong. It went horribly wrong, and came down on their heads instead of ours and the Lagoans'. Magecraft that works fine here or on the mainland of Derlavai has a way of going wrong down in the land of the Ice People."
"That's what they say." Pekka nodded again, then laughed. "Whoever they are." Because she found worrying about her husband's problems easier than worrying about her own, she quickly found another question to ask: "Will that cause trouble for Habakkuk?"
"It shouldn't." Leino used an extravagant gesture. "Habakkuk is… something else." He chuckled ruefully. "I can't talk about it, any more than you can say much about whatever it is you're working on."
"I know. I understand." Pekka wanted to tell him everything. Just for a moment, she wished Fernao were there so she could talk shop. Then she shook her hair, and had to brush hair out of her eyes. He was part of what she'd come here, come away from the project, to escape.