The Nascenza Conspiracy (13 page)

“But I do exist,” growled Emilia. “And protocol states
…
”

“If none of us knew that you were about, how were we supposed to know your precious protocol? There’s no crime in seizing an opportunity, especially when we needed aid the most.”

Amadeo seemed impressed by Petro’s defense. “He’s right.” Even Elettra nodded, though her face remained grave. “I thought I was helping.”

“You were.” Elettra held out her hands in apology. “If I hadn’t panicked when I woke up and you weren’t there, none of this would have happened.”

“And I did get some food,” Amadeo said, reaching into his pockets. When he turned them out, he produced two handfuls of knuckle-nuts. “There’s some walnuts, too. I know it’s not much, but the fisherman was only just going out, so he hadn’t any catches yet, and
…
”

“Nuts!” exclaimed Petro. The sight of those dark brown shells with the knobby caps stirred a memory.

“Excuse me?” asked Emilia. She was plainly cross with Petro for opposing her.

“The biggest nuts I’ve ever seen!” Without explanation, Petro began running at top speed for the riverbank and the tradesman who had been kind to Amadeo. “Signor!” he cried out. “Signor, stop!”

The nut farmer had already started his team in motion, so that they towed the curious barge upstream, against the current. Now that he was closer, it was easy to see that the bundles atop the raft were being held in place by four wheels, folded up on arms attached to the sides. “Yes?” When he turned, Petro was relieved to see a pair of long and elaborate silver mustaches. “Can I help you, young signor?”

“Magnus Costa.” By the time Petro reached the familiar face, he was out of breath. Had it only been a few days before that he and Adrio had encountered the man and his curious
zattera
by the side of the road, just beyond the Cassafortean river gate? It seemed a lifetime ago, and a spate of leagues away. “I don’t know if you remember me. We met
…
”

“The cazarrino of Divetri.” When the old man broke out into a genuine smile and pointed directly at him, Petro was startled for a good moment. But no, the nut farmer hadn’t recognized him for what he really was. “You were the friend of the cazarrino of Divetri. I remember you.”

It was with Magnus Costa that Petro’s deception had begun. It was a pity that it could not end with him. “That’s right.”

“You know this man?” Emilia had caught up to him. The others straggled toward them.

“We talked to him outside the city, the first day.” Petro took a deep breath. “He’s a good man. An honest man.” Unlike himself, he added silently.

“And what does that—?”

Petro interrupted her. “He could take them back to the city.” Before she could protest, he expounded further. “It’s downriver all the way and a straight shot. How long would it take you, Signor Costa?”

“To return to Cassaforte city? A day and a half, a day and three-quarters. But I just came back from there, young’un. I’m not planning to go back for another fortnight or more.”

“There are guards coming from Colona,” Emilia pointed out.

“Ah yes, perhaps we should abide by protocol.” Petro nodded wisely. “The unthinking man’s scripture.” Emilia plainly bristled at that remark, which was fine with him. “Think about it, Palace Guard Fossi. If you wait for your partner to return from Colona, that will take, what? An entire day? Perhaps closer to two, if he has to find you?”

“We have ways of signaling.” When affronted, Emilia grew stiff and distant, concealing her emotions behind a guard’s formal and blank exterior. At the moment, she was very much an enigma. “But yes.”

“If you were to entrust these two to Signor Costa here, you could begin following the loyalists’ trail now, while it’s still warm. Am I right? Oh, but wait,” said Petro. He decided to thrust at one of Emilia’s apparent weak spots. “You aren’t the senior guard. Your partner is. You can’t make decisions on your own.”

His offensive seemed to work, for Emilia visibly bristled. “I am his senior.”

“I’m not going back to the city,” repeated the nut farmer, clearly lost. He took a step closer. “Say,” he added, his voice more serious. He nodded toward Amadeo. “Has this aught to do with that lad’s wild tale?” Their group all looked around, taking in the others. “It has, hasn’t it?”

“Signor Costa, there is truth in that tale.”

Amadeo wasn’t satisfied with Petro’s reply. “It was all true,” he said, bitterly.

“Good Signor Costa.” Emilia stepped forward, shaking off any animosity she was feeling toward Petro at that moment to present herself at her most professional. “Where do you call home?”

“Why, up Sepino way, on the west side of the river,” he said, pointing upstream. “Perhaps a morning’s travel, more or less.”

Emilia bit her lip and appeared to consider her options. “The boy’s tale was true,” she admitted, acknowledging the expression of vindication on Amadeo’s plain white face. “There was an incident in Campobasso last night, and these youths are the only ones who escaped.” The nut farmer let out a long, low whistle. “There are two others who may have survived, and my job is to find them. But I cannot do it with them in my way.”

“Yes, yes,” nodded Signor Costa, taking it all in. His eyes danced with excitement.

“I can assure you that you will be handsomely rewarded, were you to take a message of mine to Cassaforte and deliver it to Lorco Fiernetto, High Commander of the Palace Guards, and deliver these three youths to him as well. Well rewarded,” she added, meaningfully.

Without hesitation, the farmer agreed. “I will do it.”

“Wait.” Petro turned to Emilia. “I’m not going.”

“I don’t want to go either,” Elettra said. She was looking at Petro, not Emilia.

“I do.” Amadeo walked directly over to Magnus Costa and all but clambered onto the
zattera
. “I’ll deliver your message. Just let me go home.”

“You would desert Brother Narciso?” Elettra’s question was full of scorn.

“I’d rather not be murdered in my sleep,” he replied. “If you and the Ventimilla boy had any sense, you wouldn’t either.”

“The issue is not open for discussion.” Emilia growled the words through clenched teeth as she sat down upon the grassy slope. From a concealed pocket in her surcoat she pulled a fold of paper and a
grafite
, one of the tiny writing implements from Caza Cassamagi that left tracings upon a page as if from a stick of lead. “You’re all returning home.”

Elettra seemed to take her word as law. Petro was not as easily cowed. Emilia might have authority and rank within her own world, but he was not a part of that sphere. “I’m not going,” he announced. “And you can’t make me.”

“I can put you on that
…
wherry,” she said, pointing to the convertible cart.

“It’s a
zattera
,” said Costa, looking pleased that she had noticed it. “On the ground, it’s a cart, see, but in the water
…
”

“You can put me on it, but I can jump right off,” Petro told her. All his willfulness could be heard concentrated in every word. “And I will. I don’t answer to you, Emilia Fossi.” She looked up from whatever she’d been about to write and narrowed her eyes at him. “My friend is out there, somewhere, and in trouble, and I swear to the gods I’ll find him. I’ll follow you if I have to.”

“Not if I tie you to a tree,” she snapped.

Just as sharply, he shot back, “Is that protocol?”

“Do you ever stop talking?”

“If you think my jaw is tireless, you should see the rest of me.” Petro blinked, startled to hear himself so contrary. The only people he’d ever argued with so vehemently were Risa and Adrio, the two people in the world closest to him. He remembered when he’d laid eyes on Emilia at Eulo, when she’d actually seemed to see him for who he was. And now they were arguing as if they’d known each other all their lives.

“Gods!” Emilia put her hands to her temples as if she had a headache. “Fine. But just you. Not her, and especially not him,” she said, stabbing the
grafite
first at Elettra and then at Amadeo. Elettra deflated at the news. “You, though. Do as you will. But be warned, Ventimilla, that I’ll not tarry to kiss your bruises or be your mama when darkness falls. I’m here to do my job and follow that trail before it gets cold.”

“My idea, by the way,” he pointed out. His heart was beating fast from having to confront her, but he was elated that he was being allowed to remain.

“And if you so much as put my job in danger, even for one moment, I’ll make sure to tie you to the nearest tree and leave you for the wolves. Protocol or not. Now let me write in peace.”

Magnus Costa had raised his ill-kempt eyebrows during the argument. “Fiery lass,” was all he said, before he clucked at his team to attend. He began to unfasten the harnesses that attached them to the
zattera
so that he could turn them around.

Petro had little time to savor his minor triumph, because at that moment he found Elettra attacking him. Or hugging him, to be more precise. Though she was a full hand-span taller than he was, she lay her head on his shoulder and let it rest there as she squeezed him around the midsection. “I wish you would come home with us,” she murmured.

Petro had never been squeezed so hard, or by someone outside his own caza. “You’ll be fine,” were the best words he could summon. He accompanied them with a pat on Elettra’s back.

“You’re so brave,” she said. Shock followed relief when she let him go, grabbed his hands, and then unexpectedly laid a gentle kiss on his cheek. “Gods speed you back to the city.”

Petro had experienced flirting before, but never affection like this; usually the attentions of girls like Talia Settecordi were thrown his way solely because of his name. But Elettra’s kiss wasn’t for Petro, cazarrino of Divetri. It was for him—the real him, who’d traveled alongside her for days and had helped her flee from Campobasso the night before. It was special.

He held his hand to his cheek, cupping his fingers over where Elettra had pressed her lips, as he watched her wander to the riverside. “Gods speed you home safely, too,” he murmured.

From the ground, he heard a snort. Emilia Fossi wasn’t looking at him as she scrawled her missive upon the paper, but she’d plainly heard the entire exchange and thought very little of it. Message complete, she unfolded her legs and stood in one swift motion, not the least bit unbalanced. “You’re a heartbreaker, Ventimilla,” she sniped as she walked past. “I hope I don’t fall in love with you myself along the way.”

Petro had to blink several times as she gave her final instructions to the nut farmer. Though all he’d wanted was to find and rescue his friend before it was too late, he could think of worse fates.

Is there anything more charming or picturesque than a forest? How sweet the scents of nature in its glory, and how abundant its fruits! I cannot imagine anything sweeter. There is a reason so many fairy tales take place in forests, you know.

—City-dweller Penina Nochi, in a letter to her sister, Anna

It seemed that Petro had seen more trees in several hours than ever he’d seen in the course of his entire life. By the middle of the afternoon, his back hurt from ducking under the branches, and his chest ached from trying to catch breaths that constantly seemed to elude his stinging lungs. For all he could feel of his feet, his boots could have been filled with pulped steak. Yet he kept trudging on.

Emilia Fossi seemed tireless. With almost superhuman endurance she wove her way through the forests, pausing only every few minutes to kneel on the ground. She would pluck at some broken twig or sift a palmful of earth through her fingers, or run her hand over a thatch of weeds. “This way,” she’d announce, and carom in a new direction.

“Are you sure?” Petro had asked. After being on the receiving end of one of her withering looks of scorn, he never asked again.

Surely enough, though, they managed to wend their way back to Campobasso in the space of two short hours. Petro remained hidden among the trees while Emilia looked for traces of the path the loyalists might have taken. She flitted like a shadow around the little village’s dirt clearing, seemingly without substance or weight. Had Petro been watching her from the inn, he might have thought her only a trick of the light, had he noticed her at all.

Not that the caution seemed necessary, for Campobasso was deserted. The inn sat like a leering
memento mori
, with darkened windows instead of eyes, sightless and empty. Petro averted his glance, hating to think of the lifeless guards lying within. The clearing was deserted, save for a thin squirrel scavenging for scraps, and the stables were empty, though a broken harness rattled limply in the breeze as it swung from a hook.

After what felt like an hour, though surely it had to be much less, Emilia returned to the trees, making no more sound than a chipmunk in the brush as she crept toward him. “This way,” she told him.

“Wait.” When she turned, it was with annoyance, as if she begrudged every second lost in her pursuit. Petro resisted the urge to remind her that if they’d followed her protocols, they’d still be sitting by the riverside. “What about … ?” He jerked his head in the direction of the inn.

Emilia’s face had been stony until that moment, but at Petro’s oblique mention of the slain guards, it softened. She blinked and faltered. Petro’s heart went out to her in that moment. The guards had been her colleagues. Very likely they’d been her friends. If she had retreated into some hardened world where procedures and rules of conduct reigned, it was due to the discipline that had been trained into her. None of them had expected this journey to be anything other than a routine, and probably boring, trip into cow country and back. Emilia was likely as overwhelmed as he.

“We took care of them,” she said at last. The memory was obviously painful enough that she forgot, for the moment, her urgency to press on. “It seemed cruel to leave them where they lay. I found some sort of icehouse in the back. Giles and I carried them in there, so they would be
…
preserved until we could return. For something more final.”

It was awful to think of Aluysio Raponi and Bonifacio de Maczo lying upon the very ice that had been chipped and shaved to make the raspberry foole they’d so liberally consumed the night before. Padrona Colleta had been so proud of that ice, too. Petro winced. Emilia, however, mistook his expression for something else. Her hand shot out and clutched his. For a few seconds, she squeezed his grubby fingers between her own. “They were indeed good men.”

The way she said the words seemed to imply she was agreeing to something he’d left unsaid. He nodded. “Yes. They were.” Another squeeze, and then she pulled him to his feet and they were on their way once more.

Petro had to concede one thing: Emilia was a natural tracker. At the insula he’d seen the way expert artists and craftsmen approached their work, and her method with a path was very similar. She would look at a depression in the soft earth with the same critical eye that his own father, or anyone in the Divetri workshop, would peer at a red ball of glowing glass, hot from the furnace, when inspecting it for flaws or bubbles. Like a master sculptor waiting for a block of marble to speak to her before she applied a chisel to its untouched exterior, she would kneel and examine what looked like a perfectly ordinary clump of grasses. Before long, the twisted and bent blades would impart to her whatever they had to say, and she would rise with confidence and announce they were moving forward. It was marvelous.

Like a weaver at her loom, Emilia was expert at picking out the tiniest, seemingly unconnected textures and piecing them into a pattern. If his attention was drawn to them, Petro might observe things lying on the ground in close proximity: a shower of fresh green needles from a pine tree, a broken growth of moss, a river stone caked with still-moist dirt, a small indentation in a finger’s length of tree bark. To Petro, each was its own thing, a singularity, unremarkable. To Emilia, they told a story. “They stopped here, perhaps for some food or water,” she announced.

At the mention of eating, Petro’s stomach began to grumble. He’d eaten the few knuckle-nuts Amadeo had given him hours before. “Lucky them,” he said to himself, refusing to admit to his needs aloud.

Fortunately, Emilia did not seem to notice. She paced around the tree for a moment. “He struggled when he got up, kicking loose the moss and the stone,” she said, dropping down to turn the stone over. Its unexposed side was perfectly smooth. She returned the palm-sized white rock to a depression in the earth where it seemed to fit perfectly, as if it had lain there untouched for several years until the night before. Her finger traced the bark. “His shoulder—or head—struck here.” She looked up. “Hard enough to dislodge the needles.”

In his mind’s eye, Petro could see it all happening exactly as she’d said. Even the depression in the bark was rough and dented, where Adrio’s shoulders would have been. “You’re marvelous,” he whispered, seeing it all for the first time as she did. “Bloody marvelous.” Though she pretended not to hear, Petro could tell she was pleased by the compliment. “So that means he’s still alive.”

“It implies that someone had a struggle here, and that it took place
…
sometime within the last half day or so, I wager.” She was trying to be cautious in pronouncing Adrio still alive, but Petro felt stirrings of hope. “Perhaps we should take a rest,” she suggested.

Did he look worse than even he suspected? Perhaps so, because when Emilia’s eyes flicked over him, she almost seemed to take pity upon him. His clothes were soaked through—but not from the river water of the morning, which had dried long ago. It was sweat that drenched him now, from his hair down to the damp seat of his pants. His cheeks had to be apple red from the exertion. He’d kept his mouth firmly shut about how miserable he felt, even when he’d been certain that he couldn’t take a step further, but perhaps it was too plainly written on his face. “If you need to, I suppose we can,” he said, trying to sound indifferent to the idea.

She said nothing to that, though it sounded as if she snorted slightly. She sat down on a fallen tree trunk before pulling out her rucksack. From it, she pulled a metal container that made a sloshing sound when she uncorked it. She took two swallows of the water within, and two only, a fact Petro remembered when she handed it to him. The twin gulps he took barely began to slake the dryness of his cracked and aching throat. He could have guzzled down an entire river at that moment. He even captured the drop of water that spilled from the container’s mouth and ran down to his chin, greedily sucking it from his thumb.

After passing back the metal bottle, Petro sat down and leaned against the log, painfully aware of how brittle his spine felt after so many hours of remaining upright. “How did you get to be so good at tracking, anyway?”

“Sheep,” she replied automatically. Then, aware of how incongruous her answer must have sounded, she added, “My first assignment was at an insula outpost near Piperno. It’s known primarily for cloth production, far to the east. Awful, awful place. Nothing but mud and sheep for leagues. The country’s bunghole, our captain used to call it. He said that only the hopeless and the incompetent stayed there for longer than a year.”

Talking to Emilia about her past felt natural, and good. She spoke to him as if he were a regular person and not one of the Seven. “How long were you there?”

“One year and one month,” she said, allowing herself a wry smile. “But it wasn’t because I was hopeless—though I felt like I’d lost hope of seeing anything green ever again, in that sea of mud.” She pulled an oilcloth from her sack and began to unfold it. From within it she pulled several lengths of dried fish, and leaned forward to hand half to Petro. Although just the day before he’d wished never to see the stuff again, he grabbed it and eagerly began to tear off bites of the briny, chewy meat with his teeth. At that moment, it tasted better than any feast. “It was because I was too good at tracking the sheep.”

“Tracking them?” Petro had inhaled his first bite so quickly that he nearly choked. He cleared his throat. “Where would they go?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. The gods created man and woman to have dominion over the kingdom of dumb creatures, and the sheep are the dumbest of them all.” She picked a fleck or a bone from her teeth and continued to nibble at her rations. “If there’s an opening in a gate, a sheep will force its way out. If there’s a cliff it shouldn’t climb, that sheep will climb it. If there’s a well to fall into, or a bramble bush to be caught in, or a wolf they shouldn’t find, they’ll fall, get caught, and get found. Well. At the outpost there was always one sheep or another getting out at night and doing something stupid, and the insula folk would be mighty complacent about it. What’s one sheep to them, more or less, when they had so many? Since there was aught else to do, I’d set out to find the animals myself.”

When Emilia smiled, as she did now, she was as attractive as Petro remembered her being in Eulo. She wasn’t pretty the way fine girls could be, as her features could only be described as starkly handsome. When her eyes twinkled with the memory of the sheep, though, she softened. Despite the grime on her face, she seemed to shine. To encourage her, Petro grinned a little himself. “Was it difficult?”

“Oh, at night it was. I’d make a game out of it. There were rules. If a sheep had been gone an hour, I only had an hour to locate it. If it had been gone two, I’d take two hours out of my sleep to find the thing. I got to the point that I knew what to look for, outside the clearings where they kept the bloody critters. I knew how they bent branches, where I’d find traces of their wool, what they’d stop to chew on along the way.” She finished off one of her rubbery fish snacks and started on the other. “I got good at it. I’m known for it, in fact.”

“What if they were out all night?”

Again she let loose with a quick grin that seemed to ease the hard edges of her face. “They never were.” It sounded more like a boast. “Of course, sheep have one advantage for tracking.”

“What’s that?”

“They leave piles of dung every thirty feet, or so it seems.”

Petro laughed a little. “It would be more convenient if humans did that, I imagine.”

“Oh, they do,” said Emilia with a completely straight face. “But only when they stop to take a break.”