Then she stopped again, feeling even more foolish. If she could go out and about in Eoforwic, she could buy clothes for herself. Why hadn’t that occurred to her sooner? Because I’ve been locked away from everything for so long, that’s why. The answer formed itself as fast as the question had. Because I’m not used to doing things for myself any more. High time I start again.
She was so nervous, she almost tripped going down the stairs. What if she’d done something wrong this time? She’d betray herself the instant she walked out the door of her block of flats. I should have had Ealstan tell me everything was all right.
But she couldn’t stand going back up to the flat. Defiantly, she threw open the door and walked down the stone steps to the sidewalk. No cries of “Cursed Kaunian!” rose from any of the people walking up and down the street. No one paid any attention to her at all. Hers had to be the most unnoticed defiance in the history of Forthweg.
Vanai walked along, staring in wonder at buildings and pigeons and wagons and all the other things she’d had little chance to see close up lately. Seeing people who weren’t Ealstan up close felt strange, too. And seeing Forthwegians who didn’t react to her Kaunianity at all felt stranger than anything. As far as they could tell, she wasn’t a Kaunian.
Two Algarvian constables came round a corner and headed straight toward her. She wanted to flee. She couldn’t. That would give the game away. She knew it, and made herself keep walking toward them. “Hello, sweetheart!” one of the redheads chirped in accented Forthwegian. Vanai stuck her nose in the air. Both constables laughed. Vanai kept walking. They didn’t bother her any more, as they surely would have bothered a Kaunian woman even before Kaunians were forced into their own tiny districts. And they’d told her she was at least passably pretty as a Forthwegian. She liked that.
She didn’t stay out long, not on her first foray into Eoforwic. She still wasn’t sure how long she could rely on the spell-and leaving the flat and going through the city threatened to overwhelm her. At first, she felt a pang of regret at returning to confinement, but it didn’t last long. I can go out again, she thought, looking at the words of the spell she’d adapted from the useless version in You Too Can Be a Mage.
Then she looked at the paper again, this time in a different way. Her eyes went big and round. She’d adapted the spell thinking of herself, no one else. That was selfish, but selfishness had its place, too; without it, she wouldn’t have started trying to fix the spell at all. Since she had. .
She found another leaf of paper, and copied the spell onto it. She also wrote out instructions for the passes to make, for using the lengths of yarn, and on what she knew about how long the spell could disguise a Kaunian. When Ealstan got home that evening, she told him what she’d done and what she had in mind doing. He thought it over, then said, “That would be wonderful-if you can find a safe way to do it.”
“I have one,” Vanai said. Ihope I have one. But she wouldn’t let Ealstan hear anything but confidence in her voice.
He raised an eyebrow even so. Vanai nodded emphatically. “Are you sure?” he asked. She nodded again. He studied her, then nodded himself. “All right. May it do some good, by the powers above.”
Vanai cast the spell again the next morning and, cloaked in her sorcerous disguise, went to the apothecary’s shop where she’d bought medicines when Ealstan was so sick. The Forthwegian behind the counter had given her what she needed even though she was a Kaunian. Now she handed him the spell and the commentary she’d written and asked, “Can you get this into the Kaunian quarter?”
“Depends on what it is,” the apothecary answered, and began to read. Halfway through, his head came up sharply and he stared at her. She looked back. He couldn’t have known her face. Did he recognize her voice? He’d heard it only once. He finished reading, then folded the paper in half. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised, in perfect classical Kaunian.
“Good,” Vanai said, and left. Another pair of Algarvian constables leered at her as she headed back to the flat. Because she looked like a Forthwegian, they did nothing but leer. If a lot of Kaunians suddenly started looking like Forthwegians… Vanai walked on, a wide, joyous smile on her face. She didn’t think she could have hurt the redheads more if she’d grabbed a stick and started blazing at them.
Fourteen
Leudast crouched in the ruins of the great ironworks near Sulingen’s port on the Wolter. He and his countrymen held only the eastern part of the ironworks now; the Algarvians had finally managed to gain a lodgment inside the building. One forge, one anvil at a time, they were clearing the Unkerlanters from it.
“What do we do, Sergeant?” one of his troopers called to him.
“Hang on as long as we can,” Leudast answered. “Make the redheads pay as high a price as we can for getting rid of us.”
He coughed. The air was full of smoke. It was also full of the twin stenches of burnt and rotting flesh. When he looked up, he could see the sky almost unhindered by roof beams. Eggs dropped by dragons and lobbed from tossers had left only a few bits of ceiling intact. He wondered why they hadn’t fallen in, too.
He sprawled behind a forge. Chunks of chain mail still lay on the anvil nearby. The Unkerlanter smith had kept working as long as he could. Dark stains on the floor argued that he’d kept working too long for his own good.
Ever so cautiously, Leudast peered westward over the top of the forge. He didn’t see anything moving in the eyeblink of time before he ducked back down again. The Algarvians were every bit as careful hereabouts as were his own countrymen. Fighting in a place like this, even the most wary soldiers died in droves. The ones who weren’t wary died even faster.
“Leudast!” someone called from behind him.
“Aye, Captain Hawart?” Leudast didn’t turn his head. Watching what was in front and to either side of him mattered. If he looked to the rear, bad things were liable to happen before he could look back.
“I’m coming up,” Hawart said. Leudast blazed a couple of times, almost at random, to let the officer scramble up beside him in back of the solid brickwork of the forge.
“What now, sir?” Leudast asked. Once again, the regiment Hawart was commanding had shrunk to a company’s worth of men, while Leudast’s nominal company was only a little bigger than the usual squad. They’d been brought up to strength since falling back into Sulingen-been brought up to strength and then seen that strength melt away like snowdrifts when the warm north winds started to blow.
“We’re going to let them have this building, Sergeant,” Hawart answered. “Holding on to even a piece of it is just costing us too dear.”
“But what about the piers, sir?” Leudast asked in no small alarm. “How are we going to get more men up into Sulingen? If we lose the ironworks here, we can’t hold the piers, and if we can’t hold the piers. ..” He shuddered. “If we hadn’t been able to bring in those three brigades a few nights ago, we would have lost the city by now.”
Hawart nodded. “I know all that, believe me I do. By now, we’ve lost most of the men in those brigades instead. A lot of them went in here, and you know what’s happened to this place. And the rest, or most of the rest, went into the granary, and the Algarvians hold it, or what’s left of it. Those brigades probably saved Sulingen, but they wrecked themselves doing it.”
“Wrecked plenty of Algarvians, too, by the powers above,” Leudast said savagely. Captain Hawart nodded again. Leudast repeated the question the officer hadn’t answered before: “If we give up the ironworks, if we’ve lost the granary, if we lose the piers, too-how do we bring in reinforcements?”