“Fernao,” Pekka murmured, and slowly nodded. Sure enough, she remembered his earlier letter. He’d been a snoop then, and evidently remained one. But now he was a snoop with a right to know.
She set aside her calculations (not without a small, irked grimace: she couldn’t see now where she’d hoped to head before the soldier knocked on the door) and reinked the pen she’d been using on them. I have received your letter, she wrote, and hope your recovery from your wounds is swift and sure. My own husband went into the service of the Seven Princes not long ago, and I worry about him.
Pekka looked at that and frowned again. Was it too personal? She decided to leave it in; the powers above knew it was true. She went on,
Indeed, we have done a good deal of interesting work since we stopped publishing in the learned journals, and a man of your abilities will help us go further. I cannot set down the details here, but I think we may be on the edge of something intriguing, as perhaps you may also be hearing from my colleagues. Again, I wish you well, and hope to hear from you again. Pekka, at Kajaani City College.
She put the letter into a prepaid envelope and copied out the address in Setubal Fernao had given her. Then she hesitated. Her letter didn’t say much, but neither had Fernao’s, and he’d sent his by courier. Could she risk hers in the maelstrom of the mailstream? For all she knew, half the postal workers in Kajaani were Algarvian spies.
But she hadn’t the faintest idea how to order up a special courier. Maybe she should have told the one who’d brought the letter to wait. Unfortunately, that would have required more forethought than she’d had in her. The head of whatever garrison Kajaani boasted could have told her, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t already know what she was involved with.
Then she smiled. Ilmarinen would know. Siuntio would, too, no doubt, but she still fought shy of bothering him. She didn’t so much with Ilmarinen; he lived both to bother and to be bothered.
When she attuned her crystal to his, she found his image looking out of the glass at her a moment later. “Well, what now?” he asked. “An assignation, because your husband’s not at home? I can be there in a few hours, if you like.”
“You are a filthy old man,” Pekka said, to which the senior theoretical sorcerer responded with an enormous grin and a big nod of agreement. Telling herself she should have expected as much, she asked, “How do I go about getting a courier to deliver a letter for me?”
Ilmarinen might have made more suggestive banter. Pekka watched him think about it and, to her relief, decide against it. He said, “You’d do best to talk to Prince Jauhainen’s men, I think. He’s not half the man his uncle was, but he can manage that for you-he’d cursed well better be able to, anyhow.”
“Expecting anyone to match up to Prince Joroinen is asking a lot,” Pekka replied. “But that’s still a good notion--his folk will know enough of what I’m doing that I won’t have to do any more explaining. Thank you. I’ll try it.”
“Who’s the letter to?” Ilmarinen asked.
“The Lagoan named Fernao,” Pekka said; she wouldn’t mention Fernao’s trade by crystal, not when emanations might be stolen. She did add, “You know him, don’t you?”
“Oh, aye-a most inquisitive fellow, Fernao is.” Ilmarinen set a finger by the side of his nose. “I see: you’re arranging an assignation with him, not with me. I must be too old and ugly for you.”
“And too crackbrained, to boot,” Pekka snapped. Ilmarinen crowed laughter, delighted at getting a rise out of her. She glared. “I’ll have you know he was wounded down in the land of the Ice People.”
“What a painful place to be hurt,” Ilmarinen exclaimed. Pekka refused to acknowledge that in any way, which wasn’t easy. Ilmarinen shrugged. “Anything else?” he asked. Pekka shook her head. “So long, then,” he told her, and vanished from the crystal. It glowed for a moment, then went back to being nothing but a glassy sphere.
Pekka activated her crystal again. Sure enough, Prince Jauhainen’s aide- who’d served Prince Joroinen before he died in the Algarvians’ sorcerous assault on Yliharma-promised to send a man, and the fellow arrived not much later. Pekka gave him the letter and went back to work.
It went better than she’d thought it would. Maybe that was because she, like Fernao, had written in classical Kaunian: composing in a language not her own, especially one so different from Kuusaman, forced her to think clearly. Or maybe, though she hadn’t thought so, she’d just needed a break from what she was doing.
Pretty soon, I’ll be ready to go back into the laboratory again, she thought. If Siuntio or Ilmarinen comes up with something interesting, it’ll be sooner yet. Those were notions she’d had several times since she’d started probing the relationship at the heart of the laws of similarity and contagion. Now, though, she had a new one: Iwonder what Fernao is making of this as he catches up to us. She hoped the Lagoan was well and truly impressed. If he wasn’t, he should have been.
Without Leino to come knock on her door, she had to pay more attention to leaving for home at the right time. She’d been very late one day when Uto had been even more inventive than usual, and her sister Elimaki, usually the best-natured woman around, had screamed at her when she finally came to get her son. She didn’t want that to happen again.
As she chanted the spells that would secure her calculations in her desk till she came for them in the morning, she wondered if they were as strong as they might be. Oh, she was sure they would foil a burglar looking for whatever he could sell for a little cash, but who was more likely to want to break into her office: that kind of burglar or an Algarvian spy?
Ilmarinen will know if the spells are good enough, she thought. Ilmarinen had a raffish distrust of his fellow man Siuntio couldn’t come close to matching. Siuntio was more brilliant, but Ilmarinen lived in-reveled in-the real world.
The real world hit her in the face when she walked across the Kajaani City College campus to the ley-line caravan stop to wait for a car to take her home. The news-sheet vendor at the stop was shouting word of the Algarvian breakthrough into the outskirts of Sulingen. “Trapani says it’s so, and Cot-tbus doesn’t deny it!” he added, as if that proved everything. Maybe it did; she’d got used to evaluating war claims out of the west by splitting the difference between what the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters said. If the Unkerlanters weren’t saying anything. . Pekka shook her head. That wasn’t a good sign.
And the grim look on Elimaki’s face when Pekka came to pick up Uto wasn’t a good sign, either. Pekka wanted to throw up her hands. “What now?” she asked, and scowled at her son. “What did you do today?”
“Nothing,” Uto replied, as sweetly as he always did when he’d committed some new enormity.
“He learned a little spell,” Elimaki said. “Powers above only know where children pick these things up, but they do. And he’s your son and Leino’s, so he has talent, too-talent for trouble, that’s what.”
“What did you do? Pekka asked Uto, and then, realizing she wouldn’t get an answer from him, she turned to Elimaki. “What did he do?”
“He animated the dog’s dish, that’s what, so it chased poor Thumper all over the house and spilled table scraps everywhere, that’s what he did,” Elimaki said. Uto looked up at the sky, as if he’d had nothing to do with that dish.
“Oh, no,” Pekka said, doing her best to sound severe and not burst into giggles. Uto found such creative ways to land in trouble. Not many children his age could have made that spell-Pekka was pretty sure she knew which one it was-work so well. Even so … Even so, he would have to be punished. “Uto, you can’t do that kind of thing at Aunt Elimaki’s house-or at home, either,” Pekka added hastily; leaving loopholes around Uto wasn’t safe. “Your tiny stuffed leviathan is going to spend the night up on the mantel.”