by Ken Hood
"So I may have to wed a mere noble, you mean? Even, perhaps, a commoner?"
Her mother favored her with a very knowing smile. "I did say the Fiend had turned the world upside down, dear, didn't I? Yes, I do believe that I could even see my way to arranging your marriage with a commoner. He would, of course, have to be a very outstanding and accomplished foreigner."
Not Hamish. She didn't mean Hamish. Oh, demons! She couldn't possibly mean... could she?...
"Longdirk? That oaf? You are seriously thinking—"
Lisa sprang to her feet and spoke three words that she had never spoken before and had heard only rarely. She was not at all clear what two of them meant; they just sounded appropriate. Apparently her mother did not know them at all, for she merely frowned at the tone.
"Do sit down, dear. You said you wanted a serious discussion, so a serious discussion you shall have. Listen carefully. I have given the matter much thought. If Sir Tobias drives the Fiend's armies back over the Alps, as I am confident he will, then there is no doubt at all that Europe will rise against the monster and rally to the Khan's banner he bears. He may be a commoner now, my darling, but he will not be one for long under those circumstances. The Khan will—"
"I wouldn't touch Toby Long—"
"...at least a duke and probably a sovereign prince. He is, of course, greatly smitten with you!"
Lisa almost fell off her stool, having to grab at the edge of the stone table for balance. "He is what? Mother, he is the most insulting man I have ever met. He snaps at me, treats me like a child, orders me around. I assure you he likes me no better than I like him, which means utter revulsion. Repugnance!"
Her mother chuckled. "You think so? You should see the way he looks at you. Oh, Lisa, I know longing when I see it, and he craves you mightily. If he seems a little brusque at times, then that is merely because he is struggling to contain his feelings. Realizing how far above his own station you are, he is being careful not to embarrass you by revealing his great affection and desire. His worship must be unspoken and distant. Understand the strain this places on his self-control."
Awrrk!
Lisa drew a very deep breath. "He told me himself that he is celibate because he has no choice in the matter. When I said ox, I meant ox!"
The countess knew what that word meant, and her fair cheeks colored. "I doubt it very much! If he suffered an injury of that, um, description, then the story would be general knowledge. Your Master Campbell has a reputation as a libertine and lecher, but Sir Tobias's is above reproach."
Oh, worse yet! Humiliation! "You have been making inquiries?"
"Certainly. Women of the lower sort have thrown themselves in his path and he, er..."
"Steps over them?"
"Exactly. Are you quite sure of your own feelings in the matter, dearest? I have seen how you, in turn, regard Constable Longdirk when you believe you are unobserved. He is, of course, a magnificent figure of manhood, Hercules himself. Any young girl can be forgiven a certain fascination with such an Atlas."
"Atlas?" Lisa said hoarsely. "Don't you mean Grendel? That side of beef? Let me tell you, Mother, that all his stupid posturing as comandante is going to end very shortly. Even Hamish admits that he was lucky at Trent—that he was only elected commander because they couldn't agree on anyone else. And now the Khan has sent one of his sons to rally the opposition, so that problem will not arise again. Prince Sartaq will appoint a suzerain, and the suzerain will send Toby Longdirk packing, right back to the Highland bog he crawled out of in the first place!"
Even those harsh words failed to ruffle her mother's maniacal serenity. "Will he really? Princes don't discard warriors who win wars, Lisa, they promote them. I think," she added, fixing her daughter with a reproving eye, "that you had better face up to cold reality, dearest. Everyone is now talking as if your father is dead, which legally may be true. Under English law an underage heiress becomes a ward in chancery, and Tartar law or Florentine law won't be much different."
Lisa opened and closed her mouth a few times... "Or even the laws of chivalry," Blanche continued. "As heir to the throne of England you are a ward of your father's overlord, the Khan, or his suzerain, or perhaps this darughachi prince. One of them, certainly. Not the Florentine courts, I hope. Whichever it turns out to be, he will choose a husband for you."
This was ghastly! Even Hamish had never mentioned anything so grim. Talking Mother into something was a matter of persistence and hard work. Tartar princes might be much less malleable. "Mother...?"
"You bring a kingdom as dowry, dear. If the Khan wishes to confer royalty on a commoner, the easiest way is to marry him to a queen, you understand? Now the outstanding military figure in Europe at the moment is Sir Toby. I foresee a great future for Longdirk."
"Foresee anything you like for him as long as you don't include me in it!"
"Lisa, Lisa! Don't deceive yourself. Oftentimes we foolish women fail to understand our own desires. Many a highborn maiden has fallen in love with a man of inferior social station and exaggerated his rough qualities in her own mind to deny the stirrings in her breast. A certain amount of animal sensuality is a virtue in a man, alarming though it may seem to a virgin. I remember how terrified I was when my own parents informed me that they had chosen a man barely older than myself to be my husband. I quite—"
"No! No! No!" Lisa clapped her hands over her ears and fled howling from the courtyard.
CHAPTER THREE
Although the banquet had lasted late into the night, Toby had been out riding Smeòrach since before dawn. Between times he had slept, but poorly—too many things to do, too much to think about. Drumming had wakened him. He heard drumming often now, and the fact that others did not made it no less real to him. He was convinced that the darughachi had set shamans to spy on him, but if the Tartars could do that, then so could the Fiend's hexers. It was past time he found a replacement for Maestro Fischart.
Dusty and bleary-eyed, he strode into the courtyard. Hamish was there already with a pile of reports and correspondence. He looked up and frowned. "Did you come to bed at all?" At times he mothered Toby infuriatingly.
"You were asleep. And still snoring when I left." Toby sat on a stool and enjoyed a long yawn. The one bright note in the morning was that the Company had money again and could hold a pay parade at long last. He leaned his arms on the stone table and scowled at the heap of paper. "What bullguts have you got for me today?" He took a harder look at that face he knew so well and spoke more gently. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. There's a letter in from—"
"Tell me."
Hamish sighed crossly and laid a pottery paperweight on the heap, although there was no wind. "You tell me what you think of Lisa."
A tiny demon of temptation told Toby to scream at the top of his voice, grab Master Campbell up by the throat, and wave him like a flag. Here they were preparing for a war that would decide the fate of Europe for centuries to come and his chief helper and closest friend—his only friend—was obsessed by an animal fire in his crotch. A fire that could never cook anything. Why couldn't he lust after some two-lire bawd who would drag him into the bushes and quench the blaze for him? Twenty minutes' rollick and he would be the old Hamish again, at least for a day or two.
Lisa? Toby scratched his unshaven jaw. "If you like statuesque blondes, she's one of the greatest beauties you'll ever meet. She has a wit like a whip, a mind like a rapier, and nerves of steel. She is also totally spoiled, completely self-centered, and as devious as an Italian. Not," he added, seeing the storm clouds roiling in Hamish's eyes, "that she can be blamed for all that. It goes with the royal blood. She had a bizarre upbringing, and her mother is nine-sixteenths madder than a March hare. As a king's wife she'd be magnificent, but never as a ruler in her own right. Not for another ten years anyway. I can't imagine her grinding meal or milking the goat. Why do you ask?"
The storm clouds had not dispersed. "Her mother thinks you are in love with her."
&nb
sp; Toby said, "Oh, demons!" under his breath.
"You do not deny it?"
"I have told you what I think of her. If I could have dreams, old friend, they might well include a Lisa in them."
"She says you make eyes at her." Hamish bared his teeth. "Her mother is plotting to marry Lisa to you! You are going to destroy Nevil's army, reconquer Europe, marry Lisa, and become King of England."
If a ditch-born bastard was a suitable match for the future queen, then why wasn't a schoolmaster's son? Toby was aware that Queen Blanche had taken to smiling at him excessively. He snapped at both her and her daughter as much as he could to keep them away. Apparently that strategy was not working.
"She's even madder than I thought. Marry? I don't dare even smile at a girl, you know that!"
His suffering friend was not convinced. "Are you sure? How long since you lost control of the hob? It didn't escape you even at the Battle of Trent. If you can stay master in a turmoil like that, with gramarye and demons loose, then you can stay master anywhere!"
Toby sighed, shaking his head. "Believe me, it's different. I know." He shuddered, remembered the dozens of innocent people who had died in Mezquiriz. "Remember Jacques, at Montserrat, who tried to be a saint and failed that test? He started with an elementary, not a hob, and yet it became a demon." It had taken most of him with it when it was exorcised, and left a human cabbage. "Have you bedded her yet?"
"No!" Hamish glowered at the papers on the table.
"Do you plan to?"
Without looking up, Hamish mumbled, "You think I couldn't? If I wanted?"
"Sorry. Yes, she's lovely. If I give her sheepdog looks behind her back, then I'm sorry about that, too. I didn't know I was doing it. I probably ogle lots of women—didn't you tell me once that that was why men's heads could turn?" Briefly Toby considered ordering his chancellor to report to the camp brothel, but discretion prevailed. His troubles were too serious to cure that way. "Old friends should not squabble over a prize that neither of them can ever hope to win."
He ought to be more sympathetic. Things were easier for him, who was forever denied love. Time had dulled the pain of Jeanne and that terrible night in Mezquiriz, and yet he still dreamed of her sometimes. He wakened weeping.
"It does seem irrational." Hamish was too upset to smile. "It's the thought that she's going to have to marry someone, and probably very soon. Demons, Toby, I'm crazy about her! I've never felt like this about a woman, never. At times I want to burst out laughing, yelling, 'Lisa loves me!' so the whole world can know. And then I remember that some man is going to drag her off to bed to breed a pack of royal brats, and I want to kill myself. It's driving me insane! I can't eat or sleep or think straight." He pounded his fists on the table.
Man chooses woman, woman accepts man, society forbids the match—it happened all the time, but that made it no less tragic.
"Flea farts! You slept like a millstone last night. You're also doing the work of three men and managing to squire Lisa at the same time. Let's get started here. What have..." A flash of movement on the roof of the villa...
"What?" Hamish looked where Toby was looking.
"My keeper is back."
Hamish's eyes grew almost as wide as the owl's. It was a white owl, a large one, staring fixedly at them. "It's the same one. Can you hear drumming now?"
"No. Can you?"
"No."
This was new. Drumming with no owl, yes, but never owl without drumming.
Before Hamish could comment further, Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo came striding out of the villa with a couple of squires at his heels. He paused long enough to wave them away before advancing on the table like a stalking leopard. What would he say to tales of invisible drummers? He probably heard them all the time, and bugles, too. Toby and Hamish rose and bowed.
He sat down without inviting them to. He was even more resplendent than usual in a dazzling new military doublet that Toby had not seen before; he had his silver helmet on his head and carried his captain-general's baton. Although his blue eyes shone inhumanly bright, he did not seem especially mad this morning, neither angry nor crazy. Time would tell.
"I want an explanation for that scene yesterday! You told me that Marradi had put his villa at your disposal."
Toby met his glare squarely. "He did, senor. I suspect his sister bears me a grudge, and the problem is of her devising."
"The word in Florence is that the duchessa has sworn to have your hide for a rug and certain other parts of you as paperweights."
"I have done nothing to provoke her enmity."
"Obviously doing nothing was the trouble. Demons have no fury like a woman scorned, Constable." The don's smirk implied that he had not made the same mistake and his information had been collected firsthand, which was certainly possible.
Hamish was scrabbling in his papers. "A note arrived from Il Volpe this morning, Captain-General. He apologizes for the misunderstanding. The meeting may proceed at Cafaggiolo as planned."
All very fine, but a private apology would not begin to undo the damage of that very public snub.
"Typical republican stupidity!" said the don. "Never apologize, under any circumstances."
Hamish had not finished. "There is also a note from podestà Origo. He says that the prince has absolutely forbidden any meetings until he arrives in Florence. He does not say when that will be."
"Sometimes republicans don't seem so bad," Toby remarked glumly. "Does the idiot think the war will wait on his pleasure?"
After a tense silence, the don said, "Who was coming?"
Toby had been trying to keep the don and the proposed meeting well apart, but he could not refuse his nominal superior information when he asked for it, especially after the brilliant save the man had improvised in the loggia yesterday. He passed the question to Hamish.
"There was a letter in last night from Rome. The College will send Captain-General Villari. That's everyone we invited! Ercole Abonio from Milan—and he's bringing di Gramasci of the Black Lances. The Stiletto from Venice. Mezzo will come if his health improves; otherwise he'll send Gioberti or Desjardins."
The don raised aristocratic eyebrows. "Mezzo?"
"Paride Mezzo, collaterale of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." No one but Hamish ever bothered to use that formal name for Naples. He just liked the sound of it. "We were about to invite the small guns: Verona, Bologna, Genoa—"
"Bah! They don't matter. They do what Milan and Venice and Florence tell them, and those three have no choice but to cooperate."
"They have some very competent soldiers," Toby protested.
"We do not need advice." From the don, that we was a remarkable concession, unless he had just taken to classifying himself as royalty. "The keys are Naples and Rome—Naples because it has the men, and Rome because it has the hierocracy for hexers. It also has to let the Neapolitans march through. Get those two into the coalition, and we may have a chance. At least we'll bloody the foe. The Swiss?"
"We can try. They're as biddable as cats."
"I assume that the real purpose of the orgy was to get you elected comandante?"
"Would be nice," Toby admitted. "But I do want to discuss strategy. We need to plan how to resist the invasion. We can't know where until we know which way Nevil's coming."
"Make up your mind, Constable. If you want to be elected jefe, then you bring in every little town that can field a pikeman. They'll all vote for you because Florence is less of a threat than any of the other four, but they'll never agree on anything else. If you need to decide whose crops are going to get burned, then you leave them out, all of them." Whatever illusions Don Ramon pursued, he was never stupid. He had a much better grasp of politics than he normally cared to admit.
"Another thing we must talk about is gramarye," Toby said. "We don't have a single hexer, and I've heard that the College is being absurdly uncooperative. If all the senior condottieri unite to appeal to Rome, then perhaps the hierocracy will bend a little."
"What need have you of hexers if you have one good shaman?"
Toby had registered Hamish's slack-jawed astonishment a split second before that new voice at his back spun him around.
A bizarre figure came limping across the courtyard toward them. It was short and completely enveloped in a floating costume of many colors and many parts—panels and swatches in green and brown and gray, bedecked with ribbons and lace, beads and embroidery, bunches of feathers and wisps of grass, a design that was either completely random or fraught with great meaning. Some parts of it looked new, others were grubby and worn by many years of use. The dainty, pointed chin suggested a woman, but she might be a young girl, or even a boy. Her hair and the upper part of her face were hidden by a blindfold and an elaborate headdress. Around her neck hung a drum as large as a meal sieve, which she steadied against her hip with one small brown hand.
Obviously she had just come out of the villa, but how had she passed the guards in there? How had she even entered the camp unchallenged? The hob was not reacting as it did to gramarye. Was this one of the camp brats playing a joke?
To his credit, the don remained on his stool. A slight narrowing of his eyes was the only sign of tension as he crossed his legs and leaned back to rest his elbows on the table. "And who might you be?"
She smiled, revealing a perfect set of sparkling white teeth. "Are you not in need of a hexer?" Her voice had a singsong accent and a curious huskiness. "And are you not all faithful children of His Splendor the Khan, who has sent his son to direct you? Who doubts that the illustrious prince has sent his personal shaman to be your guide and protector against the demons of the foe?"
Toby did, but he bowed. Hamish just glowered.
The don frowned. "A battlefield is not a fit place for a woman!"
"Who is it a fit place for?"
For a moment he bristled at such heresy, then twirled up his mustache, which was usually a sign of amusement. He rose gracefully and bowed. "Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo at your service, madonna."
"And I am Toby Longdirk."
