The Spirit Ring (33 page)

      
Monreale's lip twisted. "And in the end—if we win—both men must eventually burn at the stake. Hardly harmless in intent, even if legal in means."

      
"If
they
win, are they even likely to bother with legality?"

      
"To hold what they have taken, they must wrap their crimes in some cloak of public pretense. Eyewitnesses to the contrary will be... in very grave straits."

      
"That includes me," Fiametta realized with a shiver.

      
"It includes enough by now to guarantee a very massacre." Monreale sighed. "Well, I am ready. Until the lieutenant reports his men assembled, let us compose ourselves in prayer."

      
I might have predicted that.
But Fiametta settled herself upon her knees before the crucifix on Monreale's office wall without demur. She did not lack things to pray about. She thought sadly of all the prayers she'd wasted in the past on her small desires... a lace cap, a silver bracelet like Maddelena's, a pony... a husband. Yet, in a backhanded way, all had been forthcoming; the cap and the bracelet from Papa, the white horse... Thur? What was this strange girl-power, to make the intractable world spit forth her wishes?
Oh, I wish it were over.

      
At length, Sandrino's surviving senior officer returned to confer briefly with Monreale. The soldier's eyes glinted grimly in the shadow of his steel helmet. His dented breastplate was dull and leaden. More determination than enthusiasm tightened his jaw, but perhaps that was the more durable emotion, under fire. The ten-year-old Duke's offer to lead his troops himself had been tactfully turned down, the lieutenant reported; but the man's spine seemed to stiffen in memory of it. Monreale blessed him and sent him on his way with a slap to his cuirass that echoed hollowly in the plastered office.

      
Monreale then led Perotto, Ambrose, and Fiametta into his workroom. The prior followed as a witness. The prior was more an administrator than magician or healer or even, Fiametta suspected, monk, but he had been Monreale's practical right hand throughout the crisis, managing men and space and the daily bread.

      
Monreale arranged his brothers standing around the table laden with the simple set for the spell. He bent his head in one more blessedly brief prayer, and extended his right hand to Ambrose and his left to Perotto. "Brothers, lend me your strength."

      
Fiametta stepped to the table's fourth side. "Father, I will gladly lend mine."

      
Monreale frowned, his brow furrowing. "No... no," he said slowly. "I don't want you exposed to the danger of the backlash, if this effort fails."

      
"My little mite could be the difference between failure and success. And not such a little mite as all that, either!"

      
Monreale’s smile was sad, though Brother Perotto frowned repellingly. "You are a good girl, Fiametta," said Monreale. "But no. Please do not distract me further."

      
His raised palm blocked her protest, which she swallowed back into her tight throat. She stepped away from the table to the prior's side and locked her hands behind her back.

      
"Ambrose, Perotto, join hands," Monreale instructed, and they reached across to each other to complete the ring. Monreale's grip tightened. "The first strike requires all our hearts, to overwhelm Sprenger." He bent his gaze to the symbols on the table, knife and wand, and began to chant in a healer's low drone.

      
Fiametta could feel the power build, as if an invisible sphere were forming above the table. Monreale's control seemed very precise, meticulous, almost finicky, compared to her Papa's flowing, sweeping gestures.
Monreale wastes nothing.
And yet his economy wasted time and attention, it seemed to Fiametta.
Abundance can afford to be daring.

      
The sphere began to glow with a visible, coruscating white fire, shimmering in waves both upon its surface and within its heart, as its power built up and up. Now,
that
was wasteful. Papa had always insisted that a properly cast spell should be heatless and invisible. Perhaps it was some inevitable friction from trying to combine strengths from Ambrose and Perotto. Fiametta held her breath.
Oh, strike now, or Vitelli will feel it and be warned!

      
Still Monreale held his hand, building up his power. The lacy sphere cast the monks' shadows on the walls. Then the light began to pour down like water into the vessels of knife and wand. They filled; the knife blade gleamed like moonlight. Soundlessly, the gauze lifted and drifted across the two glowing objects, settling gently over them.

      
Monreale's eyes opened; he breathed the last syllable of his chant. Ambrose grinned in triumph, and even surly Perotto's eyes lighted. Monreale inhaled, smiling, to speak.

      
The dry willow wand exploded into flame, which flashed across the gauze, consuming it to crumbling blackness. White fire tainted with red flared up into Monreale's face like a powder flash from a misfired hand cannon. His features, lit from below, contorted. Red and green afterimages swirled in Fiametta's eyes, and she squinted futilely against them, her hands pressed to her mouth to stifle her scream.

      
Monreale's eyes rolled back, and he fell, unaided, since Ambrose's hands were clapped to his eyes and Perotto, too, was toppling. Monreale's forehead cracked the table as he collapsed. All three men's faces were reddening from the burn.

      
Fiametta and the prior jostled each other in their rush around the table. The prior knelt beside Monreale's bleeding head, but hesitated to touch him, still fearful perhaps of being guilty of interrupting some magic in progress. But there was nothing left to interrupt. Fiametta could feel it. The circle and the spell were broken.

      
"Father Monreale? Father Monreale!" cried the prior in anxiety. Monreale's face was dead white, mottled with red patches. His singed eyebrows gave off an acrid whiff of burned hair. Overcoming his hesitation, the prior pressed his ear to Monreale's robed chest. "I hear nothing...."

      
Fiametta ran to the cupboard and snatched up a fragment of broken mirror stored there, and thrust it under Monreale's nose. "It clouds. He breathes...."

      
Perotto moaned; Ambrose lay as oddly as his abbot.

      
"What happened?" asked the prior. "Did Vitelli counterattack them somehow?"

      
"Yes, but... Vitelli's counter-surge might have been contained. Should have been contained. It was the excess heat, and the tinder-dryness of the willow. Abbot Monreale let too much heat build up."

      
The prior frowned at this critique, and wiped the blood away from the rising lump on Monreale's forehead. He palpated the skull. "Not broken, I think. He should come around soon."

      
I don't think so.
It wasn't just the crack on his head that was incapacitating Monreale. It was the spell, turned back on its source; she wasn't sure how Vitelli was doing it, but it was almost as if she could see a dark hand pressed to Monreale's face, as a man might hold his enemy under water. Strange. She shook her head to clear it of the ghostly impressions. She'd been steeped in too much magic of late; it was as if her senses for it had been sanded to an almost painful new receptivity. Maybe Ambrose could lift the spell hand, when he recovered. If he recovered.

      
Brother Perotto sat up on his own. Brother Ambrose's eyes opened at last, but he was dazed and incoherent. After another moment of uncertain observation, the prior ran to fetch the senior healer, Brother Mario. The healer directed several more monks to gather up the stricken men and take them to their beds. Fiametta waited for Mario to ask her what had happened, but he didn't, so she tried to tell him.

      
"You!" Perotto, supported between two brothers, turned on her. "You ruined the spell. You don't belong in here!

      
"Me! Abbot Monreale ordered me to be here!" said Fiametta.

      
"Impure..." moaned Perotto.

      
Fiametta drew up in indignation. "How dare you! I am a virgin!"
More’s the pity.
And doomed to remain so, for all the rescue Thur seemed likely to receive now. At least until the Losimon soldiers took the monastery by storm. Ought she to suicide before Saint Jerome was overrun? But that way lay damnation, too. Her heart burned in rage, and outrage. Why should
she
have to die and be damned for the crimes of men? She would rather fight, claw, and run away from the dismal fate of women and orphans.

      
The prior took her by the arm and steered her out onto the gallery overlooking the cloister. "Yes, yes, he meant no insult. But truly, it is improper for you to be in this part of the building. Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta, and stay there."

      
"Till when? Till the Losimons come over the walls?"

      
"If the Abbot does not regain his senses from that knock soon..." The prior licked dry lips.

      
"He is
enspelled.
He won't come round until the spell is lifted. It must be possible to determine how to lift it. Vitelli labors under the same disadvantages of distance as we do."

      
"I will have the healers do what they can."

      
"It will take more than a healer!"

      
"Be that as it may, healers are what we have left, unless Ambrose recovers first."

      
"What will you do if neither man recovers soon? Or at all?"

      
The prior's shoulders bent, as the full weight of Monreale's burdens seemed to fell on them. "I will... I will wait the night. Perhaps the morning will bring better counsel. But if Ferrante's emissary returns to plague us again... perhaps it would be better to surrender on terms. Before it is too late."

      
"To Ferrante? You think he would honor his terms for five breaths?" cried Fiametta.

      
The prior's hands made impotent fists down by his sides. "Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta! You understand not the first principle of the affairs of men!"

      
"What first principle? Save your own head, and let the devil take the hindmost? I understand that very well, thank you!"

      
"Go to —!" the prior began to roar, then dropped his voice to hiss between clenched teeth, "Go to your quarters! And hold your tongue!"

      
"Will you at least let me try to lift the spell of sleep, if the healers fail?" Fiametta begged in desperation.

      
"Perotto is right. You do not belong in here. Go to!"

      
In a moment, he would beat her in his frustration, and call it a just chastisement; Fiametta could see it coming. She bared her teeth at him and ducked away, stalking stiff-backed out of the cloister. She should have kept silence. She should have spoken up. She should have... she should have...

      
In the women's quarters, two children were puking, three were crying, and a sharp argument between two mothers over the last of the clean swaddling cloths had degenerated into hair-pulling and shrieking. Fiametta fled again. Her attempt to see Abbot Monreale in the infirmary was turned back sternly by Brother Mario. A Montefoglian guard in the refectory tried to squeeze her breast, in passing, and whispered a lewd jest into her ear as she twisted away from him. The old lay sister in charge, capped and kirtled, gave him a box on the ear and a sharp rebuke, invoking his mother by name. He fell back, grinning and holding his nose, as Fiametta dove into the chaotic, infant-squalling, vomitous sanctuary of the women's dormitory.

      
She flung herself down upon her pile of straw and burrowed her face into it, her teeth gritted against tears. A stick poked into her neck, and a flea jumped upon her sleeve and then into her hair before she could crush it. Turning over, she was elbowed by the girl next to her.

      
"Keep to your own side, blackamoor!" The girl's snarl was angry, but her pale face was furrowed with suppressed grief and fear. Strained with the waiting, along with the rest, to be murdered.

      
Fiametta almost set her hair afire with a word. She clamped her lips on the heat boiling off her tongue, and curled in a tight ball, trembling.
In the practice of magic,
Monreale had said,
you will be exposed to temptations that do not trouble the ignorant.
Indeed. Yet what of the spell embodied in her silver snake belt, still concealed under her velvet bodice? Its effect had been far from benign, though it fell short of lethal. Had her Papa allowed himself to be just a little bit damned after all, as the price of his magic? If he could do it, why couldn't she?

      
Mother Mary, keep me from harm.
At Monreale's order Fiametta had prayed to the Virgin for patience, settling to the pavement in the chapel and arranging her skirts and gazing up earnestly at the serene white marble face of the statue holding the Child. Patience was apparently another one of those women's virtues, for she could not recall it as ever being one of Papa's. Fiametta's eyes fell now on that same velvet skirt, bunched in her fist, stained and tattered.
Mother Mary... Mama, who were you?

      
This red dress was less faded than the fragmented images in Fiametta's mind of the woman who had first worn it. Her mother had died when Fiametta was eight, in Rome, of the fever that had carried off so many. A bad year, and August had been its worst month, with hard times upon them, Papa imprisoned in the Castel Sain' Angelo upon those deadly dangerous charges.... Fiametta could not remember anything about her mother's death. Someone else must have been taking care of her for the sick woman. She held only a scrap-vision of following the cheap and simple bier through hot, stifling, smelly streets, dressed in stiff and uncomfortable clothes and holding some big woman's hand.