“I said, what are we going to do about Ilmarinen?” Pekka’s voice was brittle. She was looking past Fernao’s shoulder rather than at him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The more I think about it, the better the idea of wringing his neck looks.”

“We do need him for the work,” Pekka said grudgingly. “Since it’s hard to go out to the blockhouse and experiment with everything all over mud, I was hoping to use the quiet time to start standardizing our spells so practical mages can use them. That will make Prince Juhainen happy.”

“So it will.” Fernao sipped tea. He nodded, he hoped, judiciously. “It does need doing.”

“So many things need doing, and we have so little time to do them,” Pekka said. “Anything that distracts us from them is a nuisance. Anything at all.” Now she did look straight into Fernao’s eyes.

“Have I ever argued with that?” he asked. No matter what he’d been thinking, he’d always pulled his weight in the sorcerous research. He wasn’t so brilliant as Ilmarinen, and knew he wasn’t, but he didn’t go around making people want to throttle him, either.

“No.” Pekka shook her head. “You’ve always done everything I could have wanted, except… I mean…” Now she wouldn’t look at him anymore.

He finished his tea at a gulp, wishing it were something stronger. When he set down the mug, he said, “Come to my chamber with me.” Pekka’s eyebrows leaped upwards. As he had with Ilmarinen, he went back to classical Kaunian to explain exactly what he meant: “People have been gossiping about us for a long time now, even though we have given them nothing about which to gossip. If we make it seem as though something really has happened between us, perhaps they will take it for granted and leave us be so we can go on about our business.”

“Perhaps,” Pekka echoed, also in classical Kaunian. She sat beside him for half a minute or so, her face closed in thought. Then, abruptly, she nodded. “Worth a try.” She got to her feet. So did Fernao. She slipped her hand into his. “It should look convincing,” she murmured in a low, serious voice. He nodded and smiled and squeezed her hand a little. She squeezed back.

Mages and servers in the refectory eyed them as they walked toward the stairway hand in hand. Either we’ll stop the gossip about us, Fernao thought, or else we’ll start a lot more.

When they got to his chamber, he was glad he’d set the bed to rights and hadn’t left anything but sorcerous tomes strewn about on the table and the stool and the chest of drawers that were the spare little room’s only other furniture. “I don’t want to disturb your work,” Pekka said, and sat down on the bed while Fernao paused to bar the door.

“It wouldn’t have mattered much,” he answered as he sat beside her. “Now we just have to wait long enough so all the other people are sure they know what’s going on in here.”

“Aye.” Pekka nodded. They sat close together, not touching at all, not even looking at each other, for a couple of minutes. What happened next seemed likelier to have sprung from a three-hundred-year-old Valmieran comedy of manners than real life. Fernao slipped his arm around Pekka at exactly the same moment she leaned toward him. An instant after that, they weren’t sitting on the bed any more. They were lying on it, clinging to each other as if they were lodestone and iron.

When at last their lips separated, Fernao whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.” He trailed kisses across her cheek and down the side of her neck.

She shivered a little and sighed when he nibbled the lobe of her ear. She wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at anything; her eyes were shut tight. In a tiny voice, she said, “Please tell me you didn’t have this in mind when you asked me to come up here with you.”

“By the powers above, I didn’t!” Fernao exclaimed, more truthfully than not. “It just-happened.”

“It just-happened,” Pekka echoed. Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded once more and reached for him. If anything, her kiss was even more desperate than his.

She shivered again when he unbuttoned her tunic, and once more when his mouth descended on her left breast. He teased her nipple with lips and tongue. She pressed his head to her. Then, panting and laughing, she reached under his kilt.

When all her clothes lay scattered on the floor, Fernao wondered how he could ever have thought her scrawny. She was what she was-a Kuusaman woman, made as Kuusamans were. And… Not much later, he stopped thinking at all, but leaned on one elbow above her for a moment while he guided himself in. She let out a low, breathy moan and clasped him with arms and legs. She still kept her eyes shut tight.

He had to fight not to explode in the first instant. Once he managed that, once he found a rhythm that suited them both, he thought for a while that he could go on forever. But Pekka’s mounting excitement spurred him toward the end, too. She called out a name and gave a short, sharp cry of joy. Her nails scored his back. He gasped and shuddered and spent himself. Only afterwards did he notice the name she’d called wasn’t his.

He stroked her cheek. With a little luck, she hadn’t realized she’d cried her husband’s name, there in the moment when all thought fled. But she had. She jerked away from his gentle hand and burst into tears. “Leave me alone!” she said. “What have I done?”

The answer to that was only too obvious. Fernao didn’t point it out to her. He dressed quickly and hurried out of the chamber. Even though it was his, he fled it like an adulterer diving out a bedroom window when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He was halfway down the hall before he wondered what sort of rumors that would start.

Patrol. Somebody had to do it. Sidroc understood as much. The Unkerlanters had written the book on infiltration, written it and revised it several times. If you didn’t go prowling forth and find out what they were up to and hold them at arm’s length, you’d wake up one fine morning with them bellowing, “Urra!” from front, rear, and both flanks all at the same time.

But if you did go prowling forth, they were liable to kill you for your trouble. Patrols didn’t always come back. Sometimes they just vanished as if they’d never been. Sidroc was painfully aware of that. He tried to tiptoe through the woods of the eastern Duchy of Grelz. Somebody had to go out on patrol, aye. He wished he weren’t one of the somebodies.

He also wished he and his comrades from Plegmund’s Brigade didn’t have to rely on the guide who walked through the woods with them. Some Grelzer peasants hated King Swemmel and his inspectors and impressers worse than the Algarvians did. Others pretended to hate Swemmel so as to lure the redheads-and the Forthwegians who fought alongside them-to destruction. Finding out you’d trusted the wrong sort of guide was too apt to be the last discovery you ever made.

Sergeant Werferth spoke in Algarvian: “Where did you see these Unker-lanter soldiers?” Then he repeated the question in Forthwegian, which was at least related to the language spoken hereabouts.

“I see… by village,” the guide said in bad Algarvian, and pointed west and a little north. “Two companies, maybeso three.” He showed the numbers on his fingers to leave no room for error.

“Maybeso,” Ceorl jeered. “Maybeso you’re leading us into an ambush, eh?”

With a shrug, the guide answered, “You kill me then.”

“Let him alone, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “He’s supposed to be on our side, remember?”

“He’s supposed to be, aye,” Sidroc said. “But is he?” Ceorl looked at him in surprise; they seldom agreed about anything. Sidroc went on, “I don’t want him leading us down the primrose path, either, you know.”

He’d spoken Forthwegian. Sure enough, the local could follow bits of the language, for he said, “No primroses.” Then he said several other things in his own dialect of Unkerlanter. Sidroc got only fragments of that, but none of it sounded complimentary to King Swemmel. He kicked at the muddy pine needles underfoot. The guide would sound the same way no matter how he really felt about the King of Unkerlant.