“Very well. See that you pierce some of our enemy on the morrow.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“Follow the line for your bowl of stew, and see that you bed down for the night over there, with the others.” He pointed a threatening finger at us. “No revelry for my troops this night. Only rest. Understood?”
We nodded and moved, trying not to rush and give away our desire to escape him. We stood in line for half an hour to receive our big ladle of watery stew, then sat down to eat it. It was bland, tasteless, but we made ourselves eat it anyway, knowing we’d need the strength. I covertly stared across the fire, counting the men within my line of vision. There were more than a hundred in this circle, and there were nine others like it—with more men beyond in makeshift camps. Somehow we’d landed in a group of pros, mercenaries eager to enter another fight. More than a thousand here…
My heart stopped for a second and then pounded painfully.
What if this wasn’t the only camp? How many more men fought for Firenze?
“Wait here,” I murmured to Lia. I rose, stretched, and ambled toward the latrines. Just before I reached them, I veered left and moved behind the noblemen’s tents, then between two, testing the boundaries. No one stopped me.
Lia fell in step beside me. I sighed, seeing her bare feet beside mine. “I told you to stay back there,” I said lowly.
“You need me,” she returned.
We passed the crimson tent, the color eerily reminding me of the Paratores. But Lord Paratore was vanquished. Released from Siena’s prison, yes, in exchange for a hundred of Siena’s. But without a home. Honor. Or ears.
Marcello believed it likely he was ostracized from noble company, even banished from Firenze-held lands.
Unless…
I paused at the empty tent doorway, where I’d seen two nobles leaning over a map. It still sat there, but there was no one else in sight.
“Gabi.”
“Go to the side, between the tents,” I whispered over my shoulder. “Keep watch.”
I was inside, blinking in surprise at my own stupid bravery. Focus, Gabi, focus. Two candles burned on a side table beside a narrow bed. I turned and released the rope that held the tent door to one side. It swung across the empty space and stilled, giving me a crazy sense of safety. I grabbed the candles and went to the map.
The first thing I saw in the corner made me want to throw up.
Prepared for Lord Cosmo Paratore.
He was here. Somehow, he was here.
He’d marshaled enough support to come, undoubtedly to try to regain his name, if not his land. I didn’t know those two guys who’d been in here earlier, but it wouldn’t take much for Lord Paratore to identify me or Lia, disguised or not.
I shuddered, remembering his accusation. They’re not who they say they are! And my order, to cut off his ears…
Gabi, this is important. It was my own voice but deep and demanding. Different, somehow. And yet known.
I focused on Paratore’s pen and corked ink well on the desk. He’d been here, writing. I shook my head as if I could shake out the scary memories of the man as easily as water from my ears.
I reached out trembling hands and leaned down on the table to force myself to study the map, feeling the seconds pass with each pound of my heart. Clearly, I was looking at Siena’s and Florence’s territories. I could see the jagged line of the border. I could see the Roman road we had traveled to get here, the camp, marked with an indigo-inked star. “Firenze’s finest,” I muttered.
Across the valley from us was an indigo square, just between the border and Castello Paratore and Castello Forelli. There, the border line had been changed, hatched out, moved to denote the lands won that night last summer. Along the border, there were four others. Sienese troops assembling, I guessed.
I frowned and my eyes returned to Castello Paratore and Castello Forelli. Except on this map, Castello Forelli had been renamed Castello Rossi. And lands far beyond Forelli borders had been shaded in and labeled Rossi too.
Was it an error? A shiver of foreboding ran down my back.
My frown deepened as I forced my eyes beyond the name.
There were five squares.
There were seven stars. Three more were among them, drawn with a finer line and a date: 21 Sept.
September twenty-first. I counted back, trying to figure out what day it was now.
The twentieth, best I could guess. So, if I was reading this right, four thousand more soldiers would be on the border come tomorrow.
Men passed by, laughing and shouting. I straightened, easing a dagger from the back of my roped waistband. But they moved on, and I forced myself to take a deep breath and study the map again.
Arrows pointed to the two stars on either end and swept around, through Umbria and Lazio—the traitorous neighbors—coming around and behind Siena’s men. These were dated 22 Sept.
Was Siena prepared for this onslaught? How could they know what was soon upon them?
I frowned at the map, trying to make better sense of it. Four of the stars were in deep forest; apparently they intended to sneak through the trees. Could a thousand men at a time truly remain hidden? With scouts out?
I knew these hills, and her forest, knew how dense the trees could be in places. Yeah, I reluctantly admitted, it’s possible. If they didn’t light fires. Which they might just be dedicated enough to do.
My eyes went back to the lighter-colored stars. The twenty-first. September twenty-second, the following day.
Fortino and Romana’s wedding date.
The last day of the temporary peace treaty. The day all of Siena had been poised to celebrate and rejoice.
A symbolic moment to take back what Firenze and Paratore believed was stolen from them. And by the looks of this map, much more…They were gunning for five castles on the outer borders, Castello Forelli among them. Did they have aid from within? Was Lord Rossi truly a traitor?
I heard voices coming my way. This time straight on.
Lia whistled the first few notes of a top-ten hit from the twenty-first century. Hurriedly, I grabbed a candle and tried to set it back on the side table, but it was flimsy, and collapsed. The candle tipped toward the side of the tent, a brown spot appearing almost instantly. Flame caught and raced upward.
They were at the door. I had no choice but to cut my way out.
I used my dagger to jab into the back of the tent, then dragged it down. It stuck on a seam, only a foot long when I heard a man shout. “You there—thief!” He paused. “Fire! Fire!” he screamed.
I glanced back and met his eyes.
He stared at me. Paratore.
Belatedly, I turned away. I was sure my clothes confused him, but he’d seen me, looked into my eyes. I rammed the knife down, through the seam and dived through, wondering if he would grab my ankles as I did so.
But the fire was spreading too fast, already licking down the back of the tent too, keeping him away.
“Stop them!” Lord Paratore cried. “Out back! Stop them!”
Lia pulled me the rest of the way out, her eyes wide. We rushed away. “What’d you do?” she said with a groan.
“I couldn’t help it, I—”
“Stop!” cried a man behind us, three, almost four tents away now. “You two, halt!”
We looked at each other. It wasn’t like we were going to be able to outrun him. He’d call down the entire camp on us. Slowly, we turned. It was one of the noblemen from the tent, one who had been there earlier. I could tell from the tunic.
“Let me see your hands!”
We put them out before him. I scanned the crowd behind him. Others were being searched. Most stared at the burning tents, the peasants laughing behind their hands.
“Lift up your tunics. Let me see y
our waistbands.”
He wanted to see if we were the Paratore thieves, assuming we’d taken something. But it wouldn’t be a good thing, us lifting our tunics. He might figure out we had hips.
“Fire! Fire!” cried a man, running past us. It was spreading among the tents. Hurriedly, other noblemen and servants were madly collapsing their tents. “Go for water! Down by the river!”
“Do it now!” said the nobleman, drawing his sword. “Let me see your belt!”
I glanced at Lia and nodded once. She turned to him and lifted her tunic, higher than he expected, giving him an eyeful of her flat stomach, a wisp of a belly button, and the graceful curve of hips.
It had the desired effect. His sword tipped to the ground, and his mouth went slightly agape. She stared him in the face, then grinned.
At that moment, I kicked his sword to the ground. He turned in a daze toward me. I pulled back and belted him with my closed fist.
The pain shrieked through my arm, shoulder, neck, and up into my head.
But he spun and went down, just like in the movies.
Others were pausing, looking our way in the odd, flickering light of the tents on fire. Beyond them, Lord Paratore plowed forward, shoving people aside, looking left, just turning toward us…and I could see the red, raw skin where his ear had been.
“Run,” I said to Lia. Her hood was already off, her blond hair streaming behind her. Men stepped aside as we charged toward them, mouths open in surprise.
“You fools!” Paratore cried. “Do you not see the enemies right before you? Catch those two! They are the Ladies Betarrini!”
CHAPTER 18
“Well, that’s not good,” I panted, hearing our name in the air behind us as if it had grown wings and was flying around the camp, shrieking its repetition to everyone it passed. We were the symbol of defeat. The reason they were all here. And now the sole focus of a thousand men.
We jumped from camp and into the woods, holding hands so we didn’t lose each other in the dark. We held our other hands out, guarding against branches that slowed us down, desperately seeking a path. And taking a beating while we did so.
“Here they come,” Lia grunted.
I glanced back. The forest was alive with torches, more arriving by the second.
“Burn them out!” bellowed Paratore.
“Is he insane?” Lia asked in a whisper. “He intends to burn down the forest to kill us?”
“Yeah.”
“Here,” she said. “Come on.” She yanked me to the right, and my tights ripped on a thorny bush.
“Lia. This is my only pair.”
She ignored my weak joke and we rushed on. We found our stride and tore down the path as fast as we could, one in front of the other now. After a while, freaked that they’d find the path too, we cut right and moved through the trees again. Slowly, we were making our way to the border.
I thought. Unless we were getting totally turned around in the woods.
Which was possible, since we were operating by gut instinct and in the total dark. For the thousandth time, I wished I had my cell and its compass app. Or GPS. Yeah, that’d be helpful…
We hit a patch of boulders and immediately started climbing them. Up top, we paused. We could see torches coming our way, but fewer of them. They’d divided up; obviously they didn’t know where we were.
“Which way is south?” I asked Lia, looking up. Here, away from the fires and torchlight, we were again under the blanket of a thousand stars. The Milky Way was more like the Creamy Way in Toscana; you could see her millions of glittering stars so clearly. Stargazing was so good here, in fact, that it made it harder to pick out the major constellations. Fortunately, Mom and Dad had always been big on us getting to know the night skies when we were little, dragging us out in the dark for meteor showers. But that’d been a few years…
“Big Dipper,” she said, speaking behind me. “See it?”
I turned and studied the sky with her. “Got it. So if that’s the North Star off the end, then south is…this way.”
I turned to my right, fighting the feeling that it was the wrong direction. “Right? This is south?” I picked my way down a boulder, tapping my foot out, reaching for the next.
“Right,” she said.
The assurance in her voice calmed my fears a bit. Lia had always had a better sense of direction than I.
We were halfway down the rock face—this side twice as high as the other, obviously some sort of cliff descending into a valley—when we heard voices above, not thirty feet away. They’d caught up to us, impossibly fast. Or we’d been too slow, picking our way down, trying to avoid a total freefall.
We stilled. I squeezed Lia’s hand and let her go so we could each slip into a crevice in the rocks.
“They came through here, m’lord,” said a man, looking down the cliff.
Lord Greco’s tracker. So they’d joined the party too. Super.
“Right here,” said the tracker. “They moved through these boulders and down.”
Man, I hate that dude. What? Can he see a pebble out of place?
Torchlight grew long around us, but we remained in shadow. I found myself thanking God that there was a large boulder directly above us, giving us a bit of overhang.
“Do you truly believe they made it down there?”
“They’ve proven fairly versatile in their capabilities among the rocks and forests, m’lord,” he said. He was coming down.
“True enough. They head toward Sienese lands.”
“We shall cut them off before they reach it.”
That was enough for me. Lia, too, I guess, since she was rising up and drawing an arrow.
“There they are!” cried Lord Greco. “Over here!” he shouted. “Here!”
I groaned inside but began scrambling down the rocks, too fast, scraping my palms and forearms, landing painfully hard on the rock below me when I slid. “Come on, Lia!” I demanded.
“I can hold them off,” she said over her shoulder. “You go.”
“No,” I said, alarmed at her words. “We go together. Come. Come, now.”
She shot one more arrow, and up above, I saw a knight crumple.
“Can’t you get that tracker dude?” I asked, when she reached me. “It’d be handy to get him off our tail.”
“Uh, yeah,” she said, and we slid down to the next rock. “But he’s good. He seems to anticipate my shots.”
“Like any good hunter with his prey,” I said. “That’s just super fantastic.”
We slid down the next rock, and then the next. But when we hit that one, our combined weight seemed to shake it loose from the cliffside and it gave way, striking the next, which dislodged it. “Look out!” I cried.
We were in a rockslide. How far to bottom? I thought, longing for the base to meet our feet. To be sliding, unable to see…How high was this crazy hill? Or were we on a mountain?
I grunted as I hit my injured ribs on another rock.
I didn’t need the stars in the sky. They were dancing in my head, then. Really. I always thought it was just in cartoons, but no—
We hit bottom. Pain ran up my ankles, calves, thighs. I felt a burning tear in the back of my right thigh and collapsed all the way to the ground.
I gasped for breath. “Lia? You okay?” I managed to ask.
“Yeah,” she said, rising. “Other than my feet and hands getting all torn up. Come on. At least we’re ahead of them now. They won’t want to take our express route.” I could tell from the direction of her voice that she was looking up. “But there are more probably coming around the hill,” she said. “We’ve gotta hurry.”
I forced myself to rise on my good leg. Tentatively, I tried my other. I gasped.
“Gabs…”
I pante
d, trying to avoid my sudden desire to cry and not stop. “It’s not good, Lia. When we hit—something happened to my leg. The big muscle in back of my right thigh.”
“Your hamstring?” I could hear the panic in her voice.
“Yeah. Not so good when you’re trying to outrun the bad guys, huh?”
“C’mon,” she said, sliding under my right arm. “Try and keep your weight off of it.”
We limped on for five minutes, now on a small road that seemed to circle the base of the hill. As much as we were making decent time on it, we knew that if those that pursued us were on it too, we’d soon be overtaken. I heard a horse whinny, and Lia looked back over her shoulder.
We dashed into the woods again, but it was slow going. She had to let go of me, the trees were so dense. I was hopping and making too much noise. She cried out once in a while, her bare feet getting cut up by pinecones and sticks and thorns. When we reached a creek, still running a couple inches deep, I sat down and looked up at her. “It’s no use,” I said.
“What?” she asked, turning to face me.
“This is where we split—”
“No, Gabi. No.”
I reached out and took her shoulders. “Listen to me. Listen!”
“No. C’mon. We can’t wait here. They’ll be here any minute!”
“Exactly.”
She stilled.
“What I saw in that tent…we have to get word to Fortino, Lia. They have twice the men that Siena anticipates. I’m sure of it. Tell them thousands are hidden, deep in the forest. They plan to send thousands around on two flanks, through Umbria and Lazio. They intend to strike on Fortino’s wedding day—and take Paratore’s castle back, along with all the other outlying castles. And tell him…tell him that I saw a map that had renamed Castello Forelli as Castello Rossi.” He could figure out what that meant and what to do about it.
“This is not our fight, Gabi,” she said, gripping my arms and shaking me back to the present.
“It is now,” I said. “There’s only one way to change Castello Forelli into Castello Rossi—and Mom will be right in the middle of it.”
She was quiet. We’d seen firsthand what came down when a castle changed ownership. I’d almost died during our last castle takeover.
The River of Time Series Page 47
