It was enough. He was tired of them.

  “We will wait,” he said. “Do nothing yet. Send to Mylasia to find out what we can about how the Beast was killed. We still don’t know.”

  He enjoyed saying “the Beast” instead of Uberto.

  Men called Teobaldo Monticola the Wolf of Remigio, but that was different. It spoke to prowess in battle, not vicious ugliness. His uncle had warned him to be cautious with the lords of Acorsi and Remigio, while working to curb them. They didn’t have significant power, their cities were too small—not like Seressa or Macera (which was a threat under the Ripoli), or the emerging greatness of his own beloved Firenta—but the two men had large and loyal armies. They also hated each other, for reasons no one seemed especially precise in explaining. Something in the past.

  You could hate someone for reasons you’d forgotten, the High Patriarch thought. Out of habit, as much as anything.

  In fact, he still believed it might well be best if they were allowed to fight each other. One would win, or they both might die . . . ? There were other capable leaders of armies in Batiara, surely. A younger generation, as he was of a younger generation. Perhaps he could even claim control of one of their cities for Rhodias. Or both!

  This was a game, Scarsone thought. Yes, people died in the playing, but that always happened, didn’t it—and didn’t it tend to be the unimportant? He thought he might enjoy this game. In due course. For the moment, there were other amusements.

  “That is my decision,” he said. “We wait. You are dismissed.”

  The two of them stood. Kindly enough, he added, “We will speak again on this.”

  They bowed and walked out, damply.

  “Am I also dismissed?” the woman beside him asked, affecting an aggrieved tone. The High Patriarch of Jad laughed aloud. He splashed her. She splashed him back, which was startling and delightful.

  * * *

  Sometime before this, back in the heat of summer in Acorsi, which was inland and lacked a port and the moderating influence of the sea, Folco Cino, lord of that city, had been in the chambers of his lady wife Caterina at day’s end, admiring her, which he often did.

  Her maid was brushing the lady of Acorsi’s unbound hair, which was still reddish and lustrous, despite her being no longer young and with four children birthed alive. It would be scented after brushing, with musk and clove powder. Red hair was a trait in the Ripoli, men and women. So was the arrogance that came with a dukedom in Macera now, even if it had been bought by her brother at staggering cost from the Holy Jaddite Emperor, who always needed money and claimed the power to dispense titles.

  Caterina, gazing at herself in a mirror set in a frame studded with pearls, said to her husband, whom she loved, “If anything happens to her, I shall leave you for a retreat. You are warned.”

  An old conversation, this one. Folco, who was notorious for his fidelity to his wife, cleared his throat, nodded towards the servant (his wife saw this in the mirror), and said, “I live in a state of being warned by you for something or other.”

  They did not name the person being referred to. It wasn’t necessary.

  “I don’t like it,” said Caterina.

  “I know. She knows. Her parents don’t like it either, and no cleric in Batiara would. Should she be given in marriage, then? Or choose a retreat? Your brother can buy her a First Daughter position anywhere he wants, and perhaps save his soul in the process.”

  “She wouldn’t be likely to stay, and Arimanno’s soul needs more than that.”

  “Exactly so,” said the lord of Acorsi. “So why are we discussing this again?”

  “Because she doesn’t have to live in so much danger,” said his wife.

  She still hadn’t turned around. There were earrings, rings, and a necklace on the table before her. She would put them on before rising, she never went out of these rooms unadorned. She was charitable, brilliantly clever, and loved jewellery.

  “The same danger as my cousin Aldo, or Coppo, or anyone serving me,” her husband said.

  “Folco, she isn’t your cousin Aldo, nor is she Coppo Peralta!”

  “No. But she’s as good. My love, I’m not just saying this. She can’t wield a sword or go to war with me, but in almost every other way Adria is one of the best weapons I have.”

  “A weapon,” said his wife. She noted that he’d said the name now.

  “She wants to be a weapon,” he said. It really was an old debate.

  “She wants your approval. Your love, in fact. Indeed, if I died she would—”

  “Stop,” he said, a different tone.

  Caterina looked at her husband in the mirror. She saw him look away, wincing. She did stop.

  “You are not,” said Folco d’Acorsi quietly, “permitted to die before me. I have told you this.”

  “Permitted,” she mocked—or tried to, but failed.

  He said, after a silence, “Caterina, there are men and women who are marked or who mark themselves for different lives. Adria is one of those. We know it. Her father also does, even if against his will. It is why she’s here, not in Macera, not entering a marriage that could affect Batiara. I am trying—with your permission—to give her that different life for a time, before it will have to change. To respect what she’s shown us all that she wants. My love, on some of those paths, at moments along them, it might become dangerous. But it is still her choice, and she’s not a child.”

  She looked at him in the mirror, which was extremely expensive, gold, those pearls on its border.

  “Very well, but promise me—”

  “I cannot,” he said.

  * * *

  • • •

  THREE MONTHS LATER, the dry heat broken, autumn upon them, grapes being harvested outside the city walls, he came to his wife again in her rooms. A morning this time, the sun just risen, the hills through an open-shuttered window vivid with colour—russet and red and gold.

  She was in a robe, reading a letter from her sister-in-law. The maid was laying out the first of the day’s clothes.

  He said, briskly, “Good morning. I must leave, my love. Six men with me. There are matters that need my attention. We will hunt and . . . deal with what emerges.”

  “Only six?”

  “No more required. This is not war. I will send messages, as ever.”

  She looked at him from her chair. Her eyes were a pale green, memorably so. Caterina Ripoli was one of the aristocratic beauties of their time. It was a marriage that had honoured him greatly, for services done Macera as its mercenary commander for years. She had—unusually—been given the opportunity by her father to decline. She had not done so.

  “Come back to me,” she said. “Do not die.”

  She always said that.

  “I can’t die yet. I have too many sins unexpiated to be allowed Jad’s light.”

  “Indeed. And what will you do about those sins?”

  “Am I not doing? The sanctuary we are building?”

  “Ah. That. The noise destroys my mornings.”

  “We all make sacrifices for faith,” he said, grinning.

  He was an ugly man, in truth—a missing eye, a scar, a hooked, raptor’s nose—but his smile was a life-enhancing thing. Men and women loved him. She, first among all, responding to his own love for her, from the start and to this day.

  He bent and kissed his wife, and left.

  This happened ten days before Adria Ripoli, posing as a farm girl outside Mylasia, received a visitor from the palace there, bearing clothing, and instructions that on the next night she would be taken to attend upon the count. There would be, she was informed, a generous reward. Should she not be present when the escort came, the farmhouse would be set on fire and she and her aunt and uncle would be found and killed, wherever they went.

  Coppo Peralta, who had been watching over her for Folco since the summer, also under an assumed identity inside Mylasia, had known a summons was coming.

  The neighbours by that farmhouse were being observed by others who had come south with him. The younger son from the nearest farm had been followed into the city several days before. He’d been alone—and without goods for market. It wasn’t a market day.

  He’d gone to the palace guard by the main entrance, unusual for a farmer. He had been seen speaking to a captain there. Then he’d turned around and left the city, without doing anything else at all.

  Folco had told Coppo, back in Acorsi, that someone was likely to do this. It was at the heart of their plan. Coppo had asked if he could kill whichever man this turned out to be, but it had been made clear to him that this was not permitted. Not until after, at any rate.

  It might take time for the next steps to commence within Uberto’s palace, but not that much time, and Folco’s men were always told by him to be ahead of events, not chasing them. A message to Acorsi took at least four days at this time of year. Coppo sent a man north that same day. Then he went to the sanctuary he preferred in Mylasia, to pray.

  If this was beginning, finally, they surely needed someone to beseech holy Jad for safety and success, and Coppo was the likeliest among them. He spoke his prayers at least twice a day every day of his life, in a sanctuary whenever possible, to honour his mother and his god.

  Coppo had two men with him, plus the one from Mylasia who had agreed to assist them here, for a price. One of these he stationed by the western gate, and so they did know when courtiers from the palace rode out towards the farm. They would want a look at Adria. Folco had told him this would happen—and her, of course. She was old for Uberto, and too tall, but she was lithe, with splendid auburn hair. Folco had had no doubt she’d be invited to come to the Beast at night.

  Coppo had his own thoughts on Adria’s appeal: modest, he’d have called it himself, but he’d admit if pressed that his resistance to her was partly his response to how unnatural it was for a woman of high birth (for any woman!) to live the life she was living with them.

  It was not proper, in his view, either in the world or in the sight of Jad. Still, she was as unyielding as any soldier Folco had, and Coppo had never heard her complain, or refuse a task, or do it less well than . . . well, than Coppo himself, if you excepted feats of strength and weaponry. She also rode better than any of them. It was irritating but undeniable.

  And, truthfully, Coppo doubted he’d have been brave enough to take on a role such as the one she was to play: alone at night in the chambers of the count of Mylasia, intending to kill him and escape.

  Coppo was responsible for that escape once she got outside the palace. In fact, after a deeply unsettling interview with the lady Caterina back in Acorsi, the afternoon before he and Adria and the others had set out in early summer, he understood that his responsibilities extended to his own survival.

  “If my niece does not come back,” that lady had said, receiving him in her chambers, “I will arrange for our new Esperañan to poison you. I thought, in fairness, you’d want to be aware of this.”

  Fairness? It was entirely unfair, Coppo had thought, given that this scheme to lay claim to Mylasia was Folco’s, with Adria’s agreement and approval, and Coppo was merely there to assist—and he didn’t even like it!

  What made it even more unfair was that whatever his personal judgment with respect to the desirability of Adria Ripoli, there were no limits—at all—as to how beautiful he thought her aunt, his commander’s wife.

  He was embarrassed in her presence, only a maidservant in the room with them, to find himself remembering certain night thoughts he’d recently had concerning the lady of Acorsi.

  And now she was threatening him with death! At the hands of a scented Esperañan who clearly preferred men to women. Coppo would never, ever say a word against anything his commander did—he loved Folco, he would die for him—but in his own view of the world and the proper actions of brave men, you fought on a battlefield with swords so you could meet the gaze of anyone you killed. He even disliked bows and guns, and he hated the new field cannons.

  Still, and always, there was no one like Folco in the world, and if he was employing these tactics—including this never-a-soldier poisoner from the west—then Coppo Peralta would do everything he could to assist. He’d risk his soul.

  To the woman that summer day, the elegant, green-eyed figure who slipped into his dreams, he said only, in a rush of words, “If I fail my lord—or you, my lady—I will deserve any punishment you visit upon me, including death.”

  He was a soldier, a big man, unhappy in rooms like this, not a courtier, never that. He had no ease in him, he was fidgety and awkward speaking to her. Being with her in this room, her room. But he meant every word.

  She looked at him, seemed to look right into him. She said gravely, “How perfect you are. How does he find and hold you all? Go. Go do whatever your lord requires. Bring her back.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HE WAS TRYING to bring her back—but she’d been knifed in the thigh, and was bleeding heavily. They didn’t dare stop, however, not before achieving some distance from Mylasia. That had been made clear to him by Folco before they’d come south.

  Actually, one stop she’d insisted upon, before they’d gone far enough at all. She’d made him hand her the small pouch he’d carried here, given by the Esperañan back in Acorsi. She did something to her mouth, still on horseback, with the contents of a vial she took from the pouch. Coppo didn’t ask questions. Some things you didn’t need to know.

  What he did know was that Adria had done what they’d come here to do. Chaos would descend on Mylasia in the morning, even tonight, and that meant people were going to be killed. It might or might not impede any search for the girl who’d assassinated the count and escaped through a window into the square, somehow eluding the guards there. Those guards would be interrogated about that. How had she avoided them? Had they assisted her? Coppo suspected they were all dead men.

  The large question was, who would take control now in the city? Folco had designs in that regard, but it would take time to see if they could be realized. Their own Acorsi, lovely as it was, had no port. Mylasia did. Ports were good things to have. That was the reason for all of this. And Coppo and Adria had been given orders not to linger anywhere near Mylasia.

  They were going to have to stop fairly close, however, because the first night’s riding had made it clear to him that he’d be killing Adria Ripoli if they didn’t find her treatment soon.

  He’d caught her once sliding off her horse. He’d ordered a halt then, in an olive grove, much too exposed this time of year, even at night. He looked at her leg in the dark (no torches) and he felt as much as he saw how it was bleeding. He put a fresh cloth in the wound, and tied it, but that would only do so much. She needed it cleaned and salved and wrapped, she was losing too much blood. She was also shivering now.

  Leone, who had elected to leave Mylasia and come with them, after being the one to scale the palace wall and plant the spike and rope, said he had heard of a healer in a hamlet ahead of them. Coppo was frightened and unhappy but he didn’t see a choice. He told Leone to take them there. Sometimes all you could do was pick the least bad thing. It took the rest of the night and all the next day, they didn’t get there till sundown.

  It was a terrible ride. They had to stay off any decent roads in the daytime, could not allow themselves to be seen too readily. Four people on good horses? Of course that would be talked about! But neither could they wait for another nightfall. Adria wouldn’t last so long.

  On the way, riding beside her whenever the paths or trails were wide enough, Coppo thought about the moment he’d seen her come out from the palace, through that low doorway behind bushes and a thorn tree. There had been a man with her. Not part of the plan. He’d thought he’d have to kill that one, until he saw that she was being supported by him.

  He moved towards the two of them, cautiously, and realized how badly she was hurt. He swore. He tried not to do that, generally. It was impious.

  He heard her say, to this other one, “You did not have to do this.”

  “I know,” the man said. “Call me a fool. I’ll accept it.”

  “I can do that,” Adria said. He knew that tone from her, though her voice was weak. Then she said, “Do you want to come? With us?”

  Coppo blinked. What? What was she—

  “I’d be very happy to stay with you,” this man said quietly. It was too dark to see him clearly. A pause, then the man went on, “But honour demands I remain here.”

  “Why?” Adria asked.

  “Morani. I have to try to protect him.”

  “You are not likely to be able to do that,” Adria said.

  “There’s no way he could have been aware of the poison.”

  This man knew much too much, Coppo thought, really alarmed now.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Adria said flatly. “He let me in.”

  Enough, Coppo Peralta decided. He strode up to them. They both startled, then Adria saw it was him.

  “Coppo!” she said. “Jad is good, after all.”

  “He is,” Coppo agreed, making the sign of the sun disk. “You did it?”

  “I did,” she said. “But I am . . . I will have trouble riding, I fear.”

  “I doubt she can,” the other man said. “Have you another plan? A boat?”

  They didn’t have another plan. And who was this to be talking that way?

  “Nothing for you here,” Coppo said brusquely. “I thank you for helping her. We’ll deal with this now.”

  Adria hadn’t yet moved away from this man. She still had an arm around his neck. Now she removed it, awkwardly. She said, “You saved my life. I will not forget this encounter.”

  “Nor I,” he said. “Pray for me.”

  “I’m not good at that. I’ll get Coppo to do it.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43