The Spirit Ring

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Thur helped Fiametta down; she stumbled inside. His fingers numb, Thur picked at the knots in the rope and freed the crate lid. By that time Tich came out with a lantern and led the horse around to the high gate into the back garden.

  Together, they tied it out of range of the spring onions and lettuces of the kitchen vegetable plot. Tich brought the beast a bucket of water, which it drank thirstily, with a grateful snuffle that blew slobber all over him. In the general filth and soot of Tich's tunic it was scarcely noticeable.

  "We'll have to find it fodder in the morning," Tich said in a tone of judicious expertise. "This little bit of grass won't last."

  "Not the way it eats. I'll help you go look for your mules tomorrow, too."

  Tich nodded, satisfied, and they locked the garden gate. Tich helped Thur carry Master Beneforte's plank inside to lay in the front room next to Uri's; someone had moved him to rest again in this quieter place.

  "They should be buried soon," said Thur. "Properly."

  "There's going to be a lot of funerals tomorrow in Montefoglia, from what we've heard," said Tich.

  "They'll make room for these two," said Thur. "I'll make them make room."

  "Ruberta has put bedrolls for us in the front hall," said Tich. "She says we can guard the door that way till it's fixed."

  Thur half-smiled. "I don't think anyone is going to bother this house." Bedroll. What a beautiful word. Thur could have wept at the beautiful charity of someone making a bedroll for him.

  Tich retired to his bedroll before it had entirely cooled, but Thur stumbled one last time into the courtyard. A light shone there, candle or lantern—both, he saw, entering. Fiametta had stuck a candle-stub upright in the dirt beside the empty casting pit, and was holding up a lantern for closer inspection of the damages.

  The place looked like a midden. Abandoned furnace, empty casting pit, broken-up furniture, scattered tools. The center of one side of the gallery was gone, the whitewash above it black with smoke stain, and charred timbers swung dangerously loose in the corners.

  "They put the fire out," Thur noted brightly.

  "Yes," said Fiametta. "Ruberta and Tich and the neighbors. I did not know I had such friends." She sat down heavily upon the cinder-scattered flagstones in her sodden velvets. "Oh, Thur! My poor house is a shambles!"

  "Now, now." Gingerly, he eased himself down beside her and stroked her shaking shoulders. "Maybe it won't look that bad in the morning. I'll help you fix it up. That gallery's the easy part. I used to help build mine-timbering, you know. I can build you a gallery that won't ever come down."

  Her breath puffed out between her quivering lips, whether in a laugh or a sob Thur could not tell. "Is there anything you can't do?"

  "I don't know." Thur considered this. "I haven't tried everything."

  Her brows rose quizzically. "Do you want to try everything?"

  He took a breath, for courage. "I'd like to try being your husband."

  She blinked, rapidly, and rubbed her eyes with a soot-smudged hand. "I'd be a bad wife. My tongue is too sharp. Everybody says so. You'd get henpecked."

  Thur wrinkled his brows. "Was that yes, or no? Come. Where else will you find a fellow brave enough to marry a girl who can set him on fire with a word?"

  "I'd never!" Her spine straightened. "But truly. I talk a lot—Papa said so—and I'm not very patient."

  "I'm very patient," Thur offered. "I'm patient enough for us both."

  "You weren't very patient with the caking bronze." Her lips curved up.

  "Yes, well... it wasn't right. I needed it to be excellent." He needed to be eloquent. He shouldn't be trying to say these things when he was so damned tired he couldn't even see straight. He looked up, and was startled by an orange tinge outlined by the shadowy black square of the tile roof. Was the town afire? "Why is the sky that funny color?"

  Fiametta looked up, too. "It's dawn," she said after a long moment. "The clouds are breaking up."

  So it was. An apricot luminosity edged slate-blue masses. "Oh." His brains felt like porridge.

  Fiametta giggled, and sniffled. She ought to be in a bedroll, and in a dry gown, too. He gathered her into his lap, hugging her for warmth. She did not object. In fact, she twined her arms around his neck. And so they sat for a time, while the sky lightened.

  "It looks worse," Fiametta observed in a dreamy voice.

  "Huh?" Thur jerked awake.

  "It looks worse. In the morning."

  He stared over her rat's nest of hair at the wreck of a courtyard. "Well. Yes."

  Fiametta's nose wrinkled. "Yes."

  "Yes what?" Thur asked after a minute's pause decided him that he no longer had any idea what they were talking about.

  "Yes. I want to marry you, too."

  "Oh. Good." He blinked and hugged her closer.

  "I think it's because you understand excellence. What it takes."

  "What is?"

  "Why I love you."

  A slow grin fought its way onto his exhaustion-numbed face. "Of course. That's why I love you."

  Epilogue

  By design, the high light of midsummer morning falling through the clerestory windows sent a beam directly down upon the altar of Montefoglia Cathedral. The light caught the garnet of the lion ring as Fiametta slipped it onto Thur's finger. The gem blazed like a ruby, like a star. The gold lion mask seemed to purr under Fiametta's hand, like the most satisfied and cream-stuffed of great cats. Thur felt it too, Fiametta thought, for he smiled like a great cream-stuffed cat himself. He caught her in an embrace that bent her ribs, till Bishop Monreale cleared his throat, and they took the hint and turned obediently, hand in hand, to receive his final benediction. Fiametta could not decide if Monreale looked more at home in his plain gray monk's habit, or as now, splendid in the flowing silk, red cloak, and high mitered hat of the bishopric. Equally easy, perhaps. Monreale was not made by his garments, and so his clothes always conformed to him.

  Thur's clothes did not make him, she mused, so much as reveal him. She kept sipping little contented glimpses from the corner of her eye even while bowing her head. He had not let her see his wedding garments till this morning, a conspiracy between himself, Ruberta, and the tailor. Fiametta and Thur had frugally divided the purchase of a length of silk between them, so his green tunic matched her over gown. Still, the clever tailor had squeezed enough material for proper pleats. Thur's upright bearing made the modest decorative braid on the sleeves and hem look restrained rather than plain. And many a spindle-shanked rich lord might envy the calves that most perfectly filled those white silk hose. New polished shoes, and no one needed to know he only had one other pair of boots. His bright blond hair was topped by a fine big dark green cloth hat with a copper-gilt badge of Fiametta's own design. Eat your hearts out, ladies of Montefoglia. He's mine.

  Fiametta had cast her own wedding ring—without ensorcellments, this time—in the mask of a lioness. Its tiny gold teeth closed on a green-faceted chip borrowed from the eye of her silver snake-belt; the gems upon testing had proved to be real emeralds. That chaste snake must just wink a while, till she could afford a replacement stone. She turned her hand a little to make the green flash, and smirked into her lap.

  They turned from the altar to collect kisses and hugs and hearty congratulations from the witnesses, each according to their style; Lorenzetti the notary shook hands, Tich pecked her cheek, Ruberta embraced everyone and dabbed at her eyes. Thur's mother grasped Fiametta's hands and gave her a warm smile, though her swimming eyes were still tinged with a searching doubt. Time would put those doubts to rest, Monreale had assured Fiametta privately. Fiametta smiled back in earnest hope thereof.

  Tich had escorted Mistress Ochs personally from Bruinwald, on his first round-trip with his pack mules. He had finally managed to recover all but two of the lost beasts. His eager personal persuasion and good offices had much to do with prying the aging woman from her familiar cottage and carrying her on this mixed adventure, fraught with both sor
row and joy, to visit one son's grave and the other's wedding. Thur and Fiametta had awaited her arrival anxiously, as the date of their wedding had been agreed between them to be the day after her arrival. She seemed a quiet woman, obviously devoted to Thur; perhaps that was enough mutual interest upon which to start building her acquaintance with her new daughter-in-law. She had clearly been thrilled by his new clothes.

  Before leaving the cathedral they stopped into one of the side chapels. This holy chamber had been the recipient, over a year ago, of a noble gift from Master Beneforte's hand: a fine carved marble crucifix with a white Christ upon a black marble cross, now affixed to the wall with its iron clamps. In exchange, the building committee had permitted his humble request: space for a stone sarcophagus beneath Our Lord's feet. Fiametta did not think this represented morbid premonition, exactly, because he had not then ordered the sarcophagus. The stonecutters she'd hired had placed the tomb only a week ago, but at least it was in time for her to kneel and lay her wedding flowers upon it. "Peace, Papa," she whispered.

  To her gnawing regret, she had not found her mother's death mask again. It had been nowhere in the patiently-sorted shambles of her house, nor had her inquiries among neighbors who had recovered portions of their looted possessions borne fruit. Even Thur's peculiar talent proved no help this time, though he had walked for hours, absent-faced with concentration, quartering Montefoglia. The bronze mask must have been carried out of the city.

  I am a sorceress. If I truly seek, I must find you at last, Mama, Fiametta made silent oath. Someday. Someday.

  When she rose she found Monreale standing back looking at the Christ, meditating artistically rather than theologically, for he said, "It's very fine. The proportions are strange, yet they hold the eye and the mind."

  "He did not use a model. It was from a vision, Papa told me, that he had when he was in prison in Rome once upon... uh... what he said were false charges."

  "Yes, I heard that tale from him. The vision, at least, was true," Monreale mused. "Well, he rests now under better eyes than mine. It is good for him to have such a guardian.

  "Speaking of guardians," he turned to her, "I have a wedding present for you." From his robe he drew a folded piece of parchment and handed it to her.

  She crackled it open eagerly, read, and bounced twice into the air. "Wonderful! My Guild permit! Now I can make and sell spells, as well as metal bagatelles!"

  "Only such as are inspected and approved for your level of license," he cautioned. "You are officially listed as my apprentice, so I am in part responsible for the consequences of your actions. I will not be able to watch you daily as an ordinary master would, but you may be sure I will inspect your shop frequently." He mustered a stern frown for emphasis. “I'll have no more such Beneforte tricks as your Papa played upon me, now!"

  "No, sir!" Fiametta danced, and hugged Thur. "Now we're truly in business!" Her husband grinned, reflecting back her shining delight.

  Monreale lowered his voice to her ear alone. "I mean that most seriously, Fiametta. I had to use the utmost care, in dealing with the committee from the Inquisition over the matter of the late and damned Vitelli, to keep you out of it. As far as any official report states, Uri's spirit got into that casting by itself, as an accidental result of Vitelli's machinations. I do not recommend that you draw their attention twice."

  "It was by itself," Fiametta argued sotto voce. "I did not compel; I only channeled him."

  "I tried not to trouble their minds with that subtle distinction. Consider the matter sealed under my authority as your master, and do not discuss it without my permission. Eh?"

  Fiametta smiled. "Yes—Master."

  Monreale nodded, grimly satisfied. With blessings all round he excused himself to attend to the Diocese, and the chancellery business that had come upon him as he found himself chief advisor to Duchess Letitia in her unaccustomed role as Regent for little Duke Ascanio.

  The wedding party spilled out into the beautiful morning light on the cathedral steps. Ruberta and Lorenzetti headed back on foot to the house, to supervise the laying of the tables and the tapping of the wine cask, respectively, before all the neighbors who had helped put out the house fire arrived for the fete. "I don't trust that hired girl with my pastries," Ruberta sniffed. The kobolds had not been invited; in fact, Fiametta had not even seen one of the shy gnomes since that wild night of spell and metal casting. But the bowl of goat's milk she laid out nightly on the floor of the root cellar was always empty the next morning.

  Thur helped his mother up onto a white mule, borrowed from Tich, and Fiametta up onto their white horse. Fiametta herself had spent yesterday afternoon shampooing both beasts and scrubbing them clean of every manure stain. She'd pinned old sheets around them overnight to protect her labors. Both animals' hooves were blacked with polish and their manes and tails braided with colored ribbons. The white horse's swayed back was built up with enough pads and flowers to look almost normal, and Fiametta happily arranged her green brocade outer skirt and cream-white inner skirt over the rugs. As if in response to all this attention the old horse arched its neck and stepped out finely. Thur walked between the two mounted women. They wound through the streets and headed up the hill toward Montefoglia castle.

  The battlements seemed to glow, sunny and open, not the midnight-sinister pile of stone they had been in the rain-swept dark of that terrifying night six weeks ago. Only six weeks ago? It seemed a world past. When the word of the deaths of their leader and his dark advisor had arrived, the Losimon army had turned away at the border fords and marched back to their own capital. A Ferrante cousin appointed heir by the Curia was presently scrambling for political control there, and in no mood to seek extra trouble from his new neighbors.

  The animals' hooves clopped, echoing off the stone walls, as the women rode through the tower-flanked gate into a busy and noisy castle courtyard. Blacksmiths were at work repairing the portcullis, and their laborers stoked a portable forge. Lord Pia, dressed in summer linens and an Egyptian cotton shirt, leaned on a cane supervising. Under his wife's devoted care he'd made a good recovery, though appearing more frail, as his hair was grayer and he'd lost some of his robust girth. Except for a certain uncharacteristic hesitancy, his tone of mind was much improved from the over-stressed dementia of those days of madness, magic, and murder. He recognized Fiametta and favored her with a friendly wave of his hand. Fiametta waved back while trying to look very busy, lest he come over and corner Thur again for more talk of his proposed bat-wing experiments.

  The bronze Perseus/Uri had been raised to its stone plinth, square in front of the marble staircase. And so Duke Sandrino's captain guarded his house for all time. Fiametta still bit her lip in frustration that the Duchess had chosen to entrust the finishing details to di Rimini, and not to Fiametta. She trusted Papa was truly sped far from this world of woe; even his ghost would have been livid at the thought of his greatest work fallen into the hands of his rival, though he would probably have been almost equally horrified at the thought of it in the hands of his daughter. Well... di Rimini appeared to have done a competent job, so far. At least the thing hadn't fallen over yet.

  One could only carry on. The Duchess, frugal in the uncertain days of her new widowhood, had elected not to have the body of the Medusa cast to lie at the Perseus's feet and complete the tableau, but to mount the statue as it was. This saved that work from going to di Rimini, but also gave her the excuse to knock a full half off the payment Papa had thought to get from Duke Sandrino.

  Thur read these tense thoughts from Fiametta's face; she'd expressed them often and vigorously enough to his ear. Lifting her down from the horse before the bronze, he kissed her forehead and whispered, "Daily bread, love."

  She nodded, sighing in resignation. The half-payment, plus the residue of monies still owed on the saltcellar, had at least settled all of Papa's debts. After buying new tools for the shop and setting aside enough to live on until business was established, Thur had stretched i
t further by doing repairs on the wrecked house himself. His new gallery looked sturdy enough for the Sultan's elephants to dance upon.

  New furniture and fine clothes could wait. Thur had cooled her tongue by pointing out that God only promised daily bread, not a bakery. And indeed, the Duchess had soon given her a commission for some silver and pearl jewelry for Julia. And where the Duchess shopped, all the great ladies of Montefoglia must soon follow.

  They laid the armload of flowers they'd brought at the bronze Uri's feet, and Fiametta stood back respectfully to let Thur's mother gaze, one last unexpected time, upon the features of her lost son. Would she appreciate the beautiful flowing form, the dramatic pose, the perfection of the casting? Would she be moved at this monument to his memory and his courage?

  "Thur," the aging lady said in a choked voice, "he's naked." Her hand touched her lips in dismay.

  "Well, yes, Mama," said Thur, placating and phlegmatic. "That's the way the Italians make their statues. Maybe it's because of the hot climate."

  "Oh, dear."

  Thur scratched his head, looking as if he was wondering if he ought to jump up on the plinth and affix a bouquet in a strategic spot to console her.

  But she overcame her horror enough to quaver politely, "It's... it's very fine. I'm sure." But he's naked! Fiametta could almost hear her wail in her thoughts.

  Fiametta, uncertain whether to smile or snarl, bit her fingers and said nothing. She raised her eyes to the bronze face under the winged helmet, those metal lips curled faintly at the corners, and knew.

  Uri would have laughed.

  Author's Note

  For the curious book lover, I'd like to add a word on the principal historical sources for The Spirit Ring.