The Spirit Ring (13 page)

      
"Take us to him, then, Innkeeper, and we’ll see if he's the thief we seek," said the bearded horseman, wiping his lips with his sleeve.

      
"For the price of his ransom, you can have him," grumbled Catti. "I knew something stank of old fish. This way."

      
Catti lit a lamp and led the two strangers through the inn to his back yard. Thur and, after a moment, two other of the curious yokels tagged along. The sky was still luminous with late twilight, though the evening star shone above the western hills.

      
Catti held up the lamp; he and the bearded man ducked into the smokehouse. They emerged again very shortly. The bearded Losimon spoke to his stubble-shaved companion. "Found him. Get the horses."

      
The younger man glanced around uneasily at the gathering dusk. "Sure you don't want to spend the night here, and go in the morning?"

      
The bearded man's voice fell to a growl. "If we're late, or botch this again, you'll
wish
for hobgoblins.
Without delay
, he said. Get the horses."

      
The younger man shrugged and trudged off around the corner of the inn.

      
Catti rubbed his hands together happily. Thur drifted over to him. Catti looked up. "Did you get the she-cat out of my best room?" he asked.

      
"Yes."

      
"And where is she?"

      
"She ran off up the road."

      
"In the dark? Damn! I wanted that ring. Well, I have the horse. Good riddance. It looks like I'll be quit of both my problems in a moment."

      
The younger stranger returned, leading three horses. Two were caparisoned with light cavalry saddles. The third bore an empty pack saddle. The younger man laid out a large piece of old canvas on the ground and tossed some rope down beside it.

      
"Who are those men?" Thur whispered to Catti.

      
"Guardsmen from Montefoglia. That dead graybeard in my smokehouse turns out to be a thief. Stole a valuable gold saltcellar from the castle, they say. They're taking him off my hands."

      
"I'd think they'd want the saltcellar, not the body. Isn't it a little late for a hanging?" said Thur. The two men entered the smokehouse. After some thumping sounds, they came out with the old man's body on its board. They pulled the board away and began rolling up the corpse in the canvas. "What do they want it for? And whose guardsmen are they, the Duke's or Lord Ferrante's?"

      
"Who cares, if their coins are good?" Catti murmured impatiently.

      
The two men bound the canvas round with rope and lifted the long package. They grunted, forcing it to bend over the pack saddle. While the bearded man tied the canvas-covered shape firmly to its carrier, the younger man ducked back inside the smokehouse and came out with two hams, which he slung over his saddle bow.

      
"This is wrong, Master Catti," Thur whispered urgently. "You mustn't let them take him. Here—I have some coins in my pack. I’ll get them right now. I'll ransom him from you, instead."

      
"I'll take their coins in my hand, thank you," snapped Catti. "They offer a better bargain."

      
"Whatever they offered, I'll give you more."

      
"Not likely, muleteer." Catti waved him away and approached the strangers, smiling. "I see you fancy my hams. You won't regret them, I guarantee. Now, let's see. The ransom, plus two pots of ale, plus two hams, comes to..." He counted on his fingers.

      
Thur saw it coming. He dropped back by the smokehouse and snatched up a long billet of wood from the stack alongside.

      
The younger man swung aboard his horse as the older man grasped the counting Catti by the shoulder and pulled him toward himself. "Here's your payment, Innkeeper." The steel of his dagger flashed in the folds of his cloak as he stabbed Catti in the stomach.

      
Catti cried out in pain and astonishment and stumbled backward, hands clutching his belly, as the bravo flung him away. The two watching locals started toward him, their reactions slow. The bearded man grinned, dark-mouthed with his missing teeth, and vaulted aboard his horse. His subordinate was already spurring toward the road, yanking the packhorse along. Futilely, Thur flung his billet at the younger Losimon's back with all his strength. It rotated through the air and bounced off the cloak- and doublet-padded man with little effect. Clods of dirt spun up from the horses’ hooves as the bravos fled into the gathering shadows.

      
Thur pelted around the building in their wake, but by the time he reached the front gate, the hoof beats were only a fading echo in the twilight. Fiametta was standing in the middle of the road amidst the dust hanging in the air, peering south after the vanished horsemen. Her face was drawn, eyes big and dark.

      
"They stole your father's body," Thur panted. "I couldn't stop them."

      
"I know. I saw."

      
"
Why?
It's madness! They took two hams as well. Surely they don't plan to eat him!"

      
"Oh..." she breathed. Intensity of thought struggled with dismay in her face. "I have a guess. A monstrous guess. He cannot—I have to stop —" She stepped down the road a few paces, fists clenched, as if in a trance.

      
Thur caught her by the sleeve. "You can't go running down the road by yourself in the middle of the night."

      
She rotated in his grip, looking across to the pasture and the dim glimmer of her white horse among Pico's mules. "Then I'll ride."

      
"No!"

      
She stared at him, brows lowering. Her eyes flamed. "What?"

      
"I'll go. Tomorrow." And, as her angry breath drew in, he added in haste, "We'll both go."

      
She hesitated. Her hands uncurled. She stared around into the vast uncertain darkness. Her shoulders slumped. "I don't know what to... how to... yes. You're right. Very well." Looking stunned, she turned to follow him back into the inn.

Chapter Six

The uproar in the inn was augmented by two families of refugees from Montefoglia who arrived just as the wounded Catti was carried indoors by the big blond Swiss and the yokels. The chaos did not die down till Catti's wife returned, fetched by a breathless neighbor. Fiametta hung back uncertainly, as the woman who had been kind to her bustled within. But Madonna Catti, though she frowned deeply, spoke no blame. Instead she drafted Fiametta's aid, and set her to carrying and arranging bedding, water, and washbasins for the mob of new guests while she tended to her husband. She emerged from her bedroom several times, to keep her stableboys hustling and to direct the Montefoglians' servants to put together a meal of bread, cheese, smoked sausage, wine, and ale, served all round. Fiametta did not partake of the smoked meats.

      
At Madonna Catti's request Packmaster Pico brought his mules, his cargo, and his sons within the walls of the compound.
 
The gates were firmly locked for the night. The Montefoglians were distressed to learn that the marauding soldiers from whom they'd fled were ranging this far north, and made plans to move on in the morning. In the meantime, counting up the fathers, brothers, servants, Catti's stablehands, the Picos and the Swiss, there were fourteen armed men within the walls tonight. Nothing less than a large mounted patrol would offer threat.
But Lord Ferrante already has what he wanted,
Fiametta thought with numb certainty.
They won't be back tonight.
Not till Ferrante marched up the road a conqueror, at the head of a troop no country inn was likely to resist.

      
Fiametta kept moving like a clockwork doll. Work was better than thinking, or feeling. But inevitably, she came to the end of her chores. The babble and excitement faded, and people blew out their candles and went to their beds. Catti's wife emerged from their bedroom with bloodstained bandages and Catti's shirt to put to soak in cold water, which Fiametta drew for her from the well in the yard. They set the bucket down outside the back door in the lantern light.

      
"How is Master Catti doing?" Fiametta asked guiltily.

      
"If the wound doesn't go bad," Madonna Catti sighed, "he'll probably live. His fat belly saved him from the dagger going too deep. If he asks for food, don't give him any." She pushed the bundled cloths down into the bucket, straightened wearily, and wiped her hands on her apron.

      
"I'm sorry to have brought these troubles upon you."

      
"If the greedy old ass had set you on the road to the priest at Bergoa that second morning, as I begged him to do for charity's sake, these troubles would have gone elsewhere," Madonna Catti said tartly. She glanced up at her inn, bulking in the dark; her mouth flattened. "If he truly feared a dead sorcerer's ghost, he should have buried him decently, not put him up in my good smokehouse. My smokehouse will be accurst, now. I shouldn't wonder if all my meat goes rotten and maggoty."

      
"My father was never a man to overlook an insult," Fiametta reluctantly admitted. "But I think—I fear—his spirit has greater troubles just now." Her hand kneaded the folds of her skirt.

      
"Oh?" Madonna Catti studied her, sharp-eyed. "Well... go to bed, girl. But go from here tomorrow."

      
"May I have my horse?" Fiametta asked humbly.

      
"Horse and all. In fact, I don't want you to leave anything here that you came with." She shook her head. Fiametta followed her back indoors.

      
A second-floor porch or loggia overlooking the back yard of the inn, usually used for drying laundry, had been converted into a dormitory for the female servants of the two Montefoglian families. Fiametta had laid a bedroll for herself closest to the railing. She now picked her way over the snoring forms of the exhausted women. She slipped off her overdress and laid it atop her blanket, and pulled down her linen underdress, bunched a bit above the snake belt she'd worn concealed from Catti's greed. Despite the night chill, she leaned on the railing and looked out over the inn yard.

      
The moon, waning and dull, rode a quarter of the way up the sky. Along the far wall, Pico's mules stood strung along a horse line, fodder piled at their feet to keep them content. Smoke still seeped from the smokehouse, a layer of haze in the dimming moonlight. Pico, his sons, and the Swiss were bedded down in a little bastion formed of the pack saddles, near the mules. The blond man's bowl-cropped hair gleamed as he shifted and turned over in his bedroll. She curled her fingers around her ringless left thumb, rubbing the empty place.
What have I done? Did my ring draw him to me? Is he really supposed to be my true love? Does he know this?

      
Thur wasn't what she'd pictured, when she'd cast the ring and its true-love spell together on the first day of spring. She could scarcely say what she had pictured, in her inarticulate longing to be loved. She stared down at the blanketed lump in the yard and tried to feel ardent, or swept by passion, or at least impressed. Nothing. It wasn't that she disliked him. He was just sort of there, alarmingly solid and real. Friendly, certainly, after the manner of a big spoiled mastiff pup who'd never been cuffed, snuffling up to be petted.

      
It had never even crossed her mind that she would not immediately love her true love back. But she'd been expecting someone... shorter. Older. More sophisticated. Better dressed, at least. And richer.

      
He really doesn't smell all that bad, for a muleteer.

      
She felt a frustrated urge to rip her ring from his hand and tap it on the nearest tabletop, as if something stuck inside her spell could so be loosened. But she could still feel it, even now at this distance, the same quiet, tiny hum of magic. The spell had emitted scarcely a ripple when the Swiss had slipped the ring on, curling around his finger and purring like a smug and comfortable cat fed on fish and cream. A well-cast spell was a barely discernible thing even to the inner eye of a trained mage. Only when badly botched or thwarted was magic obvious to ordinary senses, a jangling discord that wasted power. Teseo's first efforts had been almost painfully loud, emitting visible sparks. But one scarcely knew Master Beneforte's spells were there, flowing as much as possible with nature, not wrestling against it.

      
You see, if a corpse is preserved unshriven and unburied, the new-riven spirit can be harnessed to the will of a master....

      
Did Lord Ferrante seek a new spirit ring? A murdered master mage must be a fount of great power. The ironic symmetry must appeal to Lord Ferrante, to compel the man who'd destroyed his ring to become its replacement. And if Ferrante had ransacked their house, God knew what else he'd found to rivet his power-hungry attention.

      
She turned the days over in her mind. A night and a day for the Losimons to ride back with their injured to the castle, and return the magic saltcellar to their master. A day for the siege-preoccupied Lord Ferrante to awaken to the fact that they'd left a greater treasure of sorcery to rot in a field. A day for them to return and find their prize gone, a day to ask up and down the road after a conspicuous corpse....

      
She rubbed her aching temples. Surely her fears for her father should have ended with his death. The dead were supposed to be beyond pain, healed and comforted in the bosom of Lord Jesus and the saints. That first night, mixed with her grief, she'd felt a curious lightness to her spirit, as if an unrealized weight had been removed from her shoulders. As if her world had suddenly enlarged, a vast vacated space above her freed to grow into. Her life become, unexpectedly, her own to choose and order. Her heart had pulsed with a subdued joy even while her throat choked on sobs. Surely that joy was a great sin. She should feel only grief, and fear of the world, with her protector removed. Only grief. Not resentment.