The Spirit Ring (12 page)

      
Thur's breath stopped. He had never seen anyone so extraordinary. Midnight-black hair tumbled like a storm cloud. Skin like toast, breathing the heat of a Mediterranean noon. A petite, alert, yet well-padded body that reminded him of the walnut-wood carvings of angels around the altar of the parish church in Bruinwald. Brilliant eyes, the warm brown color of his mother's precious cinnamon sticks. She looked warm all over, in fact. She shrank back, glaring at him.

      
That
wouldn't do. He squeezed the rest of himself through the door, shifting the bed across the floor with another shattering
skreek
, and clasped his hands together in what he hoped was a non-threatening manner. His hands felt as big as cheese paddles, and as clumsy. He swallowed and remembered to exhale. "Hello." He ducked his head politely at her, clearing his throat.

      
She backed another step. Her arms bearing up the chamber pot sank a little.

      
"You really can't stay in here. Not forever, anyway," Thur said. Her arms were shaking. "Does that greedy innkeeper bring you any food?"

      
"Not... not since yesterday, when his wife left," she stammered out, not taking her wary gaze from him. "I had a bottle of wine that I was making last, but it's gone now."

      
She was staring at him as if he were some sort of monster. Really, he wasn't that big. He bent his knees a little, and slumped his shoulders, and tried futilely to shrink. It was the little room that set him off to such disadvantage. He needed a bigger room, or the outdoors.

      
The gold ring on her pot-clutching thumb riveted his eye. A lion mask with a red gem in its mouth seemed to glow with a Saharan heat, drawing him like a fire. He nodded to it. "Is that the ring Catti wants to steal?"

      
She smiled bitterly. "He wants to, but he can't. He's tried twice, but he can't keep hold of it. Only one man can wear this ring. I'll prove it." She tossed her mane of wildly curling hair and set the chamber pot down on the floor. "I was planning to break this over Catti's head, but on you I can't reach that high." She grimaced and shoved it away with her foot. She pulled the ring from her thumb, and, sourly smug, held it out to him. "Just try to put it on. You'll find you can't."

      
It glowed in his palm. When he closed his hand over it, it felt alive, like a beating heart. Automatically, he slipped it over the ring finger of his left hand, holding it up to the last sunbeam, a golden slice of light that penetrated the room's shutters and made a bright line on the wall. The tiny lion's mane shimmered in singing waves, and the little gem burned. He turned his hand, making the red reflection dance like a fairy over the opposite wall. He looked up to find the brown girl staring at him with a look of utter horror on her beautiful soft features.

      
"Oh—I'm sorry," he apologized, he knew not what for. "You said to put it on. Here." He tugged at it against his wrinkling knuckle.

      
"A muleteer?" she whispered, still with that aghast look. "My ring has brought me a stinking
muleteer
? A big stupid German lout —"

      
"Swiss," Thur corrected, still tugging. A big stupid Swiss lout, yah. She must have been watching him from the window when Pico's pack train arrived. He grew scarlet, like the gem. His knuckle was red and white, and swelling. "Excuse me. It's stuck." He twisted the ring around in embarrassment, but it still jammed. "Maybe some soap. I have a bit of soap in my pack. You can come with me. I'm not trying to steal your ring, Madonna. I was going to Montefoglia. My brother has apprenticed me to a goldsmith there, or he was going to, but now I don't know what's happening. My brother Uri is a captain in the Duke's guard, you see, and I don't know... I'm afraid... I don't know if he's alive or dead right now." He twisted and pulled more frantically as her face, stunned, began to crumple with tears, but it was no good. The ring was stuck fast. "Sorry. Can... can I help? Can I help you, Madonna?" He opened his hands to her, offering—well, he didn't have much. Offering his hands, anyway.

      
To his alarm and distress, she sank to the floor weeping, palms pressed to her face. Awkwardly, he levered himself down beside her. "I'll get the ring off somehow, if I have to... to chop off my finger," he promised recklessly.

      
She shook her head helplessly and gulped out, "It's not that. It's the whole thing."

      
Thur paused, and spoke more gently. "That really is your father in the smokehouse, isn't it? I'm sorry. That innkeeper is a bit of a monster, I'm afraid. I'll break his head for you, if you like."

      
"Oh..." She put her hands out flat on the floor and leaned on them wearily for support. She stared down at them, then looked up at Thur, searching his face. "You don't look much like Uri. I didn't expect his younger brother to be so much bigger. And you're so blond and pale, compared to him.”

      
"I worked in the mines most of this winter. I scarcely saw the sun." He must look as repulsive to her as a white worm winkled from under a rock... his thought stuttered, jerked about. "You know my brother Uri?" And, more urgently, "Do you have any idea of his fate?"

      
She sat up straighter, holding out a hand to him in sad irony. "Hello, Thur Ochs. I'm Fiametta Beneforte. Prospero Beneforte is my father. You have arrived just in time to become apprenticed to a smoked corpse." Her lips compressed on an angry sob.

      
"Uri's letter didn't mention a daughter," Thur blurted in surprise. He grasped her hand quickly, lest she take it away again. "His letters are always too short, Mother says."

      
Her voice lowered. "I last saw Captain Ochs take a sword thrust through his chest, while trying to defend little Lord Ascanio from Ferrante's murdering men. I don't know if he's alive or dead, or if he got away with the other wounded to the healers at Saint Jerome. But it was no small wound." She released his grip and plucked jerkily at the wrinkled velvet of her skirts, bunched in her lap. "I'm sorry I have no better news, nor more recent. My father and I fled away for our lives. Or we tried to."

      
"What happened?" His belly was cold, cold....

      
In short, blunt sentences she stammered out a nightmare account of her last four days. Thur remembered the grief and loss of his own father's death in the mines. He'd been at school with Brother Glarus that winter day; the news of the cave-in had come at breathless second-hand. After days of frantic, fruitless rescue efforts, the priest had consecrated the shaft and the lost men had been left buried, and Thur had never looked on his father's face again. Fiametta had been left to wrestle with her dead alone in the night. Thur felt both horror for her, and a strange envy. Dead her father was, as his, but at least not cut off from the last services survivors could bestow, though smoking and curing was not exactly on the usual list of comforting ritual pieties properly due a paterfamilias.

      
"... and the second time he tried to twist it from my thumb, I kicked him in the knee and barricaded myself in here. That was... that was yesterday," she came to the end of her tale, and rested her head on her knees, face turned to his, rocking a little. "How did you come here?"

      
Briefly, he described his brother's letter, and how he had found a guide and company in exchange for his labor with Pico.

      
"But how
here
? To this inn, just in time to meet me?"

      
Thur blinked. He had an extraordinary knack for finding things, yes, but surely it would be some kind of arrogance, in front of a real mage's daughter, to claim supernatural meaning for a mere knot in his belly and catch in his breath. "Pico always stops here. It's the only place between Bergoa, on the border, and Cecchino."

      
"Have I wrought true after all?" she breathed in bewilderment. Her hand closed. "You put my ring right on...."

      
Thur twisted it. "I'll get it off. I promise."

      
"No." She sat up and spread her fingers, pink palms down.
      
"Keep it. For now. Anyway, fat Catti won't try to wrest it from
your
hand."

      
"I can't take this—it's much too valuable!" Not that he seemed to have much choice, till his knuckle shrank again. "I tell you what, Madonna Beneforte. I have a few coins. I think I have enough to ransom your father's body from that greedy-head innkeeper. Get him out of the smokehouse, at least, and help you get him property buried."

      
She wrinkled her brow. "Yes, but where? The ignorant peasants here all fear to have him planted on their property, because he was a mage. And I won't have him buried in the middle of the road."

      
"I passed through the village of Bergoa yesterday. There's a little parish church there, and a priest. He'll have to take your father in. I'll help you take him there tomorrow."

      
She bowed her head, and whispered, "Thank you." Now that she was freed of the stiffening from her isolation and fear, Thur could see her weariness was near to overwhelming her.

      
“I'll have to go south, after that," Thur said. "I have to find out the fate of my brother."

      
Her head came up. "It will grow dangerous, the closer you try to go to Montefoglia. Lord Ferrante's mercenaries will be out marauding, pillaging for their needs, killing any who resist or... or compelling them to their service. Or do you think to volunteer your service to the Duke's guards, if they still hold Saint Jerome against Ferrante?"

      
Thur shook his head. "I have no calling to be a soldier. Unless I were defending Bruinwald, the way the men of Schwyz fought off the Armagnacs at the battle of St. Jakob an der Birs. But I can't go home to our mother without sure news of Uri. If he's hurt, I must try to bring him away."

      
"And if he's dead?"

      
"If he's dead... I must know." Thur shrugged. "But it's certainly too dangerous for you down that way, Madonna Beneforte. Maybe the priest at Bergoa will know of a safe place for you to stay till I—we—return."

      
"Return?"

      
He smiled in an attempt at reassurance. "Your ring will be your surety. If I can't get it off, I'll have to bring it back, won't I?"

      
Her generous mouth pursed in plaintive puzzlement. "Isn't that the wrong way around, for a surety?"

      
"A debt is a bond. It must be paid."

      
"You are an unusual man. Muleteer. Miner." Her brow lifted. "Mage?"

      
"Oh, I'm no mage. I meant to apprentice to your father, yes, but I figured to haul wood and lift ingots, mainly. Just a workman, really."

      
"I am my father's only heir." She bit her lower lip with strong white teeth. "Your apprentice's contract—had it been drawn up—would now be a part of my inheritance. I wonder how much of the rest has been looted by the Losimons, by now?"

      
"There you go, then," said Thur cheerfully. "Well met, Madonna, though the times are ill."

      
"Well met, Muleteer," she whispered. Her twisted smile was not unkind, her brows quizzical, as if she were growing used to him, or to the idea of him. "Though the times are very ill."

      
He lumbered to his feet and gave her a hand up. "Come. Let's get something to eat. I don't think Catti will refuse my coins."

      
"No, but with his wife gone, the food could be chancy," Fiametta warned. "I gather she did all the cooking, and a great deal more besides."

      
"You can have my toasted sausage by Pico's fire, if you will. You can share our camp. Pico won't mind."

      
She grimaced. "I'd rather sleep under a tree than spend another night under Catti's roof, that's certain."

      
They started for the stairs that gave onto the front taproom. Men's talk echoed up. At the head of the stairs, Fiametta suddenly froze and held up her hand to stop Thur. "Shh," she whispered, and listened intently, head cocked to one side. "Oh, God, I know that voice. That spitty sound it has...."

      
"A friend?" said Thur in hope.

      
"No. It sounds like the man who led Ferrante's bravos, the night they killed my father."

      
"Would you recognize him if you peeked through the staircase?" The wood below the rail had decorative trefoil holes cut in it.

      
She shook her head. "I never saw his face."

      
"They don't know me," murmured Thur after a moment "Crouch here, and I'll go see what's happening."

      
"Turn the ring inward. They might recognize it," she whispered, and he nodded and turned the lion mask to his palm, letting his hand curl.

      
She sank to the floor, slipped a little way down the staircase, and put her eye to one trefoil cutout. She drew in her breath, her hands clenching to fists; apparently she knew the man after all. Thur walked openly into the taproom.

      
Three or four local folk had drifted in and sat on the benches nursing mugs. By their work-stained tunics and leggings, they were farmers or laborers. In addition, two strangers stood, quaffing pots of ale and talking to Catti. They were clearly horsemen, travelers, wearing mud-splattered boots, short cloaks, doublets, and heavy hose. In addition to the usual dagger that every man carried, each bore a steel sword. They wore no badge or colors identifying them as Lord Ferrante's men or any other lord's. When the senior, bearded one put down his mug after a last up-tipping draught, Thur could see he was missing several front teeth. Thur hung in the background, blending in with the local peasantry.