He watched them all think about lying—as a constable, he had no trouble recognizing that expression. As he looked at them, he realized they were of Kaunian stock. They must have seen as much on his face, for, one by one, they nodded.

  “It’s like Falsirone told you,” said the man in the chair in front of the barber. “All we want is for people to leave us alone. With our hair red, they mostly do.”

  “Powers above,” Bembo said softly. He pointed to Falsirone. “How many Kaunians have you turned into redheads?”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you, sir, not exactly,” Falsirone answered. “A fair number, though, I’d say.” Evadne nodded. Her husband continued, “All we want to do is get along, not make any trouble for anybody and not have anybody make any trouble for us. Nothing wrong with that, is there, sir? It’s not against the law.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it is,” Bembo said abstractedly. The law hadn’t considered that Kaunians who found trouble as blonds might reach for the henna bottle. The law could be pretty stupid.

  “Are we in trouble, sir?” Evadne asked. “If we are, I do hope you’ll give us the chance to make it right.”

  She meant she hoped Bembo would take another bribe. Like most Algarvian constables, he was seldom known to turn one down. This, though, looked to be one of those rare times. He thought he could get more from his superiors for telling what he’d learned than he could from the Kaunians for keeping quiet.

  “I don’t think there’s any problem,” he said, not wanting to give the game away. Evadne and Falsirone and their customers looked relieved. They looked even more relieved when Bembo left. Only after he headed back to the constabulary station did he realize he could have taken their money and that from his superiors. As constables went, he was relatively honest.

  “What are you doing here, Bembo?” Sergeant Pesaro demanded when he came into the station. “You’re supposed to be out there protecting our poor, endangered citizens from each other.”

  “Oh, bugger our poor, endangered citizens,” Bembo said. “Bugger ’em with a pinecone, as a matter of fact. This is important.”

  “It had better be, after a buildup like that,” the fat sergeant said. “Come on, give forth.” He spread his hands in anticipation.

  And Bembo gave forth. As he did, Sergeant Pesaro’s expression changed. Bembo smiled to himself. Pesaro had been waiting for him to come out with something not worth interrupting his usual beat to deliver. Had he done so, the sergeant would have taken unholy glee in roasting him over a slow fire. But if what he had to say wasn’t worth mentioning, he didn’t know what would be.

  “Why, those dirty, sneaking whoresons!” Pesaro burst out when he was through. “Going around hiding what they are, are they? We’ll put paid to that, and bugger me with a pinecone if we don’t.”

  “Right now, there’s no law on the books against it,” Bembo said. “I’m only too bloody sure of that. Used to be, the cursed Kaunians would flaunt what they were: wave their hair in our faces, you might say. They can’t get away with that any more, so they’re doing their best to turn into chameleons instead.”

  “They won’t get away with it.” Pesaro heaved his bulk out of the chair behind the front desk. “I’m going to have myself a talk with Captain Sasso. He’ll know what we can do about the miserable yellow-hairs, law or no law.”

  “Aye, so he will.” Bembo picked his next words with care: “Let me come along with you, Sergeant, if you’d be so kind. The captain will surely want to hear the details straight from the man who found them.”

  Pesaro glared at him as if he were half a worm in an apple. Bembo knew what that meant: the sergeant had been planning to grab all the credit himself. If he were a heartless enough bastard, he could still do it. For a moment, Bembo thought he would. But that would infuriate not just Bembo—which wouldn’t have bothered Pesaro in the slightest—but all the other ordinary constables, too. Still looking sour, Pesaro nodded and jerked his head toward the stairs leading up to Captain Sasso’s office. “Come on, then.”

  Sasso was a lean, middle-aged man with a startling streak of white in his cinnamon hair. He had a scar on his scalp from a knife fight in his youth, and the hair along it had been silver ever since. He looked up from paperwork as Pesaro and Bembo stood in the doorway waiting to be noticed. “All right, boys, come on in,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Constable Bembo here noticed something I think you ought to know about, sir,” Pesaro said: if he couldn’t take all the credit, he’d take some. He nudged Bernbo with an elbow. “Go on, tell the captain what the dirty Kaunians are up to.”

  “Kaunians, eh?” Sasso leaned forward, his form almost silhouetted against the window in front of which he sat. “Aye, do tell me.”

  Before Bembo could begin, shadows dappled the street outside. “A lot of dragons flying these days,” he remarked. “Powers above be praised they’re ours, and not the cursed Jelgavans’.”

  “Aye.” Captain Sasso’s smile displayed sharp teeth. By the way his eyes gleamed, Bembo got the notion he knew more than he was saying. Bembo got no chance to ask questions; Sasso gestured impatiently. “Out with it, Constable.”

  “Aye, sir.” As Bembo had for Pesaro, he told Sasso how the Kaunians were dyeing their hair to become less conspicuous in Tricarico.

  “Well, well,” the constabulary captain said when he was through. “I heard a natural philosopher talk once about spiders that looked like flowers, so the bees and butterflies would come right up and get eaten. Sounds like what the Kaunians are doing, doesn’t it? And if they’re doing it in Tricarico, sure as sure they’re doing it all over Algarve.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, sir,” Bembo said, which was true. Officers got paid to worry about the whole puzzle; he had enough trouble trying to keep track of what was going on in his own little piece.

  “We’ll put a stop to it, though—curse me if we don’t,” Sasso said, his voice thoroughly grim. He nodded to Bembo and Pesaro. “And your name will be remembered, Constable, for ferreting this out, and yours, Sergeant, for bringing it to my notice. On that you both have my solemn word.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the two men chorused. They beamed at each other. Bembo was willing to share the credit, so long as he got some. So was Pesaro, even if he had tried to steal it for himself. That made them both uncommonly generous for Algarvian constables.

  Pekka had always maintained that a mage’s most important tools were pen and paper: a fitting attitude for a theoretical sorcerer. Now she was in the laboratory rather than behind her desk. Instead of the abstracted expression she usually wore while practicing her craft, the look on her face at the moment was one of intense frustration.

  She glowered at the acorn on the table in front of her. “Better you should have been fed to a pig,” she told it. It lay there, mute, inert, unhelpful. It might also have reproached her for clumsy technique—and she was far more frustrated than she’d imagined, if she invested an acorn with the power to reproach.

  She felt like reproaching the little brown nut far more loudly and stridently than she already had. Kuusaman restraint won out, but only barely. The foreign sailors whose loud foreign oaths sometimes spilled out of the harbor district of Kajaani never left any doubt of how they felt about things. Pekka envied the release they gained so easily.

  “Let me learn the truth,” she murmured. “That will release me.”

  If the acorn knew the truth, it wasn’t talking. She’d thought she’d found a way to coax the truth from it, but hadn’t managed that yet. She muttered again. She had no doubt Leino would have seen half a dozen ways to improve her experiment. Any mage with a practical bent would have. But she wasn’t supposed to let her husband know about the work she was doing. She wasn’t supposed to let anyone know but her colleagues—and they were theoretical sorcerers, too.

  She gave the acorn another glare. For good measure, she walked across the laboratory and glared at the other acorn in the experiment. It sat on a white plate identical to that on which the first acorn rested. The two plates sat on identical tables. The two acorns themselves were tightly similar—Pekka had picked them and several more from one branch of an oak—and had been in contact not only through the tree but also in a single jar here in this chamber. She knew they’d touched. She’d made sure they touched.

  And all her care had got her… nothing, so far. She strode back to the table that held the first acorn. Angry footsteps on the stone floor served her almost as well as angry curses served foreign sailors. She wanted to pick up the acorn and fling it out the window. With more than a little effort, she checked herself.

  “It should have worked,” she said, and then laughed in spite of her anger and frustration. That was the sort of thing Uto might have said. No one would have, no one could have, blamed a small boy for thinking that way. Pekka, however, was supposed to know better.

  “But it should have,” she protested, and laughed at herself again. Aye, she sounded very much like Uto.

  Sounding like her son didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong. If she wanted to get to the bottom of the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion, till now reckoned the basic laws of sorcery, what better way to approach it than through acorns, the basic forms of oaks? She’d thought herself very clever to come up with that. It seemed the sort of notion a seasoned experimenter might devise.

  Sometimes, of course, even seasoned experimenters failed. Up till now, Pekka certainly had. For all she’d learned, the laws of similarity and contagion might as well not have existed, let alone any relationship between them.

  “And wouldn’t that be grand?” she said with a small shiver. “Nothing but the mechanic arts forevermore?” She imagined disproving the laws of similarity and contagion and, as knowledge of the disproof spread, mage-craft grinding to a halt. Then she shook her head, so violently that she had to brush her coarse black hair back from her face. It couldn’t happen, and she was heartily glad it couldn’t.

  But what had gone wrong here? She still couldn’t figure that out. When she’d done something to one acorn, nothing had happened to the other, even though they were similar and had been in contact. That made no sorcerous sense.

  Pekka snapped her fingers. “I’ll try something different,” she said. “If that doesn’t work… Powers below eat me, I don’t know what I’ll do if that doesn’t work.”

  She carried a bucket and a trowel outside and scooped up some moist soil. Then she went back to the laboratory chamber and stirred the soil around as thoroughly as she could before dividing it into two equal piles. Using a tossed coin to make sure she chose the piles randomly, she buried one acorn in the first and the other in the second.

  That done, she began to chant over one of the acorns. The chant sprang from one horticultural mages used to force fruits and flowers to flourish out of season, but she’d spent some time strengthening it so she could see results more quickly. One day, if she ever found the time—and if the chant proved useless to her present project, and so would not be reckoned a princely secret—she thought she might license out the improvements, which could well bring in enough money to make her brother-in-law smile.

  Unlike some of the others she’d tried, this spell seemed to perform as it should have. An oak sapling sprouted up through the soil and stretched toward the ceiling, compressing several months’ growth into half an hour. Satisfied, Pekka stopped the chant and looked over toward the other table, where the other acorn should have shown similar growth.

  But it hadn’t. Real fear ran through Pekka. If the other acorn hadn’t grown, maybe the laws of similarity and contagion weren’t so universal as she’d thought. Maybe nothing lay beneath them, and she’d reached through the fabric of belief to grasp it. Maybe magic really would start falling apart.

  “Avert the omen,” Pekka murmured. She hurried over to the other table, wondering what was wrong with the acorn on it.

  There lay the white plate, with a mound of soil on it but with no sapling coming up. Pekka spread the soil aside to get at the acorn. Maybe, she thought hopefully, it was infertile. If it was, that would explain why her experiments kept going awry: it wouldn’t be truly similar to the other. A very simple sorcerous test would tell her whether that was so.

  “Where is the cursed acorn?” she said. She knew she’d buried it: about a thumb’s breadth from the top of the mound of soil. It wasn’t there. She sifted through all the soil, spreading it out till it slopped off the plate and on to the table. Still no sign of the acorn.

  Careless of the dirt on her fingers and palms, Pekka set hands on hips. She knew perfectly well that she’d set an acorn in the pile of soil. She couldn’t have carried it over to the other pile and put it in there along with the other acorn—could she? She did that kind of thing around the house now and again. Everybody did. But she couldn’t have been so careless in the laboratory… could she?

  “Powers above,” she said. “If I did that, Leino would never let me forget it. If I did that, nobody ought to let me forget it.”

  She walked back to the first table. If she had somehow—she couldn’t imagine how—set both acorns in one pile of dirt, she should have got two saplings springing up toward the ceiling. If she’d made a major blunder and the other acorn was somehow infertile… She shook her head. How slim were the odds that two improbables had both gone wrong at the same time.

  “But if they haven’t, where’s my acorn?” she demanded of the laboratory chamber. She got no answer. By then, she wouldn’t have been too surprised had one of the tables up and spoken.

  She sifted through all the dirt in the pile from which the sapling had sprouted. She did not find the missing acorn. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. On the one hand, she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid. On the other hand, if she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid, the earlier question recurred: where had the bloody acorn gone?

  “I know where it should be,” Pekka said, and went back to the pile of dirt in which she had—she knew she had—planted the acorn now missing.

  Could it have fallen off the table? Pekka couldn’t see how, but she couldn’t see how it had disappeared, either. She got down on hands and knees and, backside in the air, stuck her nose down to the stone floor and looked all around. She still couldn’t find the acorn. It had been there. She was sure of that. It wasn’t any more. She was becoming sure of that, too.

  “Then where is it?” she asked herself and the world at large. “How am I supposed to write up my experimental diary if I don’t know what to put in it?”

  She started a list of all the places the acorn wasn’t: in the soil, on the plate, on the table, on the other plate or table, anywhere on the floor—anywhere in the chamber, as far as she could tell. That was all good, solid information. It belonged in the diary, and she put it there.

  It was, however, information of a negative sort. Where was the acorn? Positive information was a lot harder to come by. The acorn, she wrote, was carried off by Gyongyosian spies. Then she made sure that was too thoroughly scratched out to be legible, even though it made as much sense as anything else she’d thought of, and more sense than most of the things.

  She tried again. The parameters of the experiment were as follows, she wrote, and set down everything she’d done, including the alterations she’d made to the horticultural magic that formed the basis for her spell. The control acorn performed as expected in every way. The other acorn, although emplaced in a setting attuned to the first through both similarity and contagion, did not germinate as a result of the spell and, in fact, could not be located despite diligent search at the close of the experiment.

  There. That told the truth, even if in a bloodless way. She didn’t know what it meant. Maybe one of her clever colleagues would be able to figure it out after seeing exactly what she’d done. Maybe, on the other hand, all her clever colleagues would laugh themselves silly at her clumsy technique.

  “Suppose,” she said to the air, “just suppose, mind you, that my technique wasn’t clumsy. Suppose something did happen.”

  Imbued with fresh purpose, she nodded. Odds were, she had done something foolish. Repeating the experiment as exactly as she could would tell her, one way or the other.

  To reduce the risk of magical contamination, she used different tables, different plants, and fresh soil for the new trial. Obviously, she used new acorns, too. This time, she took care to note where each of them went. She chanted over one. A sapling duly sprouted. No sapling grew at the other table. She went back there and sifted through the dirt. She found no acorn.

  “It’s real,” she breathed. Then she started to laugh. It might have been real, but she had no idea what it meant.

  15.

  Sergeant Jokai clanged a gong that sounded like the end of the world. Gyongyosian soldiers tumbled out of the barracks, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Istvan clutched his stick, wondering what sort of new and fiendish drill his superiors had come up with this time.

  “Come on, you lugs, down toward the beach,” Jokai shouted. “The cursed Kuusamans are paying us another call.”

  Istvan looked around for Borsos. The dowser was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was the one who’d raised the alarm. Whether he was or not, Istvan had no time to find him, not with Jokai and the officers set above Jokai screaming at the top of their lungs for every soldier to hurry down to the beaches and throw back the invaders. The Kuusaman attack had turned him into an ordinary warrior again. For that if for no other reason—and he had plenty of others—he cursed the Kuusamans as vilely as he could.

  Along with his comrades, he stumbled down a path toward the sea. Stumbled was the operative word; the eastern sky behind him had gone gray with the beginnings of morning twilight, but dawn still lay most of an hour away. The Gyongyosians could hardly see where they were putting their feet. Every so often, someone would go down with a thump and a howl. As like as not, somebody else would trip over the luckless soldier before he made it to his feet again.