The Spirit Ring

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  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.

  Now Master Beneforte's troubles flapped back in to settle on her life like a great flock of carrion crows, weighing her back down. It's not fair. You're dead. I should be free of you. Now not death but eternal damnation loomed, and the danger of a black magic far beyond her depth.

  What can I do? I'm only half-trained. You yourself neglected to train me. It's your fault I don't even know where to begin. I'm only a puny girl.

  Tomorrow, she would attach herself to the servants of the Montefoglians and run away to the north. Let the big stupid Swiss go in any direction he chose but the one she took. Let him lumber into the nearest ditch, for all she cared. She never wanted to see him again. Nor Montefoglia. Nor her house. Nor her own little bedroom, warm and cozy....

  Shivering, her nose clogged with unshed tears, she rolled up in the blanket and buried her face as best she could in the thin pillow. Her spinning thoughts bogged at last in sleep.

  *****

  Fiametta woke out of a troubled dream of wandering in a strangely labyrinthine version of their house in Montefoglia. The place was deserted, in ruins, boards of the gallery rotting treacherously underfoot, shutters hanging half-off, walls crumbling. She'd been trying to light a fire, but couldn't, and armed creditors banged at the door calling for payments that Master Beneforte had hidden and Fiametta could not find, though she searched frantically from room to room....

  Her pillow was damp and cold and her blanket wet with dew over the inner pocket warmed by her body. The waning moon was at zenith, casting its sickly insufficient light down into the inn yard. Still drenched with the unease of her dream, she rolled over and peered through the railing slats, glancing along the outer wall of the compound. No menacing men's shapes moved atop it; the wide night sky swallowed sound. Only her fears drained the scene of peace, though the line of hip-shot sleepy mules radiated a comforting animal warmth. Yet something was subtly wrong. She stared into the darkness for a full minute before she realized what.

  The last trailing smoke from the smokehouse was curling down, not up, collecting in a pool like a misted pond in the middle of the inn yard. Thickening. Contracting. The formless, seeking substance... Her heart lumped against her ribs. She caught her breath. She scrambled onto her knees, careless of the cold, and pressed her face to the slats.

  The silver-gray smoke coalesced to man-form, legs in hose, a pleated tunic, a big cloth hat wound round like a turban with a jaunty fall of smoke-fabric to the side. The hat tilted upward toward Fiametta on the loggia. A faint smoke beard curled beneath the brim. Moonlight picked out a gleam, like the edging of silver on a high cloud, from smoky eyes.

  "Papa?" Fiametta whispered. The word stuck in her throat. She swallowed.

  The figure beckoned to her, with visible effort, smoke wisping off its arm as it moved. The knot in her belly dissolved in a strange cockeyed pleasure. I'm glad to see you.... Weren't ghosts supposed to be fearful manifestations, instilling terror? But Master Beneforte looked so... himself. Impatient and annoyed, as ever. She could almost hear his voice, ordering her about, threatening to beat her for clumsiness or delay, a threat he almost never carried out except when he was seriously short of money, and on those days she'd learned to be careful. The translucent figure beckoned again.

  Fiametta swarmed over the railing, hung from the porch's edge by her hands, and dropped into the inn yard. She ran to the apparition, then stopped, longing yet afraid to touch it; clearly, he was holding the smoke together with great difficulty. She could see it in his expression, that familiar tense absorption that transformed his face when he worked his subtler spells. His gray hands opened to her, and he mouthed words.

  "Papa, I can't hear you!"

  He shook his head, mouthed more. Nothing. He pointed south.

  "What are you trying to tell me?" She danced from foot to foot, mirroring his frustration.

  Idiot child, he mouthed; that one she could make out, through long familiarity. But what followed was too rapid and complex. Her hands clenched, like his.

  Pico's younger son, wakened by her voice, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and peered at the smoke-man over a packsaddle. He yelled in fright, dove for his father's bedroll, and burrowed under, waking Packmaster Pico with a floundering snort. Open-mouthed, Pico drew his blanket up over his boy all the way to his own chin. Thur, dressed still in his same tunic and leggings, sat up, then stood, staring. Pico's older boy Tich snored on, oblivious.

  Thur took a deep breath and trod warily toward her. He came up beside her, rather paler even than his usual whiteness, and looked back and forth between her face and the moon-gray one. "Is it your father, Madonna Beneforte? What's he saying?"

  The hazy figure, agonized, was beginning to shred away in the night wind. His dissolving arms reached for her, and she for them. Then the smoke abruptly contracted to a white sphere the size of a French tennis ball. It exploded outward again with a single word.

  "Monreale!"

  The word and the smoke both passed away down a puff of breeze, then the inn yard was empty once more.

  "Monreale?" said Thur blankly. "What does he mean?"

  "Monreale!" Fiercely, Fiametta stamped her foot. "Of course, Monreale! He'll know what to do. He'll know how to rescue Papa if anyone does. Except..."—she faltered—"if those gossipy maids speak truth, he's on the wrong side of a besieged wall."

  The Swiss nodded solemnly, as if he failed to grasp this was not just an interesting fact, but a fatal flaw.

  "A wall surrounded by Ferrante's soldiers," Fiametta amplified.

  "I'm starting to dislike Ferrante's soldiers," he remarked mildly.

  "I'm sure they'll be quite alarmed by that news," Fiametta snapped. "No doubt they'll run away and let us right through."

  He smiled in embarrassment, palms out. "We'll figure out something. First we have to get there. Or I have to get there, anyway. Don't you think you'd be better off, and safer, going north with those other Montefoglians tomorrow?"

  "You aren't going to dump me in a ditch!" she cried, outraged. He took a step backward, making little negative flaps with his big hands. "This is my business. I just might... might let you come with me, is all."

  "Thank you, Madonna," he said earnestly.

  Fiametta's lip curled in suspicion. "Don't you dare mock me!"

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then settled on that same safely stupid friendly smile he'd favored her with when she'd threatened him with the chamber pot. She realized she was shivering violently, her thin linen rippling in the night breeze.
/>   The maids in the loggia were awake, crying and praying. An uproar almost equal to the one following Catti's stabbing spread from them through the inn, till three-fourths of its occupants were roused. By the time the story of the ghostly apparition had been told and retold by those who'd seen to those who hadn't, gaining drama, Madonna Catti was in despair.

  "This will ruin my business!"

  "I doubt he'll be back," said Fiametta through her teeth.

  "I'll call for the priest, and get my smokehouse exorcised!"

  "What, that same priest you couldn't afford to have bury him?"

  The two women exchanged tight-lipped frowns. The maids babbled hysterical nonsense. Tich was loudly irate that no one had wakened him to see the show. Fiametta went back to her cold bedroll and pulled the pillow over her head. No one dared approach her.

  The interminable night gave way at last to a foggy pinkish-orange dawn. Fiametta's head throbbed vilely, her mouth felt full of fustian, and her eyelids scratched like sand. She dragged on her ruined velvet overdress, wanting nothing more than to be gone from this place, the sooner the better.

  At least Thur made no demur or delay. Dressed already, he had his bedding rolled and packed within a minute of his rising out of it. They sat on the benches in the tap room and washed down a breakfast of dry bread with ale. Catching the white horse from the pasture proved to be the greatest obstacle to their quick start. The innkeeper's wife, after watching them lunge through the dew-wet grass after it for several minutes, shook her head and came out with a basin of oats to entice it, and bridled it herself. She handed the reins to Thur, who handed them to Fiametta.

  "Can't you ride a horse?" Fiametta demanded of her would-be cavalier.

  He shook his head. "My mother only kept a few goats. We couldn't afford a cow, still less a horse." He added after an uneasy moment, "I could lead you on it, though. Like the mules."

  "Well... all right," Fiametta said doubtfully. She stood beside the animal, her nose level with its withers. "Lead it to the fence, and I'll climb on."

  "Oh, that's easy," said Thur. He picked her up around the waist and popped her aboard as if she'd been a three-year-old. At her outraged look, he added apologetically, "You're much lighter than an ox hide full of rocks, Madonna Beneforte."

  She wrestled her skirts around her legs, wedged Thur's pack in front of her, took up a handful of long greasy mane, swallowed, and nodded. "Lead on, then."

  The white horse was loath to leave the green pasture, but once out on the road seemed to become reconciled to its fate, and plodded on beside the Swiss. Madonna Catti watched them out of sight, as if to make certain that they and their bad luck were really departing. The early morning light was level and golden, setting the lingering wisps of mist ablaze in the meadows, casting knife-dark shadows across their feet from the poplar and cypress trees along the road. The damp warming air was redolent with spring flowers, and with the green scent of the little rocky streams that crossed the road as it dipped into shaded dells, then climbed again. The sun and the horse's warm back began to drive the night's chill from Fiametta's bones. If she hadn’t been so tired and aching, the ride would have been pleasant.

  Thur strode along easily beside the horse, petting it encouragingly on the neck now and then. He at least seemed no worse worn for the night's disruptions. He glanced over his shoulder at Fiametta as they crested a little hill.

  "Your father said Monreale. You called him the Abbot—is he the same as the Bishop Monreale my brother mentioned sometimes in his letters?"

  "Yes, there's only one of him. Except unlike the Roman bishops, he actually serves both of the benefices he holds, Papa says. Said. Abbot Monreale's father was a Savoyard nobleman who married a Lombard lady. Monreale was a younger son, so he went off to seek his fortune as a captain in the armies of France, back when they drove the English from Bordeaux. Your brother Uri used to like to get him to talk about it, and it was never too hard to persuade him to reminisce, though he pretends to be ashamed of it now. Monreale kept trying to persuade Uri that he'd be better off turning monk himself, serving God instead of Duke Sandrino. It grew to be a kind of running joke between them, except that it wasn't quite a joke.” Fiametta bit her lip. It was no joke now, that was certain.

  "Papa and the Abbot were gossips, somewhat. At first because of their being the two best magicians in Montefoglia, I suppose, and Papa of course had to stay on Monreale's good side to get his ecclesiastical license from Monreale as bishop. But I think they really liked each other. When Monreale came to town to the cathedral to tend to the affairs of the Diocese, they would sometimes sit in our courtyard and drink wine and talk. And sometimes they would go fishing together on the lake. Papa was more practical, wanting to master material magic. Monreale was more interested in the theory of sorcery, with an eye to his spiritual duties about it, I suppose. Sometimes Papa would go to him for ideas, when he was stuck working out a new spell. Monreale must know about spirit-magic—he'd have to study it to fight it, at least."

  "Spirit-magic?"

  "Black necromancy." She described the silver putti ring Lord Ferrante had worn, the casket with the salt-shriveled baby, and the connection Master Beneforte had feared, found, and severed between the two.

  "That's a level of sorcery over my head, I'm afraid," said Thur humbly.

  "Yes, I can see that," Fiametta sighed. But to be fair was compelled to add, "Over my head too." But not over Monreale's. Nor Master Beneforte's—there could be no concealments now, though Fiametta was near-certain her father had never confessed his experiment in Florence to the Abbot-and-Bishop. If Fiametta's vague understanding was correct, her father's spirit dangled now over damnation on Lord Ferrante's string. His soul risked being cut off from God even at this late hour. "I hope Abbot Monreale is not too busy with the siege to attend to one poor lost spirit."

  Thur frowned thoughtfully down the winding road. "If Lord Ferrante succeeds in compelling your father's ghost to serve his will, and if this spirit-magic is as strong as you think, it would put all those people Monreale is trying to protect into greater danger. Your father's fate is near the center of his troubles. He'll attend." Determination stiffened his face. "All I have to do is get you there. Right."

  Fiametta hung on tightly as Thur and the horse picked their way across a rocky brook at the bottom of the hill. The hazard cleared, she asked, "What is your magic, Thur? Your brother must suspect you of some talent, or he wouldn't have sought to apprentice you to a mage."

  Thur's mouth screwed up in uncertainty. "I'm not sure. I've never been tested by a real master. I can find water with the dowsing-stick. And I have a knack for finding things, Mother says. I once found a little girl, the millwright's daughter Helga, who was lost in a snowstorm. But we were all out searching, so maybe I was just lucky. And I've long thought..." He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed, "Thought I could sense the metal ore, in the rocks. But I was always afraid to speak, for if I was wrong, the men would have been very angry with me. A false stringer is the devil to work." He hesitated, then added shyly, "I saw a kobold once, not long ago." He seemed about to add more, twisting the lion ring around his finger, but then shook his head. "And you, Madonna Beneforte? You must be skilled."

  Her brow puckered. She should be skilled, yes. But. "I'm very good with fires," she offered at last. "Even Papa has me light his. And my Latin pronunciation is good, Papa says—said." She brightened in memory. "The best thing I got to work on so far was, Papa let me help cast a spell for fertility for Madonna Tura, the silk-merchant's wife. She'd had no children, though she'd been married for four years. The spell required a balance of male and female elements, you see. We made it in the form of a belt of little silver rabbits. He let me design and shape the rabbits, all different. I got to keep two real rabbits for models. White French. Lorenzo and Cecelia. They had baby bunnies, which I adored—they were so soft!—it was part of the spell. But then they had more baby bunnies, and they kept digging out of the run in the back garden, and th
ey ate all of Ruberta's herbs, and left rabbit droppings all over the house, which Papa made me clean up. So when the spell was finished, Papa said we had to eat all the rabbits. I suppose thirty-six of them really were too many, but I didn't forgive Ruberta, our cook, for weeks. Rabbit stew, rabbit ravioli, rabbit sausage... I went hungry," she said virtuously, but then rather spoiled the impassioned account of her pets' martyrdom by adding, "Except I helped eat Lorenzo, because he always bit me."

  She frowned at Thur's grin, which immediately muffled itself. "I sneaked Cecelia out and let her go at the edge of town."

  “And did it work?" Thur inquired, as she fell silent.

  "What? Oh, the spell. Yes. Madonna Tura was delivered of a boy just last month. I hope they're all right." A silk-merchant's shop would be a likely target for looters. But perhaps Madonna Tura had escaped to other relatives.

  He held up the lion ring to the sunlight, wriggling his fingers to make it sparkle. "And is this a magic ring, Madonna?"

  His words gave her a chill, nearly identical as they were to those of his—dead?—brother. "It... was supposed to be. But it didn't work, so I just wore it as jewelry."

  She glanced down at him warily, but he merely remarked, "It's very beautiful."

  She had been surviving hour to hour, not looking ahead. As a result here she was, alone in the wilderness, or at least passing through somebody's wood lot, with almost-a-strange man. A week ago, she would have thought it terribly compromising. Those careful social safeguards seemed as flimsy and false as a stage-setting, now. Yet what fate was she riding toward?