Kun thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Aye, of course you did, and I'm a natural-born idiot. I must be."
Down in the flatlands, towns got bigger and closer together. Istvan had all he could do not to marvel at the sight of so many buildings all in the same place, and at the sight of tall towers climbing toward the stars. "How do so many clans live together in one place without feuds tearing them to pieces?" he asked Kun. "You're a city man, so you ought to know."
"What you have to understand is, a lot of people move to the cities from out of the countryside," the former mage's apprentice answered. "Some of them are younger sons and the like- men who won't get a fair share from their family plots. And others are the men who want to find out if they can get rich. The odds are slim in town, stars above know that's so, but it'll never, ever happen on a farm."
"I suppose you're going somewhere with this, but I'm not following you, not yet," Istvan said.
"Bear with me," Kun told him. "In your valley, your clan's been living next to its neighbors for hundreds of years. Everybody remembers who did what to whom, and why, since the stars first shone. Some of the clan quarrels are that old, too. Am I right, or am I wrong?"
"Oh, you're right, of course," Istvan said. "That's how things are."
"Ha!" Kun pounced. "But it's not how things are in the cities, or not so much. If you move away from most of the people in your clan, you move away from most of the old squabbles, too. You get to know a man for what he is himself, not for whether his grandfather's great-uncle stole three hens from your cousin's great-grandma. Do you see what I'm saying?"
"What it sounds like is the army, except without the discipline in the army," Istvan said. "Here, I do what I do because the officers tell me to, and you do what you do because I tell you to, and the troopers do what they do because you tell them to. Back in my valley, my place in the clan tells me what to do. I always know what's expected, if you understand what I'm saying." He waited for Kun to nod, then went on, "But if you're living in the city away from your clan, how do you know what to do or how to act? Who tells you?"
"I tell myself," Kun answered. "That's what cities are all about: making your own choices, I mean. They're changing the face of Gyongyos, too."
Istvan disapproved of change on general principles. In that, he reckoned himself a typical Gyongyosian. His eyes slid over to Kun, who smiled as if knowing what he was thinking. As far as Istvan was concerned, Kun was no typical Gyongyosian- and a good thing, too, he thought. What Kun might be thinking of him never entered his mind.
They slid through Gyorvar the next morning, heading down to the docks. All the chief rivers watering the Gyongyosian plain came together at Gyorvar and went down as one to the not far distant sea. Istvan didn't think about that. He craned his neck to get a glimpse of Ekrekek Arpad's palace. Before his first trip through the capital, he'd imagined it as a tower taller than any mountains, a tower from which the Ekrekek could reach out and touch the sacred stars if he so desired. It was nothing of the sort, being pavilions of gleaming marble scattered across parkland, but lovely nonetheless. He'd remembered that.
And then, after Istvan got his glimpse, the ley-line caravan stopped at the docks, which were anything but lovely. He'd remembered that, too. The battered transports waiting to take his comrades and him across the sea were even more unlovely than the ones he remembered from his last trip through Gyorvar. He didn't know what that meant. Nothing good, probably.
Little by little, Cornelu was learning to read Lagoan. He'd never thought he would do that, but he turned out to have a powerful incentive: the better he read, the more readily he could learn of Unkerlant's advances in the west. Anything that told him of Algarve's troubles was worth investigating in detail. He might not have liked Lagoas' language, but he liked what was being said in it.
When he took Janira out to a band concert, though, he stuck to Sibian, saying, "Mezentio's men are finally starting to pay for their folly."
"Good," she answered in the same language. She had an odd accent- part lower-class, part Lagoan. Her father, Balio, was a Sibian fisherman who'd settled in Setubal after the Six Years' War, married a local woman, and started an eatery. Janira was in fact more fluent in Lagoan. That she spoke Sibian at all helped endear her to Cornelu.
"Aye," he said fiercely, and squeezed her hand. "May they be driven back on every front. May they be driven from Sibiu."
"May they stop dropping eggs on Setubal," Janira said. "Father's only just starting to get back on his feet." An Algarvian egg had wrecked the eatery where Balio had cooked and Janira served. She went on, "Everything is more expensive in the new place."
"I'm sorry," Cornelu said. And he was: that meant she had to work even more than she had before, which meant she had fewer chances to see him. Since his own duties often kept him from seeing her, their romance, if that was the name for it, had advanced only by fits and starts.
Of course, Cornelu was also a married man, at least technically. He hoped his little daughter Brindza was doing well back in Tirgoviste town. He hoped no such thing for his wife, not after Costache had taken up with at least one of the Algarvian officers who'd been billeted on her.
Standing in line with Janira, Cornelu tried to put all that out of his mind. The line snaked forward in the darkness. He passed through a couple of black curtains before emerging into light and paying the fee for himself and Janira. They both held out their hands. One of the fee-takers stamped them with red ink to show they'd paid. Then they hurried into the concert hall.
It was filling fast. Cornelu spotted a couple of seats. He went for them as ferociously as if charging on leviathanback. "There!" he said in something like triumph as he and Janira reached them just ahead of a Lagoan couple.
Janira smiled. "I can see why all your enemies must fear you," she said, sitting down beside him.
Cornelu smiled, too. "The main reason my enemies fear me is that they do not know my leviathan and I are there till too late. Sometimes they never find out what happened to them. Sometimes they do realize, and it is the last thing they ever know."
"You sound so… happy about it," Janira said with a small shiver.
"I am happy about it," he replied. "They are Algarvians. They are the enemies, the occupiers, of my kingdom. They are the enemies of this kingdom, too."
"I know. I understand all that." She hesitated, then went on, "It's only that… I haven't heard you sound really happy very often. It's… strange when you sound that way and it has to do with killing."
"Oh." Cornelu contemplated that for a moment. "I should probably be ashamed. But, aside from that, I have not had much to be happy about lately." Just before he turned the evening into a disaster even as it began, he redeemed himself with a handful of words: "Present company excepted, of course." Janira, who had started to cloud up, relaxed and leaned her head on his shoulder.
They both applauded when the musicians came out on stage. Lagoan music was on the whole delicate, like that of the other Algarvic kingdoms. It didn't thump and harangue, the way Kaunian music did. A couple of things set it apart, though. For one, it was generally more cheerful than anything Cornelu would have been likely to hear in Sibiu. Of course, the Lagoans had more reason to be cheerful- they lived farther away from Algarve. And, for another, they'd borrowed triangles and bells from their Kuusaman neighbors, which gave their pieces an almost fantastical feel to Cornelu's ears.
Janira enjoyed the music; that was plain. Cornelu applauded a little more than dutifully when the concert ended. Seeing his companion having a good time let him have a good time at one remove. That was almost as good as the real thing.