Thur held his palm near the statue's face. The bronze, though no longer glowing with its own light, was still too hot to touch. But Uri was no longer there to touch even if Thur could. The streaming rain would cool the metal soon enough. Thur raised his face to the sky, and let the cold drops mix with the hot ones from his eyes, disguising his grief before all these strangers. Their world would know Uri no more, would soon forget that he'd ever lived or laughed. But I swear I will remember.
When he'd blinked his vision clear, Thur saw that soldiers, Montefoglian soldiers, were arriving through the ruined gates. A couple of them pointed at the statue in startled recognition of their late captain's features, but then hurried about their work. Fiametta stood in the scintillating rain looking small, and exhausted, and very wet, her crinkly black curls escaping her braid only to be plastered flat to her skin. Thur wanted to offer her a cloak, but he himself possessed only the sodden old robe turned down around his loins. He rucked it back up over his shoulders and stood barefoot in the puddles and shivered, partly from cold, partly from reaction.
Fiametta turned her wan face to Monreale. “How did you come here, Father? When they carried you off to the infirmary at Saint Jerome under Vitelli's spell, you were lying almost as pale and still as a dead man yourself. Brother Mario wouldn't let me see you.”
Monreale hung on his crozier, his sandaled feet apart. He tore his pensive gaze from the cooling bronze. “The spell was broken late yesterday evening. Was that your doing, Thur?”
“I ... think it may have been, Father. I did not know for sure what spell was broken, but it distracted Vitelli when I swept a spell-set from the table. It was just before I escaped from the castle dungeon with my brother's body.”
“Indeed,” said Monreale. “I woke, but I was very sick. Hie healers kept me abed until morning, when I finally regained enough strength to ride over them. It was not until afternoon that I discovered you were gone from Saint Jerome, Fiametta, and no one seemed to know for how long. I sent out my birds, but could learn little except that Vitelli and Ferrante were not abroad, and Thur was not yet hanging by his neck from the castle tower.
“Sandrino's officers and I agreed we must attack, try as we'd planned yesterday. But I decided I must close the distance before attempting to grapple again with Vitelli. His powers had clearly grown to an extraordinary degree. We made ready, settling on a night assault to disguise our thin numbers.” Wearily, he rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes narrowed and glinted with the press of these recent memories.
“We sallied out at dark, and had a sharp fight with the besiegers that delayed us again. We finally broke through, and made for town. The soldiers needed the few horses we had, but a brother found that white one wandering among our sheep. Our remaining sheep. Is that the beast your Papa bought in Ceccnino, Fiametta? He was robbed. Well ... it saved my strength, I suppose.
“But when we all came up to the town gates, expecting a desperate battle, the Losimons were gone from them, pulled out by a mob of townsmen. So instead of leading the populace to the castle, we followed them. I had by then gained the idea that you were mounting some sort of magical attack, Fiametta, and I rode ahead as fast as I could, in great fear that Vitelli's demonic powers might indeed have grown so transcendent as to conquer death. And so it proved.” Monreale vented a depressed sigh. “Not that this second-rate old man imagined himself a match for that dark power.”
“Yet you came anyway,” said Thur.
“Father, we would have been destroyed without you. In fact,” Fiametta's brows drew down, puzzling this out, “none of us alone was a match for Vitelli. I could release Papa, but I could not hold Vitelli. Papa could hold Vitelli, but could not exorcise him. You could speed him to banishment, which thing neither Papa nor I were capable of ... but only if he were held. And we could never have entered in here at all without Uri, who would not have been made without Thur. We may all of us be lesser folk, but we were a first-rate company together.”
“Huh. Monreale smiled slowly, his eyes half-lidded. “Could that be the lesson God had been trying to teach me, all this time? From the mouths of babes.”
“I am not a babe,” said Fiametta with some determination.
“Child, from the vantage of my half-century, you all look like babes.” Monreale pulled himself up by his crozier, straightening painfully. He gazed a moment more at the bronze statue, “No. You are not a babe. And so you stand in a grown woman's danger.”
“Father,” said Thur. “There's something you had better see, right away before it gets disturbed. I left one of your monks to guard the door.
Monreale nodded. 'Lead me, boy. For there is much yet to do.”
Thur beckoned him into the castle by the servant's entry and down the now-familiar corridors into the dungeon. At least they were out of the rain. A monk held a torch for his abbot. Thur was not sure how the stone-cut halls could be any darker at night than in the day, but they seemed so. The strength that relentless terror had lent him was passing off, and he bumped into the walls as he walked. Limped. Every muscle he owned seemed shot through with rust and grit, twinging when he moved, aching when he stood still.
The racks of iron bars that were the cell doors stood open; the prison was half-emptied of prisoners. The hale had already departed to join the fray. The injured were being helped out by Montefoglian townsmen, some of them relatives.
Thur's little procession wound down the stairway to the lower half. A white-faced monk stood holding Thur's sledgehammer outside the shattered, splintered door to the necromancers' magic work chamber. They all entered after Monreale, and Thur took the one burning candle and lit the slagged remains of others from it.
Monreale's breath hissed out between his front teeth. The trestles were knocked over, and the salt crate dropped and split and spilled where Thur and a monk had snatched the lid in their haste to bring out Master Beneforte's body. Upon the floor spiraled a complex double diagram; one lobe was emptied— Thur had lifted up Master Beneforte's remains himself, when the frightened monk had refused to touch them—the other lobe framed yet another corpse. A naked young man, dreadfully mutilated, his throat slit.
“That was the power by which they finally forced Papa into the spirit ring,” breathed Fiametta, peering fearfully around Monreale. “The new ghost. I saw him, inside Vitelli. Oh, Father.” She turned, and closed her eyes, and swallowed hard.
That could have been himself, Thur thought, looking, but out of the corner of his eye. “Who is this poor wretch, Father?”
Monreale moistened his lips, and cautiously approached and knelt by the dead man's head. But whatever magic had been generated by this dark deed was apparently now consumed. “Yes. I know the boy. He's one of my brethren ... his name was Luca. He is the monk I sent to spy two days before you, Thur, and heard no more of. Vitelli must have selected him for this from among the prisoners, after you escaped. He has a family in town, parents and brothers and sisters ... Murder, murder of the blackest.” He bent his head in deep sorrow, and began the rites of blessing.
When he rose, Thur asked in worry, “Should we have this room boarded up, or something?”
Monreale sucked grimly on his lower Up, and walked around, muffling his shock, examining the evidence with the cool thoroughness of one who realizes he must soon write an official report upon it all. “Hm? No .. .” He gathered up the notes and papers on the worktable. “These should not be left about, however. No, Thur, quite the contrary. This room should be left open, and every guard and citizen who can should be brought to view it. Let the evidence of Vitelli and Ferrante's wrongdoing be made public before as many witnesses as can be gathered.” He paused. “As many witnesses as saw a bronze statue get up and walk, and slay two men. At least that many witnesses.”
He turned on his heel to face Thur and Fiametta. “You two know what you have done, and we will talk of it further. Later. The first reports to the Archdiocese, the Curia, and the general of my Order will be written by me. In the meantime ... you may be certain that the most fantastical rumors will be flying among the people about tonight's events. I hope as many of those rumors as possible may attach to Vitelli, and not to yourself. Do you understand?”
Fiametta nodded rather doubtfully; Thur shook his head in honest bewilderment. Monreale motioned him over, and lowered his voice. “Look, boy. It is absolutely essential that Fiametta never come to be questioned by the Inquisition. They would burn her for her hot tongue alone at the end of the first day, the evidence go hang. Understand?”
“Oh ...” Thur could see it, yes.
“If you love her, help her keep her head down and her mouth shut. Church politics are my department. If necessary, well, a man or two owes me a favor or two. But Fiametta must take care not to offend her neighbors, or to appear ... too unusual. Or I might not be able to control all of the consequences.”
“Uh ... would getting married and setting up shop in her father's house be too ... unusual?”
“No. That would be ideal. Her setting up shop without getting married, now that could be dangerous.”
Thur brightened. “I'll help her all she'll let me, Father.”
“You'd better be prepared to help her more than that, boy, if necessary,” Monreale murmured dryly.
“With all my heart, sir.”
Monreale gave Thur a short nod, and turned to go out. Thur paused for one last disturbed sidelong look at the sacrificed man lying in his pooled blood.
“He was ... my scapegoat. Luca.” He must remember that name, even as he hoped others would remember Uri's.
Monreale pursed his lips. “Yes, in a sense ... though if you had died yesterday, it would not have saved him tonight. Still, I charge you to light a candle for him each Sunday in Montefoglia Cathedral, and pray for his soul.”
“Yes, Father,” said Thur, comforted.
Monreale nodded, and led them out.
While passing again through the now nearly deserted prison corridor, one level up, Thur heard a faint moan. “Wait ...” He ducked back to the end cell. Sure enough, a bundled shape lay on the woven straw pallet. “Why has this door not been opened? Where is the key? Thur called.
An elderly townsman appeared from the guard station, rattling the key ring. “They told us he was mad, sir. Is the proper sergeant coming, to take these?”
“I'll take them,” said Monreale, unburdening the townsman of the ring. He passed it to Thur, who bent and opened the lock.
Lord Pia lay alone in the cell under a thin blanket. His face was very gray, and his glazed eyes seemed not to recognize Thur. The wound in his arm had never been bandaged, and was thickly clotted with blood. Judging by his mottled bruises, he had been badly beaten upon his final recapture. To satisfy his mind, Thur stuck his head out of the cefl window. One bar remained at the side; around it were tied the points of a stretched-out silk hose leg, its foot in turn tied to another to make a rope of sorts, now hanging limp and wet against the cliff face. How very simple. Thur was both relieved and slightly disappointed. Lord Pia had not flown down like a giant bat to Vitelli's dark chamber window last night after all. Thur imagined he would have liked to.
Monreale sent for help, and soon had the poor castellan laid on a plank and carried out of the dungeon before them by a sturdy monk and another townsman-parishoner. They all arrived back at the courtyard to find a swirl of shouting people coalescing around Duchess Letitia, who had been released from the tower. She had called Sandrino's surviving officers to her, and was organizing them to regain control of her castle, first from the remaining Losimons, and then from the Montefoglian townsmen. The Montefoglians, while scorning to steal from their late Duke directly, were not above relieving any captured or killed Losimon looters of their booty. Monreale was promptly drawn into the Duchess's whirlwind.
Lady Pia ran to her husband's side, looking distressed. Lord Pia seemed to recognize her, despite his debilitation and uncertain mental state. He smiled weakly up at her, and grasped her hand as she knelt by him. She immediately browbeat some passing men into carrying him upstairs to their apartments in the tower, once more a home and not a prison, and ruthlessly diverted a healer-monk in Monreale's train to her aid.
Somehow, the center of all this midnight chaos had shifted, from them to Monreale to the Duchess. Thur was just as glad. The rain was letting up, turning to a fine misting drizzle. Thur put his arm around Fiametta's shivering shoulders.
“I guess we can take your Papa's body home, now.”
“If my house is still standing. What .. . what of Uri?”
“You mean the statue? Leave it, I suppose. It's only a statue, now. Nobody's going to steal him without the aid of a couple of yokes of oxen.”
She nodded, her eyes wide in the wavering half-light. They picked their way to the crate lid resting on the cobbles with its shrouded burden. “Thur, I don't think I can carry my half,” she worried.
“I don't think I could either, right now,” Thur said honestly. “D'you want your horse back?”
The white horse was sniffing dolefully at the cobbles, where no grass grew. It had not wandered far, and for some reason no one had attempted to abscond with it while Monreale's back was turned. Thur captured it by walking up to it and scratching it behind the ears. It rubbed its head against him, scraping Thur's skin on the bridle studs and shedding wet white hairs.
Thur handed the reins to Fiametta, and went to look for a piece of rope. He found a coil hanging on a nail in the stables. No one disputed his claim of it. He tied one end of the rope to a stirrup, wound it around the headboard of the crate lid, and tied the other end to the other stirrup, converting the lid to a makeshift drag or sledge. The white horse flared its nostrils in worry at the scraping sound behind it, and sidled, giving Thur a mad vision of the beast bolting across the country with Master Beneforte thudding and bouncing along behind in one last wild ride. But after a moment the horse settled down to its usual tired plod, and Thur judged it safe to help Fiametta aboard. She wrapped her hands in the long mane, and drooped over the animal's thick neck. Thur led them out the ruined castle gate and down the hill.
The streets of Montefoglia were growing quieter as the night waned. They passed only two small groups of excited men with torches, who yet swung as wide as the narrow streets permitted around Thur's little cavalcade. Thur was too tired to do anything but ignore them. They arrived at the wrecked oak door to Fiametta's house without being accosted. The walls were still standing, nor had the tile roof fallen in. That was nice, if unexpected.
Thur helped Fiametta down; she stumbled inside. His fingers numb, Thur picked at the knots in the rope, and freed the crate lid. By that time Tich came out with a lantern and led the horse around to the high gate into the back garden.
Together, they tied it out of range of the spring onions and lettuces of the kitchen vegetable plot. Tien brought the beast a bucket of water, which it drank thirstily, with a grateful snuffle that blew slobber all over him. In the general filth and soot of Tich's tunic it was scarcely noticeable.
“We'll have to find it fodder in the morning,” Tich said in a tone of judicious expertise. “This little bit of grass won't last.”
“Not the way it eats. I'll help you go look for your mules tomorrow, too.”
Tich nodded, satisfied, and they locked the garden gate. Tich helped Thur carry Master Beneforte's plank inside, to lay in the front room next to Uri's; someone had moved him to rest again in this quieter place.
“They should be buried soon,” said Thur. “Properly.”
“There's going to be a lot of funerals tomorrow in Montefoglia, from what we've heard,” said Tich.
“They'll make room for these two,” said Thur. “I'll make them make room.”
“Ruberta has put bedrolls for us in the front hall,” said Tich. “She says we can guard the door that way till it's fixed.”
Thur half-smiled. “I don't think anyone is going to bother this house.” Bedroll. What a beautiful word. Thur could have wept at the beautiful charity of someone making a bedroll for him.
Tich retired to his bedroll before it had entirely cooled, but Thur stumbled one last time into the courtyard. A light shone there, candle or lantern—both, he saw, entering. Fiametta had stuck a candle-stub upright in the dirt beside the empty casting pit, and was holding up a lantern for closer inspection of the damages.
The place looked like a midden. Abandoned furnace, empty casting pit, broken-up furniture, scattered tools. The center of one side of the gallery was gone, the whitewash above it was black with smoke stain, and charred timbers swung dangerously loose in the corners.
“They got the fire out,” Thur noted brightly.
“Yes,” said Fiametta. “Ruberta and Tich and the neighbors. I did not know ... I had such friends.” She sat down heavily upon the cinder-scattered flagstones in her sodden velvets. “Oh, Thur! My poor house is a shambles!”
“Now. Now.” Gingerly, he eased himself down beside her and stroked her shaking shoulders. “Maybe it won't look that bad in the morning. I'll help you fix it up. That gallery's the easy part. I used to help build mine-timbering, you know. I can build you a gallery that won't ever come down.”
Her breath puffed out between her quivering lips, whether in a laugh or a sob Thur could not tell. 'Is there anything you can't do?”
“I don't know.” Thur considered this. “I haven't tried everything.”
Her brows rose quizzically. “Do you want to try everything?”
He took a breath, for courage. “I'd like to try being your husband.”
She blinked, rapidly, and rubbed her eyes with a soot-smudged hand. “I'd be a bad wife. My tongue is too sharp. Everybody says so. You'd get henpecked.”
Thur wrinkled his brows. “Was that yes, or no? Come. Where else will you find a fellow brave enough to marry a girl who can set him on fire with a word?”
“I'd never!” Her spine straightened. “But truly. I talk a lot—Papa said so—and I'm not very patient.”
“I'm very patient,” Thur offered. “I'm patient enough for us both.'
“You weren't very patient with the caking bronze.” Her lips curved up.
“Yes, well... it wasn't right. I needed it to be excellent.” He needed to be eloquent. He shouldn't be trying to say these things when he was so damned tired he couldn't even see straight. He looked up, and was startled by an orange tinge outlined by the shadowy black square of the tile roof. Was the town afire? “Why is the sky that funny color?”
Fiametta looked up, too. “It's dawn,” she said after a long moment. “The clouds are breaking up.”
So it was. An apricot luminosity edged slate-blue masses. “Oh.” His brains felt like porridge.
Fiametta giggled, and sniffled. She ought to be in a bedroll, and in a dry gown, too. He gathered her into his lap, and hugged her for warmth. She did not object. In fact, she twined her arms around his neck. And so they sat for a time, while the sky lightened.
“It looks worse,” Fiametta observed in a dreamy voice.
“Huh?” Thur jerked awake.
“It looks worse. In the morning.”
He stared over her rat's nest of hair at the wreck of a courtyard. “Well. Yes.”
Fiametta's nose wrinkled. “Yes.”
“Yes what?” Thur asked after a minute's pause decided him that he no longer had any idea what they were talking about.
“Yes. I want to marry you, too.”
“Oh. Good.” He blinked, and hugged her closer.
“I think it's because you understand excellence. What it takes.”
“What is?”
“Why I love you.”
A slow grin fought its way onto his exhaustion-numbed face. “Of course. That's why I love you.”
By design, the high light of midsummer morning falling through the clerestory windows sent a beam directly down upon the altar of Montefoglia Cathedral. The light caught the garnet of the lion ring as Fiametta slipped it onto Thurs finger. The gem blazed like a ruby, like a star. The gold lion mask seemed to purr under Fiametta's hand, like the most satisfied and cream-stuffed of great cats. Thur felt it too, Fiametta thought, for he smiled like a great cream-stuffed cat himself. He caught her in an embrace that bent her ribs, till Bishop Monreale cleared his throat, and they took the hint and turned obediently, hand in hand, to receive his final benediction. Fiametta could not decide if Monreale looked more at home in his plain gray monk's habit, or as now, splendid in the flowing silk, red cloak, and high mitered hat of the bishophric. Equally easy, perhaps. Monreale was not made by his garments, and so his clothes always conformed to him.
Thur's clothes did not make him, she mused, so much as reveal him. She kept sipping little contented glimpses from the corner of her eye even while bowing her head. He had not let her see his wedding garments till this morning, a conspiracy between himself, Ruberta, and the tailor. Fiametta and Thur had frugally divided the purchase of a length of silk between them, so his green tunic matched her overgown. Still, the clever tailor had squeezed enough material for proper pleats. Thur's upright bearing made the modest decorative braid on the sleeves and hem look restrained rather than plain. And many a spindle-shanked rich lord might envy the calves that most perfectly filled those white silk hose. New polished shoes, and no one needed to know he only had one other pair of boots. His bright blond hair was topped by a fine big dark green cloth hat with a copper-gilt badge of Fiametta's own design. Eat your hearts out, ladies of Montefoglia. He's mine.
Fiametta had cast her own wedding ring—without ensorcellments, this time—in the mask of a lioness. Its tiny gold teeth closed on a green-faceted chip borrowed from the eye of her silver snake-belt; the gems upon testing had proved to be real emeralds. That chaste snake must just wink a while, till she could afford a replacement stone. She turned her hand a little to make the green flash, and smirked into her lap.
They turned from the altar to collect kisses and hugs and hearty congratulations from the witnesses, each according to their style; Lorenzetti the notary shook hands, Tich pecked her cheek, Ruberta embraced everyone, and dabbed at her eyes. Thur's mother grasped Fiametta's hands, and gave her a warm smile, though her swimming eyes were still tinged with a searching doubt. Time would put those doubts to rest, Monreale had assured Fiametta privately. Fiametta smiled back in earnest hope thereof.
Tich had escorted Mistress Ochs personally from Bruinwald, on his first round-trip with his pack mules. He had finally managed to recover all but two of the lost beasts. His eager personal persuasion and good offices had much to do with prying the aging woman from her familiar cottage and carrying her on this mixed adventure, fraught with both sorrow and joy, to visit one son's grave and the other's wedding. Thur and Fiametta had awaited her arrival anxiously, as the date of their wedding had been agreed between them to be the day after her arrival. She seemed a quiet woman, obviously devoted to Thur; perhaps that was enough mutual interest upon which to start building her acquaintance with her new daughter-in-law. She had clearly been thrilled by his new clothes.
Before leaving the cathedral they stopped into one of the side chapels. This holy chamber had been the recipient, over a year ago, of a noble gift from Master Beneforte's hand: a fine carved marble crucifix with a white Christ upon a black marble cross, now affixed to the wall with its iron clamps. In exchange, the building committee had permitted his humble request: space for a stone sarcophagus beneath Our Lord's feet. Fiametta did not think this represented morbid premonition, exactly, because he had not then ordered the sarcophagus. The stonecutters she'd hired had placed the tomb only a week ago, but at least it was in time for her to kneel and lay her wedding flowers upon it. “Peace, Papa,” she whispered.
To her gnawing regret, she had not found her mother's death mask again. It had been nowhere in the patiently sorted shambles of her house, nor had her inquiries among neighbors who had recovered portions of their looted possessions borne fruit. Even Thur's peculiar talent proved no help this time, though he had walked for hours, absent-faced with concentration, quartering Montefoglia. The bronze mask must have been carried out of the city.
I am a sorceress. If I truly seek, I must find you at last, Mama, Fiametta made silent oath. Someday. Someday.
When she rose she found Monreale standing back looking at the Christ, meditating artistically rather than theologically, for he said, “It's very fine. The proportions are strange, yet they hold the eye and the mind.”
“He did not use a model. It was from a vision, Papa told me, that he had when he was in prison in Rome once upon ... uh ... what he said were false charges.”
“Yes, I heard that tale from him. The vision, at least, was true,” Monreale mused. “Well, he rests now under better eyes than mine. It is good for him to have such a guardian.
'Speaking of guardians,” he turned to her, “I have a wedding present for you.” From his robe he drew a folded piece of parchment, and handed it to her.
She cracked it open eagerly, read, and bounced twice into the air. “Wonderful! My Guild permit! Now I can make and sell spells, as well as metal bagatelles!”
“Only such as are inspected and approved for your level of license,” he cautioned. “You are officially listed as my apprentice, so I am in part responsible for the consequences of your actions. I will not be able to watch you daily as an ordinary master would, but you may be sure I will inspect your shop frequently.” He mustered a stern frown for emphasis. “I'll have no more such Beneforte tricks as your Papa played upon me, now!”
“No, sir!” Fiametta danced, and hugged Thur. “Now we're truly in business!” He grinned reflecting back her shining delight.
Monreale lowered his voice to her ear alone. “I mean that most seriously, Fiametta. I had to use the utmost care, in dealing with the committee from the Inquisition over the matter of the late and damned Vitelli, to keep you out of it. As far as any official report states, Uri's spirit got into that casting by itself, as an accidental result of Vitelli's machinations. I do not recommend that you draw their attention twice.”
“It was by itself,” Fiametta argued sotto voce. “I did not compel, I only channeled him.”
“I tried not to trouble their minds with that subtle distinction. Consider the matter sealed under my authority as your master, and do not discuss it without my permission. Eh?”
Fiametta smiled. “Yes—Master.”
Monreale nodded, grimly satisfied. With blessings all round he excused himself to attend to the Diocese, and the chancellory business that had come upon him as he found himself chief advisor to Duchess Letitia in her unaccustomed role as Regent for little Duke Ascanio.
The wedding party spilled out into the beautiful morning light on the cathedral steps. Ruberta and Lorenzetti headed back on foot to the house, to supervise the laying of the tables and the tapping of the wine cask, respectively, before all the neighbors who had helped put out the house fire arrived for the fete. “I don't trust that hired girl with my pastries,” Ruberta sniffed. The kobolds had not been invited; in fact, Fiametta had not even seen one of the shy gnomes since that wild night of spell and metal casting. But the bowl of goat's milk she laid out nightly on the floor of the root cellar was always empty the next morning.
Thur helped his mother up onto a white mule, borrowed from Tich, and Fiametta up onto their white horse. Fiametta herself had spent yesterday afternoon shampooing both beasts and scrubbing them clean of every manure stain. She'd pinned old sheets around them overnight to protect her labors. Both animals' hooves were blacked with polish and their manes and tails braided with colored ribbons. The white horse's swayed back was built up with enough pads and flowers to look almost normal, and Fiametta happily arranged her green brocade outer skirt and cream-white inner skirt over the rugs. As if in response to all this attention the old horse arched its neck and stepped out finely. Thur walked between the two mounted women. They wound through the streets and headed up the hill toward Montefoglia castle.
The battlements seemed to glow, sunny and open, not the midnight-sinister pile of stone they had been in the rain-swept dark of that terrifying night six weeks ago. Only six weeks ago? It seemed a world past. When the word of the deaths of their leader and his dark advisor had arrived, the Losimon army had turned away at the border fords and marched back to their own capital. A Ferrante cousin appointed heir by the Curia was presently scrambling for political control there, and in no mood to seek extra trouble from his new neighbors.
The animals' hooves clopped, echoing off the stone walls, as the women rode through the tower-flanked gate into a busy and noisy castle courtyard. Blacksmiths were at work repairing the portcullis, and their laborers stoked a portable forge. Lord Pia, dressed in summer linens and an Egyptian cotton shirt, leaned on a cane supervising. Under his wife's devoted care he'd made a good recovery, though appearing more frail, as his hair was grayer and he'd lost some of his robust girth. Except for a certain uncharacteristic hesitancy, his tone of mind was much improved from the over-stressed dementia of those days of madness, magic, and murder. He recognized Fiametta, and favored her with a friendly wave of his hand. Fiametta waved back while trying to look very busy, lest he come over and corner Thur again for more talk of his proposed bat-wing experiments.
The bronze Perseus/Uri had been raised to its stone plinth, square in front of the marble staircase. And so Duke Sandrino's captain guarded his house for all time. Fiametta still bit her lip in frustration that the Duchess had chosen to entrust the finishing details to di Rimini, and not to Fiametta. She trusted Papa was truly sped far from this world of woe; even his ghost would nave been livid at the thought of his greatest work fallen into the hands of his rival, though he would probably have been almost equally horrified at the thought of it in the hands of his daughter. Well ... di Rimini appeared to have done a competent job so far. At least the thing hadn't fallen over yet.
One could only carry on. The Duchess, frugal in the uncertain days of her new widowhood, had elected not to have the body of the Medusa cast to lie at the Perseus's feet and complete the tableau, but to mount the statue as it was. This saved that work from going to di Rimini, but also gave her the excuse to knock a full half off the payment Papa had thought to get from Duke Sandrino.
Thur read these tense thoughts from Fiametta's face; she'd expressed them often and vigorously enough to his ear. Lifting her down from the horse before the bronze, he kissed her forehead and whispered, “Daily bread, love.”
She nodded, and sighed in resignation. The half-payment, plus the residue of monies still owed on the saltcellar, had at least settled all of Papa's debts. After buying new tools for the shop and setting aside enough to live on until business was established, Thur had stretched it further by doing repairs on the wrecked house himself. His new gallery looked sturdy enough for the Sultan's elephants to dance upon.
New furniture and fine clothes could wait. Thur had cooled her tongue by pointing out that God only promised daily bread, not a bakery. And indeed, the Duchess had soon given her a commission for some silver and pearl jewelry for Julia. And where the Duchess shopped, all the great ladies of Montefoglia must soon follow.
They laid the armload of flowers they'd brought at the bronze Uri's feet, and Fiametta stood back respectfully to let Thur's mother gaze, one last unexpected time, upon the features of her lost son. Would she appreciate the beautiful flowing form, the dramatic pose, the perfection of the casting? Would she be moved at this monument to his memory and his courage?
“Thur,” the aging lady said in a choked voice, “he's naked.” Her hand touched her lips in dismay.
“Well, yes, Mama,” said Thur, placatingy phlegmatic. “That's the way the Italians make their statues. Maybe it's because of the hot climate.”
“Oh, dear.”
Thur scratched his head, looking as if he was wondering if he ought to jump up on the plinth and affix a bouquet in a strategic spot, to console her.
But she overcame her horror enough to quaver politely, “It's ... it's very fine. I'm sure.” But he's naked! Fiametta could almost hear her wail in her thoughts.
Fiametta, uncertain whether to smile or snarl, bit her fingers and said nothing. She raised her eyes to the bronze face under the winged helmet, those metal lips curled faintly at the corners, and knew.
Uri would have laughed.
For the curious book lover, I'd like to add a word on the principal historical sources for The Spirit Ring.
This novel started with a book—three books, to be precise, all with family connections, which sat side by side on my bookshelf for years. The first seed from my family tree, and surely the rarest book among my inspirations, was a scholarly monograph published in 1907 titled The Grateful Dead, The History of a Folk Story, written by my great uncle Gordon Hall Gerould, B. Utt. (Oxon.), Preceptor in English in Princeton University. It came down through my mother's side of the family. In 174 densely written pages Uncle Gordon traced the history, through about twenty countries and twenty centuries, of a very old folk tale of that name. The fast-forward version goes: Young man goes out to seek his fortune, and comes across an altercation where the body of a debtor lies unburied until his debts are paid. Our hero forks over his grubstake (varying wildly depending on the version, but always the whole of his resources) and gets the debtor planted. He goes on down the road to further adventures, in the course in which he finds himself supematurally aided by the grateful ghost of the dead man, in reward for his pious deed.
It was quite clear from the wide range of versions, studding the monograph like little dried raisins and crying out to have the life pumped back into them, that here was a universal theme of great power.
Enter two more books, inherited from my engineer-father's extensive and eclectic bookshelf. De Be Metallica by Agricola is a 16th century Latin treatise on mining and metallurgy, translated into English by Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover. (Yes, the President. He was a mining engineer before he was a politician. His wife was also a Latin scholar.) Agricola inspired The Spirit Ring's hero, the self-effacing Swiss miner's son Thur Ochs. The kobolds came from a footnote therein. And The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini of course yielded up Prospero Beneforte, and a great deal more besides. Agricola is not light reading, but I highly recommend Cellini to all comers. In it you will discover the golden saltcellar, the bronze Perseus, the mad castellan, the vision in the dungeon of the Castel Sain Angelo, and a thousand other delightful or horrifying details of the times, as well as that wonderful egotistical monster, Cellini himself.
A couple dozen more research books followed in my reading (you will find Lorenzo d'Medici's spirit ring in the gorgeously illustrated Europe 1492 by Franco Cardini), but these three were the generative seeds.
Cellini leaves no record of ever having had a daughter. Fiametta is my own creation.