Elayne drew a breath, looking up into his dark eyes. They were half-hidden by black lashes, encircled by purpling skin. His fine lips were swollen at one corner, his cheekbone scraped and red. It was not his beauty now that made desire and pain sink down through her.
"Yes," she lied. "I will stay."
* * *
The stallion hadn’t wandered far. She bridled it hurriedly and led it back to where its saddle lay, looking often over her shoulder at the empty doorway. The bags were still tied to the hind-bow; they held a purse of coins, enough to buy food, she hoped, if she couldn’t find a religious house soon. She would be leaving him with nothing but the bread and watered wine.
She heaved the saddle over the stallion’s back in one great effort and pulled up the girth. With a glance over her shoulder, to make certain again that the doorway was empty, she swung herself into the saddle.
As she gathered the reins, she remembered the tuft of Nimue’s white hair that she had saved. Carefully she drew off her glove, to make sure of the keepsake. It was there still, clinging to her palm beneath the ring. Elayne slipped the tuft into a safe corner of one saddlebag. She took a deep breath, frowning fiercely at the horizon. She would not think of Nimue and Margaret and Matteo and the others. She could not.
She started to pull on her glove, and paused. In the soft morning light the engraved ring on her hand gleamed.
With an effort, twisting and rotating it, she tried to remove it from her finger. It was tight about her joint, a painfully close fit over the knuckle. She spit into her hand and worked at it, whimpering in frustration. But she wanted to leave it with him; it didn’t belong to her; she didn’t want to abandon him injured and outlawed and utterly without resource. There was at least gold in the ring. With a painful rush of air through her teeth, she managed to work it off at last.
She hesitated, her finger throbbing from her efforts. She had left him as he was easing back against the saddle, propped up on the lambskin pad with his arm across his forehead. She held the ring in her palm, looking down at it. When she turned it in her hand, she saw for the first time that there were letters engraved on the inner curve as well as the outside. She tilted it to the light.
A vila mon Coeur, it said in French.
A vila mon Coeur. Gardi li mo.
She closed her eyes, curling her fingers tight around the ring, and bowed her head with a whimper of despair. Here is my heart. Guard it well.
EIGHT
"Allegreto," she said.
He had lain in a dead sleep for the whole of the day, propped against the palfrey’s saddle. When she’d returned to the salt house and noisily overturned a heavy tub to sit upon, sending crystals of salt flying across the dirt floor, he hadn’t stirred. It was a little frightening, for she’d never yet known him to fail to wake alert at the slightest sound.
She’d called him "pirate," and shaken his shoulder as evening came on. She had given him a rousing lecture on just how it felt to be abducted and dragged away from all she knew by an assassin and murderer who was afraid to go to Hell. She’d shed tears of hot annoyance and pain as she struggled to push the ring onto her finger again—it was too small, and her joint was inflamed from pulling it off. But she shoved it over her knuckle in spite of how it hurt, and there it was now, hiding his secret words.
He breathed steadily. Untroubled, as if she were on watch over him, like Zafer and Dario. As if he trusted her.
She pulled all of the papers from the saddlebags, but they were only brief letters of introduction to men she’d never heard of, and lists of words that made no sense. The only thing she found of value among them was the contract that betrothed her to Franco Pietro. She’d hardly glanced at it when she’d signed it, but she read it now as if the words were written in flame. Make known that when I give my consent, I will take the most puissant and excellent lord Franco Pietro of Riata and Monteverde to be my wedded husband...
When.
When she gave her consent. It did not say that she gave it yet.
She had no vow to Franco Pietro. In truth, by all that she had ever read of the ecclesiastical courts and marriage suits in the documents that Lady Melanthe had provided for her education, Elayne was not betrothed at all.
She remembered her godmother in fierce negotiation with Lancaster—the long hours of argument over dowries and gold and this paper, while Elayne stared out the window, deaf to it all. She thought of how the pirate had faced Countess Beatrice and smiled at the mention of the contract and its words.
"Allegreto," she said again, because when she called him by that name, his eyelashes flickered a little, and he turned his head and sighed.
It sounded so strange on her tongue.
She didn’t want to become attached to him. She tried to think of Raymond, tried and tried. She loved Raymond. For this pirate, this dark and beaten angel—she felt desire and sin, but not love, or anything like it.
"Allegreto," she said sharply. "Awaken," she said. "The night comes on."
He swallowed and smiled a little, then made a faint groan. He closed one fist, bending his arm upward. "Mary and Jesus," he muttered, without opening his eyes.
He spread his fingers. He closed the other fist, as if testing it, and then he sat up all at once, exhaling sharply.
"God bless," he said, leaning on one arm. "I can scarce move."
"It will be worse tomorrow," Elayne said.
He blinked at her with one eye. The other had swollen shut completely. "What promising news," he uttered, his voice slurred.
She offered him the wine flagon. With a painful effort, he sat up against the saddle and drank. He remained still, staring at the floor for a long time. Elayne ate a few bites of bread and left the rest in the rumpled crown of his hat for him.
"How long since we left Venice?" he asked abruptly.
Elayne frowned, reckoning. "Not yet a full night and day," she said.
He looked up at her, then toward the door, where the reeds and bushes cast long shadows. "The galley—when did it sail?"
"They were drawing anchor as we disembarked it," she said.
He made a soft curse and tried to stand. On the second attempt he made it to his feet with a sound of agony. "We must move on. Without the rendezvous. I’ll have to conjecture what was arranged. But we must be at Val d’Avina before they reach it."
Elayne rose. "Val d’ Avina? Where’s that?"
He gave her an odd look, and a short laugh. "You don’t know? Depardeu, is there nothing they taught you of Monteverde?"
Her eyes widened. "We’re bound for Monteverde?"
"In the mountains," he said. "High up the valley, at the mines." He lifted the wine again and drank deeply. "Zafer and Margaret are bound there also, in guise as Il Corvo and his new bride." He wiped his mouth. "With Franco Pietro hot at their heels, if God wills." He smiled at her, his face an evil mask of bruises. "And I don’t intend to meet your betrothed with honey and sweet affection, of that you may be certain."
* * *
The palfrey paced rhythmically ahead of her, tireless as the leagues and hours fell away. She barely remembered the vellum maps that Lady Melanthe had unrolled, so full of unfamiliar names. But when dawn broke, they were in a rich province of ordered fields and vineyards, of dogs that barked and roads with loaded donkeys and early travelers upon them. She thought these must be the tributary lands that lay between Venice and the mountains of Monteverde. When full day came, she could see a precipice in the far distance, a serrated wall of crags that seemed to spring up from the level horizon like dragon’s teeth against the sky.
They watered the horses and ate without dismounting. Though he pulled the unkempt hunter’s hat down low, people noticed his battered face and blackened eye, offering witty condolences and advice to stay out of street fights. He only returned a hellish grin, shrugging.
His palfrey held the steady pace all the night and full into midday, the sweat darkening its shoulders and neck and flanks, the stallion trailing gamely behi
nd. Just as Elayne was near to begging that they rest the animals, Il Corvo pulled back on the palfrey’s reins and brought it to a halt in the midst of the open road.
The sharp mountains were close now: sheer, jumbled faces of gray rock mantled by dark green brush. And they had begun to seem like mere hills, for beyond them rose peaks such as Elayne had never imagined, massive slopes that faded into clouds and misty distance, robed in green and blue. They were startling, so near to the flat lands of Venice, looming unexpected and majestic.
The pirate made a sound low in his throat, like a man not happily surprised. Here beside the empty road, the neat vineyards had been abandoned to brush and undergrowth. Weeds bloomed in the derelict hayfields and gave way to unkempt ravines.
"This way," he said. He pulled the uncomplaining palfrey onto a smaller track, through a gap in a rotting wicker fence. The overgrown road led down into a heavily wooded vale and then climbed a steep rise.
The palfrey heaved itself up the hill, its head lowered. Elayne let the exhausted stallion follow on a loose rein. As they reached the top, she saw sunlight sparkle ahead through the brush. The view opened suddenly, blindingly...a vast lake, with the sun dazzling across its shimmering surface, a lake so huge that vapor nearly obscured the mountainous shore on the far side. The horses stumbled and lurched down a sharp incline. Their weary hooves sank into pebbly sand. Small waves washed the shoreline, water as crystalline and clear as the Middle Sea, darkening to blue and purple at its heart.
A peninsula ran out from the shore, a low saddle of land thrusting into the lake. At the end of it, like a crown set upon the water, stood a castle—four tall towers and a fifth that surpassed them, strong and beautiful, soaring upward against the mountains and the sky.
A castle—and broken—its crenellated walls breached, its stone harbor torn open, its inner courtyard empty and exposed to the lake’s shimmering reflections.
* * *
The place was deserted, given over to doves and echoes. The towers stood untouched, but no contents had been left within the pale walls. The pirate walked through it silently, without expression. The frescoes on the inner courtyard walls had been spoiled by hammers, the faces of graceful ladies and proud mounted lords hacked and gouged away.
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 as he began to mount the stairs. Elayne took a deep breath and started up after him.
This was a Navona stronghold. It must have been. 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 a door.
She recognized it instantly, though the metal had turned black with age. In relief, the dogs and bear, the shepherd; tarnished but defiant, like the words engraved down the center. Gardi li mo.
He cast a glance at her, a half-smile in the dim reflections. "Do you remember?"
Elayne pressed the first letter. The shepherd’s staff, then the last letter. She reached for the bear. 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. 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’re sure that the galley sailed as we left Venice," he said. "One full day and a half 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 my man here."
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 wasn’t 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."
"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’s 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 aren’t to ride further? Is this Val d’Avina?"
"No, d’Avina is leagues from here yet. But we’ll 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 don’t 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’s maddening!" he said. "I recall arriving in Venice…then nothing. Nothing after. I know what I intended—pray God that’s what was arranged. But I thought we’d be expected here, and Gerolamo had no word."
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 wasn’t violated," she said.
"Yes. 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’s not what I would have expected," she said.
"Did you imagine a torture chamber? He didn’t 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 can’t 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. Perhaps I’ll take you there, hell-cat, in time—and you can light a candle to keep him dead."
For once, she didn’t 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.
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