by Carol Berg
The library, too, was a jumble, shelves toppled, volumes scattered across the floor. Many were already burning. Loose papers floated on the heated air, bursting into flame like swamp lights.
“Which ones?” croaked Finn, coughing as he picked through whatever volumes lay atop the piles.
“His own first. Anything in his hand.” Frantically wiping my eyes, I spun around. Nothing was in its place. “But where?”
“Here, I think.” Finn waded through the ash-covered debris and thrust leather-bound journals and stacks of paper into my arms. “Now go on. I’ll bring what else I can.”
“Hurry.”
I stumbled through the door into the blessed air, dropped my burden on the pile, and whirled around, intending to go back for more. But the roof had caught, lighting the yard with garish orange.
“Finn!” I screamed between hacking coughs. “Get out!”
He emerged on the heels of my words, staggering under the load. I thrust my arms under his and together we lowered the treasures onto the pile. So little…all that remained of a life’s work.
Thunderous flames geysered skyward, as the roof collapsed into the shell of the house. I sank to my knees in the mud, coughing. Flooding tears eased the smoke sting in my eyes, but naught else.
Finn collapsed beside me, long arms dangling over his knees as he coughed until he could scarce catch a breath.
The firelight dimmed quickly inside the blackened shell of stone.
“What’s left standing?” I said. “We need to get these under cover.” The mist was thickening. My face and neck were slick with moisture.
“The guesthouse and stable weren’t fired,” he rasped, getting slowly to his feet. “I’ll fetch a barrow.”
As he slogged around the smoky ruin, I stacked pages with bound books atop and underneath to preserve what I could from the moisture. Finn brought a sheet of canvas along with the barrow. I used it to cover the remaining pile. He pushed the loaded barrow and I carried an armful across the muddy yard and garden to the guesthouse.
“What happened?” I said, numb. Dante had woven fire wards about Pradoverde, but they could merely warn those under its roofs. It was impossible to weave protections against every possible source of fire.
“I’d gone down the village for a stoup. Come back round the lake and through the wood. Surprised someone creeping round the house. Guess I should be grateful he didn’t want to kill no one. I’m no good wrastler. Woke up face down in the muck with the house afire.”
“You’re a hero, Finn. Bless all saints and angels you’re all right.”
He pushed open the guesthouse door. “Badger balls!”
The smaller dwelling where Finn and Dante slept had been ransacked. Beds and tables overturned, lamps and ink bottles smashed, clothes chests emptied. We had to lift a heavy oak chest and move it aside to get the barrow through the door. What were they after?
Finn threw a broken table and the torn pallets into a corner so we could unload the barrow. Three trips more and we had all we could salvage under the guesthouse roof. Rain hissed on the fallen timbers, sending acrid smoke billowing into the mist and choking us with the stink.
While Finn tended Duskborn, I laid a hearth fire, shoved debris aside, and assembled beds. By the time Finn stumbled inside, we had water boiling for black tea, all the provision Finn and Dante kept.
We gulped it until we stopped shivering. Now we had light enough, I insisted Finn let me clean and dress several nasty burns on his arms and back with the ointment of aloe Dante always kept nearby. Only then could I pose the question that kept me on my feet: “Have you had any word from Dante, Lord Ilario, or Captain de Santo since they rode north?”
Finn shook his head, too tired to speak, and collapsed on his pallet. I soon followed. Everything else would have to wait for morning.
“WHO DID THIS?” I SAID, when Finn stumbled out of the guesthouse door into the rain-washed sunlight. A thicket of hair framed his bony soot-smudged face.
I sat on a bench in our little orchard, my back to the ruined house. Idle, for the moment. One glimpse into the blackened carcass of my home had convinced me there was nothing in the steaming black soup within that could possibly be salvaged.
Finn joined me on the bench. His grimy fingers gripped the seat’s edge. “Didn’t see him well, as it was dark early and fogged in. And he wore a kerchief covered his mouth. But he had a swagger about him very like a fellow I met down to Nelli’s taproom. One of the three that come from the north I wrote you about.”
“The ones who told you of the winter storms on the road to Coverge?” That’s where Jarasco lay—Tetrarch de Ferrau’s sacred demesne. Now I could envision the city on the maps my father had hung in our schoolroom. The pale-eyed tetrarch had not left my thoughts all morning. Papa had always said that righteous holy men were the most dangerous enemies.
“Aye. Mayhap I talked too free.…”
“Common thieves, do you think, looking for charms or silver or gems a mage might own?” Or had they been more purposeful, as someone hunting evidence of necromancy?
“Never met a thief, save me and other lads snatchin’ lemons and such.” Finn glanced out from under his wild shock of hair. “These were friendly—
at least two of ’em were, as one kept always to himself. Yet I’d not think of ’em as common. They was clean. Tidy, you know, not like someone’s been working in the vineyard, nor even draymen. Fingernails clean, too, as you’re always onto me about. They said they’d come south looking for work where it weren’t so cold. I didn’t ask what as I’d no work to offer, but mayhap I ought to have.”
“No reason you should. Were any of them in the taproom last night to see you there?”
“Don’t know. I was down there, but…with Nelli…out back. Not inside. That’s where I am mostly in the village.”
I nodded as if I’d not noticed his cheeks scarlet under the soot.
His whole posture softened, while his earnestness redoubled. “But mayhap someone heard talk of the grenadier’s dream. That fellow, John Deune, said three emeralds so large would be worth more than Pradoverde.”
“Grenadier? Emeralds? I thought Dante went to see his father.”
“That come later—the message from his brother. From the day he got that, I knew he’d go. It talked about the angel, you see…the angel in the dream that was still preyin’ on his mind.”
Clearly Finn had a much longer tale than I’d imagined. “Come, I’ve got some cheese and biscuits in my saddle pack. You can draw some water. After we eat I’ll sort through this mess while you tell me everything that happened from the hour I left Pradoverde.”
He heaved a great sigh and leapt to his feet. “There’s a deal to tell. I had to write it all twice…but it’s likely burnt up now.”
As I sorted books, blotted pages, and spread them near the hearth to dry, Finn replaced the spare furnishings, gathered the scattered clothing, and recounted the tale of Masson de Cuvier and his terrible dream, and of the day Dante received the unexpected letter from his family.
“So he believed this woman—this enchantress—caused his father’s accident?”
“Drove him half loony, it did. He ran me off and spent the whole day in the forge. Never heard the like of his hammering.”
I had heard it before, whenever Dante’s temper drove him to violence.
“You ought to leave when he warns you,” I said, though it felt like a betrayal, like admitting de Ferrau’s accusations. Yet I had experienced the ferocity of Dante’s rage in the aether. Dante’s wonder at the universe, his keen, ever-questioning mind, and his passion to make sense of what he found made him an incomparable teacher—and a companion worthy of a lifetime’s knowing. But whatever drove him—whether his desire to know, or to set the world to rights, or to overcome the scars of a past he refused to share—fed both his passion and his fragile, frightening temper.
“The way he was, I didn’t know but he would burn the place down and himself in it.”
Finn glanced up from his bundle of muddy garments. “He had me write the letter to the chevalier that very night.…”
“And the three of them rode north—Dante, Lord Ilario, and Captain de Santo—and you never heard from them after.”
“Aye.”
What had happened to Dante and Ilario? And John Deune, too, who was supposed to meet with them along the road? How had Captain
de Santo ended up dead at Montclaire?
Where did I begin to make sense of all this? I felt less certain that heading for Coverge was the right course. Dante was not dead, so I couldn’t imagine him remaining long with a family he despised. Such a magical mystery would drive him hard, especially if he saw some remnant of Kajetan’s hand in it. His blindness necessitated a companion. That he had asked Ilario to do it—angels comfort the chevalier for enduring that task—was a powerful measure of his urgency.
I could not come up with any hypothesis that would connect this dream enchantress to the Temple. The Temple had no argument with magic, save when it impinged on their particular view of the divine—as necromancy did. Neither did they use magic in their practices. But perhaps de Ferrau’s investigation had turned up evidence relevant to this inquiry, something that might tell me where to look if not the tetrarch.
Merona, then. I would accept de Ferrau’s invitation to hear his witnesses. And I could, perhaps, ask the zealous tetrarch if he commonly burnt the homes of those he accused. Or tortured soldiers…
Having a plan got me moving. I did what I could to dry and sort the books and papers. Many were ruined, charred, or the ink hopelessly smeared. The scant information Finn recalled about the emeralds had me sort through the small stacks of surviving books to see if the particular volume he’d read had survived. I didn’t see it. Nor did I find any useful history. Papa and my goodfather had always talked of the Maldivean Hegemony as a model of good governance, but it had been such a slight interruption in the brutal history of Aroth, I’d never paid any attention to it.
Finn fetched supplies from Laurentine and verified through Nelli the tap girl that the three men from the north were yet hanging about. “I’d like to talk to them before I go,” I said. “But I don’t want it known that I’ve been here.” I decided to wait until I was ready to ride for Merona.
FINN AND I DUG THROUGH the cooling ruins and found our iron money box under the stone floor of the kitchen. Before I left, he needed money to pay our tax lest he be hauled off to debtors’ prison in our stead.
“What’s all this?” I said, as I opened the iron box to see a heap of folded paper.
“I threw the post in there till the master came back,” he said as he wrung out a shirt and hung it over a chair next the hearth. I had suggested that Nelli merited a shirt that wasn’t black with soot. “Figured I wouldn’t lose it that way and have him yelling at me.”
“But you needed me to unlock it.”
He shrugged. “After I wrote you the letter, I thought to look in the master’s pettibox, where he keeps that ring and the silver locket and such at night. Sure enough, he left his keys there. Now they’re lost in that stew of the house.”
“Well done, though.” I riffled through the stack, disappointed to find nothing in Portier’s scholarly script or Dante’s oddly angled one. I tossed the tax notice back in the box, along with a small stack of responses from booksellers and libraries regarding some general inquiries. One large fold of stiff, cheap paper bore the seal of Castelle Escalon’s steward, the usual wrapping for a forwarded letter. I set it aside.
“You should leave Pradoverde, Finn,” I said, as I counted out the tax assessment and his wages. “Leave Laurentine altogether. This Temple inquiry means mortal danger for anyone connected with Dante and me.”
“Nah. You trust me to take care of things. The master does, too, though he does give me the frights, I’ll confess. And it’s…interesting. I’m not just doing sweat chores here. Besides, Nelli is close and willing. Wherever am I going to find all that again?”
Despite all, I had to laugh at his practical view of the world.
Once we’d hidden the money box in a new location, I ripped open the packet from the palace. Inside was a stained fold, sealed with the cheapest wax. The letter was addressed to Lady Anne de Vernaze at the Palace in Merona in a big, loopy script like that of a child. Curious, I perched on the table edge, rising to my feet again as I read.…
Lady Anne,
I am writting this to tell you of events that have brot the man you know as Dante to a wild and forrin land. Stubborn as he is, he will not. Nor does he know I do so.
I wuld prefer to speak as he wuld address you, but his words are like to be bigger than I can spell, and I just have a difficulty enuff as we have not even met, you and me, and you being the nobul lady he values so deeply. Come to that, Dante and I have not met in so many years until this month past that it would be awkward writting to him! So, first to tell you whose pen is addressing you. I am his elder brother, called by name Andero, of late the Smith at Raghinne.
Our father is dead, exploded by a dream. I ween that you are more customed to such doings than I, but there it is. Words spoke in Da’s dream, and the fearful vision of it, now lead us south to a ruin called Karabayngor. My brother is beset with worry over his frend, the man who cannot die, and guilt over your noble frend and others dead by his doing. He feels portents that an old enemy plots some great evil he cannot guess. You likely know enuff of my brother to heed his portents, as I lernt to when I was but a nub.
A manservant has come with us, one John Doon by name. He is a sneaking sort and sorely dislikes Dante, but seems a useful companion. He says he serves us as honor to his dead master. I watch him carefully.
“No, no, no!” Ilario, dead? John Doon…his dead master. The words could mean naught else. “Gods, no!” My arms crossed my breast as if to hold him in…the lean, rangy grace, whether dancing or fighting…his silliness…his charm, utter devotion, and solid friendship. Such life he exhibited in his most ridiculous posturing…and in the quiet, whimsical, honorable person so few in the world were privileged to know. The gaping hole in my heart, as raw as if the tissue had been ripped away in that moment, could not…could never be…eased. Holding a fist tight to my breast, I read on.…
I asked Dante to come home when Da got exploded, so as maybe to fix up the badness between them, but Da was hard beyond what I even knew. Dante is grown hard, too, and stubborn, as I said. But I am equally stubborn. He lets me see for him.
Excuse my boldness, my Lady, but I think that if you care for my little brother as much as he cares for you, you will want to know how he fares. If he travels with me, then he does not miss as many meals as he might otherwise, and though he frets a deal about you and his frend and those lying dead, he feels a rightful purpose. But since some terrible events in the northland, more troubles him than he will speak. He is feared to work magic, even as he knows this task will require it. It is a death to him, and I know not how to ease it.
I will do my best to send another report from the south. This fine tavern lady, Marga Tasso, says she will send this on and hold whatever further papers I dispatch to her.
My highest regards and looking forward to meeting you in person on some future day,
Andero, at the town of Mattefreese
8 Estar
8 Estar. Almost a month past. Atop grief worthy of a lifetime’s weeping, I had to imagine Dante headed to Carabangor, the ruin in the dream, the place where the enchantress waited with her terrible jewels. And an old enemy. Stars of night, could he mean Jacard? Of course he would be driven to pursue such a mystery. But to venture so far without sending for me…Stubborn did not begin to name him. Why could I not make him understand that I would venture any danger, any risk, at his side? We were two halves of the same whole; I was so sure of it.
Yet in all the wrenching emotions the letter evoked, the most frightening was imagining what terrible events might make Dante afraid to use his magic. How could he breathe, how
could his heart even beat without it? This must explain what I felt in the aether…how closed and tight and cold his presence.
“My plans have changed,” I said, crumpling the hard-traveled page. “Tomorrow at dawn, I ride for Carabangor.”
LAURENTINE
“I hate leaving you behind, lady,” I said softly, combing Ladyslipper’s coat. “But you’ve gotten fat here at home and I’ll have to ride hard. Besides, I’d not risk you. I’ve no idea where this road will take us.”
To wherever Dante was. That was my only goal.
The horse next to the vacant stall where I hid with Ladyslipper whinnied in a curious note, as if asking who had intruded on the Laurentine hostelry so early.
Some disturbance had waked me in the dark hours that morning, and I would have sworn Dante was sitting on the floor beside my bed. I had stretched my arms, trying to reach him. When my hands came up empty, I had to dash the tears from my eyes, whether from the failure to touch his solid presence or from a lingering sense of despair, I could not have said. I’m on my way, friend. I’ll not leave you alone again. Not ever.