Thur saw it coming. He dropped back by the smokehouse and snatched up a long billet of wood from the stack alongside.

The younger man swung aboard his horse as the older man grasped the counting Catti by the shoulder and pulled him toward himself. "Here's your payment, Innkeeper." The steel of his dagger flashed in the folds of his cloak, as he stabbed Catti in the stomach.

Catti cried out in pain and astonishment, and stumbled backwards, hands clutching his belly, as the bravo flung him away. The two watching locals started toward him, their reactions slow. The bearded man grinned, dark-mouthed with his missing teeth, and vaulted aboard his horse. His subordinate was already spurring toward the road, yanking the packhorse along. Futilely, Thur flung his billet at the younger Losimon's back with all his strength. It rotated through the air and bounced off the cloak- and doublet-padded man with little effect. Clods of dirt spun up from the horses' hooves as the bravos fled into the gathering shadows.

Thur pelted around the building in their wake, but by the time he reached the front gate, the hoofbeats were only a fading echo in the twilight. Fiametta was standing in the middle of the road amidst the dust hanging in the air, peering south after the vanished horsemen. Her face was drawn, eyes big and dark.

"They stole your father's body," Thur panted. "I couldn't stop them."

"I know. I saw."

"Why? It's madness! They took two hams as well. Surely they don't plan to eat him!"

"On ...," she breathed. Intensity of thought struggled with dismay in her face. "I have a guess. A monstrous guess. He cannot—I have to stop—" She stepped down the road a few paces, fists clenched, as if in a trance.

Thur caught her by the sleeve. "You can't go running down the road by yourself in the middle of the night."

She rotated in his grip, looking across to the pasture and the dim glimmer of her white horse among Pico's mules. "Then I'll ride."

"No!"

She stared at him, brows lowering. Her eyes flamed. "What?"

"I'll go. Tomorrow." And, as her breath drew in angrily, he added hastily, "We'll both go."

She hesitated. Her hands uncurled. She stared around into the vast uncertain darkness. Her shoulders slumped. "I don't know what to ... how to ... yes. You're right. Very well." Looking stunned, she turned to follow him back into the inn.

The uproar in the inn was augmented by two families of refugees from Montefoglia who arrived just as the wounded Catti was carried indoors by the big blond Swiss and the locals. The chaos did not the down till Catti's wife returned, fetched by a breathless neighbor. Fiametta hung back uncertainly, as the woman who had been kind to her bustled within. But Madonna Catti, though she frowned deeply, spoke no blame. Instead she drafted Fiametta's aid, carrying and arranging bedding, water, and washbasins for the mob of new guests while she tended to her husband. She emerged from her bedroom several times, to keep her stableboys hustling, and to direct the Montefoglians' servants to put together a meal of bread, cheese, smoked sausage, wine, and ale, served all round. Fiametta did not partake of the smoked meats.

At Madonna Catti's request Packmaster Pico brought his mules, his cargo, and his sons within the walls of the compound, and the gates were firmly locked for the night. The Montefoglians were distressed to learn that me marauding soldiers from whom they'd fled were ranging this far north, and made plans to move on in the morning. In the meantime, counting up the fathers, brothers, servants, Catti's stablehands, the Picos and the Swiss, there were fourteen armed men within the walls tonight. Nothing less than a large mounted patrol would offer threat. But Lord Ferrante already has what he wanted, Fiametta thought with numb certainty. They won't be back tonight. Not till Ferrante marched up the road a conqueror, at the head of a troop no country inn was likely to resist.

Fiametta kept moving like a clockwork doll. Work was better than thinking, or feeling. But inevitably, she came to the end of her chores. The babble and excitement faded, and people blew out their candles and went to their beds. Catti's wife emerged from their bedroom with bloodstained bandages and Catti's shirt to put to soak in cold water, which Fiametta drew for her from the well in the yard. They set the bucket down outside the back door in the lantern light.

"How is Master Catti doing?" Fiametta asked guiltily.

"If the wound doesn't go bad," Madonna Catti sighed, "he'll probably live. His fat belly saved him from the dagger going too deep. If he asks for food, don't give him any." She pushed the bundled cloths down into the bucket, straightened wearily, and wiped her hands on her apron.

"I'm sorry to have brought these troubles upon you."

"If the greedy old ass had set you on the road to the priest at Bergoa that second morning, as I begged him to do for charity's sake, these troubles would nave gone elsewhere," Madonna Catti said tartly. She glanced up at her inn, bulking in the dark; her mouth flattened. "If he truly feared a dead sorcerer's ghost, he should have buried him decently, not put him up in my good smokehouse. My smokehouse will be accurst, now. I shouldn't wonder if all my meat goes rotten and maggoty."

"My father was never a man to overlook an insult," Fiametta admitted reluctantly. "But I think—I fear—his spirit has greater troubles just now." Her hand kneaded the folds of her skirt.

"Oh?" Madonna Catti studied her sharply. "Well … go to bed, girl. But go from here tomorrow."

"May I have my horse?" Fiametta asked humbly.

"Horse and all. In fact, I don't want you to leave anything here that you came with." She shook her head. Fiametta followed her back indoors.

A second-floor porch or loggia overlooking the back yard of the inn, usually used for drying laundry, had been converted into a dormitory for the female servants of the two Montefoglian families. Fiametta had laid a bedroll for herself closest to the railing. She now picked her way over the snoring forms of the exhausted women. She slipped off her overdress and laid it atop her blanket, and pulled down her linen underdress, bunched a bit above the snakebelt she'd worn concealed from Catti's greed. Despite the night chill, she leaned on the railing and looked out over the inn yard.

The moon, waning and dull, rode a quarter of the way up the sky. Along the far wall, Pico's mules stood strung along a horse line, fodder piled at their feet to keep them content. Smoke still seeped from the smokehouse, a layer of haze in the dimming moonlight Pico, his sons, and the Swiss were bedded down in a little bastion formed of the pack saddles, near the mules. She could see the blond man's bowl-cropped hair gleam as he shifted and turned over in his bedroll. She curled her fingers around her ringless left thumb, rubbing the empty place. What have I done? Did my ring draw him to me? Is he really supposed to be my true love? Does he know this?

Thur wasn't what she'd pictured, when she'd cast the ring and its true-love spell together on the first day of spring. She could scarcely say what she had pictured, in her inarticulate longing to be loved. She stared down at the blanketed lump in the yard and tried to feel ardent, or swept by passion, or at least impressed. Nothing. It wasn't that she disliked him. He was just sort of there, alarmingly solid and real. Friendly, certainly, after the manner of a big spoiled mastiff pup who a never been cuffed, snuffling up to be petted.

It had never even crossed her mind that she would not immediately love her true love back. But she'd been expecting someone ... shorter. Older. More sophisticated. Better dressed, at least. And richer. He really doesn't smell all that bad, for a muleteer. She felt a frustrated urge to rip her ring from his hand and tap it on the nearest tabletop, as if something stuck inside her spell could so be loosened. But she could still feel it, even now at this distance, the same quiet, tiny hum of magic. The spell had emitted scarcely a ripple when the Swiss had slipped the ring on, curling around his finger and purring like a smug and comfortable cat fed on fish and cream. A well-cast spell was a barely discernible thing even to the inner eye of a trained mage. Only when badly botched or thwarted was magic obvious to ordinary senses, a_ jangling discord that wasted power. Teseo's first efforts had been almost painfully loud, emitting visible sparks. But one scarcely knew Master Beneforte's spells were there, flowing as much as possible with nature, not wrestling against it.