The Medieval Hearts Series

by Laura Kinsale

  Elayne gave him an encouraging smile and reached for the wine.

  "Hold!" Il Corvo’s voice froze her, ringing harshly in the great high chamber. Elayne let go of the goblet. He strode forward from nowhere, his hair dewed with moisture, the dark mantle flaring. "Taste it, Matteo!"

  He stopped beside the table, glaring down at the kneeling boy. The child had already dropped his face to the tiled floor, quaking. "Matteo," the pirate said in a voice of ice. "You fail me. Drink of what you poured. Discard the rest. And then I do not wish to set eyes upon you again."

  The boy raised his pallid face. Still on his knees, he crawled forward. He lifted the goblet and took a sip.

  "Drink deeper," the pirate demanded.

  The child took a full swallow, and then another. The entire household watched in silence. Matteo appeared as if he might retch, his mouth screwed into a tight, unhappy rose. Elayne watched with horror. It was an undisguised tasting for poison, credence without the pleasant rituals she had seen at court that made it seem only ceremonial.

  For long moments everyone stared, but beyond the grimace, Matteo seemed to take no ill effect. He sat upon his knees, very still, his head bowed in disgrace.

  Il Corvo turned his brutal look upon Elayne. "Never...never...take food or drink without credence."

  She had forgotten. Lady Melanthe had warned her of such; this pirate himself had taken advantage of her trust to stupefy her when he pleased. He sat down, dismissing Matteo with a disdainful motion of his hand. The boy backed away on his hands and knees, in full health enough to rise and run when he reached the wall.

  The pirate watched him go. He looked around at his petrified household and narrowed his eyes at the maid. "Fatima. Matteo’s life is in your hands. If you allow him to make such a mistake again, you will be the one to put a poison cup to his lips yourself. Replace the wine."

  Fatima went to her knees. "You command me, Your Grace," she said breathlessly.

  She rose and turned, hastening after Matteo. Elayne gripped her hands in her lap.

  The Raven looked aside at her. "Remember this, my lady. You, too, are responsible for their lives. Do not allow yourself to be imprudent, or to be served carelessly. If there is any injury to you, those who caused it—by mistake or by malice—will suffer an ill fate."

  She tried to appear composed, sitting with her back rigid to control her trembling limbs. "He is but a child," she said faintly.

  "The better to do murder unobserved."

  "Do murder!" she echoed. "The boy cannot yet have eight years to his life."

  "I had but nine, at my first," he said. He took the seat beside her, throwing off his red-lined mantle. "I do not ask so much of Matteo yet, if it comforts your gentle heart. But they all know the price of an error in my service."

  Two of the littlest boys bore his cloak away, their faces solemn and scared. At his order, Margaret brought a golden dish and set it upon the table. Stiffly Elayne offered her hands to be rinsed from the pitcher of perfumed water. The fragrance did not mask the scent that lingered on her, the scent of lust and coupling—the scent of a manslayer.

  The one called Dario came forward. He was a thick-muscled, broad-shouldered youth with blunt strong features, but he bowed with a precise elegance, taking the napkin from his left shoulder and drying Elayne’s hands.

  "Your pardon for this crude meal, my lady," the pirate said gruffly. "It is not what I intended. We will have a proper feast in Monteverde to celebrate our marriage."

  " ’Tis no matter," Elayne said in a stifled voice. If she never had a feast in Monteverde, she would be pleased.

  "Pour into three cups," he instructed Dario, and watched as the youth performed a careful ritual, tasting deeply at each before he served it.

  The Raven took a slow sip of one goblet, and offered it to Elayne from his own lips. She drank a convulsive swallow, assured at least that this was safe. He lifted the next cup and held it out to her. But as she raised her hand to steady the goblet, he drew it sharply away.

  "Do not drink of this," he said. "Be careful. Smell it."

  She lifted her eyes in mistrust. He met her look under his black lashes, a steady stare. Elayne drew in a breath over the cup.

  "Do you smell it?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "It smells of spice."

  He offered the first goblet again. "Look in it. Observe the color."

  Elayne looked at a claret wine that seemed ordinary in its honey-red color and sweet scent of spicery. "I see nothing."

  He held up the second cup. "What of this?"

  She frowned down at the silver goblet so close to her nose. He tilted it—and she saw the thin film that threw transparent colors across the surface.

  "Oh—" she said. "I see it."

  "At last," he said in a tone of great congratulation. " ’Tis fortune that it’s only a drop of olive oil." He pushed the third goblet over the cloth toward her. "This one contains bane enough to kill us both. Smell it."

  Gingerly Elayne sniffed at the last goblet—one of the cups that Dario had tasted not moments before. He stood by, erect and unconcerned, bowing his head when she glanced at him.

  The faintest odor of burnt syrup, of almonds blackened beyond mere roasting, tainted the scent of the last cup. It seemed to go instantly to the back of her nose and linger there. She pushed the cup hastily away. "But he drank of it!"

  Il Corvo looked up at Dario with a slight smile. "Enlighten the princess to what passed."

  The youth bowed to his waist. "Your Grace, there was no bane in it when I drank. My lord diverted you with the second cup and envenomed the last one while you were distracted with looking at what he showed to you. It is a common ruse."

  "Common?" she repeated weakly. Her voice rose. "This is common in Monteverde?"

  "No doubt they are clumsier about it," the Raven said, "and easy to detect. But you make a credulous target. You must learn to take notice of what happens around you."

  "Helas," she cried. "God forfend that I ever came here!"

  The pirate scowled. "By Christ, can you not yet see what true profit it is to you?" He waved his hand for Dario to remove the cups. "Madame, you were bound for Monteverde and certain death in your innocence. Whatever I have done, whatever I may be—there is no one alive who can school you better in the wiles of murderers, nor keep you more surely from any human menace. Do you doubt me?"

  She stared at the white tablecloth before her, where a cup of the claret had left a mark like a bloodstained new moon—a mark of poison, or of sweet safe wine; she knew not which. Once she had trusted her dark angel to keep her from all harm. But that happy illusion was broken now; it was an assassin who proclaimed himself her protector with such forbidding certainty.

  There are a hundred dangers, Lady Melanthe had warned her, in a voice of anguish. There is no time to teach you.

  Her godmother had known this pirate.

  Elayne could not reason that Lady Melanthe had somehow sent her to him. To her family’s enemy. To the same assassin who declared that he would have killed her himself if she had wed Franco Pietro of the Riata.

  She could not reason it, and yet she remembered Lady Melanthe’s cool ruthless demeanor, her own sister’s awe of the countess, the respect tinged with dread that was never spoken. And she knew that her godmother was closer in spirit to the Raven than to anyone else Elayne had ever encountered.

  "I am yours," the pirate said to her. Softly. Simply. He watched her out of shadowed eyes. "To my death."

  She took a deep breath, staring at the shape of the half-moon stain. There was yet the hot soreness inside her, where he had taken her, left his man’s seed in her body. Black mystery and pain, and she wanted it again—she wanted him before her, his head arched back, at her mercy. The strength of what she felt, the power he gave her to hurt him—her desire for it shocked her. Thunder cracked and rumbled overhead. Sullen smoke curled from the chimneys, the tempest exhaling like a living thing from the darkest corners of the lofty kitchen.
The grave faces of children gazed at her from the shadows.

  "Do it, then," she said, lifting her eyes. "Teach me what arts of malice that you will. I am certain that you know them all."

  His lip curved in dry mockery. "I could not teach you one-tenth of what I know of malice," he said. "But I can put you on your guard against it."

  Zafer appeared at that moment, emerging from the smoky shadows, his tabard and exotic headpiece darkened and dripping with rainwater. As the Raven looked toward him, the young infidel made a bow, but no words passed between them. There was only a glance, a moment that seemed to convey some grim meaning between the youth and his master as the storm wailed outside.

  "Attend me well, then, my lady," the pirate said, turning back to her. "Place no faith in such useless concoctions as the powdered horn of a unicorn or the color of a moonstone—such false alchemy is for fools. Open all of your senses. Each poison has a character of its own. Each murderer has a nature that betrays him, if you observe closely enough."

  She lifted her chin. "And what is yours?"

  His gaze lingered on her hand upon the table, then moved upward to her face. No more than she could fathom a panther’s mind could she have said what was in his.

  "Let that question be your ultimate examination," he said. "We will discover if you are cunning enough to solve it."

  * * *

  For the night he took her to sleep beside the great kitchen fireplace, a captive within a close embrace, held against his chest as he leaned back on the hearthstone. Zafer stood silent guard. The rest of his servants lay ranged about the chamber in what comfort they could find, shapeless lumps of shadow in the ebbing firelight.

  All night the storm whistled and shrieked. Elayne slept only fitfully, plagued by uneasy dreams. She woke once to find the white pup’s chin resting on her calf as the young dog lay sprawled on its back, belly up and paws all askew within the wedge of space between her leg and the pirate’s. Dario had taken up guard, his face lit faintly by the pulsing red ember glow. She could feel the Raven sleep—strangest of all, for she had come almost to believe that he never did. But the soft touch of his breath was slow and even in her hair, his arm across her waist an insensible leaden weight.

  He had a name, such a deceptive, unapt name that she could not bring herself to employ it with him. Allegreto, he claimed to be called. The English tongue had no such word, but in the Italian and the French it meant something cheerful and light—even joyous.

  He did laugh, but only in mockery. He smiled as a cat might smile while it toyed with a mouse. She wondered if he had ever in his life had a fit of honest mirth, the way she had laughed sometime with Raymond, both of them falling into hilarity, piling one childish jest upon another until they could not draw breath.

  She doubted it. Those who knew the Raven used a title more apt than his own font name. Fitting enough, to call him after the black-winged harbingers of death and war.

  She had learned to distinguish the scent of three poisons since supper, and watched Zafer empty a vial of powder, hidden in his napkin, into the salt. She had watched him do it four times, and never once detected the faint turn of his wrist until he slowed the motion and lifted the cloth for her to observe each step of the action. Then Margaret—composed and determined—had demonstrated how to apply venom to a cloak pin and stab Zafer as she aided him to dress. She was not very accomplished at it, and apologized profusely to my lord and my lady for her inexperience while Zafer held a dagger to her heart, having turned off the maid’s assassination attempt with a move as quick and simple as a striking snake.

  The pirate had watched his apprentices with calm attention, remarking quietly on their work in the way a good master would appraise his students’ efforts and offer methods of improvement. He recommended that Margaret attempt a scratch instead of a stab, as less likely to arouse suspicion, and equally effective with the proper poison. He advised Elayne to cause any sharp fastener to be dipped in water and wiped before she touched it, and to place it in her clothing by her own hand. He slipped the daggers he wore from their sheaths and showed how poison subtly discolored a blade—the one for his left hand was always envenomed, he warned her, the one for his right was clean.

  Despicable it was, to put children in the study of such evil things. And yet they all—girls and boys, from the youngest up to Dario and Zafer and Fatima—looked to him eagerly, vying to show the degree of their scholarship in his deadly arts. In his own manner he treated them with a grim sort of kindness. When Margaret’s babe had begun to wail from its basket slung on ropes near the hearth, she was granted quick reprieve from any further mayhem in order to attend her child. Matteo, skulking miserably in a half-lit corner, was called forward to make another try at a proper poison tasting. After a multitude of attempts, he possessed himself sufficiently to pour a full cup without shaking so that he spilled drops all over the tablecloth, and performed the credence. When at last the Raven, without praise or censure, simply lifted Matteo’s offered goblet and drank from it, the boy’s face broke into a glow of tear-stained relief and pride.

  Elayne could see the pirate’s fingers dimly now, entangled in her loose hair, intertwined with her own black and rain-washed curls as if he had woven them together by design. Like enough he had, to be vigilant of her every move even while they slept— and yet a stray lock coiled across the back of his palm, lying softly against his skin, like a black lamb curled there in innocent affection.

  His hands fascinated her: their swift ease with the blades, on the wine cup, the rough jerk in her hair as he had yanked her away when she bit him. He had smiled then—smiled—and the thought of it sent an ache all down her body, a liquid pain that seemed like bliss.

  He drew her to him, a lodestone against her own will, as if all she had been taught of good and right, all she knew of joy and mirth, held no strength against the beckoning darkness. She wanted to wound him again. She craved to do it. Just that way, that shocking moment of power, to make him hurt and shudder and lose himself in her again.

  With a shiver, Elayne pulled the wizard’s robe close around herself in the night. She felt the pirate come instantly alert. Dario stood straight.

  She shifted a little within the wider space the Raven made as he lifted his arm. When she was still, he lowered it again, holding her entrapped. The puppy turned over and heaved a sigh.

  * * *

  He gave her scrolls to study. They were nothing like the texts that Lady Melanthe had provided for her education. As the storm still slashed and rumbled overhead, she read a Latin compendium of toxic substances, divided into sections, first those natural and then those made by the hand of man: their manufacture, their modes of delivery, their effects. Dry mouth; rapid heartbeat; hot, dry; agitation and delirium...certain death.

  In the margins were notations. Other effects—large pupils, muscle spasms; the names of men, some of them scratched through.

  She might have been sitting in the kitchen at Savernake, on a bench and trestle borrowed from the great hall, with the smells of bread and cooked onions and soot, the watery storm light falling down from high window slits onto the parchment. She might have been studying her notes of Libushe’s herbs and potions. Except she was not. She was reading how one man might kill another, or make him impotent or blind, while children sat about her chopping dates and talking cheerfully and Dario pumped the wheel of a whetstone, making a pitched whine above the rumble of the storm as he sharpened their proffered daggers and little knives, sending sparks flying to the tiled floor. Margaret’s baby played at her feet while she mended buttons on Elayne’s torn shift.

  Il Corvo sat midway up the stairs to the kitchen gallery, dressed in black velvet, one leg extended—like an illumination in a book Elayne had seen once, of a nonchalant fiend overlooking the souls in Purgatory, lounging between the curves and struts of the letter E.

  His languid glance came to hers as she lifted her eyes. Heat suffused her, dread and pleasure. She would have looked away, looked down,
but it seemed as if that would be weak—an admission that she even noticed him. That she remembered—vividly. Between them now there was potential; he spoke of Monteverde and taking power there, but closer and more real to Elayne was the babe that tumbled at Margaret’s hem. Libushe had explained it. Elayne knew it well enough; she had seen the animals at Savernake couple, seen the foals and lambs come spring. In her fondest dreams, she had seen herself picking wildflowers in the woods with a bright-haired son of her own and Raymond’s—but somehow the gap between chastity and that vision had not seemed to invite very close examination.

  He held her look. With a slow move, like a lazy caress, he touched his fingertips to his shoulder, to the place where she had bitten him. Instantly she felt a spring of hot sensation, a violent dream of her power to mark and wound him as he arched under her hands. He smiled at her, a mere hint in the greenish light of the storm.

  Elayne looked down, snatching a quick breath, as if the atmosphere had closed upon her.

  Perchance it was a spell he had laid on her, that made her blood run in a tangle and her breath come strangely when she thought he was remembering as she was. She had never in her life before wanted to hurt any creature. It was not anger, though anger was a part of it. But it was more than that, more—it was all twined and twisted with the way he looked beneath his lashes and smiled as if he knew.

  Perhaps it was a curse to make her foreign to herself. He would perceive how to make such a thing, and not bungle it with mismatched feathers.

  He rose from the stairs and came down in one graceful bound, scooping up one of the youngest ones as the child was about to reach for a newly honed knife that Dario had just laid aside. With a flick of his wrist, Il Corvo sent the blade spinning end-over-end above them. It reached a zenith and flashed downward; Elayne’s heart stopped as the little boy looked up at the weapon descending toward his head.