Fatima went to her knees. "You command me, Your Grace," she said breathlessly.
She rose and turned, hastening after Matteo. Elayne gripped her hands in her lap.
The Raven looked aside at her. "Remember this, my lady. You, too, are responsible for their lives. Do not allow yourself to be imprudent, or to be served carelessly. If there is any injury to you, those who caused it—by mistake or by malice—will suffer an ill fate."
She tried to appear composed, sitting with her back rigid to control her trembling limbs. "He is but a child," she said faintly.
"The better to do murder unobserved."
"Do murder!" she echoed. "The boy can’t yet have eight years to his life."
"I had but nine, at my first," he said. He took the seat beside her, throwing off his red-lined mantle. "I don’t ask so much of Matteo yet. But they all know the price of an error in my service."
Two of the littlest boys bore his cloak away, their faces solemn and scared. At his order, Margaret brought a golden dish and set it upon the table. Stiffly Elayne offered her hands to be rinsed from the pitcher of perfumed water. The fragrance didn’t mask the scent that lingered on her, the scent of lust and coupling—the scent of a manslayer.
The one called Dario came forward. He was a thick-muscled, broad-shouldered youth with blunt strong features, but he bowed with a precise elegance, taking the napkin from his left shoulder and drying Elayne’s hands.
"Your pardon for this crude meal, my lady," the pirate said gruffly. "It’s not what I intended. We’ll have a proper feast in Monteverde to celebrate our marriage."
"It’s nothing," Elayne said in a stifled voice. If she never had a feast in Monteverde, she would be pleased.
"Pour into three cups," he instructed Dario, and watched as the youth performed a careful ritual, tasting deeply at each before he served it.
The Raven took a slow sip of one goblet, and offered it to Elayne from his own lips. She drank a convulsive swallow, assured at least that this was safe. He lifted the next cup and held it out to her. But as she raised her hand to steady the goblet, he drew it sharply away.
"Don’t drink of this," he said. "Be careful. Smell it."
She lifted her eyes in mistrust. He met her look under his black lashes, a steady stare. Elayne drew in a breath over the cup.
"Do you smell it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "It smells of spice."
He offered the first goblet again. "Look in it. Observe the color."
Elayne looked at a claret wine that seemed ordinary in its honey-red color and sweet scent of spices. "I see nothing."
He held up the second cup. "What of this?"
She frowned down at the silver goblet so close to her nose. He tilted it—and she saw the thin film that threw transparent colors across the surface.
"Oh—" she said. "I see it."
"At last," he said in a tone of great congratulation. "Fortunate that it’s only a drop of olive oil." He pushed the third goblet over the cloth toward her. "This one contains bane enough to kill us both. Smell it."
Gingerly Elayne sniffed at the last goblet—one of the cups that Dario had tasted not moments before. He stood by, erect and unconcerned, bowing his head when she glanced at him.
The faintest odor of burnt syrup, of almonds blackened beyond mere roasting, tainted the scent of the last cup. It seemed to go instantly to the back of her nose and linger there. She pushed the cup hastily away. "But he drank of it!"
Il Corvo looked up at Dario with a slight smile. "Enlighten the princess to what passed."
The youth bowed to his waist. "Your Grace, there was no bane in it when I drank. My lord diverted you with the second cup and envenomed the last one while you were distracted with looking at what he showed to you. It’s a common ruse."
"Common?" she repeated weakly. Her voice rose. "This is common in Monteverde?"
"No doubt they’re clumsier about it," the Raven said, "and easy to detect. But you make a credulous target. You must learn to take notice of what happens around you."
"Helas," she cried. "God forfend that I ever came here!"
The pirate scowled. "By Christ, can’t you yet see what true profit it is to you?" He waved his hand for Dario to remove the cups. "Madam, you were bound for Monteverde and certain death in your innocence. Whatever I’ve done, whatever I may be—there’s no one alive who can school you better in the wiles of murderers, or keep you more surely from any human menace. Do you doubt me?"
She stared at the white tablecloth before her, where a cup of the claret had left a mark like a bloodstained new moon—a mark of poison, or of sweet safe wine; she knew not which. Once she had trusted her dark angel to keep her from all harm. But that happy illusion was broken now; it was an assassin who proclaimed himself her protector with such forbidding certainty.
There are a hundred dangers, Lady Melanthe had warned her, in a voice of anguish. There is no time to teach you.
Her godmother had known this pirate.
Elayne could not reason that Lady Melanthe had somehow sent her to him. To her family’s enemy. To the same assassin who declared that he would have killed her himself if she had wed Franco Pietro of the Riata.
She could not reason it, and yet she remembered Lady Melanthe’s cool ruthless demeanor, her own sister’s awe of the countess, the respect tinged with dread that was never spoken. And she knew that her godmother was closer in spirit to the Raven than to anyone else Elayne had ever encountered.
"I am yours," the pirate said to her. Softly. Simply. He watched her out of shadowed eyes. "To my death."
She took a deep breath, staring at the shape of the half-moon stain. There was yet the hot soreness inside her, where he had taken her, left his man’s seed in her body. Black mystery and pain, and she wanted it again—she wanted him before her, his head arched back, at her mercy. The strength of what she felt, the power he gave her to hurt him—her desire for it shocked her. Thunder cracked and rumbled overhead. Sullen smoke curled from the chimneys, the tempest exhaling like a living thing from the darkest corners of the lofty kitchen. The grave faces of children gazed at her from the shadows.
"Do it, then," she said, lifting her eyes. "Teach me what arts of malice that you will. I’m certain that you know them all."
His lip curved in dry mockery. "I couldn’t teach you one-tenth of what I know of malice," he said. "But I can put you on your guard against it."
Zafer appeared at that moment, emerging from the smoky shadows, his tabard and exotic headpiece darkened and dripping with rainwater. As the Raven looked toward him, the young infidel made a bow, but no words passed between them. There was only a glance, a moment that seemed to convey some grim meaning between the youth and his master as the storm wailed outside.
"Attend me well, then, my lady," the pirate said, turning back to her. "Place no faith in such useless concoctions as the powdered horn of a unicorn or the color of a moonstone—such false alchemy is for fools. Open all of your senses. Each poison has a character of its own. Each murderer has a nature that betrays him, if you observe closely enough."
She lifted her chin. "And what is yours?"
His gaze lingered on her hand upon the table, then moved upward to her face. No more than she could fathom a panther’s mind could she have said what was in his.
"Let that question be your ultimate examination," he said. "We’ll discover if you’re cunning enough to solve it."
* * *
He had a name, such a deceptive, unapt name that she could not bring herself to employ it with him. Allegreto. The English tongue had no such word, but in the language of Monteverde it meant something cheerful and light—even joyous.
He did laugh, but only in mockery. He smiled as a cat might smile while it toyed with a mouse. She wondered if he had ever in his life had a fit of honest mirth, the way she had laughed sometimes with Raymond, both of them falling into hilarity, piling one childish jest upon another until they could not draw breath.
For four day and nights, as the storm still slashed and rumbled overhead, she became another student of his evil arts. She learned to distinguish the scent of three poisons at each supper, and watched Zafer empty a vial of powder, hidden in his napkin, into the salt. She watched him do it a half dozen times, and never once detected the faint turn of his wrist until he slowed the motion and lifted the cloth for her to observe each step of the action. Then Margaret—composed and determined—demonstrated how to apply venom to a cloak pin and stab Zafer as she aided him to dress. She wasn’t very accomplished at it, and apologized profusely to my lord and my lady for her inexperience while Zafer held a dagger to her heart, having turned off the maid’s assassination attempt with a move as quick and simple as a striking snake.
The pirate watched his apprentices with calm attention, remarking quietly on their work in the way a good master would appraise his students’ efforts and offer methods of improvement. He slipped the daggers he wore from their sheaths and showed how poison subtly discolored a blade—the one for his left hand was always envenomed, he warned her, the one for his right was clean.
His hands fascinated her: their swift ease with the blades, on a wine cup, the memory of the rough jerk in her hair as he had yanked her away when she bit him. He had smiled then—smiled—and the thought of it sent an ache all down her body, a liquid pain that seemed like bliss.
He drew her to him, a lodestone against her own will, as if all she had been taught of good and right, all she knew of joy and mirth, held no strength against the beckoning darkness. She wanted to wound him again. She craved to do it. Just that way, that shocking moment of power, to make him hurt and shudder and lose himself in her again.
Despicable it was, as wicked as the way he put children in the study of such evil things. And yet they all—girls and boys, from the youngest up to Dario and Zafer and Fatima—looked to him eagerly, vying to show the degree of their scholarship in his deadly skills. In his own manner he treated them with a grim sort of kindness. When Margaret’s babe had begun to wail from its basket slung on ropes near the hearth, she was granted reprieve from any further mayhem in order to attend her child.
Matteo, skulking miserably in a half-lit corner, was called forward to make another try at a proper poison tasting. After a multitude of attempts, he possessed himself sufficiently to pour a full cup without shaking so that he spilled drops all over the tablecloth, and performed the credence. When at last the Raven, without praise or censure, simply lifted Matteo’s offered goblet and drank from it, the boy’s face broke into a glow of tear-stained relief and pride.
She was given scrolls to study. They were nothing like the texts that Lady Melanthe had provided for her education. She read a Latin compendium of toxic substances, divided into sections, first those natural and then those made by the hand of man: their manufacture, their modes of delivery, their effects. Dry mouth; rapid heartbeat; hot, dry; agitation and delirium...certain death.
In the margins were notations. Other effects—large pupils, muscle spasms; the names of men, some of them scratched through.
She might have been studying her notes of Libushe’s herbs and potions. Except she was not. She was reading how one man might kill another, or make him impotent or blind, while children sat about her chopping dates and talking cheerfully and Dario pumped the wheel of a whetstone, making a pitched whine above the rumble of the storm as he sharpened their proffered daggers and little knives, sending sparks flying to the tiled floor. Margaret’s baby played at her feet while she mended buttons on Elayne’s torn shift.
Il Corvo sat midway up the stairs to the kitchen gallery, dressed in black velvet—like an illumination in a book Elayne had seen once, of a nonchalant fiend overlooking the souls in Purgatory, lounging between the curves and struts of the letter E.
His languid glance came to hers as she lifted her eyes. Heat suffused her, dread and pleasure. She would have looked away, looked down, but it seemed as if that would be weak—an admission that she even noticed him. That she remembered—vividly.
He held her look. With a slow move, like a lazy caress, he touched his fingertips to his shoulder, stroking the place where she had bitten him. Instantly she felt a spring of hot sensation, a violent dream of her power to mark and wound him as he arched under her hands. He smiled at her, a mere hint in the greenish light of the storm.
Elayne looked down, snatching a quick breath, as if the atmosphere had closed upon her.
Perchance it was a spell he had laid on her, that made her blood run in a tangle and her breath come strangely when she thought he was remembering as she was. She had never in her life before wanted to hurt any creature. It wasn’t anger, though anger was a part of it. But it was more than that, more—it was all twined and twisted with the way he looked beneath his lashes and smiled as if he knew.
Perhaps it was a curse to make her foreign to herself. He would perceive how to make such a thing, and not bungle it with mismatched feathers.
He rose from the stairs and came down in one graceful bound, scooping up one of the youngest ones as the child was about to reach for a newly honed knife that Dario had just laid aside. With a flick of his wrist, Il Corvo sent the blade spinning end-over-end above them. It reached a zenith and flashed downward; Elayne’s heart stopped as the little boy looked up at the weapon descending toward his head.
An arm’s-length above the child, the pirate plucked the dagger from the air.
"Hot," he said, holding the blade before the boy’s face. He set the child on the floor. "Don’t touch it too soon."
The boy shook his head vigorously.
"It’s cool now," the Raven said. "Take it."
The little boy reached for the knife, but the pirate moved it. Instantly the child assumed a stance, his short legs spread, rocking forward on his toes; an echo of Il Corvo’s agile pose. For a few minutes they feinted and sparred for possession of the blade. Fifty times the cruel edge came within a hairsbreadth of slicing the child’s soft skin, but he ducked and twisted, moving in under Il Corvo’s arms. Somehow the pirate made it appear as if the boy really did dispossess him of the weapon, emitting a suitably foul oath and dropping the knife when the child cracked him on the knee-cap with a sudden, awkward kick.
"Well-placed," he said as the student bore his prize away. He sat down next to Elayne, rubbing his joint, and gave her a sideways smile. "A promising brat."
She did not return the smile. "Wouldn’t grown men serve you better?" It came out like an accusation. "Why children?"
He leaned back, his elbows on the table. "Because they are wholly mine."
Elayne turned her face away from his faultless profile. "They seem a frail force."
"Do they?" he asked idly.
She rolled the edge of the scroll under her finger. Her heart seemed to pound in her ears when he was so close to her. "Would you bring up your own child in such a manner?"
She felt him look at her. Before he spoke, she added, "And you need not enlighten me—I’m certain it’s how you were fostered. Would you make the same of your own blood?"
The sound of the whetstone wailed, searing metal to stone. His body was perfectly still beside her. She thought he was more frightening when he was motionless than when he wielded any weapon.
"Tell me what choice I have," he said softly.
Elayne wet her lips. She had not expected him to give her a serious reply. But he waited, as if he meant it. She frowned down at her knuckles. It seemed utterly wrong, to corrupt children, to bend them to such service, and yet she could only offer platitudes about abandoning his iniquity and seeking rectitude. Platitudes to the man who swore to guard her from such murderers as himself.
"I asked your sister the same once," he said. "And she had no answer for me either."
She took a deep breath and looked toward him. "If you desire that I will bear your children, then you mu
st find one."
He never moved. His lashes flicked downward and up again. He remained gazing at Dario’s back as the youth pumped the grinding wheel.
"Libushe taught me many things," Elayne murmured, barely above a breath. "Even if you force me, I can prevent a child."
It was a lie; Libushe had taught her herbs and methods that might prove successful at preventing a conception, but the wise-woman had not promised certainty, and warned her it was a deadly sin to use them. But Elayne thought even a wizard might not be sure of what a woman of knowledge could impart.
He looked at her then. Instead of the cold fury or disgust she had prepared for, it was a mystified look, as if she had spoken some riddle that made no sense to him. "Why?’
"Because it would be mine, too," she said, "and I won’t have any child of mine brought up to be what you are."
His fine mouth hardened. "You wish him to have no defenses?"
She paused at that. "No," she said. "But..." She put her palms together, trying to find words for what she meant. "No more than other people. Not corrupted and trained to slay as if it’s a game."
She thought he would mock her and call her foolish. He only frowned a little, then sprang up. He walked to the foot of the stairs, put his boot upon the lowest step, then turned and came back. He looked down into her eyes, still with that faint frown. "If I swear this to you, then you’ll not resist me?" he demanded in a low voice. "You will conceive?"
She felt her cheeks burning. She didn’t want to be his wife. The idea of bearing him sons and daughters was horrifying and frightening and exhilarating all at once. "If God wills it," she heard herself say, in a voice that barely whispered in her throat. But it did not seem that God’s will could have any link to what she felt.
"Then I swear," he said at once. "Man child or girl, their education belongs to you. I will not teach them what I know."
* * *
The storm at last swept past, leaving wreckage and a cold crystalline atmosphere. Elayne huddled close in her mantle as they toured the storm-clawed rooms and loggias. She felt as shattered as the beautiful carved doors—as if she were someone unknown to herself, born of the destruction to a new and harsher spirit.
The Medieval Hearts Series Page 155