The Nascenza Conspiracy (14 page)

“Like here, you mean? Of course, I suppose they—” Petro sniffed the air, then made a terrible surmise. “Did they—? They didn’t—!” He jerked away from the tree as if it were a branding iron. Where he was sitting was fine, thank goodness, but when he peered around the trunk’s other side, there was a blackened mass buzzing with blue bottle flies. “
Gods!
” he yelped, jumping up to put as much distance as possible between himself and the stinking pile.

Emilia laughed at his discomfort, finishing off her portion of fish without breaking stride. She waited until he sat primly down on the other end of the log before she said anything else. “Prissy little thing, aren’t you?”

“I am not. I didn’t expect
…
that.
There
.” Petro could have eaten another handful or three of the fish, but he’d finished his share and was determined not to complain or wheedle. He watched Emilia finish hers, determined that the next time they stopped, he’d try to emulate her more and take his time with the dried meat rather than wolfing it down.

“Just particular, eh?” She gnawed at her fish. As Petro watched her, it struck him for the first time that perhaps she needed this break as much as he, if not more. “Well, many of the Thirty are.”

Normally, that would be the sort of comment to call up the prickliest of Petro’s defenses, but the way she said the words, without much judgment, made him think. Many of the Thirty were awfully particular, it was true. “I suppose you ran across enough of them at the insula outpost,” he conceded. Her shoulders shook with a huff of laughter. “Is that how you knew about Brother Cappazo? You were talking about him earlier, when you were talking about that seamstress. Poppea.”

“Oh.” Under all the grime it was difficult to tell, but Petro thought he saw the guard flush. “No. I was at an insula.”

“As a guard?” There were exceptions, of course, but the insulas had always been proud to be free of both city and palace guards.

Through gritted teeth, Emilia admitted, “As an aspirant.” Before Petro could express his surprise, she held up her hand to stop him. “I don’t like talking about it.”

“Oh. All right.”

Petro had been about to leave the matter at that, despite his curiosity. After an evaluative look, however, Emilia dusted off the remnants of any fish flakes from her hands and studied the ground. “It was your insula, actually. The Penitents. I was born an outpost brat. My mother was a Sciarra, and I was her natural child.” Petro’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. His own mother had been friends with the Sciarras, growing up. They were a family of weavers, known for the durability of their plain-woven utility cloth. “You and I would have entered the insula on the same day of Scrutiny, actually. Though I’m four years older.”

“What happened?” Petro immediately wondered if his question was rude. It sounded impertinent, and they’d been becoming so close.

She didn’t seem to mind. “My mother fell in love with a common man named Marco Fossi, married, and left outpost life for good. You know the rules. To receive an insula education, one must be a child of the Seven or of the Thirty, and either living in their houses or living in the insulas or one of the outposts. It’s quite the exclusive club.” She swallowed and looked off into the distance. “Once my mother became a Fossi, out I went. The choice to join the guards was mine, though.”

“And you like it?”

Emilia seemed to struggle with the question. “It’s difficult, being female and in the guard. The opportunities to advance aren’t as frequent.” She sucked in her lips before she admitted, quietly, “My superiors don’t seem to find me fit to command, yet.”

“Why?” Petro found it difficult to believe. “You’re amazing.”

She seemed reluctant to accept so fulsome a compliment, though it was obvious she was grateful for it. “I am very good at what I do. They, however, don’t let me prove myself. My partner Giles thought that merely because he was a man
…
” She shook her head. “No matter.”

She sounded so defensive over this part of her history that Petro didn’t want to pry any further. “There’s nothing wrong with being a guard,” he said, trying to make it better. “My sister wants to marry a guard.”

“Oh, of course,” Emilia said. Her voice had caked over with derision, so that she sounded normal again. “Now that Risa Divetri has made it popular, it’s all the fashion for the Seven and Thirty to let their girls have guards as sweethearts. That won’t last. It’s ridiculous, what snobs the Thirty can be. If I sound discourteous, just remember that I was of the Thirty, at one point. But the moment I wasn’t—my, how they cut us dead. You know it’s true.”

“Yes,” said Petro, agreeing. “My family had a cousin born in the insula who came to live with us when his mother remarried outside the Seven and Thirty. He always felt like an outsider, too, I imagine.” Petro hadn’t thought of his cousin Fredo in several years. The man had been so anxious to regain his status within the Thirty that he’d betrayed the Divetris. Poor dead soul.

The thought of Prince Berto’s coup, in those panicked weeks after his Scrutiny, made Petro freeze. Suddenly he was frightened of what Emilia might know. “If we were among the same class of aspirants,” he said slowly, trying not to betray his anxiety, “did we
…
know each other?”

“Why would we?” she replied quickly. “There’s four years of difference between us. We wouldn’t have had the same lectures. Probably we never have crossed paths at all. Besides, I was there for no more than six or seven months.” She shuffled her feet on the pine needles underfoot, releasing their prickly scent. “Enough to like it before it was taken from me. Isn’t that always the way?” Relieved as he was to know that she didn’t recollect him, Petro recognized enough pain in her last comment to want to respond. She didn’t give him time, though. “Let’s go.”

Petro’s spine, when he stood up, still felt as if it might crack in two, and his feet were so numb that they might have belonged to someone else. “All right,” he said, trying to sound as if he was in a good humor about it. Necessity triumphed over comfort, though. Still, he couldn’t help but ask, “How many more hours?”

“Hours?” she replied, cocking an eyebrow. “Not even one. Look.”

She pointed to the deep blue northern sky, where, in the distance, for the first time, lay the mountains. Petro had never seen them before, and for a moment thought they were a hallucination. But no, there was the faintest vision of jagged peaks looming over the treetops, barely more than shadows of lavender and gray, tipped with white at their heights. Vereinigtelände lay above and beyond those foothills.

The world suddenly seemed much larger than he’d ever realized. Awestruck, Petro whispered, “Are we going up there?”

“No.” Emilia seemed to scorn him yet again. “Not that. Look there.” She reached out and turned his head several degrees to the right. At first he thought he was looking merely at a bank of pine and fir, much like every other evergreen he’d had the misfortune to see on that very long day. Gradually, however, after studying the scene, he saw what she’d spotted long ago: a trail of black smoke wafting up from deep within the woods. “A cooking fire,” she told him. “If I’m not mistaken, our quarry has made camp for the night.”

“When did you see that?”

“When I decided to take a break,” she said, as if it were obvious.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Almost immediately Petro forgot every hurt, every ache plaguing his body. He could have closed the distance between himself and that campfire at a gallop. “Let’s get A—Petro!”

She shook her head. “Barging into an enemy camp by myself, without knowing anything of their capabilities or defenses, is not a wise idea.”

“You’re not by yourself,” he reminded her. “You have me.”

The way she avoided his glance informed him how little she thought his presence was adding. “Regardless.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We wait until dark,” she said. From her expression, he knew there’d be no arguing her down. “Then you’ll see.”

In the far-away east there is said to be a snake so large, and its skin so naturally adapting to the colors and textures of the landscape around it, that all it need do is lie very still among the rocks with its mouth open to its fullest, in order that small animals and rodents wander in, little knowing they are to make the viper’s meal. That is how I shall swallow the barbarous nation to our south.

—The spy Gustophe Werner, in a letter to the Baron van Wiestel

Those aren’t from Cassaforte,” Petro said, pointing. Four tents sat in the midst of a natural clearing. Tall and narrow, their canvas corners swooped down from a single central pinnacle. Tiny banners flew from the central posts, visible only when the flames from the bonfire flickered high enough to illuminate them against the starry sky. No pilgrims’ tents these, hastily erected from sticks and providing only the most essential of protection from the skies above. These were the tents of diplomats or statesmen, enclosed on all sides, their entrances protected by painted flaps. Even the tents set up by the wealthiest merchants during markets and festivals in Temple Square weren’t as well made as these.

“They’re foreign, definitely,” Emilia agreed. She was crouched in the brush beside him, peering into the enclave through the branches. The ground was so rocky this close to the foothills that little flourished beyond hardy evergreens and stubborn bushes. “Or at least, of some design I’ve never seen before. Wherever these tents from, they’re not supposed to be here.”

As they watched, a man emerged from the largest of the tents to walk over to a stack of gnarled shadows opposite. He hauled something large and club-like from the pile. Not until he approached the bonfire and threw it in did Petro realize he had been carrying the trunk of a young tree, dirty roots and all. The flames roared up around it, crackling and sparkling as the clods fell into the fire’s heart. Petro scanned the camp for any signs of Adrio and Narciso, or the men from Campobasso.

“Look at that,” Emilia said in his ear. The gorse bush they were hiding behind was so narrow they had to lie close together. It was the nearest that Petro had ever been to a girl. “How long do you reckon they’ve been here?”

Petro thought rapidly about the implications of what he’d just seen. “A while, at least,” he suggested, nodding at the man as he returned to his tent. “If they had time to clear away trees.”

She grunted. To Petro, it sounded like grudging approval of his conclusion. “Tell me what else you see.”

For a split second after her question, Petro thought Emilia might be going somewhere without him. She’d left him alone earlier while she scouted out this camp on her own, returning to bring him to their concealed location. He realized, though, that she was trying to make him see the situation through her own eyes. “Well, we’ve seen six or seven men so far.”

“Six? Or seven?”

Emilia knew the answer, Petro could tell. He was being too sloppy for her standards. “One, two,” he said, counting off the men sitting near the fire. They both held mugs of ale that they had been replenishing from a small barrel over the last few minutes. “Three—the one we saw throwing the wood onto the fire. Four and five we saw yawning, and heading to the big tent a few minutes ago to sleep.”

“And another sleeping in the woods, instead of patrolling as he ought,” Emilia finished. “That’s six known. Perhaps four more could be sleeping in the other tents. Perhaps not. Have you recognized any of them? Are they the kidnappers?”

“I … maybe that one seems familiar?” Petro nodded in the direction of the fellow facing their direction, by the fire. “I don’t know for sure. I’m sorry. I was so angry last night that I wasn’t really paying attention to any of the people we met in Campobasso.”

“What were you angry about?”

“At—Petro,” he admitted. “We’d fought.”

“Over?”

The notion that Emilia might be running him through her highly analytical brain unsettled Petro more than a little. He hated considering his own plentiful faults, much less having them exposed to her logic. “Neither of us thought the other was being a particularly good friend.”

She seemed to take the statement at face value. After a little time passed, and nothing happened around the bonfire, she asked, “Weren’t you?”

“Perhaps not,” he admitted.

Luckily she didn’t press for details. “So for how long do you think they intend to stay?”

“I don’t know,” he started to respond, before he realized that if Emilia asked the question, very likely she knew the answer. To ease his muscles from cramping, he pulled up his legs and readjusted his position. “For a while?” he ventured at last. “They’ve cleared trees. Those tents look like they’d take work to bring down.”

“Military tents,” she agreed. “Not makeshift.”

“There’s firewood for days, if not weeks.”

“Very good,” was all Emilia said. She lifted her head, listening to something Petro hadn’t noticed. She looked like a roe deer in the wild, alert to possible danger, quiet, graceful of neck, and wide-eyed. After a moment, she visibly relaxed.

Once, when Petro had been younger and his sister had only just come into her powers, he had overcome his considerable awe of her to ask what it felt like to enchant something. It had been shortly after Prince Berto’s coup, and already Risa had done some miraculous things—transformed water into medicine using nothing more than an ordinary spoon, escaped through locked windows and doors, even spoken to Milo Sorranto through an ordinary glass bowl. At his question, Risa’s face had gotten a far-away expression. “It feels like I’m looking at something ordinary,” she had said, “and listening to the extraordinary story it wants to tell.”

Was that the way Emilia Fossi saw the world? She wasn’t working magic, though her ability to divine truth from the mundane bordered on the clairvoyant. Just as he had with his own sister, Petro felt a little awestruck in her presence.

“What do you make of it all?” he asked, feeling shy.

“I see a bunch of fools who don’t know what they’re doing. Look at him.” She nodded ahead. The man who had tossed the tree trunk onto the fire had emerged from the large tent once again. He talked briefly to the two by the fire, then turned his attention to the northernmost of the tents, calling to someone within. After receiving a response, he snapped his fingers at one of the men by the fire, who scurried out of sight and returned, moments later, with a large porcelain bowl imprinted with a blue pattern. It was a chamber pot. “He doesn’t even know how to work the flaps of his own tents,” Emilia pointed out. Indeed, the man did seem to fumble with the ties that kept it closed. “These men are plainly of Cassaforte, but these tents and supplies are not their own. And they’re hiding. Who has to hide in their own country? Those planning insurrection, that’s who—loyalists. Undoubtedly the same loyalists as kidnapped the cazarrino.”

“Did they steal the tents?” Petro asked. When she seemed inclined to let him answer his own question, he gave it a try. “The camp seems too well erected for that. The tents would be a jumble if they’d tried to put them up themselves.”

“Very good.” Her praise made him blush. She was tutoring him. He was her pupil now, not her liability. This change in his status made Petro acutely aware of her presence beside him. There was something highly intimate about their proximity. Especially the warmth of her hips and thigh against his where they lay side by side in the dark. Her breath tickled against his cheek and ear as she whispered, “They were given them. Someone is aiding these men. Someone from outside Cassaforte.”

The loyalist outside the tent finally passed the chamber pot in through the flaps, then froze. He whirled around to point at something on the ground, two arm-spans from the bonfire. At the sight of whatever it was, the man promptly lost his temper. Neither Emilia nor Petro could hear what he was saying, but it was plain that he was yelling at the others.

Almost immediately, one of the two leapt up to retrieve an ordinary bucket, the object of the man’s harangue. The subordinate moved the heavy metal pail a good distance away from the fire, next to the tent. The first man continued shouting. He was so involved in whatever he was saying that he failed to notice when the chamber pot once more emerged, presumably full. One of the men had to call the angry fellow’s attention to it.

Even then, the man snatched the chamber pot away so violently that Petro automatically winced, sure its contents would slop all over the camp. “What’s he so upset about?”

“Maybe there’s raw bait or fish chum in that bucket. Something that’s not supposed to be cooked.” Emilia sounded dismissive.

Petro, however, wasn’t convinced. There was plenty of bait to be had, and cooked chum would never merit such a violent reaction. “I think it’s something more.”

Emilia shifted her weight so that she was even closer to him. Had her arm been around his shoulder, they would have been embracing like lovers. “I have a theory,” she said, her lips brushing against his ear.

Petro forgot all about the bucket. He would have given every lundri he had to keep her near him, feeling the huzz of her voice and the graze of her lips against his lobe. She was so bloody marvelous, Emilia. “Hmm?” he asked, drunk and almost drowsy from the pleasure of her presence.

Her next words startled him. “Follow me.” Without warning, she sprang to her feet in one fluid, silent motion. He didn’t have long to feel cold and exposed, however, because she tugged at his collar to haul him up. For one eternal moment, Petro panicked, afraid she might spy the very physical reaction she’d aroused in him when they’d been lying close. The sweet darkness hid his shame, though, and her next words made him forget about it altogether. “I believe the cazarrino is being held in that tent.”

“What?” Now Petro was all alertness, his shyness forgotten.

She seized him by the neck so that once more she could whisper in his ear. “In the woods, people don’t piss in a pot unless they’re being held against their will in a very confined space.” She nodded at the tent. “Or unless they’re too hoity-toity to use a tree as their privy. I’m wagering on the former.”

Their slow crawl around the furthest outreaches of the loyalists’ camp gave Petro plenty of time to recover from his near embarrassment, but also gave him too much opportunity to think of question after question he wanted to ask. If Adrio were so close at hand, how could two ordinary young people face off against his captors? Emilia was a highly capable girl, to be sure, but they were plainly outnumbered. And if they succeeded, how could they possibly get away?

What if Adrio wasn’t happy to see Petro, after all he’d been through?

If the camp had been a clock, their hiding spot would have been where the hand pointed to seven. They wandered widdershins back to the three, with Petro following blindly behind Emilia, one hand hooked into the back of her belt. Enough light from the bonfire mingled with the moonlight, though, to keep them oriented and prevent them from running into anything. Petro was careful to place each foot down gently, as if he were treading on the most delicate of eggshells.

“Ssh,” Emilia said at last, stopping him. She directed his attention to a silhouette not far away, where shadows took the form of an outcropping of rock.

Earlier, Petro had tucked leaves of wild basil between his upper gums and cheek, hoping the sweetness would keep his mind off his hunger. He realized that at some point in the preceding tense moments, he’d completely swallowed the remains. “What—?” he started to ask, as Emilia withdrew something from one of her many pockets. She flung her balled-up fist toward the rock.