by Cate Glass
A most unnatural odor of oils and pigments intruded on the scent of cedar and wet stone, reminding me that the odd streaks on the shadowed stone beyond the pool was a painted door awaiting Dumond’s magic.
Had either of my partners slept while I was gone to the city? My alert, focused senses insisted both of them needed a wash, despite all the water I had splashed on them when they had at last dipped my entire body in the spring.
I’d lain here wallowing in these normal sensations much longer than I needed, enjoying the moment’s release from responsibility, while Teo explained to the others about the Singular Wall and my dangerous dreaming. Dumond had asked the questions I had refrained from about the prison and his mysterious duties—and Teo regretfully refused answers, as I’d known he would, saying that we lived in the world where the Enemy had eyes and ears, and no, he could not say exactly what those were, but to please be cautious with every mention of these mysteries … and him. Poor Teo hated to ask that of them. To protect him.
“I cannot interfere with what goes on here. It grieves me, but my duties—and my work to become capable of them—demand that I remain apart. Certain, I’ll do whatever’s possible to prevent the Enemy from prevailing … but naught else.”
Placidio, no surprise, accepted Teo’s strictures, though he said it was a damnable nuisance that the lady scribe had not seen fit to trust them with her terrifying dreams.
Dumond grumbled and said Teo might as well not have bothered coming or warning us if he couldn’t tell us what to expect or what to do about it save to keep watch so Romy doesn’t wander off a cliff.
“I’m going back up top,” said Dumond. “This delay will not have settled either Neri or our bridegroom.”
“I’ll scout the perimeter while the light is good,” said Placidio. “The first night after the ransom demand is riskiest. Will the praetorians wait for the exchange or will they spread over the countryside, knowing we can’t be too far away? We must be vigilant.”
Dumond squatted beside me. “We’ll see you when you’re ready to move ahead, Romy. Give yourself what time you need.”
I patted his boot—scuffed leather, droplets of once-molten metal stuck here and there, currently very damp. He seemed to take the pat as reassurance and followed Placidio up the stairs.
Teo made no move to go with them. Nor did I. I wanted to start with simple.
Once their footsteps had faded, I lifted my boulder of a head and supported it with an arm abuzz with scrapes from Nis’s race to perdition. “Thank you, my friend. Again.”
“Are you feeling entirely yourself, Romy?” Teo slipped from the rock where he was perched and dropped onto his knees at my side. “Such a fright you gave us. Another waking dream, yes? Or more of a—visitation? You understand, this Enemy who intrudes upon your dreams is the same Macheon I told of. Her power increases; his prison weakens. We don’t know how or why. The last Dragoni yearns to be free.”
I pushed up and curled my legs under me, feeling the delicate pressure of his gaze. “Visitation. Yes. Though similar to the dreams. The male … manifestation … this time. Spewing flattery. Promises. He said, ‘Our time approaches.’ All very unspecific. All with the same … sensations. Spirits, Teo, when you told the others what was going on with me, you didn’t miss a single intimate detail of my dreams. Your recollection is astonishing and somewhat disconcerting.”
He didn’t smile, but his worry lines smoothed a bit. He’d removed his eye patch down here in the mottled glow of four torches and remote daylight. The mark around his eye was a lacework of silver. “Recollection is my existence of late.”
“I see it in you,” I said. “So much change in the span of three months. This teaching … but not just teaching, I think. Recollection encompasses more than merely listening to someone speak of history.”
“You are a perceptive woman.”
I touched the intricate marking about his eye, knowing he would rather I didn’t, but hoping I could convince him to trust me. The tracing was cool; my finger could have followed the design even were my eyes closed. But I would not ask its meaning or if, like Dumond’s painting, it could be roused to some sort of purpose with a touch of magic.
“I cannot speak of—”
My fingers touched his mouth to shush him. Then I returned my hand to my knee. “Here are my conclusions about your situation. Some I gleaned three months ago, some today. Domenika drives you to be ready for what’s coming—whether either of you know what’s coming or not. Those dreams we shared told me that. Someone apologized for sending you beforetime because they needed you to search for something that had been lost and found again. And your own people broke your memory before they sent you, because you didn’t know enough to hide what you are.”
His lashes were lowered. “Romy, please…”
“I’m not going to pry. I’m not going to push to know if I’m correct or to ask for more. Please understand that you can trust me. You don’t have to apologize for your reticence. Spirits know—and you know—that I am damnably curious, and that I already must honor one of my partner’s privacies far more than I like. But I do so because I respect him. I respect you as well.”
He tried to start again, but again I stopped him.
“The two of them are right. I believe what you say about the danger. But I choose to not think about it, and to accept the risk that comes with the choice. The attack you fear may or may not come today or tomorrow, but the consequences that we are working to avert will most certainly happen if we fail. So I am grateful beyond words for your coming, but I have to continue. I trust that you will pull me back from the brink when I need pulling.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“I don’t know if we can persuade this tartaruga Donato to come out of his shell before tomorrow night either, but we’ll give it our damnedest. That’s what the world—through the voice of the Shadow Lord—asks of us. Though still a bit damp, I’m quite well. I promise to remember the rules you repeated a thousand times over as I lay here, and I’ve no more need to use my magic just now. Before I do it again, I’ll warn you. Indeed, I think I made progress with Livia today. She has grave misgivings about the marriage. Now we have to do the same with Donato—find some way to learn enough about him that we can persuade him to cross his parents’ wishes. He is so strange—so closed—I’m not sure we can do it, but we have to try.”
“Another lesson learned,” he said, slipping his eye patch back over his mark. “I shall watch, not push. And I’ll hope that you are successful very soon.”
“Thank you. Now I must to business.”
“I’ll be close by.”
“I’m depending on it. But first we’re going to haul Neri out of the cellar. He’ll be pleased to see you.”
* * *
Neri’s third cup of ale was almost emptied after washing down a fist-sized lump of cheese, all of our figs, and half a loaf of bread. He could have eaten more, but we needed to talk before venturing our visit to Dono’s cellar. And as soon as I finished dressing his shoulder, we needed him to do some screaming. We didn’t want Donato to think Neri had been coddled and fed while he was out of his shackle.
“This could look much worse,” I said as I smeared more of Vashti’s salve over the ugly black crease where the praetorian’s blade had sliced him. Certain, it looked bad enough. His chest, shoulder, and upper arm displayed fifty hues of purple, green, and black. The wound itself was yet swollen and seeping, and he squirmed when I pressed on the flesh next to it. But I saw no obvious pockets of pus. His putrid stink was to be expected of any young man after three harrowing days. I had to remind myself it had only been a day and a half since the fight in the Villa Giusti courtyard.
“Is there something here inside the keep that you can fix on … in case you need to magic yourself out of the cellar?” I said.
Neri glanced around. “That box that has all the food in it. Easy to see it in my head—the nail heads, the dents, the latch. Those scratches along the side.
And certain, there’s no lack of the wanting. One decent feed is not near enough for two whole days starving.”
“Good. Be sure of it and maybe a few other destinations.” Knowing that his magic could get him free on his own was reassuring. Placidio would make sure he could shed his shackle.
“Blood for now, meat for later.” Placidio strode in from the courtyard with a dead hare in one hand and a bowl of blood in the other. “Has he told you anything useful about the Confraternity, boy?”
Neri took advantage of the interruption to tear another fistful of bread from the shrinking loaf, and answered between bites. “He don’t like to talk. He walks around in the dark. Sits. Walks again. I guess that’s why he’s not turned to stone or something. I yelled at him once for getting up so often. It’s so damnably quiet out here, his chain wakes me.”
I’d not even thought … Neri had never slept anywhere farther from the city than the woolhouse. The first time Sandro had taken me to his country villa, the quiet had been unnerving. “What did he say to your yelling?”
“Said he ‘didn’t mean to bother.’” Neri snorted. “Never thought I’d have a Confraternity man come that close to apologizing.”
I tied a strip of clean linen over his shoulder. “Did he stop getting up?”
“No.”
Dumond had followed Placido inside. “Did you ask him why he sat up to sleep?”
“Didn’t.” My brother’s face registered nothing but bliss as he sucked on a plum. “Thought that would sound too interested in him. But then he told me anyway.”
My hands fell still, holding the damp, filthy, sour wrapping I was ready to layer over the fresh bandage. “Yes?”
“Sometime in the night, I guess, I started yelling.”
“I heard that,” said Placidio. “By the time I got there everything looked all right. Thought maybe I’d dropped asleep and dreamed it.”
“I woke myself up. After you walked away—your big feet can’t be quiet no matter how you try—Dono asked me what was wrong, calm as could be, like he says everything. Was it my arm? I said it was just a nightmare. And, gods’ truth, he laughed.”
“Laughed?” Placidio and I said it at the same time, with the same tone of disbelief.
“OK, snorted maybe, but it was as close to a laugh as I ever thought to hear from him. And then he said, ‘Sit up when you sleep, and you can stop them before they get serious.’ I told him I mostly slept like one of these dead trees and that maybe my problem was being stuck in a hole with ugly devils and she-witches threatening to skin me.”
Neri flashed a grin that made me feel better about his healing than any peering or sniffing at his wound.
“Then he said he hadn’t slept a full night since he was a nub, but there came a time when his arm got broke and he had wicked nightmares and someone taught him to sit up and it helped. That was it. I didn’t sit up, but I didn’t wake until Placidio started bawling at us this morning.”
“I wonder if it was his broken arm gave him wicked dreams or guilt at accusing his attacker of sorcery,” I said. “Maybe that’s where we start our assault on Dono the tartaruga—something about this boy Guillam. If he’s wondering if we’re real Cavalieri anyway…” I quickly recounted Livia’s tale of the childhood fight and this day’s addendum. “We could let him think we’re taking revenge for Guillam. Then maybe bring the magic into play.”
“Might work,” said Placidio. “But no more talk for now. We need to get one of us back on watch and get this shirker back in the hole lest our mark get suspicious when we suddenly start talking about the day his arm was broken.” He flexed a nasty-looking bundle of smoothed limbs he’d cut from a lonely birch sapling and tied together with lengths of twine.
Neri’s hand slowed as he lowered the polished pit of his plum. “Wait. You’re not really going to…”
Placidio grunted. “Want to make the playacting easy, don’t we? Dumond can saddle you over his back while I give a stripe or ten on your hind end. Did it in my Gardia training days.”
“But the arm,” said Dumond, sadly. “Romy’d likely have her dagger in your craw if we risked tearing that slice open.” Unable to hold sobriety for the moment, the two of them started snickering.
Neri took aim and the plum pit found its mark in Placidio’s scruff of a beard. The three of them burst into quiet laughter, and I joined in.
“Maybe you don’t have to worry about the boy’s health,” said Dumond. “That throw was with his wounded arm. A finger’s breadth higher and we’d be fishing that pit from the swordmaster’s gullet.”
Placidio flexed the switch. “Time to scream, student.”
We all moved into the courtyard outside the keep, where Placidio had bundled blankets and canvas around a dead trunk. He’d not really imagined the prisoners would hear the blows as he flailed the birch switch, but the rhythm gave Neri a cue to let fly a series of increasingly tormented screams and curses.
Meanwhile Dumond ripped Neri’s already ragged shirt a little more and his artist’s hand skillfully added fresh streaks of hare’s blood with a birch twig. Once the flailing and screaming were done, he added more streaks and splotches to Neri’s slops and I dribbled some of the hare’s gift on my brother’s bandaged arm and bare skin. Dumond delivered the finishing touch by flicking one of his paint brushes loaded with blood, thereby delivering a fine spray on Placidio’s face and hands. Anyone would believe he and Neri had been involved in a session of purest torment.
“One thing before you go back,” I said. “You’ve observed Donato more than the rest of us together. What do you think of him?”
Unlike his usual, Neri considered before speaking. “Different than I expected. If I didn’t know he was from the philosophists … just a fellow in the nick with me … I’d’ve guessed he was brought up rich, educated, been taught manners. Nothing else special. But he’s got something off with his da. I said something about cutting my foot off to get out of the shackle, and how it would make me a match for my wicked da who had his hand lopped for thieving. He said I ‘don’t know anything about wicked fathers.’ He’s strange no doubt, scared to his boots like Dumond says it, and more cursed private even than”—he jerked his head at Placidio—“certain people we know. But he’s no lunatic. I think his strangeness and his privacy is just how he keeps his frights from making him into one.”
“That’s useful,” I said. And more than I’d expected.
“I’d agree,” said Dumond. “Well-considered. We’ll make a spy of you yet.”
“All right. Last time for this, lad.” Placidio loaded Neri on his shoulder again. “Certain, I’ll be glad when I’m done hauling your carcass up and down that blighted ladder. Dumond?”
“I examined the spikes after you brought him up,” said Dumond, as he cleaned his blood-laden brush. “Tight as your warlike ass.”
“One more thing, sister witch,” croaked Neri, convincingly hoarse from all the screaming. “Dono wears summat round his neck—a pendant or the like under his shirt. He checks for it time to time, even when he’s sleeping, like to make sure it’s still there. Not sure he even knows he does it.”
I’d never imagined Dono might have worn jewelry to bed.
“Well done, little brother. We’ll need to check on that.” I put the bucket that contained Donato’s water flask and evening food ration into Neri’s hand. “As soon as I’ve cleaned up and changed back to Cavalieri garb, I’ll be over to watch.”
Placidio marched Neri off to Donato’s cellar. Dumond put his cleaned brush with his paint case and set off to patrol the perimeter of the ridgetop while there was still plenty of light. I pulled open the canvas clothing bag and stared into the dark jumble inside.
Darkness swallowed me. I could not move, could not think at all what I was doing.
“Neri is a brave fellow,” said Teo.
My attention snapped to the doorway to the keep. I’d almost forgotten Teo was with us. But in that same instant the events of two hours previous engulfed me�
�a torrent of sensations, of terror, of the view from the cliff where I’d come a hair’s breadth from plunging to my death.
“Breathe, Romy.”
My waking in the grotto of the spring had been a charmed time, as if the water had not only cooled the rage that lingered under my skin, but veiled the horror of the event. Only now, inhaling the heavy airs of late afternoon, hearing the clicks and rasps of beetles and spiders and other lively denizens of the rocks, and seeing blood under my fingernails …
“Spirits,” I said, clamping a trembling hand over my mouth before a wail could rouse the settling hawks to flight again. I sank to the broken, blood-splotched paving suffering a fit of the shakes that rattled my bones and a certainty that collapsed my every belief.
“I can’t unsee his eyes, Teo. They were fire, sunset, shimmering blood, molten rock. It was him, wasn’t it? Dragonis. The beauteous monster is real. His voice … reached inside, as if to grab the heart right out of me. And I wanted— Spirits of Night and Day, of Moon and Stars and the Unseeable Gods lost in the Night Eternal, I wanted him to do it.”
Teo knelt in front of me, his lean, ageless form so reminiscent of the marble divinities in our ruined temples, sculpted at a time when the popular style rejected natural muscle and bone in favor of the sublime. The shifting hues of his eyes—blues and purples, violets and greens so different from those other eyes—soothed the lancing terror. I inhaled his peace in great gulping sobs, but it did not stop my shaking.
“Did you perceive the wonder that I just beheld?” he said, taking my hands in his slim, cool ones. “The four of you … laughing in the face of your dangers, bearing each other upon your shoulders as you prepared for the good work you’ve chosen. Cling to that. That echo of human life—courage, friendship, respect, pain—all of those will give you power.”