You see, if a corpse is preserved unshriven and unburied, the new-riven spirit can be harnessed to the will of a master...
Did Lord Ferrante seek a new spirit ring? A murdered master mage must be a fount of great power. The ironic symmetry must appeal to Lord Ferrante, to compel the man who'd destroyed his ring to become its replacement. And if Ferrante had ransacked their house, God knew what else he'd found to rivet his power-hungry attention.
She turned the days over in her mind. A night and a day for the Losimons to ride back with their injured to the castle, and return the magic saltcellar to their master. A day for the siege-preoccupied Lord Ferrante to awaken to the fact that they'd left a greater treasure of sorcery to rot in a field. A day for them to return and find their prize gone, a day to ask up and down the road after a conspicuous corpse. ...
She rubbed her aching temples. Surely her fears for her father should have ended with his death. The dead were supposed to be beyond pain, healed and comforted in the bosom of Lord Jesus and the saints. That first night, mixed with her grief, she'd felt a curious lightness to her spirit, as if an unrealized weight had been removed from her shoulders. As if her world had suddenly enlarged, a vast vacated space above her freed to grow into. Her life become, unexpectedly, her own to choose and order. Her heart had pulsed with a subdued joy even while her throat choked on sobs. Surely that joy was a great sin. She should feel only grief, and fear of the world, with her protector removed. Only grief. Not resentment.
Now Master Beneforte's troubles flapped back in to settle on her life like a great flock of carrion crows, weighing her back down. It's not fair. You're dead. I should be free of you. Now not death but eternal damnation loomed, and the danger of a black magic far beyond her depth.
What can I do? I'm only half-trained. You yourself neglected to train me. It's your fault 1 don't even know where to begin. I'm only a puny girl.
Tomorrow, she would attach herself to the servants of the Montefoglians, and run away to the north. Let the big stupid Swiss go in any direction he chose but the one she took. Let him lumber into the nearest ditch, for all she cared. She never wanted to see him again. Nor Montefoglia. Nor her house. Nor her own little bedroom, warm and cozy... .
Shivering, her nose clogged with unshed tears, she rolled up in the blanket and buried her face as best she could in the thin pillow. Her spinning thoughts bogged at last in sleep.
Fiametta woke out of a troubled dream of wandering in a strangely labyrinthine version of their house in Montefoglia. The place was deserted, in ruins, boards of the gallery rotting treacherously underfoot, shutters hanging half-off, walls crumbling. She'd been trying to light a fire, but couldn't, and armed creditors banged at the door calling for payments Master Beneforte had hidden and Fiametta could not find, though she searched frantically from room to room....
Her pillow was damp and cold and her blanket wet with dew over the inner pocket warmed by her body. The waning moon was at zenith, casting its sickly insufficient light down into the inn yard. Still drenched with the unease of her dream, she rolled over and peered through the railing slats, glancing along the outer wall of the compound. No menacing men's shapes moved atop it; the wide night sky swallowed sound. Only her fears drained the scene of peace, though the line of hip-shot sleepy mules radiated a comforting animal warmth. Yet something was subtly wrong. She stared into the darkness for a full minute before she realized what.
The last trailing smoke from the smokehouse was curling down, not up, collecting in a pool like a misted pond in the middle of the inn yard. Thickening. Contracting. The formless, seeking substance ... Her heart lumped against her ribs. She caught her breath. She scrambled onto her knees, careless of the cold, and pressed her face to the slats.
The silver-gray smoke coalesced to man-form, legs in hose, a pleated tunic, a big cloth hat wound round like a turban with a jaunty fall of smoke-fabric to the side. The hat tilted upward, toward Fiametta on the loggia. A faint smoke beard curled beneath the brim. Moonlight picked out a gleam, like the edging of silver on a high cloud, from smoky eyes.
"Papa?" Fiametta whispered. The word stuck in her throat. She swallowed.
The figure beckoned to her, with palpable effort, smoke wisping off its arm as it moved. The knot in her belly dissolved in a strange cockeyed pleasure. I'm glad to see you.... Weren't ghosts supposed to be fearful manifestations, instilling terror? But Master Beneforte looked so ... himself. Impatient and annoyed, as ever. She could almost hear his voice, ordering her about, threatening to beat her for clumsiness or delay, a threat he almost never carried out except when he was seriously short of money, and on those days she'd learned to be careful. The translucent figure beckoned again.
Fiametta swarmed over the railing, hung from the porch's edge by her hands, and dropped into the inn yard. She ran to the apparition, then stopped, longing yet afraid to touch it; clearly, he was holding the smoke together with great difficulty. She could see it in his expression, that familiar tense absorption that transformed his face when he worked his subtler spells. His gray hands opened to her, and he mouthed words.
"Papa, I can't hear you!"
He shook his head, mouthed more. Nothing. He pointed south.
"What are you trying to tell me?" She danced from foot to foot, mirroring his frustration.
Idiot child, he mouthed; that one she could make out, through long familiarity. But what followed was too rapid and complex. Her hands clenched, like his.
Pico's younger son, wakened by her voice, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and peered at the smoke-man over a packsaddle. He yelled in fright, dove for his father's bedroll, and burrowed under, waking Packmaster Pico with a floundering snort. Open-mouthed, Pico drew his blanket up over his boy all the way to his own chin. Thur, dressed still in his same tunic and leggings, sat up, then stood, staring. Pico's older boy Tich snored on, oblivious.
Thur took a deep breath and trod warily toward her. He came up beside her, rather paler even than his usual whiteness, and looked back and forth between her face and the moon-gray one. "Is it your father, Madonna Beneforte? What's he saying?"
The hazy figure, agonized, was beginning to shred away in the night wind. His dissolving arms reached for her, and she for him. Then the smoke abruptly contracted to a white sphere the size of a French tennis ball. It exploded outward again with a single word. "Monreale!"
The word and the smoke both passed away down a puff of breeze, and the inn yard was empty once more. "Monreale?" said Thur blankly. "What does he mean?"
"Monreale!" Fiercely, Fiametta stamped her foot. "Of course, Monreale! He'll know what to do. Hell know how to rescue Papa if anyone does. Except she faltered, "if those gossipy maids speak truth, he's on the wrong side of a besieged wall."
The Swiss nodded solemnly, as if he failed to grasp this was not just an interesting fact, but a fatal flaw.
"A wall surrounded by Ferrante's soldiers," Fiametta amplified.
"I'm starting to dislike Ferrante's soldiers," he remarked mildly.
"I'm sure they'll be quite alarmed by that news," Fiametta snapped. "No doubt they'll run away and let us right through."
He smiled in embarrassment, palms out. "We'll figure out something. First we have to get there. Or I have to get there, anyway. Don't you think you'd be better off, and safer, going north with those other Montefoglians tomorrow?"
"You aren't going to dump me in a ditch!" she cried, outraged. He took a step backward, making little negative naps with his big hands. "This is my business. I just might . .. might let you come with me, is all."