Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

For a long moment, Vanai didn’t say anything. She looked away from Ealstan. Fear ran through him. Was she going to turn him down? But then she looked back. Tears streaked her face. “You’d marry me, in spite of-everything?” she asked. Everything, of course, boiled down to one thing: her blood.

“No,” Ealstan said. “I just asked you that to watch you jump.” And then, fearful lest she take him seriously, he went on, “I’m marrying you-or I will marry you, if you want to marry me-because of everything. I can’t imagine finding anybody else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with.”

“I’m glad to marry you,” Vanai said. “After all, if it weren’t for you, I’d probably be dead.” She shook her head, dissatisfied with the way she’d answered. “And I love you.”

“That sounds like a good reason to me.” Ealstan walked over and kissed her. One thing led to another, and the dishes ended up getting finished rather later than they would have if he hadn’t proposed.

When they woke the next morning, Vanai’s sorcery had slipped, so that she looked like herself, or herself with dark hair. She quickly set the spell to rights, waiting for Ealstan’s nod to let her know she’d done it correctly. Once she was sure of that, she meticulously redyed her hair, both above and below.

“You don’t suppose they’ll have mages at the hall of laws, do you?” she asked anxiously.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Ealstan answered. “Unless I’m daft, any redhead with enough magic in him to make a flower open two days early is off fighting the Unkerlanters.” His smile held a fierce delight. “And they’re not doing too bloody well even so. That’s why you find SULINGEN scrawled on every other wall.”

“Let’s see how many times we see it before we get to the hall of laws,” Vanai said, at least as happy at the idea of Algarvian disasters as Ealstan was.

They counted fourteen graffiti on the walk through Eoforwic. Twice, the name of the Unkerlanter city had been painted over recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade. The combination made Ealstan thoughtful. “I wonder if Sidroc’s down in Sulingen,” he said hopefully. “The only thing wrong with that would be getting my revenge through an Unkerlanter instead of all by myself.”

“Would it do?” Vanai asked.

After a little thought, Ealstan nodded. “Aye. It would do.”

The hall of laws lay not far from King Penda’s palace. In the days before the war, judges and barristers and functionaries would have gone back and forth from one building to the other. They still did, the only difference being that most of them, and all the high-ranking ones, were Algarvians now.

Forthwegians did remain in the hall of laws-as clerks and other minor officials not worth the occupiers’ while to replace. One of those clerks, who looked so bored he should have been covered with dust, handed a form to Ealstan and another to Vanai. “Fill these out and return them to me with the fee indicated on the sign on the wall,” he droned, not even bothering to point at the sign he’d mentioned.

Ealstan filled in his own true name and his place of residence. That was where the truth stopped for him. He invented his father’s name and declared that his fictitious forebear had been born and raised in Eoforwic. He didn’t know whether the constables were still looking for Ealstan son of Hestan of Gromheort, but he didn’t know that they weren’t, either, and didn’t care to find out by experiment.

Glancing over at Vanai’s form, he saw that the only truth she’d told on it was her place of residence. She’d invented a fine Forthwegian pedigree for herself. Their eyes met. They both grinned. This was all part of the masquerade.

When they went back to the counter, the clerk barely glanced at the forms. He was more interested in making sure Ealstan had paid the proper fee. On that, he was meticulous; Ealstan supposed the Algarvians would take it out of his pay if he came up short there. Having satisfied himself, the clerk said, “There is one more formality. Do you both swear by the powers above that you are pure Forthwegian blood, without the slightest taint of vile Kaunianity?”

“Aye.” Ealstan and Vanai spoke together. She must have expected something like this, Ealstan thought, for not even a flicker of anger showed in her eyes.

But the occupiers required more than oaths. A couple of burly Forthwegian men came up to Ealstan; a couple of almost equally burly women approached Vanai. One of the men said, “Step into this anteroom with us, if you please.” He sounded polite enough, but not like somebody who would take no for an answer.

As Ealstan headed for the antechamber, the women led Vanai off in the other direction. “What’s all this about?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.

And, sure enough, the bruiser said, “Ward against oathbreakers.” He closed the door to the antechamber, then took a small scissors from his belt pouch. “I’m going to snip a lock of hair from your head.” He did, then nodded when it failed to change color. “That’s all right, but you wouldn’t believe what some of the stinking Kaunians try and get away with. I’m going to have to ask you to hike up your tunic and drop your drawers.”

“This is an outrage!” Ealstan exclaimed. He wondered what Vanai was saying in the other room. With any luck, something more memorable than that.

With a shrug, the Forthwegian tough said, “You’ve got to do it if you want to get married. Otherwise you throw away your fee and you get the redheads poking and prodding at you, not just fellows like me.”

Still fuming, Ealstan did what he had to do. The tough with the scissors snipped again, with surprising delicacy. He looked at the little tuft of hair between his fingers, nodded, and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Ealstan yanked his drawers back up. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

“I am, and now you can be.” The bruiser chuckled at his own wit. So did his pal. Ealstan maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence.

Vanai came out of her anteroom at the same time as he came out of his. She looked furious, like a cat that had just been forced to take a bath. The two blocky women who’d escorted her in there were both smirking. But they weren’t restraining her. Ealstan assumed that meant she’d passed her test.

He asked the clerk, “What do we have to go through now?”

“Nothing,” the man answered. “You’re married. Congratulations.” He sounded as bored saying that as he had through the rest of the proceedings.

Ealstan didn’t much care how he sounded. Turning, he embraced Vanai and gave her a kiss. The two bruisers who’d taken him away snickered. So did the women who’d examined Vanai-but not closely enough.

The newlyweds left the hall of laws as quickly as they could. Not all of Vanai’s fury turned out to be acting. “Those, those-” She came out with a classical Kaunian word Ealstan had never heard before. “I’d almost sooner have had your pair. They couldn’t have been worse about letting their hands wander where they didn’t belong. And they kept looking at me as if they thought I was enjoying it.” She said that Kaunian word, in a low voice but even more hotly than before. Now Ealstan had a pretty fair notion of what it meant.

He said, “The ones who got hold of me weren’t interested like that. They just wanted to make sure I was a real Forthwegian.”

“Well, I’m a real Forthwegian, too-now I am,” Vanai said. “And I took an oath to prove it.” She sighed. “I hate being forsworn, but what choice had I? None.”

“It was a wicked oath,” Ealstan said. “If the oath is wicked, how can you do wrong by swearing falsely?” He wasn’t sorry when Vanai didn’t pursue that. He saw the slippery slope ahead. Who decided when an oath was wicked? Whoever he was, how did he decide? This one seemed obvious to Ealstan, but it must have looked different to the Algarvians.