A second-floor porch or loggia overlooking the back yard of the inn, usually used for drying laundry, had been converted into a dormitory for the female servants of the two Montefoglian families. Fiametta had laid a bedroll for herself closest to the railing. She now picked her way over the snoring forms of the exhausted women. She slipped off her overdress and laid it atop her blanket, and pulled down her linen underdress, bunched a bit above the snakebelt she'd worn concealed from Catti's greed. Despite the night chill, she leaned on the railing and looked out over the inn yard.
The moon, waning and dull, rode a quarter of the way up the sky. Along the far wall, Pico's mules stood strung along a horse line, fodder piled at their feet to keep them content. Smoke still seeped from the smokehouse, a layer of haze in the dimming moonlight Pico, his sons, and the Swiss were bedded down in a little bastion formed of the pack saddles, near the mules. She could see the blond man's bowl-cropped hair gleam as he shifted and turned over in his bedroll. She curled her fingers around her ringless left thumb, rubbing the empty place. What have I done? Did my ring draw him to me? Is he really supposed to be my true love? Does he know this?
Thur wasn't what she'd pictured, when she'd cast the ring and its true-love spell together on the first day of spring. She could scarcely say what she had pictured, in her inarticulate longing to be loved. She stared down at the blanketed lump in the yard and tried to feel ardent, or swept by passion, or at least impressed. Nothing. It wasn't that she disliked him. He was just sort of there, alarmingly solid and real. Friendly, certainly, after the manner of a big spoiled mastiff pup who a never been cuffed, snuffling up to be petted.
It had never even crossed her mind that she would not immediately love her true love back. But she'd been expecting someone ... shorter. Older. More sophisticated. Better dressed, at least. And richer. He really doesn't smell all that bad, for a muleteer. She felt a frustrated urge to rip her ring from his hand and tap it on the nearest tabletop, as if something stuck inside her spell could so be loosened. But she could still feel it, even now at this distance, the same quiet, tiny hum of magic. The spell had emitted scarcely a ripple when the Swiss had slipped the ring on, curling around his finger and purring like a smug and comfortable cat fed on fish and cream. A well-cast spell was a barely discernible thing even to the inner eye of a trained mage. Only when badly botched or thwarted was magic obvious to ordinary senses, a_ jangling discord that wasted power. Teseo's first efforts had been almost painfully loud, emitting visible sparks. But one scarcely knew Master Beneforte's spells were there, flowing as much as possible with nature, not wrestling against it.
You see, if a corpse is preserved unshriven and unburied, the new-riven spirit can be harnessed to the will of a master...
Did Lord Ferrante seek a new spirit ring? A murdered master mage must be a fount of great power. The ironic symmetry must appeal to Lord Ferrante, to compel the man who'd destroyed his ring to become its replacement. And if Ferrante had ransacked their house, God knew what else he'd found to rivet his power-hungry attention.
She turned the days over in her mind. A night and a day for the Losimons to ride back with their injured to the castle, and return the magic saltcellar to their master. A day for the siege-preoccupied Lord Ferrante to awaken to the fact that they'd left a greater treasure of sorcery to rot in a field. A day for them to return and find their prize gone, a day to ask up and down the road after a conspicuous corpse. ...
She rubbed her aching temples. Surely her fears for her father should have ended with his death. The dead were supposed to be beyond pain, healed and comforted in the bosom of Lord Jesus and the saints. That first night, mixed with her grief, she'd felt a curious lightness to her spirit, as if an unrealized weight had been removed from her shoulders. As if her world had suddenly enlarged, a vast vacated space above her freed to grow into. Her life become, unexpectedly, her own to choose and order. Her heart had pulsed with a subdued joy even while her throat choked on sobs. Surely that joy was a great sin. She should feel only grief, and fear of the world, with her protector removed. Only grief. Not resentment.
Now Master Beneforte's troubles flapped back in to settle on her life like a great flock of carrion crows, weighing her back down. It's not fair. You're dead. I should be free of you. Now not death but eternal damnation loomed, and the danger of a black magic far beyond her depth.
What can I do? I'm only half-trained. You yourself neglected to train me. It's your fault 1 don't even know where to begin. I'm only a puny girl.
Tomorrow, she would attach herself to the servants of the Montefoglians, and run away to the north. Let the big stupid Swiss go in any direction he chose but the one she took. Let him lumber into the nearest ditch, for all she cared. She never wanted to see him again. Nor Montefoglia. Nor her house. Nor her own little bedroom, warm and cozy... .
Shivering, her nose clogged with unshed tears, she rolled up in the blanket and buried her face as best she could in the thin pillow. Her spinning thoughts bogged at last in sleep.
Fiametta woke out of a troubled dream of wandering in a strangely labyrinthine version of their house in Montefoglia. The place was deserted, in ruins, boards of the gallery rotting treacherously underfoot, shutters hanging half-off, walls crumbling. She'd been trying to light a fire, but couldn't, and armed creditors banged at the door calling for payments Master Beneforte had hidden and Fiametta could not find, though she searched frantically from room to room....
Her pillow was damp and cold and her blanket wet with dew over the inner pocket warmed by her body. The waning moon was at zenith, casting its sickly insufficient light down into the inn yard. Still drenched with the unease of her dream, she rolled over and peered through the railing slats, glancing along the outer wall of the compound. No menacing men's shapes moved atop it; the wide night sky swallowed sound. Only her fears drained the scene of peace, though the line of hip-shot sleepy mules radiated a comforting animal warmth. Yet something was subtly wrong. She stared into the darkness for a full minute before she realized what.
The last trailing smoke from the smokehouse was curling down, not up, collecting in a pool like a misted pond in the middle of the inn yard. Thickening. Contracting. The formless, seeking substance ... Her heart lumped against her ribs. She caught her breath. She scrambled onto her knees, careless of the cold, and pressed her face to the slats.
The silver-gray smoke coalesced to man-form, legs in hose, a pleated tunic, a big cloth hat wound round like a turban with a jaunty fall of smoke-fabric to the side. The hat tilted upward, toward Fiametta on the loggia. A faint smoke beard curled beneath the brim. Moonlight picked out a gleam, like the edging of silver on a high cloud, from smoky eyes.
"Papa?" Fiametta whispered. The word stuck in her throat. She swallowed.
The figure beckoned to her, with palpable effort, smoke wisping off its arm as it moved. The knot in her belly dissolved in a strange cockeyed pleasure. I'm glad to see you.... Weren't ghosts supposed to be fearful manifestations, instilling terror? But Master Beneforte looked so ... himself. Impatient and annoyed, as ever. She could almost hear his voice, ordering her about, threatening to beat her for clumsiness or delay, a threat he almost never carried out except when he was seriously short of money, and on those days she'd learned to be careful. The translucent figure beckoned again.
Fiametta swarmed over the railing, hung from the porch's edge by her hands, and dropped into the inn yard. She ran to the apparition, then stopped, longing yet afraid to touch it; clearly, he was holding the smoke together with great difficulty. She could see it in his expression, that familiar tense absorption that transformed his face when he worked his subtler spells. His gray hands opened to her, and he mouthed words.