The Medieval Hearts Series

by Laura Kinsale

  At first Elayne saw nothing happen. Then she realized that a dark line was growing at the edge of the small quay. As the water level dropped, a wall appeared, separating the lake from the pool under the arched gate. The reeds at the edge bent and laid down in mud, but the bottom of the pool was deeper. With a gurgling sound, the water line fell, revealing a stair and another arch.

  Just inside the arch, under the wall, there was a door.

  She recognized it instantly, though the metal had turned black with age. In the relief, the dogs and bear, the shepherd; tarnished but defiant, like the words engraved down the center. Gardi li mo.

  Elayne followed him down the wet stairs in wonder. At the bottom he cast a glance at her, a half-smile in the dim water reflections. "Do you remember?"

  Elayne pressed the first letter. She remembered that much. The shepherd’s staff, then the last letter. She reached for the bear. But the pattern had been irregular after that; she could only guess. The darkened bronze gave beneath her fingers as she tried the sheep.

  "Nay," he said, stopping her hand. "Watch again."

  She felt a little ashamed that she had not recalled it correctly. She watched intently as he made the pattern, repeating each letter to herself under her breath. The lock clicked, the panels came apart, though they required some pushing to force them fully open. This door did not give so easily as the one to his island strong-room. He had to put his shoulder against it and shove, wincing as he did it.

  A stone stairway lay before them, dry and empty, turning up and up the inside wall of a square tower, a dim, echoing well of stone. Light entered from arrow-slits at each landing, bright beams slanting across the dim height. Doves cooed and rustled somewhere above her, but the floor and stairs were strangely clean.

  He closed the door and began to mount the stairs. Elayne hefted her boots under her arm, took a deep breath, and started up after him. Halfway to the top she had to stop and catch her breath, leaning on the plastered wall, looking out the narrow slit through a wall nigh as thick as a man’s height. She could see only a sliver of the lake below.

  This was a Navona stronghold. It must have been, with that motto upon the secret door. Though the walls were breached, the gates torn down, it had not been destroyed. Only made unfit for defense. She had read of such, in some of the copies of royal writs among the papers she had studied. It was an insult, a deliberate mark of disdain, to slight the walls in such a way.

  He passed from her sight above. She forced her aching legs to mount the stairs. Her knees were trembling by the time she climbed past the beams that supported the upper floor. She expected to emerge into a guard room, or outside, but instead there was a tiny landing, with no protection from the giddy drop, and another door: bronze again, embellished with the dogs and sheep and bear.

  He waited beside it, looking at her expectantly. Elayne leaned her hand against the wall, still panting from the climb as she repeated the secret pattern. This time she made it work. The lock made a familiar sound, and the panels slid open smoothly. She turned the latch. The door swung full open on silent hinges.

  Rich colors caught her eye, and a flutter of motion as birds took off, shadows on the outside of the shuttered windows. There was a great bed hung about with red-and-gold damask. A soft, fringed carpet beckoned her bare feet. A large chest and a throne-like chair and stool, a cupboard—even a mirror the size of a woman’s face, framed in a gilded sunburst and hung on the frescoed wall.

  "Hold," he said, catching her arm before she could enter. "Let me make certain of it."

  With a quick move he sent one of his daggers spinning across the chamber. It stuck hard in the window shutter, rattling the wood. He stepped inside the door and looked up, running his hand all along the frame. Then he made a slow circuit of the room, his other knife at ready, as if some attacker might spring from the walls.

  He reached the far window and pulled his dagger from the wood.

  "You are sure that the galley sailed as we left Venice," he said. "One day and half another past now?" She wet her lips and nodded.

  "Come in," he said. "We’ll be safe here. Use the bed, but touch nothing else. I’ll return as soon as I’ve seen Gerolamo."

  Safe here. He said so. As the door closed behind him, she dropped her boots and went straight to the bed. She climbed onto it and fell back against the pillows with a great sigh, asleep almost before she let her eyes fall closed.

  * * *

  Elayne awoke with a sneeze. In the first moments of fathoming where she was, she saw half-open shutters with a sky glowing vivid blue beyond. The doves cooed and rustled on the sill. She lifted her head from the pillow. Dust motes made her sneeze again.

  There was a startled move beside her. She looked around as the pirate rolled upright in the bed, hand reaching for his dagger. For one perilous instant he stared at her, a stranger with murder in his grip, and then his hand relaxed and he made a groan, turning over into the pillows.

  His face was not so swollen, but colored now in shades of blue and violet and green that would have done justice to an artist’s palette. Dried smears of blood still marked his nose and jaw.

  "I loathe horses," he said, half-muffled in the pillow.

  Elayne sat up. She smiled wryly. "They served us full well," she said. "I hope your man took good care with them."

  "Aye, I told him all you said to do." He turned on his back with a stiffness unnatural to him. "My own servants don’t get better treatment."

  "That palfrey is a rare animal," she said, crossing her legs carefully. She was a little sore herself. "I’ve never seen a finer pacer."

  "It is yours, then, and welcome." His gaze drifted down to her lap. "God knows I hope never to mount the vicious beast again."

  She felt herself flush at the way he observed her. She moved quickly to close her legs and rearrange her skirt over the rumpled damask bedcovering. "We are not to ride further? Is this Val d’Avina?"

  "Nay, d’Avina is leagues from here yet. But we will go by the lake, when Gerolamo arranges for it. Until then, we wait here. We have two days of grace, if I told Zafer what I meant to tell him."

  "You do not remember still?"

  He stared at the bed canopy. He squinted, as if he were looking far into the distance, and then shook his head. "It is maddening!" he said. "I recall the wine with Morosini…then nothing. Nothing after. I know what I intended—we can only pray God that is what was arranged. But I thought they would expect us here, and they did not."

  Elayne slid from the bed and curled her toes in the rich carpet. She went to the window, pushing the shutters full open. The setting sun blazed just above the mountaintops. The air was so clear that she could pick out valleys and deep ravines on the far side of the lake, miles away. Angled shafts of golden light played through parting clouds and onto the water, like a perfect vision of Paradise. "What is this place?" she asked in wonder. "Is it yours?"

  He laughed, a bitter sound. "Ask that of the Riata."

  She looked back at him. He sat propped up in the great bed, a lithe shadow in the richly appointed room. It was clearly the residence of a wealthy man, but there was an air of austerity to it, a graceful simplicity, as if the owner had chosen the finest of each thing he wished to have, and no more.

  "This chamber was not violated," she said.

  "Aye. We kept some secrets, it seems." He scanned the room with a cool glance. "I’ve never been in it before. It was one of my father’s chambers."

  She remembered that he was a bastard son. He had called Gian Navona a devil; he had said that his father had tried to drown him for disloyalty. She looked at the room and its furnishings with a new perception, but still they only seemed to speak of subtle elegance, not evil.

  "It is not what I would have expected," she said.

  "Did you imagine a torture chamber? He did not like blood on his own hands." The pirate rose suddenly, swinging his long legs off the bed. He walked to the mirror and peered into it. "Mary, look at me!" he exclaimed with
a harsh laugh. "He would have been revolted. And I cannot even remember a simple assignation! Forgive me, my sweet sire. Have mercy. Don’t kill me in my sleep."

  He stared at himself for a long moment. The late afternoon shadows made a dim reflection of his face, a rippled distortion in the mirror.

  "Don’t kill me," he whispered.

  Elayne stood up straight. "Your father is dead," she said firmly. He closed his eyes, his lashes trembling, and blinked them open.

  "Yes," he said. He took a breath. "Yes. I brought him back and buried him in the duomo at Monteverde. Haps I’ll take you there, hell-cat, in time—and you can light a candle to keep him dead."

  For once, she did not object to his name for her. "Do you fear a mortal man’s memory? You told me that you could keep your wits in the face of any fell thing."

  "Did I!" He turned from the mirror. "I must have neglected to mention my father." He looked about the chamber. "We should be cautious here. There will be things even I don’t know."

  "You are ever comforting! What things?"

  He reached out and touched the sunburst frame around the mirror, running his fingers along each gilded tip. "There," he said, holding his forefinger behind the frame. He tilted his head toward the bed. "Watch."

  As she glanced toward the bed, there was a snapping sound and a flash of motion from the canopy. A needle the length of her hand stood buried in the bedclothes where the pirate had been lying. It wavered for an instant and then toppled.

  "The poison will have long since lost effect," he said. "But it would hurt."

  Elayne put her hands over her face and sighed through her fingers. "Do you know what is unspeakable?" she said, drawing her palms down and looking at him over her fingertips.

  "My murderous family?" he asked lightly. "Or my murderous self?"

  "I am not even discomfited anymore."

  He smiled in the gathering gloom, as if it pleased him. "I’ll disarm everything. I know my father’s mind well enough to find what is here."

  "Of course," she said.

  "Close the shutters now. We want no sharp-eyed fisherman to notice such a change." He nodded toward a large sack that lay upon one of the chests. "There is meat to break fast, if you want it," he said. "And then we will go down to bathe." His lip curled. "I cannot bear myself. I reek of horse."

  * * *

  "Is it safe here?" Elayne asked, looking down the little beach in the last of the silvered light. Rosemary and citron trees grew along the base of the castle walls, and even palms, a strange sight against the dark background of snowcapped mountains.

  He paused, holding a pair of robes he’d taken from his father’s chest over his arm. "You are learning to ask," he said, with approval. He moved ahead without giving an answer to her question, barefooted still, a soft shadow in the dusk. They followed a faint path that wound between the water and the castle walls. As he passed by one of the citron trees, he yanked down three of the yellow fruits from a low-hanging branch and carried them in his palm.

  The air was warm even as the sun set across the lake, but the water looked chill. Elayne carried a linen bag with soap of olive oil and herbs. She could smell the faint heavy scent of it, mingling with the rosemary, as familiar as Cara’s coffer where she stored her Italian treasures.

  Beyond the castle, a row of arches stood, black silhouettes against the day-glow. He led her along the ancient pillars that lined the shore. The lake seemed to be all around them now, at the farthest end of the peninsula. A faint white mist rose from the water ahead, a citron-scented haze that drifted through the trees.

  There were steps carved into the rock. In the fading light she followed him down to a bathing grotto. Antique columns and marble tiles formed a spacious vault, the clear blue water reflecting and shimmering against pale stone. Wild rosemary bushes grew among blocks of stone and broken friezes. The trunk of a huge olive tree overhung the entrance, its twisted branches and silvery leaves shielding the grotto from the lake. Steam rose from the smooth surface, drifting and vanishing into the evening air.

  The pirate dropped his burden onto the carved and fluted capstone of some ancient fallen column. Without hesitation he released his waist-belt and laid it out over the flat shelf edge, with the daggers’ hilts turned toward the water. He pulled the loose volume of his doublet and cape over his head, tossing them aside, revealing vambrace guards of leather and metal strapped to his forearms, and another knife sheathed along the inner side. He turned his fist up and unbuckled the straps.

  While she stood wide-eyed on the last step, he untied his hair and released his breechcloth. His back was to her as he stood for a moment, then lowered himself with a soft groan and a stiff move to sit naked on the edge, his bared arms and chest and loins awash with shadowy blue light—flawless, each muscle and limb formed in perfect harmony, the skin of his back and shoulders smooth and unscarred under the black fall of his hair. He paused only an instant, watching the steam, and then slid into the water.

  He went fully under in the purple depths, and then rose like some lost water god, sending waves and ripples to the walls as he shook back his head and swept his hands over his face and hair.

  He caught the shelf with one hand, turning to her. His blackened eye gave his face a strange asymmetry in the failing light, as if half of a pagan mask had been painted upon his temple. He tilted back his head and opened his arms on the steamy water with a fierce sound of pleasure.

  "Heaven," he said, with the vapor rising around him, his voice echoing in the vault. He looked toward her, unsmiling. "Come join me. This is as close as I will ever come to it."

  FIFTEEN

  She stood frozen on the stair, clutching the linen bag. It was not fear or shame that held her. It was not modesty or shyness. If she could have claimed even an ounce of shame, she would never have followed him here.

  She turned away, to hide her face, to compose herself. The vision of him standing for that one moment on the open shelf was like a revelation. She had not seen him so since that first night. The pure, unbridled force of her will to join him and wound him and sink down in that dark combat with him again caught her breathless, like a blow to her chest. This place, this pagan place, haunted by ancient columns and arches that no Christian hand had raised—he seemed a part of it, the very voice of it, calling her to the shadows with him.

  She glanced back. He floated with his shoulders just above the surface of the water; the faint shade of the mark she had made on him still visible. He had sometime touched it and smiled that knowing smile at her, as if it were a sign between them. As if it were a token.

  He grew still as she watched him from the ledge, returning her steady look. That memory rose before her; between them: that she had made her brand on him—that he allowed her one means to violate his guard.

  One means, to put him at her mercy.

  A hundred times, a thousand, she had thought of her teeth on his skin, his body shuddering with ecstasy as she marked him.

  His mouth curved a little. "Hell-cat," he said, as if he were amused.

  She thought distantly of Raymond. But that was so far away, another world. Not this world, where a part of herself that she had only glimpsed now sprang to vivid life.

  He let himself drift backward, pushing away from the ledge. His hair spread around his chest and shoulders. There was just enough light left to see the smooth strength in his arms, the graceful line of muscle, like a fine hot-blooded animal as he stretched. He winced as he moved, opening and closing his arms, and gave a long sigh. "Helas, I hurt all over."

  The ache of desire swelled open in her like a flower blooming in the night. The thought of raking her hands across his wet shoulders made her dig her fingernails deep into the bar of soap through the linen bag. She moistened her lips, turning her back again.

  "Do not come in, then," he said, mocking her. "If you are afraid."

  Afraid. Oh, she was afraid.

  She stepped to the water’s edge without looking at him. She knelt, s
kimming her hand into it. It was warm, near to hot, as if a spring from the brimstone depths of the earth fed it. Blue and purple and indigo swirled and broke with silver under her fingers.

  He ducked beneath the surface. She could just barely see the length of his body, a wavering shape as he swam underwater to the far side of the vault. He came up and drew air, tossing back his hair. With a twist, he sat upon some ledge beneath the water, turning toward her, barely visible now in the darkness and steam.

  With that much of distance between them, she pulled at the laces of her surcoat with trembling fingers. She hardly knew if it was dread or eagerness. She hardly knew what she intended to do until she sat down and put her feet in the water, yanking her chemise loose over her head.

  She slid quickly into the warm lake, taking a block of soap with her. The depth was uneven, but smooth; her toes rested on curved surfaces of rock. The water enveloped her naked body like silk, slid against her breasts like softest velvet on her skin. She turned her back to him and ran the soap along her arm. The apple-scent of chamomile and almonds rose around her.

  She bathed herself, vividly aware of her body, of every touch of the soap and the water and the smooth stone beneath her feet. Aware that he was there, watching her.

  "Your hair," he said, from close behind.

  Elayne paused. Her hair was still bound up, though the water caught at loose tendrils falling at the nape of her neck.

  She turned her head a little, looking aslant. She could not see him, but she felt the water surface move and break just behind her back. Her breath, already uneven, left her completely. She lifted her chin.

  "Take it down," she said, as if he were her servant.

  Her own boldness amazed her. She watched the faint steam rise, holding her breath.

  "My lady," he murmured, with a compliance that sent hot agitation surging up into her breasts.

  Water splashed softly. He touched her hair, dripping warmth down onto her shoulder. With practiced skill he found the band and pins that held her braid, as if he had done such things many times before. It fell heavily onto her neck. He tossed the pins onto the dry ledge and tugged gently at her hair, unbraiding the strands as she held her place, until the loosened mass of it floated about her shoulders.